We All Love the Beautiful Girls by Joanne Proulx

Author:Joanne Proulx
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Two gloves lie in the dirt beside Michael, and the field lights are on, but tonight, the kid hasn’t materialized—so much for his perfect attendance record. It’s hot, humid. Michael doesn’t want to wrestle the Arm out of the shed alone—if such a thing’s even possible. And after having had the machine pitching to him for the last month and a half, whacking at balls he tosses into the air holds zero appeal. He’s thinking about going home when he sees someone cutting through the grass field. At first he thinks it’s Dirk, but the figure’s wrongly proportioned, somehow both bigger and smaller than the boy. Michael’s not sure when he realizes it’s Frankie.

She’s almost at second base when, with a low bend of the wrist, she waves. Her short, flowery top creeps up from the waist of her jean shorts, leaving her midriff exposed. “I thought it was you over here,” she says, plunking herself down a few feet to Michael’s right.

None of Dirk’s buddies were under the bridge when Michael passed by a half-hour ago, but they easily could have been. They could be there now. Michael’s unsettled that Frankie’s out this late by herself, and that she’s showed up here, at his diamond in a short top, with a baseball in her hand.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he says gruffly.

“Don’t get all parenty on me, okay? It would have been easier to just walk by.” Frankie slouches against the backstop, and the chain link shifts under Michael’s back. “I have to get home, you know.” She stretches her legs out in front of her, long, bare, her feet slipped into black Converse running shoes, a smaller version of a pair Finn’s given up on account of the laces.

“People might think it looks bad,” Michael says.

“What?”

“Older guy. Younger girl.”

“Whatever.” Frankie teases the ball’s curve of red stitching with her nail. “You’re like my second dad. Or you used to be anyway.”

“Yeah. Sorry about all of that.”

Frankie shrugs. “My father can be a jerk. So can you.”

They both stare pensively across the diamond. The dark dirt, the cockeyed lights, the green of the outfield, the graffiti bridge in the distance, the city sprawling out beyond that. With traffic died down on the overpass and the pitching machine safely in the shed—no thunk of balls on metal sleeve, no snap of arm no crack of bat no bluster of boy—the soft burble of the river and the high beat of crickets act as accompaniment to the night.

Being out here with Frankie isn’t as uncomfortable as Michael might have imagined. She’s so low-key, no matter the circumstances, no matter how blunt her truths—even tonight her mellowness mellows him out. He hasn’t seen her in months, and he realizes he’s happy to have her sitting beside him.

Michael nods at the ball she’s worrying with her thumbnail. “Looking for a game?”

“No.” She tells him she’s been at the Kellys’ and that she found the ball in the field.

“I just broke up with him,” she says, when he asks why Eli didn’t walk her home.

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