Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta Read Free Book Online Page A

rippling muscles. Our driveways were adjacent, and Carl always seemed to be returning from an exhilarating session at the gym just as I was trudging o ff to work in the morning, my head still foggy from another rotten night’s sleep.
    “I’m getting pretty bu ff ,” he would tell me, proudly rubbing his pecs or biceps. “Wish I’d been built like this when I was younger.”
    Fuck you, I invariably thought, but I always said something polite like “Keep it up” or “I gotta start working out myself.”
    Carl and I had known each other forever. In high school we played football together — I was a starter, a second-team all-county linebacker, while Carl barely dirtied his uniform — and hung out in the same athletic crowd. When he and Marie bought the Detmeyers’ house nine years ago, it had seemed like a lucky break for both of us, a chance to renew a friendship that had died of natural causes when we graduated and went our separate ways — me to college and into the management sector, Carl into his father’s remodeling business. I helped him with the move, and when we fi nished, we sat on my patio with our wives, drinking beer and laughing as the summer light faded and our kids played tag on the grass. We called each other “neighbor” and imagined barbecues and block parties stretching far into the future.
    “Nice pickup, Trevor,” he called to his third baseman. “But let’s keep working on that throw, okay, pal?”
    Go fuck yourself, I thought. Okay, pal?
    •••
    “JACKIE BOY .” Tim Tolbert, the fi rst-base umpire and president of the Little League, pummeled my chest protector as though it were a punching bag. “Championship game .” He looked happier than a grown man has a right to be. “ Very exciting.”
    As usual, I wanted to grab him by the collar and ask what the hell he had to be so cheerful about. He was a baby-faced, prematurely bald man who sold satellite dishes all day, then came home to his wife, a scrawny exercise freak obsessed with her son’s peanut allergy. She’d made a big stink about it when the kid entered kindergarten, and now the school cafeteria wasn’t allowed to serve PB&J sandwiches anymore.
    “Very exciting,” I agreed. “Two best teams in the league.”
    “Not to mention the two best umps,” he said, giving me a brotherly squeeze on the shoulder.
    Th is much I owed to Tim — he was the guy who convinced me to volunteer as an umpire. He must have known how isolated I was feeling, alone in my house, my wife and kids living with my mother-in-law, nothing to do at night but stare at the TV and stu ff my face with sandwich cream cookies. I resisted at fi rst, not wanting to give people a new opportunity to whisper about me, but he kept at it until I fi nally gave in.
    And I loved it. Crouching behind the plate, peering through the bars of my mask, my whole being focused on the crucial, necessary di ff erence between a ball and a strike, I felt clearheaded and almost serene, free of the bitterness and shame that were my constant companions during the rest of my life.
    “Two best umps?” I glanced around in mock confusion. “Me and who else?”
    An errant throw rolled against the backstop, and Carl jogged over to retrieve it. He grabbed the ball and straightened up, turning to Tim and me as if we’d asked for his opinion.
    “Kids are wound tight,” he said. “I keep telling them it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, but I don’t think they believe me.”
    Carl grinned, letting us know he didn’t believe it, either. Like me, he was in his midforties, but he was carrying it o ff with a little more panache than I was. He had thick gray hair that made for a striking contrast with his still-youthful body, and a gap between his front teeth that women supposedly found irresistible (at least that’s what Jeanie used to tell me). His thick gold necklace glinted in the sun, spelling his name to the world.
    “You’re modeling the proper attitude,” Tim told