The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard Page B

little today, if you can fit that in your schedule, Henry, he said. You’ve got a glove?
    Frank didn’t have one for himself, but that wasn’t a problem. He’d noticed there was an open area, out behind where our property ended, where a person could work on his fielding.
    I thought you just had your appendix out, I said. I thought you were holding us prisoners. What happens if one of us runs away when you aren’t looking?
    Then you get your real punishment, Frank said. You have to go rejoin society.
    What we did then: he scoped out our yard, to figure out where the chicken coop could go. Cold weather was coming, but with enough straw, chickens wintered over just fine. All they needed was a warm body to huddle up to in the night, same as the rest of us.
    Frank checked out our woodpile, and when he heard the cord had just been delivered, he told my mother the guy who sold it had been shorting her.
    I’d split this wood for you, but I might bust my stitches trying, he said. I bet it gets cozy here in wintertime, when the snow piles up, and you get a fire going in the woodstove.
    He cleaned the filters on our furnace and changed the oil in the car. He replaced a fuse for the blinkers.
    How long since the last time you rotated your tires, Adele? he asked.
    She just looked at him.
    While we’re at it, he said, I’m betting nobody ever showed you how to fix a flat, am I right about that, Henry? One thing I’ll tell you now, you don’t want to wait till it happens, to learn. Particularly not if you’ve got some young lady in the seat beside you that you’re wanting to impress. You’ll be driving before you know it. That, and other things.
    He did laundry. He ironed. When he washed a floor, he also waxed it. He looked through our pantry, in search of something he could make us for lunch. Soup. He’d start out with Campbell’s but augment. Too bad we didn’t have a patch of fresh basil growing. Next year maybe. Meanwhile, there was always dried oregano.
    Then he took me out in the yard, with the new baseball he’d picked up the day before over at Pricemart.
    For starters, he said, I’m just going to take a look at how you place your fingers on the stitching.
    He bent over me, his long fingers over mine. This is your first problem, he said. Your grip.
    We won’t actually throw today, he said, after he’d shown me the good way, his way. His scar was still a little tender for that, he said. But anyway, it was a good idea for me to just get used to this feeling first. Finger the ball. Toss it lightly in the air when I walked around.
    Come nighttime, he said, I’d like you to put your glove under your pillow. Breathe in the smell of the leather. Keeps you in the zone.
    We were back in the kitchen now. Like some kind of pioneer woman, or a wife from an old western movie, my mother was mending Frank’s pants where they’d ripped. She wanted to wash them too but then he’d have nothing to wear. He sat wrapped in a towel while she sewed, dabbing off the worst of the blood with a wet rag first.
    You bite your lip when you sew, he said. Anyone ever tell you that?
    Not that, or so much else he noticed about her that day. Her neck, the knuckles on her hands—no jewelry, he observed, which was a pity, she had such pretty hands. There was a scar on her knee that I’d never noticed.
    How’d you get this, honey? he asked her, like it was no big deal calling her that, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
    A “Stars and Stripes Forever” routine at my dancing school recital, she told him. I tapped myself right off the stage.
    He kissed it.
    S OMETIME IN THE LATE AFTERNOON , after his pants were mended, after the soup, and the card game, and the trick he taught me—making a toothpick come out your nose—there was a knock on the door. Frank had been around long enough now, almost a day, to know this was unusual. I saw the