‘You don’t want to read something like that in the middle of a baseball game,’ I said, my heavy heart pounding in my ears like a jackhammer. ‘This is hardly the right kind of atmosphere for something so …’
‘Intimate.’ Bel finished my sentence for me before standing abruptly, empty peanut shells falling from herlap onto the floor. She stuffed her hands even deeper into the pockets of my jacket, the look on her face inscrutable. Not a good sign for open-book Bel.
‘I’m going to check out the store,’ she announced, pushing her hair away from her face. ‘Anyone need anything?’
‘I’m good,’ I replied, even though it was far from the truth. She shuffled down the line of seats, arse to face, ran up the stairs and melted away into the crowd. As soon as she was gone, I turned to Ren, my left foot tapping so fast, it was a surprise when I didn’t drill my way through the concrete floor. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Tell me more about these foul balls.’
Instead, he threw up his hands, the woman to his left ducking right before he took her eye out.
‘I don’t get it,’ he exclaimed. ‘Why wouldn’t she want me to read a letter if she wrote it for me?’
Probably because she wanted to read it herself first, I thought, reaching for Suzanne’s beer a second time.
‘I don’t understand, it’s like she’s two different people,’ Ren sighed. ‘Why is she pretending with me? Why can’t she be real?’
‘Could be she’s not pretending,’ I suggested. ‘People are multidimensional, you know.’
But he wasn’t listening, already far too busy working through his worst-case scenarios.
‘Oh my God,’ his face turned ashen. ‘What if she didn’t want me to read it because that letter wasn’t for me? What if that was for someone else?’
‘I’m one hundred per cent positive it wasn’t written for anyone else,’ I said to a fretful Ren with an earnest smile that I hoped was only slightly diminished by theblue-sequinned cowboy hat I’d been wearing for the last two hours. ‘She really, really likes you and you only just met, there’s still so much to find out about each other. You can’t hang your whole heart on one letter.’
‘Two letters.’
He shook his head as he slipped out of his seat and into Bel’s. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
His leg pressed against mine and, even though I tried to fight it, I took one breath in and we were back in the woods. All of the fifty thousand people around us, gone.
‘Who does?’ I replied, pinching my shoulders together.
Ren laughed and leaned in towards me, just enough for his shoulder to rest against mine.
‘Sorry, you don’t want to hear about all this. Are you having a good time?’
‘Fantastic time,’ I squeaked. My palms were wet from the condensation on my borrowed beer and clammy from feeling all my feelings, and I wiped them on my jeans when he wasn’t looking. ‘You?’
‘It’s a great game,’ he said, nodding and shaking his head at the same time, not really answering the question. ‘We have a pretty intense rivalry going with the Giants; we swept them in San Francisco, so they’re going to want to return the favour tonight.’
‘I don’t know what any of that means but yes, absolutely,’ I yelled over the crowd, one of our players whacking the ball and running for first base. ‘Are we still winning?’
‘Yeah, but we’re going to have to pull our pitcher pretty soon and I don’t love our bullpen tonight. Sure could use a three-run homer from Mookie right now.’
‘If you say so,’ I replied, fizzing happily when he laughed.
Everything went quiet for a moment. One of the players walked out onto the field (not a pitch, according to Ren), positioned himself in a slight squat, pulled back his bat and hit the ball, sending it flying through the air and out into the crowded benches on the far side of the stadium.
‘Bloody hell,’ I gasped as Ren leapt out of his seat and cheered. ‘What happens if it hits someone?’
‘You get to keep the ball!’ he yelled as though it was a good thing. ‘Five zero, baby – let’s go, Dodgers!’
All around the stadium, every kind of human celebrated in every kind of way, yelling, waving, clapping, kissing. Even the odd Giants fans dotted in between the vast swathes of Dodger blue seemed OK with it, taking a good-natured jostling from their friends. I couldn’t believe they didn’t have an away section, but I hadn’t heard a single person sing a single note of an offensive song and not once had anyone called the sexual preferences of a player’s wife into question. It was all so wholesome. No matter which team you supported, everyone was a baseball fan, the mums, the dads, grandmas and grandads, toddlers, teenagers and even tiny babies who really came into their own when the organist played ‘Circle of Life’ between the fourth and fifth innings and every proud papa in the place held their progeny aloft and pretended they were Simba.
As the crowd calmed itself, a sweet love song started up through the loudspeaker and the babies on the Jumbotron were replaced by throbbing pink love hearts. A happy-looking couple, who looked thrilled to see their faces blown up twenty feet tall, filled the screen.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked Ren. ‘Should I know who they are?’
‘It’s the Kiss Cam,’ he replied. The couple on the Jumbotron kissed then broke apart laughing with everyone cheering them on. ‘It’s another baseball thing.’
