KEEPING SCORE

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

            As Sam got ready for soccer practice, I made his favorite snack – apples and peanut butter. He clunked down the stairs, shin guards in hand, his soccer cleats tied around his neck.

            “Can I go to Matthew’s tomorrow after school?”

            “Were you invited?” 

            “I could ask to be invited.”

            “It doesn’t quite work that way, sport.” Then I remembered. “Tomorrow’s not going to work anyway. You’ve got a baseball try-out.”

            Sam’s eyes grew wide. “I do?”

            “For the Saints summer team. It’s at Chamberlin High School at five. That’s what you want, right?”

            Sam nodded so hard, it’s a wonder he didn’t get whiplash. “Can you take me to the batting cages first? So I can get loose?”

            I did a mental calculation: The batting cages were near the Metro station. Chamberlin was past my house, in the opposite direction. If I picked up Sam from the bus stop, drove him home to change, and then to the batting cages, by the time he was finished hitting, there was no way I could get him to Chamberlin by five. I’d have to drop Sam off even earlier at Taylor’s, leave the office at one-thirty, pick him up at school and take him directly to the batting cages. He’d have to change in the car.  

            “Of course I can, sweetie.”

            Soccer practice only lasted about an hour, so I stuck around the field. I grabbed my laptop and chair, planning to work on Ron’s testimony. The sun felt nice on my arms, but the glare made it hard to read the screen. I tried to log onto our web site to pull up the electronic copy he’d sent me, but the network connection was poor, and I couldn’t stay online. Oh well. Maybe I’d just close my eyes and…

            “So this is what you do at work?” Mary Beth plopped down on the grass beside me. I straightened up, chastened.

            “I’m thinking. This is what thinking looks like.”

            “Funny, because it looks an awful lot like sleeping.”

            I opened my eyes. The boys dribbled soccer balls around little orange cones. One of them got dizzy and fell down.

            Mary Beth snorted.

            “Sorry.” She looked around in case the kid’s offended mother was there. 

            I rarely saw Mary Beth at practice, because Jennifer usually picked up Nick and Josh. Mary Beth was also a stay-at-home mom, but she was the exact opposite of Jennifer. Jennifer had one child, Mary Beth had five – Nick the youngest. Jennifer was a size four, Mary Beth was a fourteen. Jennifer drove a BMW X5, while Mary Beth had a converted church van. And Mary Beth was obsessed with PTA, room parenting, and all that stuff, while Jennifer said the smell at Rockingham made her physically ill. Jennifer spent her days blogging about fashion and home design. I’ve read her blog; if she got serious about working with advertisers, she could probably make more money than Scott.

Mary Beth turned back to me. “Jennifer told me about Taylor. What are you going to do?”

            “I was thinking about just leaving him alone in the mornings. He can get himself off to school on his own now, right?”