Parker Field by Howard Owen Read Free Book Online Page B

there. I only hope he doesn’t give over completely to the dream and take the convertible. It’s a nice day outside, for early April, but it’s not that nice.
    Still, it’s spring and it’s baseball. I’m sure Les will understand. He’ll probably want to go with us. I wish he could.
    “Wait,” I say just as Peroni is ringing off. “You said four tickets.”
    “My sister,” Andy says. “She’s a baseball nut, too.”
    I vaguely remember Andy’s sister, Cindy. She was six years behind us in school. I heard she’d gotten divorced.
    “Don’t worry, Willie,” R. P. yells into the phone. “You won’t get cooties.”
    I DROP Peggy off. Custalow will come get her about four thirty.
    I’ve been standing outside about ten minutes when Andy pulls to the curb. He and R. P. are in the front. I get in the back. Thank God, he took the sedan.
    “Hey there, Willie Black. Am I old enough to play now?”
    I haven’t seen Cindy Peroni in ten years. I knew through Andy that she’d moved back to Richmond after the split and was living somewhere off Patterson in the West End.
    I don’t get the allusion at first. Then I remember little Cindy Peroni, her face red as a fire engine, demanding that we let her play basketball with us. She must have been in the fifth grade, and she was growing into a pretty good athlete—made all district when she was a senior, I think—but we were a bunch of knuckleheads who wanted no part of a girl in our game. It happened more than once, I’m remembering now.
    Yeah, I tell Cindy. I think you’re old enough now.
    She’s grown into her age pretty well. She still has those brown, sparkly eyes that made her a real knockout by the time she finished high school. Her hair’s still brown, although whether by nature or science I can’t say. She’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Cal Ripken T-shirt, and she’s wearing them well. She’s either taken care of herself well or she’s decided the best revenge on her former husband is to turn into a major MILF .
    I ask her how long she’s been back in Richmond.
    “About two years,” she says. “I can’t believe I haven’t run into you before now.”
    With Andy’s speakers blasting out songs older than we are and he and R. P. chatting away in the front seat, Cindy and I help ourselves to a couple of pony bottles each on the way to Balmer and catch up. She’s spent most of her adult life following the guy she married right after high school from Richmond to Raleigh to Charlotte to Northern Virginia while he got rich replacing woods with suburbs. She has a twenty-year-old son living up in Fairfax. She’s taking courses at VCU. Her midlife crisis, God help her, seems to involve getting a degree in English.
    “I got tired of his shit,” is the way she delicately explains the termination of marital bliss. I’d heard from Andy that Donnie Marshman had not been the ideal husband, and that his sister had kicked Marshman out on at least one occasion for doing the horizontal hula with another party. Well, with three divorces to my credit, who am I to judge?
    “I gave him back his name,” Cindy says, “and he gave me a house and sends me a nice check every month.”
    Well, I say, it’s always better to dump a rich guy than a poor one.
    “True dat,” she says, clinking bottles with me.
    W E’VE DRIVEN around a perfectly good major-league baseball stadium to get here. Washington fans have their own team now. People are rolling around on the ground and speaking in tongues over the Nats, but our drive down memory lane doesn’t go into DC.
    “I’m an AL East kind of gal,” Cindy says, and then proceeds to do a fifteen-minute running commentary on the Orioles’ past, present and future. The Ripken T-shirt is probably older than her son, and I see that it’s autographed, although Cal’s signature has faded a bit.
    “You ought to see my tattoo,” she says.
    “I probably should,” I say.
    “Maybe later,” she says.
    W E HAVE a couple more