Becky's Kiss Read Free Page B

conversations Becky had overheard, it was more like a last resort, the slim pickings left from a bad housing market, the closest buy in a good school district less than ten miles from the tool house in Philly.
    She took her soup to her room and sipped at it. He hadn’t had a great childhood, but the reasons had never really been explained—spotty mentions, through the years, of a quiet mother and a domineering father, both of whom Becky had never met, both long passed. Evidently, there had been nothing for him here, and he’d left at eighteen, joined the Navy, moved to Syracuse, met Mom, and sold tools. Nothing special. He was good old “Regular Brett,” and she had really been looking forward to their time together tonight when they were supposed to watch the game on TV, joking about how much they missed the Bronx Bombers and trying to find something to like about these crumbling Phils.
    But when Daddy drank, he went into his dark man-cave of a room and took the I-pod for himself, listening to the old-time trippy music he’d stuck on there, like The Moody Blues and The Doors. He’d be snoring loudly by the time Ma got home, and in the morning he’d be sad and apologetic, calling her “Miss Rebecca,” like he was addressing his elder. That was the worst part of it all, she supposed, because she wanted him to be consistently as strong as he looked. She wanted him to be the dad who had scrubbed her feet with a wire brush and alcohol when she was nine after she’d gone out barefoot to the street popping tar bubbles, then tracking the mess on their pretty white rugs…the dad who’d never let her lie to herself with excuses…the dad who taught her to love the game of baseball but was man enough to admit that he couldn’t play worth a lick. She’d asked him to have a catch once, and he’d laughed long and a bit too loud.
    Where do you think you get your klutziness from, Blossum? It ain’t just your ma, I mean, how many windows do you want to go breaking? Now come here and look at this. The Yanks are bringing up a young right-handed bat from Scranton/Wilkes Barre, and they got a lefty for the pen from Chicago for cash.
    Becky studied as much as she could stand and slipped under the covers, trying her best to think of what she would possibly say when she ran into this boy tomorrow. The washer ate the shirt. Her Mom gave it to Goodwill. Terrorists stole it. It was abducted by aliens. It was…
    That night, Becky Michigan dreamed that she had a baseball in her hand. She was holding it up, looking at it as if some odd specimen in a chemistry beaker, and then a hand pressed softly on top of hers from behind, moving along her knuckles, gently pressing forward across her skin until it was finger on top of finger. It was the mystery boy.
    “You grip it this way,” he whispered in her ear. It should have felt weird and inappropriate, like one of those Lifetime warning movies where the big dude in flannel gets behind the girl in the sleazy bar all smooth, “teaching her to shoot pool,” but it wasn’t gross. In fact, it was totally warm and snug, like a cushy chair, like peas and carrots. “Here,” he said, moving her index and middle fingers perpendicular to the seam at the top side of its horseshoe shape facing away to the right. Then he pushed her thumb directly underneath the ball, resting on the smooth leather, touching the seam on the underside.
    “Three strikes and you’re in,” he said in her ear then. “Three strikes and you’re in.”
    She woke up breathless, and her face was hot. She knew that she had dreamt about a four seam fastball of course, but hadn’t a clue as to why her ‘dream boy’ was interested in her knowing how to throw it in the first place. Heck, the idea of Becky Michigan actually chucking a baseball was directly linked to cliché phrases like “She throws like a girl” and the broad sides of barns. Just ask Dad!
    Still, it was far worse and completely strange that her ‘dream