Tied to the Tracks (23 page)
Read Tied to the Tracks Online
Authors: Rosina Lippi
“Okay,” Angie said slowly. “Good.”
“But I’ve got one more question,” he said. “Just one more, and it’s got nothing to do with Harriet or Tab.”
Angie put her forehead down on her knees. “Let me guess, you want to know if I’m trying to break up John and Caroline.”
“No,” said Win Walker. “But I would like to know why you and John broke up.”
Without raising her head she said, “Is this Patty-Cake’s question, or yours?”
He shrugged, and against her better judgment Angie took note of the way his shoulders filled out his uniform. “I guess I deserve that. It’s me asking.”
Angie forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. “I’ll answer that if you’ll tell me why you aren’t married. You’re what, thirty-five?”
“Forty-two.”
She leaned back to look at him harder. “You’re well preserved, and not hard to look at, either.”
He grinned. “Thanks.”
“And you’ve got a good job. So why aren’t you married?”
“I was married,” said Win Walker calmly. “I was married twice, as a matter of fact. The first time I was eighteen and way too young. The second time I was thirty-four. She died in a car accident just short of our fourth anniversary. I’m hoping the third time will be the charm.”
Angie wasn’t often at a loss for words, but this matter-of-fact recitation left her grasping for the right thing to say. “Okay, so I admit it: I had you pegged wrong.”
“Thank you. Now it’s your turn.”
She took a moment to look out over the park while she thought of one sentence and then another, and finally decided, this once, to tell the simplest truth. To say it out loud.
“We broke up because John didn’t love me. It’s that simple.”
After a long moment Win Walker said, “I never took John for an idiot.”
“Thanks,” Angie said, and meant it. “But he’s not at fault. Things just . . . burned too bright and too fast, I guess you’d have to say.” And: “Shit. Harriet wants me to come down there.”
Harriet Darling was waving her arms over her head like a swimmer in trouble. “Angie! What are you doing way up there? Come on down and sit with us, girl.”
“Be right there,” Angie called back. She managed a stiff smile. Under her breath she said, “Have a nice life, Win Walker, and give my best to your aunt Patty-Cake.”
For a short while, Angie had the idea that her evening—that her whole day—might just be saved by the miracle of baseball. The Rose clan, it turned out, were real baseball people, and she fit right in among them, or did, once the Rose grandsons in attendance—she was disappointed to see that Markus wasn’t among them—had satisfied themselves that she knew enough statistical trivia and game history to be included in their number.
There were some great plays and colorful arguments and shouting matches at the mound, there was enough food to feed the entire crowd. The Rose sisters thrust plates at her, and Angie found that her appetite had come back, after all.
“Stick around,” said Connie. “We’ll feed you till you burst. It’s a family failing, we just like food too much.”
Pearl handed her a small open bag of Fritos.
“I don’t think—” Angie began, but Pearl cut her off. “This is a southern specialty,” she said. “You’ve got to try it. Never had Frito pie before?”
“Um, no,” Angie said.
“Hold that bag open wide as you can.”
Pearl pulled a ladle out of a casserole dish and dumped a serving of chili directly into the Frito bag. Then she held out small containers of chopped onions and grated cheese and shook them in Angie’s face until she took a handful of each and dropped them on top of the chili.
“Is this a Georgia specialty?” Angie asked as she took the spoon Pearl held out to her.
“Hell no,” said Connie, snorting a laugh. “That’s Pete’s favorite. He’s an east Texas boy, born and raised.”
It turned out that three of the four married Rose girls had not married local men: Pete McCarthy was from Texas, Len Holmes from South Carolina, George Shaw from Atlanta. Only Tab was from Ogilvie.
“Lots of folks come here for college and then stay, or come back to stay,” said Connie. “Our husbands are prime examples.”
Angie ate and complimented and talked about the game and the pigheaded umpire and the weather and the plans for the Fourth of July Jubilee. The game wound up and then down and out, and Angie was just realizing that she was feeling good, really good, for the first time in days, when she looked up to see Tony walking toward them from the direction of Kai and Rob’s place just beyond the trees.
For a moment she just sat there among the Roses, who were still eating while they talked about the game and how the sun really was in Len’s eyes or he would never have missed such an easy pop-up, and thank goodness Tab was right there to pull it out of the fire. The game was over, the day stood on its cusp, and the air was sweet and cooler than it had been in a week, suffused with the gold light of a high summer gloaming.
And Tony Russo was walking toward them, long and lean, scruffy with beard, dark circles under his eyes, a cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, and a halo of smoke hovering around his head.
Pearl saw him next, and after her Connie and then Eunice and finally Harriet. The men were standing with their backs to the field and were too wound up in their argument about the last play to notice much at all. Angie was just thinking that maybe she could avert disaster by sprinting off and turning Tony back the way he had come when Connie’s youngest shot straight up into the air. At that moment Angie remembered him on the porch at Old Roses, his mouth pursed as he pulled back an arrow that sent John Grant to the emergency room. He was called Scooter, and he had a voice like a siren.
“Look, Mama,” he screeched. “It’s the cameraman.”
Tab Darling’s smile faded as he turned his head, his whole body following. He hesitated for a split second, and then broke into a jog.
“Russo!” he bellowed.
Tony stopped where he was, looking confused and wary and like a third-grader who has just seen the school bully start toward him on the playground.
Harriet shouted, “Tab, you idiot!” and ran off after her husband at the same moment Tony bolted. For a fraction of a second the rest of the clan looked at one another in horror—and, Angie was sure of it, a deep and primal satisfaction—and then they tore off in pursuit.
For her own part, Angie sat right where she was. Out of shock and dismay and a certain sense of fate. Tony went through life dragging mayhem behind him; it was a fact, and now that the worst had happened—was happening—a calm came over her. She sat there with a half-eaten Frito pie in one hand and a spoon suspended in the other and watched two dozen men, women, and children streaming over the field. There was a dog, too, a goofy beagle mix with floppy ears, though Angie had no idea where he had come from.
Somebody tell the director to lose the dog,
she thought,
it’s just too much
. And then she hiccupped a laugh.
Somebody tell the director to lose the dog,
she thought,
it’s just too much
. And then she hiccupped a laugh.
Tony was cutting a wide circle that would—she saw this now—bring him right back to the bleachers, a bold move indeed if he thought she was any kind of protection when it came to Tab Darling. Then she realized that Win Walker was standing just behind her with a half dozen other men.
“Aren’t you going to do anything?” she asked.
“It’ll take care of itself,” said Win. “It’s just Tab working off a little frustration.”
“Tab won’t hurt him none,” offered someone Angie recognized as a teller at the bank.
“Or not so much as you’d notice,” somebody else said.
Tony came to a shuddering stop right in front of them. He was heaving hard for breath, but his eyes gleamed with his own familiar brand of crazy excitement.
She began, “Don’t—”
But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Tab caught up and plowed directly into Tony as if he were first base and the call was bound to be a close one. They went down into the dirt, whirling arms and legs putting up a cloud of dust.
Harriet shouted, “Tab, you idiot! This isn’t about him, it’s about you!” And then she threw herself onto her husband’s back.
“Oh, Lordie,” called out the third baseman. “Everybody into the pool.”
Angie whirled on Win Walker. “What were you saying about nobody getting hurt?”
He shot her an irritated look and ran down the bleachers to wade into the fray, which was expanding—it seemed to Angie—exponentially. Tony, she saw with huge relief, was crawling away, and nobody seemed to notice.
“I guess old Tab is madder than we thought,” said Wyeth Horton, the English teacher with the two-foot-long beard. “But you got to admit, the Roses sure do know how to throw a party.”
City Hospital was a squat, homely building directly across from the park.
“Other ball teams go for a beer,” Angie told Wyeth Horton. “But you all form a parade and walk over to the emergency room.”
“Ogilvie,” said Wyeth, stroking the beard that flowed over his chest, “is a place at odds with itself. The true native takes great pride in the old traditions, but at the same time he dislikes to be perceived as predictable. The Rose clan are quintessential Ogilvites, and I have no doubt that sooner or later one of them—my bet would be Tab Darling—will be overcome by that conflict and combust spontaneously.”
Angie couldn’t help herself, she burst into laughter. Wyeth nodded in acknowledgment but didn’t smile. He said, “I’ve been waiting for you to come see me. I moved here from New Orleans to study at the university and stayed on to teach school these last twenty years. I do believe you might find my observations useful to your work. Shall we say—”
“Don’t you let Wyeth lure you into his lion’s den,” said Eunice, appearing from around a corner. “He talks real pretty but really what he’s doing is scheming on how to separate you from your panties.”
“Eunice,” Wyeth said smoothly, “you credit me with far too much ambition. I wouldn’t aim so high as panties, at least not to start with.”
The emergency room was very small and very clean, every seat occupied by the crowd from the park: the Roses but other people, too—players and their families, and one or two people who had just tagged along out of curiosity. The atmosphere was not exactly jovial, but nor was it tense.
“Any word yet?” Angie craned her head to see what the nurse at the reception desk was doing.
“Oh, the usual,” said Pearl. “I swear we can’t get through a summer without a half dozen emergency-room visits. Last year the staff had a pool going on how many times one of us would show up. I think the grand total was sixteen. I spend so much time in this place they should put me on the payroll.”
“You all look healthy enough,” Angie volunteered.
Pearl flapped a hand. “We are, healthy as pigs. But prone to accidents, and flights of temper.” She sent Angie a sidelong glance, drew in a breath, and held it for a moment. “I wanted to apologize to you. We really are reasonable folks. It’s just—” She paused. “We’re all worried about Tab, but that’s no excuse for his behavior or the way things got out of hand. I hope Tony in’t the kind to hold a grudge.”
Just then Eunice came down the hall from the examination rooms. She called out, “Tab sprained his ankle plowing into Tony, Drew has got a busted nose, and my Guy needed three stitches on his scalp. I hate to think what commotion y’all would get up to if you didn’t like each other.”
“Tab almost through back there?” Harriet was leaning against the wall with one arm wrapped around each of her two younger boys.
Eunice produced a forced smile. “I think Dr. Landry will be out to talk to you pretty quick. Angie?” She scanned the crowd and then smiled. “Len is just about done with Tony. He said to tell you to come on back.”
Tony looked so pleased to see her that Angie was a little guilty about the scolding she had given him on the way over from the park. There was a bandage on his forehead now, but otherwise she couldn’t see any real damage.
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