a promise to text him once I’d succeeded—which I absolutely would. I wasn’t about to lose twice in one night.
Mom didn’t care about dust and gathered me into a hug while whispering a disparaging comment about the umpire’s vision before releasing me.
“Tell that to Dad.” He was still in the dugout talking to a couple of the girls before making the final shift from Coach to Dad again, a distinction he and Selena had established back when he’d coached her softball team. Honestly, I never noticed much of a difference.
“Oh, I will.”
That made me smile, because she would. My parents often had loud, passionate disagreements that, to an outsider, might seem like fights. But they didn’t see the way Mom would goad Dad even after she’d made her point just to watch the heated color infuse his pale skin, or the way Dad would bait her until she slipped into her native Spanish because she had even less of a filter in those moments than normal.
“Who was the boy and when do I get to meet him?”
I tightened the grip on my duffel. “That was Nick, and you’ve met him a dozen times.”
“Not since you started hugging him like that.”
I so wasn’t having that conversation. “Where’s Selena?”
Mom gave me a knowing look at my obvious subject change. “Ask him to come to dinner. He’s not a vegetarian, is he?”
To my mom, being a vegetarian was slightly less offensive than being a Dodgers fan. “He’s not a vegetarian. And he’s still just a friend.”
“Hmm,” Mom said, which meant we’d be revisiting the topic later. “Selena’s waiting for us at the car.”
“Where’s her car?”
“She got in early, so we drove together.”
Great. I get both her and Dad the whole way home.
As soon as we were within earshot, Selena started. “I can’t believe you ran through a stop sign.” Her shoulder-length brown hair, a shade darker than mine, swished as she shook her head. “I get that when the adrenaline is flowing, it’s hard to stop, but, Dana, you don’t get to make that call. When I was playing...”
I tuned her out. Selena had this way of seeming to support and motivate me that undercut everything I did, and it had only gotten worse since she left for college. The University of Arizona was only a couple hours from Apache Junction, so she still tried to make most of my games—largely, I was convinced, to remind us all of her glory days as a Mustang. She was no doubt relaying one of her many victories, where she single-handedly played every position and hit so many home runs that the other team’s coach begged her to transfer schools, or my personal favorite, Dad crying when she told him she wasn’t interested in playing college ball. Those were all slight-to-gross exaggerations. Dad never cried; he’d just looked like he wanted to.
“Got it. I’ll play better next time. Hey, weren’t you telling me that you need Mom and Dad to help you with some school project tonight?” I moved my duffel bag in front of me and widened my eyes at her. Selena could be an annoying braggart when it came to softball, but she was also the only person on the planet who could read my mind with only the slightest cue.
“I was,” she said, without missing a beat, then forestalled Mom’s inevitable question. “It’s an extra-credit thing. I’ll tell you about it when we get home. I’m sure Dad’s gonna want to talk about that last out first.”
I groaned. “Can we just not? Let’s talk about something lighter, like teen-pregnancy statistics. Besides, it was a bad call.”
“You looked out to me,” Selena said.
Blood heated my face, but Dad was there before I could respond.
“That’s because she was.” He unlocked the trunk, not looking at me. “The umpire called it.”
I came up alongside him, wishing he could be a little more my dad and a little less my coach the next time a close call cost us a game. “You know, you used to get thrown out of games all the time for arguing when you coached Selena. This would have been a perfect opportunity.”
“Not all the time,” Selena said, though I was positive she was calling a list to mind same as I was.
“More than once,” I said, before turning back to Dad and waiting with raised eyebrows for his response. “There was that game against Chandler. You almost took a swing at the umpire.”
“I was never going to hit him,” Dad said. “Back then I was more of a...” He searched for the right word.
“Calentón,” Mom said, smiling.
I thought it was more than Dad being hotheaded, but I didn’t get to protest before he went on.
“I told you to stay, you didn’t, and we lost. And even if you’d been safe—run through a stop sign again and I’ll bench you for more than a few innings.” He opened the front passenger door for Mom, a practice he’d apparently started on their first date and was still doing more than twenty years later.
“You’re not serious.” But the look he gave me said otherwise. “Fine. Am I supposed to apologize to my dad or my coach?”
“What was that?” he asked, though we both knew he’d heard me.
“Nothing.”
He sighed, coming around to where I stood. “What is this attitude?”
“Why didn’t you fight the call?”
“Because you were out. Hey—hey.” He called my attention back when I looked away. “I’d have fought for you if you weren’t. Same as I did for your sister.” He lowered his voice so that Mom and Selena on the other side wouldn’t overhear. “You are one of the best players on the team. You could be as good as Selena if you worked harder.”
Except Selena never had to work the way I constantly had to. And she’d never cared enough to see how much better she could have been if she had. That was maybe the one bone of contention between her and Dad. So I worked twice as hard to be half as good, and it still wasn’t enough.
“Take the loss and work harder next time. We’ve got the whole season ahead of us, and you’re no good to me or anyone else on a bench. I need you.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I nodded and worked my mouth into a small smile for his benefit. He needed me. I wanted more than that, but I’d settle for need just then.
I cradled my duffel in my lap during the car ride home, feeling the shape of the box within. And I smiled for real.
My plan went off without a hitch. Selena was calm and cool, explaining that she needed family DNA samples for a criminology class she was supposedly taking. Selena was still technically undeclared, but she’d expressed enough middling interest in pursuing a sociology degree that neither of our parents questioned this. I think they both took it as a sign that she was finally committing to a career path.
