Page 23 of On Fire Island

“A plumber!” Matty happily declared. “Are the toilets clogged again?”

Renee and Gabe laughed; Matty assumed with him, but it turned out to be at him. Renee spoke clearly and slowly.

“Drum-mer. Gabe is a drummer, not a plumber.”

Matty mumbled, “Are we starting a band?” before drifting off into some sort of a drummer-just-screwed-my-mother coma. It was hard to watch, yet I couldn’t turn away.

Renee continued, “Gabe has a show at Maguire’s coming up, if you and Dylan want to come.”

“Dylan is working nights this summer.”

“Oh, well, maybe you’ll come. It’s alternative music.”

She turned to Gabe in a consolatory fashion. “Matty loves that kind of music.”

I was pretty sure Renee had no idea what alternative music was. She concentrated intently on an errant cuticle on her nail, studying it and biting at it instead of making eye contact with her son. I had never seen her like this.

The drummer finally spoke. “Come check it out, man, it’ll be lit.”

Matty focused on Gabe’s bare feet. They had a faint line of dirt on their sides that almost seemed to be tattooed on, as if he had been barefoot for weeks, possibly years.

Thankfully for all, the familiar sound of a foul ball slamming into the house put an end to the torturous exchange. Renee jumped, Matty snapped to attention, and the drummer barely flinched. I guessed he was used to loud banging.

A familiar “Sorry!” drifted in from the direction of the ball field, alerting Matty that the first game of the season had begun. He excused himself with “Gotta go,” grabbed his mitt, and headed for the door as the drummer picked up the box of Lucky Charms and shook it.

“When a man tires of Lucky Charms, he tires of life!” Gabe dramatically exclaimed.

Leaving Matty even more confused than he was before.

fifteen

Eight Men Out

Stepping onto the ball field on Fire Island is like stepping into an alternate universe where nothing else exists but that day’s game—a seven-inning respite from reality. It comes in very handy when trying not to think about your wife’s cancer, a lagging mortgage payment, a problem at work or, in Matty’s case, his mother’s sudden turn from lioness to cougar.

Matty stopped briefly at the pinnacle of the four corners where my house, his house, Shep’s house, and the ball field converge. There was loud music coming from mine, an alarming—or at least odd—occurrence so early in the morning. He resisted checking it out and headed straight to the field, where a few of the guys were warming up. It was immediately clear that there weren’t enough for a game. Matty really needed there to be a game.

The pitcher, a brass union attorney, hurled the ball across the plate, where it fumbled out of the catcher’s mitt. The catcher, a famous voice-over actor (the red M&M and the Charmin Papa bear) ripped off his mask and threw it to the ground.

“It’s so damn hard to align my bifocals with the catcher’smask,” he yelled in frustration, before retrieving the ball from the sidewalk.

They were both pushing sixty. Which is still considered one’s prime on the Bay Harbor Ball Field. At another time, Matty would have appreciated the humor in the curmudgeonly catcher’s complaint, but he had barely heard a word since the scrappy drummer appeared in his kitchen. The vacant look in his eyes refocused as he surveyed the situation.

I slid into the top row of bleachers, where I usually sat, as Pam strolled up, baby in tow. She looked up at me, and tears filled her eyes. For a second I thought that she saw me; it would be just like Pam to be sensitive to paranormal activity. The catcher noticed her tears and put his arm on her shoulder.

“You OK, Pam?”

“Just exhausted,” she admitted.

“It will get better real soon,” the curmudgeonly catcher promised, in an uplifting tone.

I really love these people.

“Where is everybody? I thought we’d have enough for a game,” Matty hollered, clearly not feeling as sentimental as I did at the moment.

“Well, we would if the guys would come back from Ben’s,” the catcher whined as the pitcher explained.

“Eddie and Rico went to get Ben and Shep around twenty minutes ago.”

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