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I'm not saying I wish Coach Fowler would die or anything, I'm just saying he probably will. Last week at the game he got to coughing right before I was up, and before I grabbed my bat, he coughed up a loogie right there in the dirt. It was disgusting. His son, Neville Fowler, who is our pitcher, must be so disgusted by him. And the worst thing is I never felt this way until Old Fowler benched me. So let me get back to that story and stop talking about loogies and bloody lungs.
Anyhow, Neville walked out to the mound as the Umberland Tigers' best hitter came up to bat. The kid is named Jason Davidson, and he's a real dick. For example, he once dated Henry Obermiller's sister and gave her a black eye when they got into an argument, so I think anyone can see that he had whatever was coming his way.
Jason got up there and crouched into position, and as he did, Neville got a cramp in his leg--a bad one. He started howling and hobbling around, and the poor guy dropped his mitt and the ball and was basically screaming every obscenity that you could think of. Like bad ones--you know, the biggies. The kind moms will wash out a kid's mouth with soap for saying.
So Coach Fowler shouts him off the field and he's pretty damn mad at his own kid for getting a cramp and wrecking this inning, and he kind of shoves me in even though I'm not half as good a pitcher as Neville is. I'm not ashamed to say that I took my time getting to the mound, and I did that specifically because a very cute girl by the name of Julie Miller was there in the stands watching the game, and I wanted her eyes on me for as long as possible.
Oh, does it feel cool to be a pitcher! Even knowing that it's not my best position, I still enjoyed the feeling of everyone waiting for me to stamp my foot on the mound, tap my mitt against my thigh, roll the ball between my fingers, and squint my eyes at Jason Davidson like I wanted nothing more than to throw that ball straight at his big forehead and hit him squarely between the eyes.
And do you know what? That's exactly what I did! BUT...I need to say here that it wasn't really my intention, just my deep desire, so possibly it happened because my hand and my pitching arm were listening to my brain, and before anyone knew it, Jason was flat on the ground and the whistle wasblowing and the Umberland Tigers were swarming the field and coming after every single one of our players with fists swinging.
It was mayhem. Absolute war right there on the green grass as everybody's mothers sat in the stands, fanning themselves and sipping Tab in the hot sun. The fathers jumped to their feet, shouting at their own sons to "Get 'em! Swing on 'em!" and looking like they might take to the field themselves to get a little taste of the action.
So, needless to say, Old Fowler benched the hell out of me and I was mad as a hornet because it was an accident, but I swear some day I'm going to be president of this entire country, and when I am, Coach Fowler will find himself doing some time behind bars for something--I don't even care what, but I will find something to lock him up for, and then he can hock all the loogies he wants into an old coffee can for the rest of his life.
By the time Ruby finishes reading this journal entry from fourteen-year-old Jack Hudson, star baseball player and future vengeful head of state, she's laughing.
"Oh, Jack," she says out loud, wiping at her eyes. Even with the boxes in order, Ruby has decided to walk over to one and pick a journal at random and start reading, and now she's so glad that she has. This version of Jack is one that both amuses her and cleanses her palate after reading his lovestruck missive about Etienne.
Over the course of their marriage she'd certainly imagined a young Jack, wondering what he had been like as a boy, or imagining how his youthful countenance might be echoed in their own daughters' faces, but reading his words--written in his own hand--is almost like having him there with her to tell her stories himself. She lets her fingers graze lightly over the indentthat his pen has left on the page, tracing the letters like they're written in braille.
The sun has started to set and the living room has gone dim as Ruby sits on the couch, feet pulled up beneath her. She reaches over and turns on the lamp next to her, filling the space with warm light. Outside, the waves are crashing, and inside, the music she's been listening to has stopped. She has gotten lost in Jack's words, smiling as she reads and nearly feeling the injustice he must have felt himself over Coach Fowler benching him for braining another kid with a baseball.
She opens the diary again and flips to the next page.
July 4, 1975
It happened: I kissed Julie Miller, and I think I'm in love.
Tonight is the Fourth of July and we went to a bonfire at Harbor Beach. There were fireworks, and Neville Fowler almost blew his damn hand off. But he still has ten fingers, so there's no real story there. The real story is that Julie sat next to me on the sand the whole night, and she seemed like she wanted to sit so close to me that our arms touched. She was electric. She was like a jar of fireflies or an even bigger fire than the one we were roasting hotdogs in. Every time she laughed I felt a fizz in my veins.
We had bottle rockets and sparklers and some other small-time crackers, but when the big show started down the beach, she scooted in real close and put her shoulder right up next to mine. For the first time in my whole life I didn't care at all about the fireworks. Not one of them caught my attention the way she did, and when she whispered to me that she needed to go pee in the woods but was too scared to go alone, I stood up and followed her, promising to stand guard by the trees with my back to her until she was done.
Only she didn't really need to pee at all. Or maybe she did and she just held it--you never know with girls. But then she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the dark woods, and for a second I think I was more scared than she was. Because what do you do when a girl you like holds your hand and you can't see anything? I'll tell you what you do: you pull her close and then you find her lips with yours, and then you just kiss her. So that's what I did. But then she started kissing me too, and I don't think either of us tried to pull away until my lips started to feel numb, but then we walked back to the beach holding hands, and all of our friends started making that "Woooooo!" sound at us like they knew what we were up to.
And now I think Julie is FINALLY my girlfriend, although I don't know for sure because we didn't actually talk, but if I lick my lips even now at midnight, I can still taste her Dr. Pepper flavored lipgloss and my heart starts beating really fast. I think I better call her tomorrow, and probably someday when we're married we'll joke around about our first kiss on the 4th of July in the woods.
Ruby laughs out loud at this—how can she not? She’s chewing on the end of a popsicle stick, reading young Jack’s words hungrily as she sits on the rug by the fireplace, her back leaning against the couch. She’s tempted to look up Julie Miller on Facebook, but with a name like that, it would be nearly impossible to find her. Where could Julie be now, and had she ever known that she was nearly the wife of a president?
Ruby stands up and reaches both arms in the air as she stretches. Jack’s words echo in her ears as she walks to the kitchen, turning on lights as she goes.I think Julie is FINALLY my girlfriend…probably someday when we’re married we’ll joke around about our first kiss…
Had Ruby had thoughts like this as a teenager? She must have. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had the foresight to keep an official diary throughout the years like many girls her age had done. She had gotten diaries with flimsy little gold locks on them, and pens with purple ink and fluffy feathers on the end for her birthday. Books that were meant to inspire her to write about holding hands with boys at skating parties, about her feelings of anger towards her mother, or about the fears she had for the future. But instead, she’d used the journals to write lists of the novels she’d read that year, or to draw pictures as she looked out the window of her bedroom and out onto the orange and lemon trees in her backyard. Once, she’d started writing a short story about a girl whose dad died of a heart attack, and instead of staying with her mom, the girl had gotten a job at Disneyland and somehow found a quiet corner in which to hide her belongings so that she could live there each night when the park closed. It sounds ridiculous to her now, but at the time something about living in a fantasyland and hiding from her real life had seemed so appealing.
Ruby tosses the popsicle stick into the trash can and looks out the window at the summer evening. She’s been reading all afternoon, and while she can easily call Sunday or Marigold to see if they want to join her for dinner, the solitude of being home alone with the boxes of Jack’s journals is nice. And yet…they deserve to be shared. The way his looping cursive in the early books tells the story of a young boy’s life, and the way his handwriting shifts and changes as the months and years pass, even that first entry she’d read on the beach—a confession of a night spent with a woman who was not his wife; the beginning of a love affair—it feels wrong somehow that she’s the only person getting to hear Jack’s side of the story.
Ruby picks up her phone with a frown and dials.
“I thought we weren’t going to talk until bedtime,” Dexter says when his face pops up on the screen. He’s sitting on his couch on Christmas Key, wearing his tortoise shell glasses. Dexter smiles at her. “Did you miss me too much?”
Ruby wants to banter, but she’s got other things in mind. “That,” she says distractedly, “and I’m reading Jack’s diaries here. I can’t put them down.”
Dexter takes off his glasses and stares into her eyes. This is one of the many things she truly appreciates about Dexter North: the way he can give his undivided attention.
“I don’t want to pry,” he says. "But I'm obviously curious." He waits.
“You’re not prying.” Ruby is standing at the kitchen island, tapping her big toe against the floor as she considers what she’s about to say. “I think you should come over.”
Dexter lifts an eyebrow. “Oh?”
