Continental Drift

“But it’s different. They’re not s’posed to love me. You, you’re s’posed to love Mommy. What did you get mad for?”

Elaine turns away from the stove and waits for his answer.

“You still love Daddy,” Ruthie says to her mother. It’s an announcement, but it wants confirmation.

“Yes,” Elaine says. “I love Daddy.” She turns back to the stove.

“What did you get mad for?” Ruthie asks him again.

Bob sighs and looks at his wife, as if for guidance, but she’s holding her back to him. “I … I don’t know, honey. I don’t know why I got mad last night. It was late, and I was tired, and worried. In a bad mood, that’s all. Now eat your breakfast and let me read the paper, okay?” He smiles wearily, and the child returns her gaze, brow furrowed, to the cereal box.

He reads the Red Sox box score, notes with pleasure that Yaz went three for four with two doubles and Torrez pitched seven innings and struck out five. “Sonofabitch. Yaz is forty and he’s playing like a kid. I love that sonofabitch.”

“Will you please watch your language!” Elaine says, hands planted on hips. “This is a whole new habit of yours, this swearing all the time.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says. He takes another sip of his coffee, and to win back her favor, smacks his lips noisily. “Good coffee.”

“Thanks,” she grunts. “Here’s your eggs.”

He breaks the yolks with the tip of his fork and rubs a piece of toast through them; it’s the way he has eaten eggs all his life. If by accident he were served eggs well-done, he’d try to break the yolks, and failing, he’d react with confusion. They wouldn’t be actual eggs to him. They’d be vegetables or cheese or fish. Eggs run and make a lovely mess that you can clean up with a piece of buttered toast.

“I can’t believe Yaz,” he says, still poring over the paper. “He’s almost ten years older than me, but he’s playing like a kid. If I tried to do what I did as a kid, I’d break my ass.” When Bob was a kid, large and fast and tireless, he was a graceful bear sweeping the puck away from a three-on-one rush to his goal, skating the length of the rink alone, long, graceful, powerful strides, with the puck swirling ahead of him across the blue line, where he ducks to one side and fakes the defenseman, cuts to the other, jerking the puck along as if it were attached to his stick by a piece of string, charging the net, driving the puck with the force of his rush a half foot above the ice over the goalie’s desperate slash, and as he glides past the goal, he watches the puck smack against the net, watches it drop softly to the ice, watches the goalie angrily whack his stick against the ice, and Bob smiles, skates slowly, smoothly, back to his end of the ice, barely out of breath.

“Y’know,” he says to Elaine, “I’m really sorry we didn’t get down here for spring training. I’d have loved to watch the Sox work out, over there at Chain-O’-Lakes Park, over there in Winter Haven. It’s only a couple miles. Now,” he says, lowering his voice, “now they’ve all gone north, it’s all up north. I used to go to Fenway with my dad once in a while when I was a kid. I haven’t been to Fenway in years….”

“We were here in time. You could’ve watched them play.”

“Well, yeah, I know. But we were still getting settled and all.” He looks up from the newspaper and peers out the window above the sink at the flat roof of the trailer next to theirs and the tops of the palm trees and the bright blue sky beyond, and he says, “It’s hard, I sort of didn’t believe they were here. In Florida, I mean. I’ve known it all my life, the Red Sox do spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, and here I am living ten miles away, only I can’t picture it, so I just sit around, like I always did, waiting for them to come home to Fenway and begin the season. Only, when they do begin the season, here I am in Florida. It’s strange. I probably would’ve got Yaz’s autograph. It’s real easy in spring training to get to talk to the players and all. They walk right over to the fence and talk to you.”

“I know,” she says.

Ruthie comes up next to him and says, “Bye, Daddy,” and purses her lips for a kiss.

Instead of kissing her, he stands and says, “Wait a minute. I’ll walk out to the bus stop with you.”

Surprised and pleased, she claps her hands together, then flips one hand for him to hold. Together, they step out the door into the bright sunlight, and holding hands, cross the yard and driveway to the paved lane, where, looking back at his station wagon, he notices once again his New Hampshire number plates and says aloud to himself, “Jesus, I’ve got to get Florida plates before they pick me up for it.”