Paula DeBoard - The Mourning Hours

“Another tie,” Dad announced.

When I thought about this day later, I wished I could have scooped up the whole scene in one of Mom’s canning jars, so I could keep all of us there forever. I knew it wouldn’t last for that long, though—the fireflies I captured on summer nights had to be set free or else they were nothing more than curled-up husks by morning. But I had always loved the way they buzzed frantically in the jar, their winged, beetlelike bodies going into a tizzy with even the slightest shake. If I could have done it somehow, I would have captured my own family in the same way, all of us safe and together, if only for a moment.

four

Suddenly, I was seeing Stacy Lemke everywhere. A few days after that first softball game, I saw her at Dewy’s, where I was sucking down a chocolate shake while I waited for Mom to place an order next door at Gaub’s Meats. The instant Stacy stepped through the door with two other girls, my heart performed this funny extra beat.

“Hey, Kirsten!” she called loudly, and everyone in the whole café turned for a second to look at me.

I beamed back at her. She put her arm around me in a quick hug, as if we had always known each other. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt, a denim skirt and sandals, and her reddish hair, hanging loose around her shoulders, smelled like gardenias.

She gestured behind her. “These are my sisters, Joanie and Heather.”

I smiled shyly into the whipped cream residue of my shake. Heather was in the sixth grade at Watankee Elementary, and I’d seen her on the playground, walloping a tetherball over her victims’ heads. She was basically a giant. Joanie, strawberry-blonde and shorter, was what Stacy would look like if she went through the wash a few times. We smiled our hellos.

“When’s the next softball game?” Stacy asked as her sisters stepped up to the counter to order.

“Next Tuesday, I think.”

She smiled that Stacy smile, wide and white. “Well, maybe I’ll see you then.”

My eyes tracked her as she placed her order, produced a folded bill from her skirt pocket to pay and made small talk with the girl behind the counter. I remembered what Emilie had said the other night, that Stacy used to date the quarterback of the mighty Lincoln High Shipbuilders. Even though what I knew about football was limited to helmets and “hut-hut” and touchdowns, I knew that the quarterback was a big deal. Everyone in all of Wisconsin knew who Brett Favre was, after all.

I saw Stacy only a few days later at the library, while Dad was down the street at the feed store. I was curled up in a bean bag, leafing through an encyclopedia and wondering for the millionth time why reference books couldn’t be checked out like anything else. It hardly seemed fair.

Suddenly, Stacy was squatting beside me, a book in her hand. “Oh, hey! I keep bumping into you!”

I beamed. It would be fair to say that by this time I was already half in love with Stacy Lemke. She looked happier to see me than the members of my own family did, even the ones I saw rarely. Only this morning Emilie had thrown a hairbrush across the room at me for losing her butterfly hair clip. Stacy would never throw a hairbrush at her sisters—you could tell a thing like that just by looking at her. I wondered if there was some way I could trade Emilie for Stacy, as if they were playing cards.

“So,” she said as she smiled, “how’s your family doing?”

I thought about mentioning that Emilie was in trouble for cutting five inches off the hem of one of her skirts, but figured that probably wasn’t what Stacy wanted to hear. I took a deep breath and said, “I forgot to tell you last time. Johnny said I should say hi if I saw you.” It was surprising how easily the lie had come to me, and how smoothly the next one followed on its heels. “He said he would see you at the game on Tuesday.”

“He did? Really?” She rocked backward on her heels and then straightened up, until she was standing at her full height. Her cheeks suddenly looked more pink, her tiny freckles like scattered grains of sand. I remembered what she had said: I don’t think he would notice a girl like me.

“Really,” I said. It wasn’t a lie if it was said for the sake of politeness, right? Didn’t we always compliment Mom’s casseroles, even as we shifted the food around on our plates without eating it? Besides, to repeat the truth would be rude: She’s just some girl.

Stacy grinned at me. “Well, tell him hi back.”

“I will,” I promised.

After she returned her book and left, smiling at me over her shoulder, I went to the checkout counter where Miss Elise, the librarian, was stamping books with a firm thud. “Can I check out that book?” I asked, pointing to the one Stacy had just returned.

“What, this one?” Miss Elise said, holding up Pride and Prejudice. “Are you sure? Might be a little hard for you.”

“I think I’m ready for it,” I said.

She smiled, handing the book over, but she was right. I wasn’t ready for it; I gave up after the first page. But I liked knowing that Stacy had held this very book in her hands, that her fingers with the perfectly painted nails had turned these very pages.

And, of course, I saw Stacy in the stands at every softball game for the rest of the Haybalers’ short season. At our second game, Stacy walked right up to where Mom and I were sitting, and I said, “Mom, this is Stacy Lemke. Remember, I was telling you about her?”

“Of course,” Mom said smoothly, standing. They shook hands politely.

“I go to school with Johnny,” Stacy explained.

The Haybalers took the field just then, and there was a general roar from the hundred or so of us in the stands.

“Well, I should probably find my seat,” Stacy said.

“Good to meet you,” Mom said a little dismissively. She turned her attention to the game, and Stacy winked at me. I winked right back, glad I had perfected the technique during a particularly long sermon last winter. It felt as if we were secret agents with the same mission: to get Johnny to fall in love with her.

With Stacy for me to watch, softball was much more interesting. She sat next to a friend or two, girls who seemed boring compared to her. I couldn’t help but notice how Stacy watched Johnny while she pretended not to, distributing her gaze equally among all the players, and then homing in again and again on Johnny at shortstop. When he was up to bat, she joined the crowd in chanting, “John-ny! John-ny!” She cheered when he broke up a double play at second and whooped with pleasure when he crossed home plate.

During the game, Johnny was all focus, an athlete’s athlete. He had always been a competitor, no matter what the sport. It was clear, watching him, that he had a natural talent—he could hit farther, run faster, field better, throw harder than anyone else. He also took failures more personally than anyone else, cursing when Dad dropped a throw to first, kicking divots in the dirt to shake off a bad swing. If he noticed Stacy Lemke watching him, it didn’t show.

It was Stacy who approached him first after that second game. I know because I was watching, holding my breath, clutching my fists to my side like the freak Emilie always said I was. If asked, I couldn’t have explained why their meeting was so important to me, but maybe it had something to do with ownership. In a way, I owned a part of Johnny Hammarstrom, who was star athlete for the Lincoln High Shipbuilders, but my own brother, too. And since I’d met Stacy first, since she’d sought me out under the bleachers that day, I felt I owned a part of her, too.

Stacy had walked right down the bleachers, not on the steps but on the seats, confident. She moved with purpose around the chain-link fence and out onto the field, her legs creamy white in her short shorts, a checked shirt pushed up past her elbows. She was headed right for him, and Johnny must have realized that at some point, too, because he froze, his cheeks flushed with sweat, his jeans filthy along the left side from a slide into third base.