“Hey, Matty. You’re here early.”
She nods and walks toward me, taking the seat next to me on the metal bench. She’s dressed in her uniform and has her mitt on her hand. “I was hoping to find you here.”
“Sometimes it feels like I live here.”
“Not such a bad place to live,” she says. “Especially if you’re here, because you don’t yell.”
And there it is, the opening I’ve been waiting for. The problem is, I’m not sure if I should take it or call Bellamy and ask her to come talk to Matty about her home life.
“My dad yells a lot,” she says, as if she’s reading my mind.
I hold my hand up, silently asking her to stop. “I’ll happily sit here and listen but want to offer Bellamy as an option as well, being that she’s a mom and all. I can call her.”
Matty shakes her head. “I want to talk to you.”
“Okay, I’m all ears.”
“I remember the day you first came to Richfield. My dad came home from work yelling. He started throwing things around the house. He didn’t think I was home, but I was. I cracked my bedroom door and listened to everything he said. He kept saying to my mom ‘your lover is back’ and I didn’t understand what he meant for the longest time.” She pauses and grips the end of the bench and her legs swing back and forth. I don’t want to pretend I know what she’s going through, but at her age, her biggest worry should be whether her bike has a flat tire or not.
“The day I met you, I remember I went right up to you and told you that I watch you on TV. That night, my dad took the television out of my room and canceled our cable. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to punish me for watching the sport he desperately wants me to play.”
“Do you not want to play baseball?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “I love it, I do. But I’d also like to do other things like basketball and maybe take a dance class. I’m not allowed to, though, it’s about baseball in my house all the time.”
“I get that. Kids should try a lot of different things while growing up.”
She nods and continues to swing her legs. “Do you know that my dad told me to be mean to Chase, Nolan, and the other kids he didn’t take on the team? Said a message had to be sent. Whatever that means.”
What? Now I’m gripping the bench and can feel the metal digging into my fingers. What kind of man . . . what kind of father says that about other children?
I c
lear my throat and struggle to maintain composure. “Why would your dad say something like that?”
She shrugs. Of course she doesn’t know, and she shouldn’t. “I didn’t listen to him unless he was around, but the other kids on the team did and were mean to them at school.”
“Thank you for being nice to the boys.”
“But I wasn’t, not if my dad was there. I’d make faces and roll my eyes at them. I knew it hurt them.”
“But you’re nice to them now and they seem to like you.”
Matty nods and wipes at her face. I lean forward a bit and see that she’s crying. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Do I console her? Put my arm around her? Or stay where I am? I chose to stay because I’m her coach but I don’t want anything to be misconstrued. Damn, I wish I had texted Bellamy to come down.
“Matty, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do here.”
“I’m not done talking,” she says, putting me in my place. “I have a lot of thoughts going on and sometimes can’t keep them straight.”
“Okay, I’ll sit and listen. You tell me when you’re done.”
She says okay and starts talking again. “My dad kept saying ‘your lover this and your lover that’ and I tried to ask my mom what my dad meant but all she does is tell me to mind my own business . . . and I’m not good at minding my own business. One day, I decided to pretend I was sick so I could stay home and after my parents left for work, I went into the basement and found their yearbooks. Everyone looked so funny back then. But in the box, I found this.”
She hands me a piece of yellowed paper. I unfold it carefully, noticing that it’s been folded and refolded many times by the holes in the creases. It says, Dear Hawk, followed by the lyrics to Heart’s All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You. I don’t need to read the rest of the page to know what Annie is saying here. I fold the paper back the way it was. I don’t want to read into this, but my mind is spinning. If this girl isn’t my daughter, life is playing a cruel trick on me.
“Did you ask your mom about this?” I ask, trying to keep my emotions in check.
“No, I looked the video up online though.”