Chapter 6

I didn't see Maureen on Monday, but I talked to her and to Nolan on the telephone. It was agreed that I'd come over in the late morning Tuesday and take both of them to the hospital for Nolan's regular checkup, scheduled for one p.m. After that, we'd go to Chuck E. Cheese's for a late lunch.

When I got to the house to pick them up, Patrick met me at the door.

"You did good!" he said.

"Uh. What do you mean?" I said.

He just laughed. "You did good, my man!"

"Jesus!" I said. "She came back here and told you?"

Patrick's smile was wall-to-wall. "She didn't have to say a thing!" he said.

I admitted nothing, but my crimson cranium probably said it all. But then Nolan came in and saved me. "You got to play again last night!" he said.

"You stayed up for the game?"

"We record them on the DVR," Patrick explained. "Nolan watches baseball mostly in the morning.

"I only pinch hit," I said, "and I grounded out."

"You moved the runner over," Nolan said. "Jim Palmer said that was what you were supposed to do."

"Well, if I'd have gotten a base hit, they probably wouldn't have held it against me."

"You got a hit on Sunday!" Nolan reminded, " ... And you scored!"

"Did he ever!" the evil Patrick Terry agreed, laughing uproariously at his own wit.

On the way to the physicians' center, I told Maureen that her father could read her like a Dick-and-Jane first grade primer. "I thought at first that you'd just come home Sunday night and had given him a blow by blow account," I said.

"I don't think he had to be a rocket scientist to deduce that something was afoot," she said, smiling.

"You're saying you had a certain glow about you then?"

"Don't give yourself too much credit," she said. "I just relieved a little tension, that's all."

"Could have been anyone," I agreed.

"Probably," she said.

"What?" Nolan said from the back seat.

I stayed in the waiting room while Maureen and Nolan saw the doctor. They were in there for a considerable time. When they emerged, Nolan looked chipper enough, but his mother's brow was wrinkled.

"Everything okay?" I asked.

"They just poked and prodded him more than I expected," she complained. "I hate it when they start in on him like that."

"It's okay, Mom," Nolan said. "I'm used to it. And I like Doctor Mortimer. He's way better than that other doctor."

"Dr. Mortimer is baseball-conversant," Maureen explained. "In fact, I should have introduced you to him. It would have made his day."

"Let's go back and do it!" Nolan said. "Introduce Todd to Dr. Mortimer. You could give him your autograph!"

"If he's taking good care of my boy, maybe I should ask him for his autograph," I said.

Maureen looked at me funny after that "my boy" remark, and I figured maybe I'd stepped over the line a little bit on that one.

It had just come out. I didn't think it had anything to do with what had happened on Sunday in my apartment. I was pretty sure I'd already been thinking of Nolan in that way for some time.

But I told myself to watch it.

Chuck E. Cheese's was pretty awful, but I guess if you're nine years old, it's a gas. I didn't have any comparable childhood experiences of my own to fall back on. If they had Chuck E. Cheeses in those days, they damned sure didn't have any on the bayou.

Back at the Terry house, Nolan hit the sack for a later-than-usual start on his afternoon nap, and we four played Monopoly on the kitchen table until he awoke two hours later.

I barely had time to talk to Nolan for a few minutes before it was time for me to leave for that night's game.

Out at my car, Maureen said, "You won't fly to Toronto until Thursday morning?"

"Right. But we leave early."

"I can't leave the house tomorrow -- Wednesday," she said. "The doctor is going to call with test results from today. He won't call until late."

"It's okay," I said. "I know you've got to be here with Nolan."

"Could I come tonight? Late? After the game?"

"To my place? Sure. Your mom won't mind, right?"

"She's the one who suggested it," Maureen said.

"That's great," I said. "Your mother is great. Your father is incredible. What a family you got!"

She smiled. "Yeah, they're not half bad, are they? My son's pretty good, too."

"I think I'd like Patrick and Leona to adopt me," I said.

"No way!" Maureen said. "That would be incest!"

The White Sox, who'd been out of the pennant race since around the All Star Break, managed to whip our asses on Tuesday night. The Red Sox won their regularly scheduled game against Kansas City and beat the Royals again in a two-inning-long make-up of a suspended game from earlier in the season. So at the end of the day Tuesday the Red Sox had picked up a game and a half on us in the standings and were only one game behind.

All of that registered on me as I listened to a WBAL sports report in the car on the way back to my apartment. It was important, I guess, in terms of our post-season chances, who we'd likely be matched up against in the Divisional series, and so on.

But I was going to see Maureen O'Conner as soon as I got home tonight. Maybe she'd be in my bed again, waiting for me in her birthday suit, as she had done three days earlier.

She looked good in it, I can tell you.

But when I got there, she was still dressed casually in shorts and a little polo shirt. Smart and sexy, but not n-e-k-k-e-d.

Okay, I could postpone gratification.

She'd prepared root beer floats with peanut butter ice cream. They were in the freezer. Evidently I'd arrived a little later than she'd calculated.

No serious harm done. A few ice crystals where the smooth, pliant ice cream should have been.

"I can stay all night," she said. "I'm gonna leave before dawn, just to protect your reputation."

"My reputation? Are you kidding? If someone sees you leaving my apartment, I'll be a made man around here!"

"I was kidding," she said. "But I really do have to leave very early. I want to be home before Nolan gets up."

"You think he'd disapprove? Of us?" I asked her.

"Disapprove? Hardly! But there's no profit in creating an impression that we're like -- a couple."

"We're not a couple?"

"I only meant, I don't want Nolan to start thinking of you as more of a father figure than he does already."

"Yeah, I noticed the look you gave me coming out of the doctor's office, when I referred to him as 'my boy.'"

"He's only a little boy, Todd. And he's crazy about you already -- mostly because you play baseball, and like any kid, he thinks you're a hero."

"I don't do anything to push that," I said defensively. "If you want, I could sit down with Nolan, tell him the truth. Tell him it's about 60-40 against that I'll even be with the club a year from now. Six months from now, I could be selling ceiling fans down at Lowe's."

"It's not the baseball-hero image that worries me," Maureen said. "It's fear that Nolan will get the idea that you're looking to be his new daddy."

"Supposing I am? Supposing I'd like to be his new daddy? No disrespect for his father, but Nolan's in the market for a new daddy, is he not?"

"You only see him when he's all fired up about being in the presence of his baseball heroes," Maureen said.

She was raising her voice now. Not angry at me, exactly -- not yet anyway -- but losing patience with my naiveté, with trying to make me understand that this wasn't just some little romantic fairy tale where everyone lives happily ever after.

"You haven't been there when he throws up his dinner and most everything else he's eaten since he got up in the morning. Or when he can't sleep at night.

"They give us drugs for him, but they don't half work when it gets really bad, or if they do work, they turn him from a little boy into a goddamned zombie, and we have to watch him like a hawk or he'll just fall down the stairs or up the stairs or walk into a kitchen stove like a sleepwalker."

Maureen's rapid mood-switch was disconcerting. "Okay. It's true that I've only seen Nolan when he was doing better ... But you don't love him just when he's doing well. Your mom and dad don't forsake him when he barfs in his bed. How come I'm the only one, can't care about the boy through the bad times?"

"Why would you? Is getting to fuck me all that terrific, you'd suffer though all the heartache with Nolan just for an occasional roll in the hay?"

"That's a nasty, horrible thing for you to say to me! ... I started to care about that boy before I ever so much as saw you, and I cared about him after I saw you and before I ever, ever, ever expected you'd sleep with me!"

"Oh yeah? ... How long after I came into your hospital room that morning, looking for Nolan, before it crossed your mind -- about sleeping with me?"

"Fuck you, Lady! If you knew the first thing about men, you'd know what a super-dumb question that is. You'd know it doesn't prove a goddamned thing -- about me or about anything.

"But you know what the answer is? You think I won't tell you? You walked in that room looking for Nolan and ... what was your question -- how long after you came in before I thought about fucking you? ... Well, let's put it this way, remember how you hit the floor with your knees and hugged Nolan that morning, soon as you came in and saw him there?

"It was before that! I thought about fucking you before you'd gotten across the room! And when you went down on your knees, I also thought about you sucking my cock while you were down there!

"How's that? Is that ugly enough for you? You think I'm exaggerating? Well, I'm not. But none of that prevented me from treating you with respect. And it didn't prevent me from caring about Nolan. Nothing I've done with Nolan has had anything to do with getting into your pants.

"Your dad saw that clearly enough. He's smart enough to distinguish between love and lust. He knew I cared about Nolan -- whether or not I ever got anywhere with you. I wasn't even so much as going to try to start anything with you! ... Not until Patrick convinced me that I should."

"My father thinks I needed a man so badly that it was like a sickness. We never talked about it, right out in the open, but he fancies himself some kind of amateur Doctor Phil. He wanted to save me. He wants to help Nolan, but he wants to save me, above all."

I hated how this conversation was flying out of control. " ... Seemed to me, last Sunday, maybe your father wasn't so far wrong. I thought we helped each other. I thought we were good together."

"You relieved some tension," she said. "I don't deny that. But you men -- all of you. You've got this perverted idea that all a woman ever needs is for you to lay a little pipe, and, bingo, all her troubles disappear. Just wave that magic wand. Presto!"

"Didn't know you were such a man-hater."

"I'm not a man-hater! I just don't want a man who hovers around my sick little boy and makes out like he loves him like a son."

"What makes you so certain I'm faking it?"

"'My boy!... My boy, ' you called him. You're just going to waltz in and take his dead father's place overnight, just like that! Calm Mama down with your magic dick, and then sign up for a hitch with your 'boy.'"

"Why'd you come here tonight, if you were so full of venom? I thought you were here because we were going to make love."

"I did come to spend the night with you, but this has been preying on my mind ever since we left the doctor's office. You don't know -- you can't know -- how awful it is when Nolan goes down with this! He's so goddamn sick! You just don't know!"

"Why can't we do this together?" I asked her. "Why is it so impossible that I could want to be a part of it? Okay, maybe when I see how bad it can get, I'll be repulsed, just as you've said. But aren't you, sometimes? You may never stop loving him, but don't you reach the end of your rope, sometimes, when he's throwing up everything and won't sleep and won't let you sleep? In those times, don't you hate your dead husband for getting himself killed in Iraq and leaving you to handle this all alone?"

She was crying hard now, and I grasped both her arms, trying not to hurt her but holding them in a tight grip all the same. I held her out in front of me, making her look at me. "It's just human to bend a little under the pressure, Maureen! But I can help some. The season's almost over, and I'll be right here. I'm not going anywhere. I live in Baltimore now, the year 'round. Let me be Nolan's new daddy. You need all the help you can get!"

"If you come on to him like a father, and then leave, it would kill him," she said. "He thinks the sun comes up right out of your goddamned ass!"