7 Days at the Hot Corner Read online

  “Shut up!” Davita says to Angela, then looks back at me, staring into my eyes again. “See you.”

  I just smile at them.

  Back in my truck driving to Mom’s, for the first mile I feel really happy and full of myself.

  I’m famous.

  I’m gonna be a great baseball player.

  I’ll make the pros and be rich and happy and …

  I just miss the green at a stoplight on the corner of Seventeenth and Grand. It’s a busy intersection with signals from all directions: east, west, north, and south; and four different left-turn lanes with lights of their own. I’m on Grand, facing south, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a cat races into the middle of all this traffic.

  I guess you’d call it an orange tabby: orange striped with flecks of white mixed in with the orange. It runs right in front of my truck, with cars streaming by from both my left and right, and now it just stops in the middle of the street and looks right up at me.

  Cats’ eyes are so strange-looking. Cats stare at you completely differently than dogs do: Dogs always look like they want to know you, but when a cat stares, it’s like it’s daring you to look back at it; it’s just a weird feeling. Does this cat know how much danger it’s in? A cat with eight of its nine lives left wouldn’t stand a chance in this traffic—but this one isn’t moving, it’s just sitting out between the two lanes, staring straight at me as cars and trucks and SUVs and vans drive by it.

  I freeze. If I honk my horn, it might run into the path of a car and get killed; if I jump out and try to stop the traffic or grab the cat, it might get scared and run anyway. The only thing keeping it alive this second is that it’s just sitting still; but how long until a car drives too close to the middle line and runs it over? None of the other drivers seem to even see it. I don’t know what to do! Just when I don’t think I can stand it for another second, the cat shoots off across the street, heading away from me. Two cars drive right toward it, but by some miracle, some totally perfect bit of luck, they miss it. The last I see of the cat, it’s running through a gas station parking lot, leaping up, and clawing its way over a wooden fence into the backyard of a small house.

  The car behind me honks—not just a little beep-beep, either, but a long blast. I look up and see that my light has turned green, so I ease forward.

  I drive on thinking about the cat, about Travis, about my inability to make things okay. Before I realize what’s happening, my whole feeling of happiness from the girls at the Safeway has completely collapsed. Famous? A pro? A millionaire jock? Come on! I can’t even handle my own life: My parents got divorced; I don’t know what to say to Travis; I can’t save a suicidal cat; I struck out four times today.

  Baseball legend?

  Big-shot sports hero?

  No way!

  The whole rest of the drive out to Mom’s, I feel worse and worse, absolutely stupid and worthless.

  Mom’s house at Weaver Lake used to be Mom and Dad’s place before I was even born. We all three lived there together until I was four and they split up. For several years after the separation Dad would stay overnight sometimes and they “tried to work things out,” until they finally gave up for good and got the divorce. And that divorce changed everything forever—at least for me it did.

  Although the town is also called Weaver Lake, Mom’s house is right on the lake itself, twelve miles southwest of Spokane. I pull my truck into my parking spot next to the fence and look out at the wind gently playing across the water. Against my will I say to myself that Weaver Lake would be as good a place as any to lie around and die of AIDS. I gotta knock this off; I don’t even know if Travis has ever had sex with anybody before, much less whether he’s infected. I’ve been acting totally stupid.

  I open the truck door and climb out. I love the smell of the lake: kind of a seaweed-meets-fresh-air scent. Off the shore from our house, about a hundred yards out, there are some big rocks. Seagulls and ducks hang out there. Twice a year Canadian honkers, a huge gaggle, show up and hang around for a couple of weeks. Mom and I have always taken walks along the lake, and it’s beautiful. For a guy my age, the line between boring and relaxing can be pretty thin sometimes. But at Mom’s, even though there’s really not much to do, it’s almost always good; I guess you’d have to call it peaceful.

  When my dad lived here, he built a space in the back of the garage that he called a studio. He put up a wall and insulated it and rewired it for lights and an outlet. He even put in a baseboard heater. I walk into the studio now, clicking on the light. I called Mom from Dad’s house to ask if I could come out, and she was really happy that I’d be coming, but I want a few minutes to myself before I see her. A few years ago I turned the studio into my space, a place for my friends and me. Now, when I come out to stay with my mom, I always spend at least one night up here, away from the main house. It’s kind of like having my own little apartment. Over the years Travis and I have spent a lot of nights here. I sleep in the little loft and Travis sleeps on the foldout couch. We’ve had some great times: eating junk food, talking until all hours of the night, watching ball games on my little black-and-white TV with its weak signal for channels 2 or 6 from Spokane, the only stations we could get. Those times all feel like ancient history now. I miss them. I miss him.

  I stand in the studio looking out the window, down toward the lake. I start thinking about everything: the baseball championships, Travis, his folks, AIDS, and then about my mom and dad. What did Travis say? You think your parents are not okay because they got a divorce....

  I think about how sad I was back then. I can see the old sandbox where I played as a little kid, the boards all weathered and splintery now from so many years exposed to the winds from the lake. I remember how young my mom looked back when we built the sandbox, how big and strong and invincible my dad seemed. I remember him lifting me up and flying me around the yard like I was Superman. I swear I can almost see the outline of his footsteps in the grass.

  I look out past the huge old pines in our yard, down to where the waves wash silently onto our beach. And suddenly I start crying. Not just a little teary-eyed boo-hoo, but the real thing. I’m sobbing so hard that it hurts my chest and ribs and drives me to the floor. I can hardly catch a breath. I lie here in the studio all alone on the floor and I cry and cry. I’m ashamed and totally embarrassed. But the weirdest part about this crying is how good it feels, so good and so terrible. I lie here and I think about all those atbats when I couldn’t hit the ball to save my soul; I think about not being able to talk with Trav and not really being there for him when he needs me. I think about when I was a little kid wondering why my parents stopped loving each other.

  My crying is so heavy that my body aches. I wrap my arms around myself to keep from flying apart. I can’t breathe. I feel like I’m drowning.

  After a while I finally get control of myself. It feels like something has lifted off me, like kicking off a heavy blanket when you’re mostly asleep but way too hot. My head hurts a little and my body still feels sore—actually, “trashed” is more accurate—but somehow I feel better. In fact, I feel the best I’ve felt in days. Actually, I feel a tiny sense of peace. I don’t know why, but I just do.

  When I’m recovered enough so that maybe Mom won’t be able to tell I’ve been crying, I walk down to the house from the studio.

  We have two dogs, Evander and Bob, who charge up the yard to meet me. Despite the common wisdom on the subject, having dogs has never done anything much to help me grow up. The truth is, Mom has always done more of the work of taking care of them than I have. She feeds them all the time I’m at Dad’s and most of the rest of the time too. She cleans up the dog crap because, honest to god, it makes me gag to do it. Despite my complete worthlessness when it comes to doing my fair share with the dogs, I really love them. It’s embarrassing how much I baby them, and how I talk to them, calling them moronic nicknames like Baby Bobbie and Pretty Girl. If Matt Tompkins heard me with the dogs, he’d be sure he’d
found the girly-boy.

  The dogs love me too. We go for walks together every week. I only leash them up when it’s absolutely necessary, so they get to run free through the woods on the west side of the lake and over the wheat fields to the south. Right now, I wish I were just a dog, running along all happy and stupid and totally unworried, crashing through the brush and over the pine needles and splashing through the shallows of the lake, freaking out the ducks. You live in fantasyland … Yeah, maybe, but right now I’m stuck being a human, so I walk into the house.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Mom says, turning toward me and smiling.

  “Hi,” I answer.

  “Are you hungry? Can I fix you something to eat?” My mom is exactly the kind of person who, up to her elbows in dishwater, asks me if I’d like to dirty some more dishes.

  “No, I’m good,” I say.

  “It’s such a treat to have you here on a Thursday night,” Mom says. “I can’t think of the last time you were out here on a Thursday—”

  She stops right in the middle of her sentence the second she looks closely at my face for the first time since I came into the room.

  “What’s wrong, Scotty?” she asks, staring into my eyes.

  I try to smile at her. I walk across the kitchen and plop down onto the big overstuffed couch that runs along one wall of the kitchen–dining room area. From here I can talk to Mom and look out the windows at the lake.

  Where do I even start? With Mom, actually, anyplace will do. I ask, “Have you heard about this stuff with Travis?”

  Mom says, “Yes, your father told me.”

  I ask, “Well?”

  Mom says, “Well, what? I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re asking me.”

  I ask, “Do you think I live in a fantasyland all the time?”

  Mom says, “Actually, that thought has never occurred to me. Do you?”

  I say, “Travis said so.”

  Mom asks, “But he said that when you two were quarreling, right?”

  “Yeah,” I answer. “Right before I screamed ‘fuck you’ into his face!”

  “Scotty!” Mom’s not a big fan of what she calls “the F word.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “Yeah, we were arguing—he was for sure mad at me.”

  Mom asks, “What else did he say?”

  My palms are sweaty and I feel my heart pounding hard, but I decide to just spit it out. “He said that I treat you and Dad like you’re not great parents because you got divorced—he said it like anybody who knew me would think that I felt that way, and that it’s fuck—sorry … that it’s messed-up that I think that.”

  Mom asks, “Do you feel that way?”

  I answer right away. “No, not at all—I don’t know why he’d think that or why he’d say it.”

  Mom says, “You two were arguing; people say lots of things when they’re angry.”

  I say, “Yeah, and I was being pretty hard on him about the whole ‘gay’ thing—I couldn’t help it.”

  Mom says, “You know, honey, relationships change—people change and our feelings for one another change too, but this tension with Travis shouldn’t be something that ruins your friendship.”

  “I know,” I say.

  Mom says, “It sounds like you’ve been under a ton of stress lately.”

  I say “Yeah,” but a thought is growing inside me, something Mom and I have never talked about.

  Without even knowing I’m going to say it, I just blurt out, “Why’d you stop loving Dad?”

  Mom stops washing the dishes and looks at me. “I still love your dad, and I’ll always love him, just not in the ways that let us share our lives together—not like a wife needs to love her husband.”

  I’ve always been confused about how my mom and dad can be so nice to each other, such great friends, but weren’t able to keep our family together.

  I ask, “Why didn’t you and Dad stay together, like Roy and Rita—why couldn’t you do that for me, for our family?” As I hear myself ask this question, I realize it’s something that’s been inside me since I was seven years old, but it’s a little kid’s question and one that Mom just answered—she still loves Dad, just not in the ways that would let them stay married.

  Mom is quiet for a few seconds. Then she says, “Your dad and I love each other as friends; we were in love once, but our ways of loving each other changed.”

  I remember, now, something Dad once told me back when he and Mom first split up. I was seven then, and Dad was tucking me into bed at our apartment, the first place we lived after he moved out. I asked him, “Can’t you two get back together?”

  “Sorry, buddy,” Dad explained, “it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Can’t you make her love you?” I asked. (Hey, cut me some slack, I was only seven.)

  Dad answered, “You can’t make somebody love you, Scotty. Love has to be felt and then given—it’s a gift, not something you can demand.”

  When I looked at Dad that night, I saw tears in his eyes—I knew how sad he was, how hurt he felt. Thinking back on it now, remembering how sad my dad was, I know that’s the reason he and I have never talked about it since—I’ve never wanted to see him so sad again.

  Feeling tears start to come to my eyes again, I admit to Mom the worst thing I ever felt, the scariest, hardest thing: “You know, I always thought it was something I did that made you guys break up.”

  She looks at me, and there’re tears in her eyes too. “God no, Scotty, that’s the furthest thing from the truth—why would you think that?”

  I try to answer. “I don’t know why, I always just thought it....” I’m unable to finish my thought. “I just don’t know why, I—”

  Mom interrupts, “I know why, sweetie; it’s in every divorce book I ever read. A child, especially a young child, always blames him- or herself—your dad and I hoped that we handled things in a way where you wouldn’t feel that; but I think that’s impossible. It was not your fault, Scotty, you have to know that now.”

  “Really?” I ask, and for the first time since I was seven years old, I maybe believe it.

  “Yes, really,” Mom says.

  I take a couple of deep breaths and we’re quiet.

  The older I get, the more complicated everything seems to be; maybe Travis is right, maybe as you grow up baseball and bullshit aren’t enough to make life okay.

  Finally I say, “Things have changed for me and Travis. I’m not sure how to be friends with him anymore, and I feel guilty.”

  Mom says, “Change is always scary and hard—but to love someone, you have to really know them. Travis has been afraid to be himself. Now you see the real Travis, so you can be a real friend to him, and him to you—if you let him.”

  I nod and force a smile, but I think about all the stuff that’s been going on with Trav. How can we get back to being friends? I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing.

  I watch Mom finishing the dishes, study her face as she looks out the window at the sun starting to go down. Both she and Dad have gotten older, actually almost old, in the time I’ve been alive. It’s so strange, the way they’ve changed in how they look—Dad more than Mom, but both of them. Mom’s face is like it used to be, only with more lines and wrinkles.

  If my HIV test comes back saying that I have it, the news will kill her. My dad will be real messed up about it too, but I know for sure that Mom couldn’t handle it. And another thing I realize now, for the first time since all this started: I know that bad news about the test would be worse for them than for me.

  Okay, that’s enough of that. I have to try something other than just sitting around feeling scared.

  Suddenly I know exactly what I need to do. I say, “Hey, Mom, I’m gonna go up to the studio and use the computer.”

  Mom asks, “School stuff?”

  I lie. “Sort of.”

  In truth, it’s not studying I want to do. I gotta Google “AIDS+HIV+third+baseman+who+gets+all+chickenbutt+for+no+reason” and see what I come up with.
/>   Time to stop being an idiot, a self-centered, bad friend, and a wimpy wuss! Time to do some serious work on my attitude.

  Final thoughts on keeping your head in the game: When I was in Little League, about ten or eleven, I decided I wanted to be a swish hitter. Not only did I not know that it was “switch,” not “swish,” but I had no idea about the reason why it was better to be able to hit from both sides of the plate. One day I stepped into the left-side batter’s box against a hard-throwing left-handed pitcher—thank god my coach saw this, and after I struck out, he pulled me over and quietly explained the right-hand/left-hand pitcher equation in relation to switch, not swish, hitting. So here’s the deal: Ignorance of something is fixable—you just have to get the right information and you’re set. Stupidity, on the other hand, which often comes from being terrified and acting like a moron … well, that can take a bit more time to handle.

  Day 4

  (Friday)

  Knowledge of the game: On the surface, this sounds a lot like “keeping your head in the game,” but there’s a difference. Knowledge of the game is based on a blend of experience and information. You keep your head in the game while you’re playing it; you build your knowledge of the game before, during, and after it. Think of it this way: If you were getting ready to face a great team, you’d make a plan and build your lineup based on that plan, kind of like if you were worried that you might be infected by HIV, maybe it’d be smart to go on the internet and get some information from places like the CDC, WebMD, or MedlinePlus!

  I learned a lot about AIDS and HIV last night. Stuff that helps me put my pathetic whining into perspective. Most people know that AIDS is a worldwide epidemic. But I never realized that eight thousand people die from it every day, eight thousand a day—moms, dads, even little kids. But it’s also true that there are medicines now that can keep you alive for years—decades—with HIV and keep it from becoming full-fledged AIDS. Those medicines, in the United States, cost about ten thousand dollars a year, but at least they exist. More and more research is being done every day to try to lower the cost and increase the availability of these drugs. Obviously none of this is great news, but it makes a guy think, and knowing this stuff is better than thinking I’m doomed if the word is bad from my blood test. Knowing that there are ways to survive and even live with the disease makes it a little easier to calm down and to focus on other things.