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We practiced on our front lawn, using tree trunks as bases and chasing Johnny’s powerful home runs until they disappeared into our cornfield. Johnny had been dying for action all spring, ever since he’d dislocated his elbow during wrestling semifinals and had been forced to sit in the bleachers at State, his left arm swaddled from shoulder to wrist. By June, Johnny’s arm had healed and he was ready to resume his status as a local hero.
We piled out of Mom’s Caprice Classic an hour before our first game at Fireman’s Field, Johnny leading the charge. Dad followed him, whistling, tossing a ball and catching it in his glove. Emilie slumped behind Dad, her hands in her jeans pockets. “This is going to be so boring,” she’d protested on the way over. “Almost as boring as staying home.”
Mom waited for me to free myself from my roost in the middle of the backseat and leaned over, shutting the door behind me. She pointed to the encyclopedia-sized book I carried, Myths and Half-True Tales. “You’re bringing that with you?”
I considered. I was too small for softball, too small for most things—I needed a boost from the top rung to reach the monkey bars and a step stool to see the top of my head in the bathroom mirror. It went without saying that I couldn’t swing a bat by myself, and that a fly ball would probably knock me down.
“What if I get bored?” I replied.
Mom and I walked toward the infield, where Bud Hirsch, captain of Hirsch’s Haybalers, waited with his clipboard. He took one look at me and, with his massive gut thrust forward, said, “You here to watch, shorty?” He chuckled as I sidled away, offended, and turned away to bark orders at the rest of the team. Johnny was going to start out in left field, Dad at first base.
Mom leaned down to me. “Never mind him. You can share my position with me if you want.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll just watch.”
During the warm-up, I sat cross-legged on the bench in the dugout, leaning back against the chain-link fence. Bud Hirsch’s son, Raymond, was pitching slow arcing lobs to Sandy Maertz, a member of our church. Dad, Johnny and the rest of the men in the infield passed the ball back and forth, rolling grounders and tossing fly balls. Mom stood awkwardly in right field, waiting to be included.
The other team, Loetze’s Lions, was starting to arrive, and the bleachers on both sides were beginning to fill up. Someone unlocked the concessions stand, flipped the wooden door down, and raised the Watankee Elementary Academic Boosters Club banner. The money raised tonight would finance our school field trips to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc and our less academic but equally inspiring annual visits to Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
I tracked Emilie as she made her way up to the top row of the bleachers, her honey-blond hair swinging behind her. It amazed me how she moved, how much confidence she had. A year ago she’d been a clumsy eighth grader. Now she was ready to take Lincoln High School by storm. “I’m going to join pep band,” she’d announced to me proudly when we were lying side by side in our twin beds one night. A shard of moonlight had fallen through the curtains and cut her slim body in half—her hipbones and long legs on one side, the small buds of her breasts, like plum halves, on the other.
“Why do you want to be in pep band?” I’d asked, thinking of the few football games I’d attended in my life. The pep band was a group of shivering kids who took the field at halftime after the cheerleading routine, right about when half the stands decided they needed a hot dog or a trip to the bathroom. “Those kids never get to watch the game.”
“I don’t care about the stupid game,” Emilie had said, sighing dramatically. “I want people to watch me.”
Bud Hirsch called my attention back to the game with two toots on his whistle. “All right! Switch it up!” Our team started a slow jog through the infield to our dugout, and Loetze’s Lions took a turn at their warm-ups.
Panting as he came off the diamond, Dad gave me a high five—as if by staying out of the way, I’d performed some huge feat.
I slid from the bench. “Can I have a dollar?”
“Sure.” Dad dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of change.
“Stay close,” Mom said.
I could feel her eyes on me as I walked behind the batter’s box, my feet kicking up little swirls of dust that instantly coated my tennis shoes. I resisted the urge to hike up my shorts, Emilie’s from years before. Sometimes I hated the way Mom looked at me, like I was a medical specimen.
A dollar bought me a can of Coke and three blue Pixy Stix, the kind of pure-sugar pleasure I was never allowed at home. Clutching the soda in one hand and my book in the other, I scanned the bleachers for a place to sit. A few people from church smiled encouragingly in my direction, but I spotted Emilie in the center of a tight, whispering circle of recent Watankee Elementary graduates and changed course. A few of my own soon-to-be-fourth-grade classmates were sitting in the stands with their parents, but we glanced away from each other with summertime awkwardness, as if we knew we weren’t meant to connect again until the Tuesday after Labor Day.
I lugged my volume of Myths and Half-True Tales to a shady spot beneath the bleachers and opened to the dog-eared page on Atlantis. The game began and cheers erupted.
We were only a mile or so from our farm, but to hear Dad yell, “Hammer one home, Hammarstrom!” during Johnny’s turn at bat was to imagine that we’d been transported somewhere far away, like an island in the South Pacific. Dad was only here at all because he’d worked out a deal with Jerry Warczak: Jerry, who had no interest in softball, would cover Dad’s last milking on these nights if Dad and Johnny would lend him a hand on Saturdays with the chickens. This was typical of the sort of deals they worked out. “It’s just being neighborly,” Dad had explained to me, but it had seemed that he was being more than neighborly when he’d clapped Jerry on the shoulder and said, “He’s like another son to me.”
When the noise of the game finally faded into the background, I spent the next few innings reading about Atlantis and wondering how a city could go missing—poof!—just like that. What would happen if Watankee, Wisconsin, and all the people I knew were to fall off the face of the earth one day—a sudden crack, then a quick slide into Lake Michigan? How long until the rest of the world missed us?
I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the crack of the bat, the sudden burst of applause. I imagined the ball hurtling through a blue sky deepening into purple with the sunset. The tall grass under the bleachers prickled and dented the undersides of my legs, and a mosquito seemed intent on sucking my blood. I was swatting my ankle when a shadow covered me.
“Hey, you’re Kirsten Hammarstrom, aren’t you?”
I struggled to sit up. For a moment, it looked like an angel was standing over me, even though my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Keithley said there was no such thing anymore, unless maybe you were a Catholic. The voice belonged to a girl who wore cutoff denim shorts and a checked shirt with the tails knotted at her waist, so that just a teensy strip of skin at her stomach showed. I realized that what looked like a fiery halo on top of her head was actually just her red hair, backlit by the stadium lights.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’m Kirsten Hammarstrom.” Suddenly I felt guilty, as if I’d been caught sneaking a sliver of pie before dinner.
“Your brother’s Johnny Hammarstrom, right?” she said, bending down to my height. Up this close, she was the loveliest person I’d ever met. Creamy white skin, a tiny bridge of freckles spanning her nose. A smile so wide and welcoming, she might have been pictured on a travel brochure.
“Yeah,” I said again, suddenly ashamed of my dirty hands, my teeth sticky with the residue of Coke. “Why?”
She smiled and held out a hand, poised as any church greeter. “I’m Stacy Lemke.”
We shook hands. Nothing drastic happened, no fireworks or a sudden crack of thunder, but somehow the moment felt significant.
Stacy’s hands were cool, her nails painted the softest pink, like cotton candy. If she noticed that my nails were ringed with dirt, she didn’t say anything. “Kirsten. That’s such a pretty name,” she said.
I smiled. “Do you know my brother?”
She laughed. “Everyone knows Johnny Hammarstrom.”
This hadn’t really occurred to me until I heard it said that way, so boldly, like a biblical fact. During wrestling season, Johnny’s name was a regular appearance in the sports section of the Watankee Weekly; whenever I was in town with Dad, someone always approached him to ask about Johnny’s prospects for the fall.
“I go to school with him, but we don’t really know each other,” Stacy said, smiling a little sadly. “I mean, I don’t think he would ever notice someone like me.”
I looked at her more closely. Her tiny freckles glistened under small bubbles of sweat, but I didn’t see any kind of defect—no eyeteeth or harelip or deformed thumbs. If my brother hadn’t noticed Stacy Lemke, he was either blind or stupid or both. “Why not?” I asked, blushing. “I think you’re really pretty.”
“Oh, you’re so sweet!” She gave me a quick touch on the knee and stood up, brushing invisible dirt from her legs.
“I would have noticed you,” I said, swallowing hard.
“Aren’t you just the cutest thing in the world!” She laughed, tossing her head so that her red hair briefly covered her face and then swung free again. “Well—it was nice meeting you.”
She started to walk away. I watched her until she got to the edge of the bleachers, where she stopped and did a little rubbing thing with her shoes in the grass, to toe off the dust. I was still watching her when she turned back to me, and I looked down, embarrassed.
“You know, maybe you could tell Johnny that I said hi.”
“Sure.” I smiled. She could have asked me anything, and I wouldn’t have said no.
When she smiled back at me, I could see a little tooth in the back of her mouth that was turned sideways and slightly pointed—the only thing about Stacy Lemke that wasn’t absolutely perfect. It made me like her even more.
three
The crowd dispersed, and the Hammarstroms reassembled in the infield, half of us sweaty and all of us satisfied.
“Watch out, shorty!” Johnny yelled, appearing from the dugout. I pretended to dodge his grasp, but he caught me by the arms and hoisted me to his shoulders. I shrieked while he ran the bases, my hands grabbing on to his neck for dear life.
“Be careful!” Mom called from somewhere, her voice lost in the darkness.
I screamed as Johnny gained speed, heading for home plate. I squeezed my feet against his chest, too terrified to look until he eased up and carefully deposited me on the ground. That was Johnny—rough and gentle at the same time.
It wasn’t until later, when we were gathered around the kitchen table dunking chunks of apple pie into bowls of soupy vanilla ice cream, that I remembered about Stacy. For a moment I hesitated to say anything, wanting to hold Stacy’s existence close, like a treasure gathered in my fist.
Johnny had finished giving Grandpa the play-by-play, and Grandpa was just about finished pretending to be interested in his analysis of Sandy Maertz’s triple, when I managed to get a word in.
“A girl named Stacy Lemke says to tell you hi,” I said.
“Who’s that?” Johnny asked gruffly, looking down into his bowl. His cheeks suddenly flamed pink.
I shrugged, trying to be casual. “Stacy Lemke. She has red hair and freckles.” She has creamy skin, the softest handshake in the world. She said I was adorable.
“That must be Bill Lemke’s daughter. He played for the other team tonight. Is she in your class, Johnny?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.
“Sure you do,” Emilie piped up. “Stacy Lemke? She used to go out with what’s-his-name, the Ships quarterback.”
I smooshed my finger into a drop of ice cream. “She says she goes to school with you.”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve seen her around,” Johnny said. He brought his bowl to his lips, trying to drain the last of his ice cream into his mouth. Mom cleared her throat pointedly, and Johnny set the bowl back on the table.
“Bill Lemke, the tax attorney?” Dad asked.
“O-o-o-h, someone’s got a crush on you,” Emilie teased.
Johnny clanked his spoon against his bowl. “Shut up, that’s not true.”
Dad said, “He’s the guy who helped Jerry hold on to some of that land after Karl died. Decent guy.”
Emilie sang, “Johnny’s got a girlfriend.... Johnny’s got—”
“I said shut up, already.” Johnny stood up and Mom sent Emilie a warning look sharp as any elbow. I had to hand it to Emilie; she wasn’t a coward. She was a master at pushing Johnny right to his very edge.
“Look, she’s just some girl.” Johnny turned away from us. His bowl and spoon landed in the sink with a clang, and the back door slammed a few seconds later.
Mom called, “Johnny! You get back here!” but Johnny was already gone.
“What’s got into him?” Dad demanded, his voice caught between annoyance and amusement.
Mom shrugged, getting up to rinse out Johnny’s bowl.
Dad stood then and stretched, the same stretch he did every night when the day was just about over. “I guess it’s time for me to make the rounds one last time,” he announced. “I could use a bit of company, though.”
This was my cue. I stood, following Dad to the door for our nighttime ritual. Kennel trotted behind us to the barn, where I dumped out some cat food for our half-dozen strays and Dad walked up and down the calf pens, whistling and cooing to the youngest, reassuring them. “Hey, now, baby,” I heard him say, and the calves responded by tottering forward in their pens, all awkward legs and clunky hooves.
I waited for Dad in the doorway of the barn with Kennel rubbing against my legs. From this perspective, slightly elevated from the rest of our property, it seemed as if all we needed was a moat and we would have our own little kingdom. Our land, all one hundred-and-sixty acres of it, stretched away farther than I could see into the deepening darkness. On the north side of the property the corn grew fiercely, shooting inches upward in a single day. Beyond the rows of corn was our neighbor Mel Wegner, beloved because he let me feed apples to his two retired quarter horses, King Henry and Queen Anne. In the opposite direction, our cow pasture joined up with what had been the Warczaks’ property, until Jerry had had to sell most of it to cover legal and medical expenses. These days, the bank rented him part of the property for a chicken farm. Sometimes, when the wind carried just right, I could hear the confusion of a thousand chickens pushing against each other. Other times, days in a row might pass without us seeing any of our human neighbors.
Our house, beaming now with yellow rectangles of light from almost every window, was set back from the road by a rolling green lawn that Grandpa Hammarstrom tended faithfully. Peeking behind it, closer to the road, was Grandpa’s house, newly remodeled to be in every way more efficient than ours. On the east end, our property ended in a thick patch of trees that started just about at one end of the county and ended at the other, a green ribbon of forest that more or less tended to itself. In the middle of it all was our barn, which Johnny had been painstakingly repainting, plus our towering blue silo, the sleek white milk tank.
“Ready, kiddo?” Dad asked, appearing behind me. He cupped his hand around the back of my head, and my silky, tangled blond hair fell through his fingers.
“Race you,” I said, suddenly filled with the night’s unspent energy, and started back. Dad was a superior racing companion, pushing me to go faster and farther, but never getting more than a step ahead of me. We arrived breathless at the back door. Mom was alone at the sink now, and she turned to grin at us.
“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.
