The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt by Patricia MacLachlan Read Free Book Online

Minna.
    â€œNo,” said her father, putting his arm around her, “it’s a condition. More like freckles or night blindness.”
    â€œNot fatal,” said Minna.
    â€œNot fatal,” he echoed.
    â€œI’ll tell you something about distraction,” said her father, smiling. “Once, just before I asked your mother to marry me, I opened her closet door and looked inside.”
    â€œAnd?” asked Minna.
    â€œAnd,” said her father, “it was like a look into the future. A hint of things to come.”
    â€œThat bad,” said Minna, smiling.
    â€œI closed the door again,” he said.
    â€œPapa?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œDid you fall in love at noon?”
    â€œAt noon,” said her father promptly, “and every day thereafter at 3:00, and at 5:30 and again at 6:45, 11:10, and 4:22, and at . . .”
    â€œMinna?” McGrew poked his head in the doorway. “Baseball practice today. And Emily Parmalee’s got her feathers,” he sang. “Want to come?”
    Minna looked up at her father. He shook his head and, having found his glasses, went off to his books and his patients. Minna closed the door of her mother’s writing room and left. Away from distractions and closets and laundry baskets and love at all hours. She went off with those she could count on, McGrew and Emily Parmalee. Off to the spring mud.
    Minna sits in the grandstands. They are not really grandstands; they are three tiers of bleacher seats, scattered with parents and brothers and sisters watching practice. Her parents should be here, but they aren’t. McGrew waves to Minna from left field. He likes left field because he can hum without interruption. Emily Parmalee is behind the plate, hunkered down in her uniform and face mask and cleats. Minna sighs and thinks about facts. Baseball is simple. There are facts there. You either know them or not. Hit. Bunt. Run. Slide. Baseball is not like love, which is confusing. It is not like Mozart, which Minna cannot play the same way twice and never perfectly. Baseball is not like her mother’s messages above her typewriter, which Minna does not understand.
    Minna watches Emily Parmalee. Her uniform is dirty, the bill of her baseball cap turned up. But as Minna leans forward to look more closely, she can see, just below Emily Parmalee’s cap, two more facts. Nearly hidden by the face mask and next to a dirt smudge are bright pink feather earrings.

EIGHT
    M inna, McGrew, and Emily Parmalee walked home after practice, McGrew singing the national anthem one beat off:
    â€œ Oh . . . oh . . . oh say can you
    See by the dawn’s early
    Light what so proudly we
    Hailed at the twilight’s last gleam . . .”
    Their team, the Moles, had played well, with Emily making a final dramatic out at home plate. McGrew, lost in thought, had dropped the one fly ball that came to him.
    â€œI was thinking about my science report,” he explained to Emily.
    â€œDidn’t you wonder what all the shouting was about?” asked Emily kindly.
    â€œNo,” said McGrew. “I didn’t hear the shouting.”
    â€œDid the sunlight get in your eyes?” asked Minna.
    â€œThere isn’t any bright sunlight,” he pointed out.
    Honest McGrew .
    â€œDad should teach you how to catch a ball the right way,” said Minna. “He should!”
    â€œYes,” said McGrew. “But I don’t know if Dad can do it.”
    Minna looked sharply at him, suddenly thinking of Lucas’s words: My parents are not the hopscotch type .
    Minna put the end of the middle finger of her left hand in the palm of her right, moving it back and forth absentmindedly.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” asked Emily Parmalee. She took off her catcher’s mask and her feathered earrings blew back like beagles’ ears in the wind.
    â€œI’m practicing my vibrato. I have a lesson this