Bullet Point Read Free Page A

Bullet points? Yeah, that was it. Wyatt lined up the most obvious bullet points, like living in a new place, a booster family, Bobby Avril, and leaving home.
    “Well?” said the coach.
    Wyatt took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
    “Smart man,” said the coach. “All you got to do is keep doin’ what you’re doin’. Play hard, stay relaxed.”
    Wyatt nodded. Yes, he could do that. He was going to miss things, his mom, of course, and Dub and the team, and other kids at East Canton High, but: yeah. And Cammy. He was going to miss her, too. Wyatt held out his hand. “Thanks, Coach, thanks a lot.”
    “Don’t thank me,” the coach said. They shook hands. The coach’s hand was hard and rough, the big fingers twisted. Wyatt turned to go. He was almost at the door when the coach called him back. “One more thing,” he said. Wyatt walked back into the room. The coach opened a filing cabinet under the window, searched through the bottom drawer. “Here you go,” he said. “Might as well have this. Everything’s just gonna end up in boxes in my garage, moldering away.”He gave Wyatt a photograph, six by nine or so.
    “What’s this?” Wyatt said. A black-and-white photo and obviously kind of old, the edges yellowish and turning up, it showed two guys in baseball uniforms with East Canton on the chests, although the lettering was different from the lettering on the uniforms now. One of the guys, the unsmiling, older one, had a salt-and-pepper mustache. The other was a kid, maybe about Wyatt’s age, a good-looking kid with a big white smile on his face. Wyatt didn’t recognize either of them. “Who are these guys?”
    Coach Bouchard jabbed his finger at the older one. “That’s me, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Oh,” said Wyatt. “Sorry.” The mustache had fooled him, plus how young the coach looked; his face—now deeply grooved—had hardly any lines at all. But those cold eyes were the same; he should have seen that. “Who’s the other one?”
    “Take a guess.”
    Wyatt had no idea. “The team captain, maybe?”
    “Woulda been, if he’d stuck around for another season.”
    “Uh-huh,” Wyatt said. Why did the coach want him to have this picture?
    “No idea who that is?” Coach Bouchard asked.
    “Nope.”
    “Look closely.”
    Wyatt looked closely, shook his head.
    The coach gave him a long stare. “Maybe this ain’t such a good idea,” he said. He reached for the photo, got a corner of it between his fingertips, but Wyatt didn’t let go.
    “Why not?” he said. “Who is this guy?”
    Coach Bouchard sighed. “Ah, Christ,” he said. “It’s a slick-fielding shortstop I had way back when. Name of Sonny Racine.”
    The photo trembled slightly in Wyatt’s hand. “My father?” he said. “My real father?”
    The coach sighed again. “Biological, I guess they say these days, ’stead of real.”

3
    WYATT HELD THE PHOTO in both hands, kept it steady. He’d never seen a picture of his father before; they’d been separated, if that was the way to put it, prior to Wyatt’s birth. First had come six or seven years of ignorance, then his mom—it was just the two of them then, pre-Rusty—had sat him down and told him the story. After that came a year or two of intermittent questions, and since then he’d pretty much stopped having any thoughts at all about his—how had Coach Bouchard put it?—his biological father. Had he ever asked to see a picture? Maybe, long ago, because he had a faint memory of his mom telling him there were no pictures. Now, with this photo in his hands, one thing was clear: the son looked a lot like the father, at least the father as a young man.
    Wyatt glanced up. The coach was watching him, eyes narrowed. “How come you never told me about this?” Wyatt said. “I never even knew he…he played ball.”
    “You never asked,” the coach said. “And it was all a long time ago. Maybe a mistake, like I said. Give it back. I’ll put the damn