The OIdest Guy Joke: A Trilogy of Families, Fame and Baseball

By Dave Weber

Greg Rittmeyer lives an almost perfect life for 54 years. Not almost perfect in the sense that each day is beautiful and wonderful, but in the sense that everything he does is excellent but not great, the biggest pot of gold perpetually just out of reach.

Meanwhile, Cassandra Banuelos is bearing down on 40 and could care less.

In this trilogy of families, fame and baseball bound into one ovel, Greg glides through the baby boomer years into the 21st Century living his B+/A- life.

From childhood, he sensed his size, strength and skill would bring success in his chosen sport of baseball. Indeed, he reaches the major leagues and pitches for 13 years, never sent back to the minors, never injured, but never an All-Star, never even once in his team’s regular starting rotation, never a closer; he defines journeyman, a generic “big right-hander.”

On the other hand, with his pro athlete’s 6’7” build, piercing blue-gray eyes and a plainspoken nature, women most other men would consider out of their league line up to play for him. He lives first with a Grammy-award winner singer, then a movie star, then a talented young lawyer – the cream of the crop from a lifetime of conquests – but never quite finds himself closing the deal.

A quarter century before, a week after her joyful quinceańera, Cassandra was attacked in broad daylight in a pleasant Southern California neighborhood, and life seemed to turn into an ordeal to be survived, with little to celebrate or look forward to. At 17, weeks away from a final chance to prove her family’s gang ties didn’t define her, the opportunity was ripped away and, in her frustration, she sparks a second violent clash that winds up with her brother dead and a judge giving her a choice: jail or military service.

Twenty years, two Middle Eastern wars and a decorated but dreary run as a military police sergeant later, she sets up shop in a one-woman office as a private investigator in Washington state almost because she can’t think of anything else to do after retiring from the Army. She gets up, goes to work, comes home and lifts weights on her back porch to fatigue herself enough to sleep. Then, brought into a large bank fraud investigation by a Seattle law firm, she sees a familiar name on the list of sources she is to contact, a former Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher she and her cousins once met at a movie premiere. The interaction lasted only a minute or two, but the pictures the guy took for them, as she and her older cousins posed with his impossibly beautiful actress girlfriend, are iconic to Cassandra, relicts of the happy girl she’d been always seemed to have before she turned 15 and life began to sour.

Greg thinks he is about to wipe the “almost” off the board, leaving only “perfect,” after joining his best friend on the Seattle Mariners’ staff after 17 years as a college coach; that life with his latest too-much-for-mortal-men lover, a TV sports reporter little more than half his age, will roll pleasantly through to the finish line realizes isn’t as far away as it once was.

Instead, as his life lengthens, Greg realizes every bit of fun his animal magnetism created has been balanced by problems left unsolved. With “change” the mantra of the day in America, facets of life many men encounter at a younger age, fatherhood, violence, romantic failure, catch up to Greg.... as does Cassandra and her search for answers.

NOTE: While this is primarily a story of families and romance and baseball, there are occasional explicit scenes making it most suitable for an adult audience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave Weber
• Release date: Aug 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990658306

Book preview

This is a work of fiction.

Each of the major characters is a figment of the author’s imagination.  There is no town of Aladdin, Illinois; no La Reina University in Northern California; no minor league baseball team known as the Tacoma Aroma.  There was never a bank called Sunbreak Savings or a horse racing channel called Stride for Stride TV.

There is no actual major league pitcher whose overall career mirrors Greg Rittmeyer’s and any similarity to a Chicago White Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers or Oakland A’s pitcher who played in the real world for any season where Greg is depicted playing in this fictional version is coincidence.

All characters associated with real schools mentioned, such as Northern Illinois University, Richwoods High School, the University of La Verne, Ganesha High School or William S. Hart High School are fictional and not intended to resemble any actual folks affiliated with those places.  John Paul II High School exists but is a very different place; my version is a hoped-for vision that indeed fell victim to a downturn in the economy.  The Big Sky Conference does not, as yet, have its own television network.

Many familiar names of professional athletes and coaches as well as some actual folks from the world of entertainment appear.  It would not be fair to ask the reader to digest, for example, an entire fictional universe of made up major leaguers, with say, Greg Rittmeyer playing for manager Lonnie Tesoro of the Los Angeles Stars.  Real names and events are used simply to create a familiar background.  All but a few of the baseball game action sequences are taken directly from the play-by-play of actual major league games, with Greg substituted for different major leaguers in different instances.

When actual folks do more than appear in a game or a headline, care has been taken not to have them do or say anything out of their known character or anything negative.  When a big leaguer is required to do or say anything controversial, a made up player has been created to carry that load.  When a player is needed to fail at something fictional – such as giving up Greg’s only American League pitcher to hit a home run – a fictional name has been used.

As a big fan of and contributor to IMDB.com’s goofs, I readily admit those abound in the mix of fact and fiction here:  I have no idea where the real premiere of Red Dawn took place.  I know the band Alabama didn’t play at UNLV over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1983.  Some songs or movies mentioned debut a few months early.  And, of course, Greg Rittmeyer wasn’t warming up in the A’s bullpen in the bottom of the ninth during Game Four of the 1989 World Series.

That’s because…. he doesn’t exist!

Part I:

Rookie Card

Chapter 1

Tacoma, Washington

June 12, 2007

Enough is enough.

When rain drips from a guy’s cap while he sits in the dugout it’s time to roll the tarp across the infield.  Greg wanted to yell at the umpire, ask him who was holding the brains out there, but didn’t know his name.  After two decades of college coaching in California he could always deliver a person-to-person rant tailored to the ump’s personality.  Back in organized ball he barely knew any of the blue and he wasn’t the manager, just the pitching coach.

Tacoma.

Playing in the rain because if they didn’t they might not get enough of the games in, period.  The precipitation didn’t bother the guys representing weatherless Albuquerque.  The sneaky-strong little lefty-hitting shortstop, Orvaz, reached out and nailed a double down the right field line. Two more runs scored.  Orvaz was a typical Dominican guy.  Swung at everything.  You can’t walk off the island.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

Larry Pack, the manager, addressing not the weather but the right-handed power pitching of Tacoma’s 6’7" Mike Underhill, a guy not unlike Greg back when he was paid to play; identical height, same fastball/slider repertoire. 

"Ritt, go talk to that idiot.  Does he have no plan?  No plan at all?  Make sure Corona is actually giving him real life catcher-to-pitcher signs, cause it doesn’t look like they are remotely on the same page!"

Larry was the reason Greg was here, supporting his former college teammate’s bid to move up to a big league dugout.  Every win was precious to Larry, every loss fresh agony.

Greg unhooked his jacket from the wall.  He took a step onto the field and held his left hand out to the nameless-to-him home plate umpire, calling for time, and headed through curtains of wet toward the mound, navigating by the massive Red Wind Casino sign painted on the left field fence.

Underhill’s breath was a little ragged, a little rapid; more from embarrassment than fatigue.  Top of the seventh and he was still well under the Seattle organization’s 96-pitch limit for Triple-A starters, but the Isotopes hadn’t missed many of his fat first pitches.  He was losing 9-1, victim of that same system-wide directive:  Top starting pitching prospects throw their pitch count no matter the results.

What’s up, Mike?  Greg said in a fatherly voice he had long since mastered at 54 though he was childless and, until recently, lived his personal life like a 20-something.  From over there it looks like everything’s easy to pick up.  They’re spanking you like it’s batting practice.

No curr ball, Milio Corona, the catcher, said; hands on hips, one holding his mask, the other his mitt.  Weak.  No spin on curr ball.

"It’s fuckin’ wet, Milly! Underhill pleaded.  Pretty hard to get it to spin."

"OK, so don’t use it.  You’ve got 14 more pitches to get out of the inning, then you’re done anyway.  Throw heat but locate it, Mike, locate it.  Focus on your release point.  Over there we see Milly diving to block every ball.  So what if it’s raining? Nothing changes; the philosophy is the same:  Get better every pitch.  Focus.  Step off.  Do whatever you need to do.  If your curve won’t cooperate give us 14 good four-seam fastballs. Milly, don’t even look to me for any more signs.  You and Mike run it, heat and maybe one slider if you get to a fourth pitch with a guy.   One out, runner at second.

Get out of this.  It’s not hard for a guy as good as you.  Get it done!

Back Greg went toward the dugout, marveling at the few hundred idiot Fans still in the stands at 10 o’clock on a squalling Tuesday night with the home team down by eight runs.  The rain drops reflected more light when you looked back toward the stands.  The people looked like cutouts in a movie baseball scene, hunched, barely moving, most with umbrellas, all with rain gear.

Fucking Tacoma: Fans equipped with rain gear in mid-June.

He knew Fans were why they played, the ultimate bosses of pro ballplayers and coaches, the source of their income, but he didn’t have to like them.  I mean, come right down to it, fuck the Fans, an NBA player he knew in the Bay Area once opined over beers and Greg agreed.  Of course, they had been conversing in private, or at least near private at the bar of a restaurant in Jack London Square.  A player’s fame, a coach’s authority came at a cost, a paring back of his First Amendment rights; some things you didn’t say out loud.

At least these Fans tonight were tough enough to stick through the wet.

A few months back, Greg was on a pleasant path.  He would coast to retirement as the successful head coach at La Reina University in pastoral Marin County; a Division II icon.  A corner of the athletic facilities would no doubt be named for him in a moving ceremony 10 or 15 years from now.  LRU was a small college, a place where you ultimately worked for your players, not the scattering of Fans who might show up for a big game.

Instead he signed on to assist Larry Pack’s ambitions.  His friend of 36 years was a four-time Manager of the Year in the minors.  He asked the Seattle organization for a hand-picked pitching coach to join him for his third year in Tacoma and received permission to hire Greg.

Larry seduced him with a predictable line: Take on a new challenge.  Don’t get stale at that small college.  You can always go back to that level.

Wouldn’t he like to right about now?  He checked the weather in Novato every time he went online:  85 degrees and clear this morning.

A voice turned his head to the left, from the first couple of rows, just beyond the end of the Aroma dugout.

Coach Rittmeyer, Coach, hey Coach…  He looked toward the stands, for one of his former college players maybe.  No one called you Coach in pro ball.  But the voice was thin, female.  He saw a teenager, curly reddish brown hair erupting from a Texas Longhorns cap, waving with her left hand, holding a program over her head as a makeshift umbrella with her right.

Hell no.  I may be dumb but I’m not stupid.

He was never a fan of jailbait like a dozen big leaguers he could name.  He nodded in the girl’s direction and went down the steps to the bench.

Underhill heaved another outsized breath.  Despite the slippery ball, he clocked low-to-mid 90s all night on the gun.  If he could spot that, he could survive the inning.  Tough task.  Greg knew Armada Wallace was down with Albuquerque, on rehab assignment from the Marlins after an oblique injury; a nasty monster of another lefty hitter.  But making a big deal out of Wallace would likely rattle Underhill more.

Mike came in on Wallace with a 94 mph heater and he swung, but couldn’t get full extension: a blooper down the left field line, the definition of fighting off a pitch.  Greg winced.  He guessed the ball would plug in the wet dirt and Orvaz would score from second.  Instead, Tory Garth, the third baseman, dove full out and caught the ball cleanly, center of the glove pocket.  Jumping up, covered with mud like a freshly-tackled football player, he found himself staring at Orvaz, 30 feet away and wishing he hadn’t sprung for third.  A nonchalant throw to second and the inning was over.

Greg popped out of the dugout along with several others to slap Garth and Underhill on the back.  The rain stopped. A big voice echoed across the field:

Ladies and gentlemen, please remove you hats and stand for the playing of God Bless America.

A so-called tradition of barely six years looking like it would last forever: playing a second patriotic song at every ball game, especially at parks like Tacoma’s, only a few miles from a variety of military installations.

More pandering to the Fans, Greg thought; making them feel righteous about wars none would be ordered to fight and few would volunteer for.  Thank you for your service little more than a patronizing nod to people brave enough to do what the average American couldn’t summon the guts to do; people faced with desperate enough alternatives to make an enlisted soldier’s career enticing.

Standing two long strides from the top step of the dugout, Greg took off his cap, Tacoma’s navy blue job with a steaming golden brown coffee cup on a burgundy semi-circle as its only logo.  Not exactly the Aroma most associated with Tacoma, a city of tide flats and industry, but when a coffee company buys a seven-figure annual sponsorship from a Triple-A club they get what they want, even the nickname.

The ballpark filled with a dead woman’s singing:

Kate Smith’s version of God Bless played loudly over the P.A.  When Smith was alive, her in-person performance of the song at hockey games in Philadelphia charged up Fans at the Spectrum and the Flyers won championships.  She was forever a sports icon.

During high school, Greg and his friends, in the decidedly un-hockeyesque climes of downstate Illinois, liked to play floor hockey in a cleared out barn or garage. Sneakers on their feet, taped-up kitchen brooms for sticks and taped-over dip cans for pucks.  The class buffoon, the guy cooler kids laughed at and not with, insisted on bellowing out God Bless tunelessly from the opposite end of Kate Smith’s soprano range. 

The final words echoed. Greg put his cap back on, smiling.  He and his friends went all out, checked each other hard into walls, slashed at ankles with their broomsticks, for no reason other than to play an idiotic game only they knew the rules to; for fun.  Not for money, not to justify a scholarship.   

He turned to go back into the dugout.  The teenager in the orange Texas cap yelled his name again.

Hey Coach Rittmeyer, hey Greg… 

Now she held a baseball card, protected from the erstwhile downpour by a toploader and a Ziploc bag.  She waved it excitedly.  A note of pleading was in her voice.

Check this out, PLEASE!

Middle of the game, not supposed to do such things.  She was a respectful kid, though, not the underage Annie he feared.  He could sign an autograph for her if she wanted it that badly.

No doubt she fell into one of two subsets of Fans maniacal enough to hunger for Greg Rittmeyer’s signature.

If some one handed him a baseball card to sign, nine times out of ten it was from 1989 and they needed his autograph to complete a set of the World Champion Oakland A’s, sweepers of San Francisco in the fabled Earthquake Series.  He didn’t throw an inning during the post season but that was the only one of his 13 years that bunch remembered.

His other stalkers typically handed him internet-bought reproductions of an AP Wirephoto transmitted after one perfect swing of the bat in the wee hours at Comiskey Park in ’79 made him the answer to a trivia question:  Name the only American League pitcher to hit a home run during the 22-year gap between the advent of the designated hitter and the beginning of interleague play.

A box on a checklist, an object. Fans gave a shit who you were beyond how well you played the night they paid to see a game and whatever nasty gossip they read about you.

Hard to be cynical about a polite teenage girl.  He nodded and motioned for the card.  The Aroma was at bat.  Underhill would go out for the eighth with 13 pitches in hand.  Greg had a free moment.  On a night like this, he could be a nice guy to one of the few Fans sticking with it. 

The girl, an earnest look on her face, skidded the baggie across the dugout roof.  She wasn’t old enough to remember 1989, what was the big deal?  He flashed a smile and took hold of the baggie.  Water droplets bubbled on the plastic.  He unzipped it.  He noticed the card had black trim; he saw the name Rittmeyer was in white italics.  None of the cards he remembered of himself resembled it.  Something new every day.

He held the toploader so the lights illuminated the face on the card.

It wasn’t him.

It was her, the kid at the railing.

Goosebumps ran up his arms.  The girl on the card was pretty; dark-skinned but fair of hair, the long curly mop combed and under control for the photo, no cap involved. Gigantic smirking smile, like she knew something to be happy about you didn’t. Her features betrayed a single flaw: an upturned nose, but not a perky beauty queen’s upturned nose, something bigger and more Germanic, a ski jump nose not unlike Greg’s own.  He registered the wording below the photo, recognized the card for what it was, a novelty item parents could buy when their child’s team posed for professional pictures:

Grier Stannage-Rittmeyer

Capital Xtreme 16U

P/1B

The hyphenated name physically rocked Greg back onto his heels:  Stannage…. Ch’Rose Stannage’s daughter? My daughter?  The question wasn’t how as much as why?  There had been hundreds of opportunities for Ch’Rose to conceive Greg’s child.  But why keep it a secret?    Now she tells me? Not in Cali, not in Texas, but in fucking Tacoma? Not when it happened, but 15 years after we broke up?

As heart-stopping shocks went, being outed as the father of Ch’Rose Stannage’s child wasn’t terrible.  He forgot nothing about Ch’Rose, remembered the smooth of her skin and the scent of her skin meeting at a point just this side of fantasy when he kissed her deep brown neck or her strong back.  Only a few nights before, at a mall in Oklahoma City, he saw a greeting card on sale: an anguished cartoon woman smacking her forehead and saying Damn!  I forgot to have children.  He felt her pain.  Still…. What the hell?

He looked into the stands for her, for Ch’Rose, the most intelligent, most put-together woman of hundreds he’d connected with.   She wasn’t there.  He couldn’t imagine her bringing her kid to a game to meet Daddy for the first time only to book for the concessions stand at the moment of truth.  A lesser woman might, but not her, not Ch’Rose.  Another chill spread through him.

Well, he shouted, his voice out of whack.  Heads turned to look at him from the dugout.  Hi, Grier…. But where’s your mom, where’s Ch’Rose?

Only when the man spoke did Greg see Ch’Rose’s brother Chuck – the only member of her family he got to know well during the years he and Ch’Rose worked on the same campus and lived together.  Chuck was a decent guy, a high school football coach in the Austin area; they bonded nicely but hadn’t hung out much and not for almost 15 years.  He was noticeably older; no doubt Greg seemed the same to Chuck.

She passed, Coach, Chuck said.  Coming up on two years.

The Cheney Stadium family lounge for loved ones and friends of players and staff wasn’t much.

It didn’t compare to the five-star hotel lobbies that sprouted in the bowels of major league parks during Greg’s last few years as a player.  It wasn’t even a dedicated space.  From first pitch through the top of the eighth it was a pseudo bunker suite for the Fans who bought tickets to the party patio down the left field line.  They could drop in, warm up, drink free coffee.  With six outs to go, it was cleared of Fans and the players’ friends and family would begin to congregate; the radio broadcast piped in.

There was no rally.  Underhill got the first two outs of the eighth.  Randy Raben held Albuquerque without a hit the rest of the way.  The game ended 9-1.

By the time it was over the score was the least of Greg’s worries.

He told Chuck and Grier about the lounge, asked them to meet him there.  He began stressing on the idiotic…. Had Ch’Rose been stricken with cancer or something when he knew her, should he have known she was dying a long, slow death?  Should he rush to the lounge in uniform as soon as the last out was recorded?  Or shower and dress so he looked and smelled more like a proper dad, if that's what he was?  Should he call Geenie with the news before or after he met Grier?

Was this good news?  Or was it bad news?

He walked into the clubhouse, his rubber-soled coach’s shoes making nowhere near the noise of the players’ steel spikes, and crossed to the small changing area he shared with Ross Gerhart, the first base coach and hitting instructor, and Mickey Masters, the 44-year old former big league all-star still listed on the active roster but who for all practical purposes was the bullpen coach and personal tutor to five-tool catching prospect Milio Corona.  Pack dressed in the manager’s office around a short corner.

In a big league clubhouse, an attendant usually collected valuables and held them throughout a game.  In Tacoma, each guy had a combination-locked valuables cubby built into his locker stall.  Greg dialed his and snatched out his Blackberry, still stuffed with hundreds of obsolete numbers for the LRU baseball recruits he bought the device to contact and track.

His cell number still had a 415 area code.  Geenie still had a 541 number, the Willamette Valley; the same digits, different order.  No switch to 206 or 253, no permanence.

They lived in Seattle, in a condo near the Elliott Bay studios of The Sky, the proprietary network for The Big Sky Conference, where Geenie worked as a producer and sideline reporter.  The Big Sky had no member school closer to Seattle than Portland State, but the chance to rent facilities from and share staff with an existing cable sports regional network was too good to pass up.

Geenie traveled constantly during fall, winter and spring.  During the Northwest’s alleged summer she was home most nights and came to more than a few Aroma games.  Why come tonight and spend three hours in the rain for the chance to support her man as he popped out of the dugout twice, once in the fourth and once in the fateful seventh?

Greg hit 1 on his speed dial list. 

Geenie answered on the second ring:  ’Sup MLB? 

Geenie was a Jill of all trades now, reporting on every sport a college plays but to the diamond born.  She grew up in Tucson worshipping the powerhouse University of Arizona softball team while working herself toward All-State honors at third base for Shadow Mountain High; an in-your-face fastpitch defender cleats in the ground 30 feet from the batter much of the time; a line drive gap hitter in the days before home runs took over the women’s game; a coach’s daughter, the offspring of former U of A baseball star turned high school coaching legend Shigetosi Teddy Ogawa.  No scholarship offer came from U of A, so she turned into a hypercompetitive, grudge-carrying four-year starter at Washington who savored every run the Dawgs scored against the Cats.

Now she was 28 and living with a 54-year old; much of the attraction being the years Greg spent in The Show.  Randomly, while he watched TV and she chopped onions, she might blurt out her amazement that he had struck out a notable Hall of Famer 11 times or that, despite spending all but three and a half years of his career as an American League relief pitcher, he hit a couple of monster home runs. 

Hence she pet-named him MLB.

Still at the park, he said.  Lost big.  Mike U got thumped.  Couldn’t handle the weather, I guess.  Clocked middle 90s, though.

Yeah, I listened to the first six innings. He’ll be alright, she said with authority and he believed her.  Hardball is hardball and softball is softball, but her instincts crossed the aisle.  You got kids with issues, but he ain’t one of them.

So good news, bad news, G, he said.  What’re you doing right now?

Nothing.  Going to bed.  Figured you’d be late.  What’s the bad news?

None, then, I wanted to make sure you weren’t waiting on me.  I got an old friend here with surprising news about another friend of ours.  I need to hang out and get a handle on the deal.  Could lead to something terrific.  I’ll fill you in when I get home.  Gonna meet ‘em in the bunker so I gotta go.

Cool.  Let’s go out to CJ’s for breakfast in the morning, you can tell me about it then.

Alright G, I love you.

Yeah, but I really love you, MLB.

Greg disconnected, disrobed in record time and hurried toward the showers.  Masters laughed at his back.

Hey, Ritt, vaguer conversations than that.  Don’t forget you’re shacked up with a reporter.  Whatever the hell that was about out there tonight, she’s gonna figure it out.

Mickey wouldn’t be far behind him.  His wife and five of his six kids were no doubt swarming around the lounge by now; an affluent plus-sized Southern California family living in a shabby rented house out in University Place for the summer.

Mickey, it’s nothing that’s gonna stay secret. If the story is what I think it is, you’ll be the second to know.  You and Patsy.  Advice will be needed.        

Greg wore no windbreaker to protect against a revival of the rain.  The team parking area was right outside the clubhouse door.  It was ridiculous to put on a jacket for the short walk.  Especially when it wasn’t particularly cold, just wet.

He wore cliché college coach/minor league staffer attire: deck shoes, khaki slacks and a Tacoma Aroma logo polo shirt.

It had been at least three weeks since his last haircut (off the ears on the side, straight across in the back and thin it out some on the top) and he didn’t bother to shampoo away the evening’s hat hair during a two-minute shower.  Mousy brown, barely any gray, chicks really did seem to dig old guys who were well preserved.  Animal instinct, he supposed; females seeing youthful vigor in an experienced male as a reproductive two-fer.   His eyes were abundantly wrinkled, though.  Pitchers didn’t wear sunglasses on the mound, leading Greg to a cosmetically unsound shadeless habit that carried over to the many years he coached day-game-heavy college ball.

Squinting became his default setting.

Thus would Grier first meet her father, if that's who Greg was; thus would Coach Stannage reacquaint himself with the man his late sister gave herself to sans ring.

Basic Greg.

An early college nickname from the girls at Northern Illinois University.  This guy was handsome; this guy was ugly.  Greg Rittmeyer was neither, just Basic Greg, somewhere in the middle.  Later he was a baseball star, later he was rampaging through many of those same girls’ beds expanding their vision of him.  But, at the bottom, it was true.  He was a B- in looks and sense of style.  Maybe he hadn’t needed a sharp wardrobe to bowl over women.  Or maybe he bowled over women with his lack of pretention.

Whatever worked.

Greg wormed his way through Franco’s Italian Army, a bevy of underdressed local chicks who showed up nightly seeking the favors of centerfielder Franco Threadgale, a multimillion-dollar bonus baby; a Scott Boras client.  Or, failing that, one of Franco’s team mates.  Or, failing all else, one of the local thugs who hung around hoping to crash the various after parties.

Groupies:  the ultimate Fans; worshipping fame, coveting cash, bailing if a man’s batting average dropped below the Mendoza Line.  Greg and Mickey named the heavily perfumed clique. Threadgale was 20 and had no idea in hell who Franco Harris had been in the sports world of a generation before or how a bunch of Hilltop sistahs could comprise an Italian army.

Through the door he again encountered Mike Underhill, slumped and looking as small as a 6’7", 240-pound block of muscle can.  His dad, just as tall and a bit heavier, up from Oklahoma for the second time already this season, hugged Mike with one arm and excoriated his son’s pitching mechanics with his voice.

So many of the successful kids, the ones who advanced from Little League to high school to college to the pros, were coached long and hard by their dads; some lovingly and some with dollar signs in mind.  Their emotions Greg would leave to the shrinks both men might visit a decade or two down the road.

It was his job to mess with Dad’s beloved mechanics if doing so would bring the kid a step closer to The Show. He hated competing with fathers.  It was a major breakthrough when a coach won the argument.

On the plus side, there was the UW phenom that Frisco drafted last June, Lincecum, freakish yet effective delivery courtesy of Dad.  Cust, the fat kid down in Oakland, striking out a billion times with his dad’s swing, but hitting enough bombs to justify drinking the family Kool-Aid.  On the other hand there were thousands whose dads didn’t know shit, were nothing but Fans with destructive opinions, and killed their kids’ careers at all stops along the way, from Little League to the minors.

Greg grew up lucky.  His father had been a postwar German immigrant whose sporting knowledge began with the high jump and ended with the javelin.

Grier watched Greg step around the two gigantic Underhills.

She gulped, blew out a breath.  You asked for this, she reminded herself.  Her dad.  A guy her mother had pronounced a de facto death sentence on before she was born; only her mom’s passing had granted the man a pardon.

Her wonderful mom.  Her best friend.  Her impossibly demanding yet undeniably loving mother.  A lady with a strange bone in her somewhere; praising her dad as a baseball player and a coach, a teacher, telling Grier only good specifics about him but alluding to a vague-yet- horrible flaw that made him unfit to share their lives.

Baby, he just has a hole in him is all, Ch’Rose had told her daughter more than once, starting before Grier entered kindergarten.  This here is the 21st Century but your father is nothing but a pure natural man, rolling downhill like rain through the cracks in the rocks when it’s time to build drainage ditches and get the world civilized.  He wouldn’t do a thing but slow me ‘n’ you up.

OK, so you don’t want him living with us.  Why can’t he visit me?

Because if I come within a mile of that man, I’ll fall right into that hole and I won’t be the same Mom you got right now.

Grier bit her tongue, didn’t remind her mom she could fly to California as an unattended minor and fly back the same way.  She loved her mom so much that even the realization of Ch’Rose’s off-beat view of the world and an obvious on-going crush on her ex – probably the thing that repeatedly sabotaged the hyperactive dating life of one of Austin’s most eligible middle-aged bachelorettes – couldn’t keep her from wondering if her mom was right about Greg.

When she was 13 and got her first laptop she Googled Greg Rittmeyer.  She plowed through the La Reina University athletics website and dozens of boring game stories from some newspaper called the Marin Independent-Journal.  A few pages into the results came game stories and the occasional feature on a veteran reliever for the powerhouse Oakland A’s.  She balked at clicking on the oldest links, archived stories from gossip rags and Southern California papers that detailed the crazy social life her mom said he lived before he met her.  She didn’t want to know about any of that, so she stopped searching the web.

Her mom said he broke a famous actress’ heart.

She didn’t want to think of him that way, she had constructed a historic record of him based on her mom’s photo albums – a nice looking guy who made her mother smile so wide – heartfelt quotes from his more grateful LRU players garnered from scrapbooks her mom had kept of those same newspaper articles and videotape showing Greg coaching third base at La Reina and pitching for Oakland or L.A.  Ch’Rose even dredged up a bit of video from a Chicago at Kansas City game during the dog days of summer 1978 in which Greg Rittmeyer looked unhittable. 

Grier liked the Dad she knew from an abridged multi-media perspective.  Two years after the most important person in her life stepped off the earth here came reality, the other half of the couple responsible for her existence.  Uncle Chuck warned her:  Some men confronted with a child they didn’t know they fathered denied it, threw up a shield, lawyered up, turned their back on the pitiful, begging kid.

Greg smiled at her.

She didn’t know if it was the same smile that crippled her mother’s defenses and brought movie stars into his arms, but she felt a daughterly affection at first sight.  He wasn’t running, he almost seemed happy.  He must see now what she saw the minute he first popped out of the dugout in the fourth inning and she got her first three-dimensional gander at him:  they looked enough alike to confirm the relationship.  She was dark, carried forth his coloring only in the brown-not-black of her hair, but their noses, the shape of their eyes were the same.

His eyes looked right at her but blinked more than they should, as if he was fighting back tears of anger at her mom or of shame at himself.

She started to stand up, to go to him, but one of the little kids who were making the lounge their playground slammed into her knees and bounced away laughing.  Damn rug rats.  Their mom, a beautiful but overweight blonde, was hunched over the snack bar texting.

I’m sorry, Grier, not the best place for a family reunion, her dad said.

She stood again.  Immediately a loud, painted-up Mexican lady at the next table jumped up laughing and, her eyes on another Latina just coming through the door, inadvertently blocked her path.  The mother of one of the players if Grier’s ninth grade Spanish could be trusted.  The lady had charm bracelets overloaded with baseball-themed baubles on both wrists and reeked of Wal-Mart perfume.

Grier squeezed past her and hugged her father for the first time in her near-15 years.  He hugged back; both were stiff, formal, doing it because characters in the movies would if this were the scenario.

He turned to Uncle Chuck.

Where you guys at?  I live way up in Seattle, down by Lake Union, kinda far.

Doubletree up by the airport.  Figure we can get G-G back to the room and me’n’you can grab a bite or a beer downstairs.

Staying long?

Long as you guys need, Uncle Chuck said.  The tone in his voice was cautious.  If anything, he and Aunt Becca were more protective of her than her mom.  They started out making the continued exclusion of Greg Rittmeyer a part of his sister’s legacy and seasoned it with their strong Christian beliefs.  She hurled a daily overdose of teen – what was the word you always heard on TV? – angst at them and wore them down.  I don’t teach nor coach until first part a August.  She supposed to have about 37 dozen softball tournaments and camps to go to, but apparently this is coming first on the priority scale since school got out last week.

Grier lost her temper, irritated at the tone in her uncle’s voice, like meeting her one and only father for the first time was a bothersome trifle.

After 14 and a half years! she snapped.

She saw her dad flinch.  He was still tall and charismatic though far older than in any picture she saw before the little 2-by-2 black-and-white in the Aroma game program.  He stood pressing his palms together, like a preacher about to launch into the thick of his sermon.   She figured he was wondering if her anger was at him or at Chuck or at her absent mom.

Good.  Let them all defer to what she thought of this situation for a change.

Her dad got away with murder for a decade and a half, ducking responsibility for a child while her mom worked her ass off to keep them upper middle class.  Her aunt and uncle wore out their knees praying for her.  Sure he didn’t know but what was that other thing they always said on TV, on the crime shows?  Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law.

Her mom had denied Grier a father based on her own inability to keep her knees together in this guy’s presence?  Momma, I’m sorry, she prayed briefly, but tough shit.  And Uncle Chuck, I am not your daughter, I’m this guy’s.  Let me finally see what he really and truly is made of.

Ninety minutes earlier, Greg was a childless bachelor who halfway regretted that fact.  Now, he was smack dab in the middle of the oldest guy joke in the book:

Got any kids?  None that I know about.

Ha-ha.  Now he knew about one.

He followed the taillights of Chuck’s rented silver Hyundai Sonata east on WA-16 to I-5 North.  His mind drifted to a subject it only reluctantly considered…. his immortal soul.

Greg occasionally stepped off the road to the next hookup and realized with an uncomfortable pang that few men enjoyed hundreds of women with no signs of stopping despite passing the scary milepost that read 50.  Even the iconic ladies man Warren Beatty married and became a dad at that point, figuring the 13,000 girls some alleged he slept with were enough.

Greg lived nearly four decades before understanding he had the slightest talent for any activities beyond throwing baseballs hard to precise parts of home plate and making women rejoice in their decision to take off their clothes for him.  Seduction was habit with exciting outcomes, difficult to change or even want to change.

It wasn’t like there were any rapes among the multitudes.

He never understood the gang bangs football players were prone to, consensual or otherwise. He had no desire to share.

Basketball guys did whatever it took to rustle up a three-way.  In college, he read how a New York schoolyard legend talked two girls into his tenement apartment and threatened to sic his Doberman on them until they gave in.  There was James Worthy, ordering up two hookers from a police-seized escort service in Houston and getting a standing O from the dumbass Fans when he took the court mid-game after making bail.

The most ludicrous story came from the Aroma’s spare outfielder, Whitlow Starnes, who played hoops in college and liked to hang out with basketball folks.  Starnes all but giggled telling the story of a college coach who found himself in a hot tub with his assistant and two coeds.  The assistant started to snuggle with one of the girls, prompting the head coach to chasten his employee – you’re married, a representative of the college, you should be ashamed of yourself  – and sent him home.

Whereupon the head coach took both of the girls to bed himself.

Until right after he met Geenie his lack of coercion, the fact that dozens of his conquests simply wanted to tell their friends they sucked a big leaguer’s dick, left Greg guilt free.  Women sensed the vibe:  Greg liked girls and no girl ever woke up in the morning disappointed to find him laying next to her.  Living a little differently didn’t mean you lived wrongly.  It did bug him that Fans remembered him more for his dalliances with well-known women than for his on-field accomplishments.

The night after he met Geenie last spring, someone – not just anyone but a woman solidly among those he could count on to do what he wanted – delivered a bit of post-coital conversation that jarred him, that made him start to think the joke was on him.  That while he may not be evil, he was stupid.  That all the fun he had, all the fun he brought to women, came at a subtle cost.

His metallic blue extended-cab F150 shot downhill past the Tacoma Dome, with its spot-lit American flag flying high above the wide gray wooden roof in the rain to his left, still 20-plus miles from the Doubletree in SeaTac.  On his right, the huge, distracting Emerald Queen Casino marquee glowed and flashed full color photographs of upcoming performers and fighters.

For 20 minutes, there would be no conversation with another human to draw him away from the echoes of Marde Frask’s nocturnal mutterings, the random spark that focused him on both his mortality and his morality.

He met Geenie in Sacramento.

They were both working:  La Reina, the hotshot D-II outfit, was stepping up in class for a three-game series with a Big Sky school, Sac State.  The Sky’s sideline reporter interviewed him on the field before the first game.  She was a Japanese-American girl wearing a simple yellow workaday dress; lush dark hair, lovely yet intense.  She belonged on TV.  A little short at 5’7" but a girl whose own moderate fame he knew.  A ring from UW, a TRANSACTIONS regular in the agate of the sports page:

USA SOFTBALL – Added IF Eugenia Ogawa to the Pan-America Games roster…. KANSAS CITY CYCLONES – Signed 3B Eugenia Ogawa…. OREGON STATE—Named Geenie Ogawa director of softball operations.

 Why don’t I want to stop talking to you?  she flirted after shutting down her mic. 

He said he knew why and whispered an inspired bit of studly nonsense into her ear.

She asked if La Reina was scheduled to play any other Big Sky Conference teams and before he could answer flipped the LRU media guide she held over to the schedule and, confirming that the Friars did not, handed Greg a business card freshly inked with her cell number.  She told him to call after the series with Sac State ended since she was staying in town until midweek to do an update on the Hornets’ basketball team.

Ethically, there would be no inappropriate mixing of business with pleasure if she waited until she was finished reporting on his team to go out with him.

A rare level of excitement filled Greg, who seldom dated anyone shorter than 5’10’ or 5’11".   But she was younger than he had a right to expect, had the thick head of hair, the dazzling smile and desert tan.  She was the closest thing to a baseball player he could date, not being gay.

He couldn’t wait to make the call in a few days. The problem was, when Greg couldn’t wait, he wouldn’t wait.  Not for sex.

He drove his own car to Sac and, after the doubleheader on Saturday, stopped off at an LRU pitching prospect’s high school basketball game in Del Paso Heights, made his presence known, chatted up a few teachers in the stands.  He headed to Fairfield and the nicely-appointed four-bedroom tract home of Mardeen Frask who, as a full colonel in the United States Air Force, held the Greg’s Girls record for Highest Rank Bedded, US Military.  He didn’t call, he cruised the driveway for unfamiliar cars and, seeing none, rapped on the door.  Anticipating Geenie, he needed someone to sooth him while he waited.

Bullshit.  No one needed stopgap sex like that.

He shot pool with Marde's 12-year old son, admired her 8-year old daughter’s science fair project and, when the kids were presumed to be asleep, Greg and Marde also hit the bed.  Hard.  Marde could do work.  Forty-one, looked 31 and screwed like the desperate divorcee she was.  She owned the rock solid body of a woman who spent 20 years proving she was as big, strong and tough as they came in the man’s world of killing-people-and-breaking-things, but kept her curves along the way.  She could generate an electric smile, had bright blue eyes and creamy skin.  And when she gave it up, she gave it all up.

Then, head crushed into the pillow, beige curtains fluttering above her from a window left open so the early spring breeze could cool them as they burned up the bed, Marde began her fateful homily….

Greg, you are the definition of awesome, awesomely incredible, I could let myself live for this….

He awaited the but and it came.

"You can come by whenever you want. I’m not seeing anyone else.  But the next time you pass through unannounced on a Saturday night, we’re just gonna sit on the couch and watch COPS."

How come? he asked idly, already thinking ahead to who else he could call between Sac and the Bay Area to break up the drive with some fleshy excitement. 

This costs too much.  I was on base late the other night.  I came back from using the bathroom and a two-star was walking around my offices.  Thought it might be a surprise inspection, but he said he was from out of town and killing time waiting for some other officers to finish a meeting.  Never one to miss a chance to curry favor upline…. – she smiled half a smile with her head still burrowed into the pillow – "I hung out with him for about an hour and we hit on most every subject under the sun.

"We got on the subject of love and sex.  Turns out he was a football star at the AFA back in the late '60s, early '70s.  Big heartthrob in Colorado Springs.  Couldn’t quite give up the role as an adult despite two marriages and five kids.  Both wives pitched him out because he couldn’t stop fooling around.  Pushing 60 and seldom sees his kids and a couple of them have grandkids.   He was hurting.  I asked him did he think he’d find wife number three and he said ‘no, I’m done, gave it all away.  Every woman I’ve been with, every man you’ve been with, you leave a piece of yourself behind.  Sooner or later, there’s nothing left of yourself to share.’

Greg, he named my unconscious fear.  I couldn’t sleep for two nights.  I never cheated on Ryan, but I’ve been with like 15-16 men before and after I was married.  I’m not sure I’m out, but I’m pretty sure I gave away far too many pieces.  Not the smallest of which to you, Coach Cocksman.

The message had the frightening force of truth. It hammered Greg quickly and convincingly.

As Marde spoke, Greg flashed on Marriette, who took his cherry when he was 16; prolific three-ways during college; the bar singer in Oakland his very first night in the bigs; a stewardess in Cleveland his full rookie year, another one in Dallas; the famous girls, Willi and Ava; the assistant rodeo coach at LRU after a Christmas party two months ago.  But wait, there’s more.  Too many more.  Random, random, random.  Scary.  Was he going nuts?  The faces were flying up from his memory banks.  He’d been planning a rematch with Marde’s snatch, but shriveled.

He considered the possibility that every last woman’s face, every last woman’s splayed legs, was going to flash before his eyes.

Magic Johnson admitted to 1,000-plus and attained a theoretically deadly virus.  Wilt Chamberlain absurdly boasted of 20,000 and died early.  Joe Namath claimed 300 conquests before leaving college and wound up a stupid old man; a drunken idiot trying to kiss a sportscaster live on national television.  Greg Rittmeyer was maybe a third of the way to Magic’s neighborhood and was about to succumb to a nervous breakdown, minutes after doing what he did best.

Geenie’s face popped up last, like a period at the end of an unsettling sentence.

The jarring mix of fond and ugly memories stopped on a dime.  Ergo, to wit, she must be The Right One.  He would focus on her.  She was smitten, she might well be captivated using the usual skills, but he knew he had to play one-on-one from here on out.  He tried monogamy a couple times before and was fine with it; but it hadn’t stuck.

Now he was old.  He wasn’t a hopeless sinner, instead a thrilling and oft-thrilled loser, giving too much of himself away for little reward, no doubt causing real pain in too many of the women who let themselves admire him. 

He kissed Marde.  They fell asleep.  He hadn’t as much as watched COPS with her since.  He and Geenie built a gem among May-December relationships.  No one gave their differences, ethnic or birthdates, a second thought.

They fit together.

She was a big factor in his accepting Larry’s offer to join him in Tacoma.  Geenie lived in Seattle.  Greg believed he could not live without Geenie.  Four.  Hundreds of women enjoyed, but Greg only loved four of them.  Geenie was the fourth.

She’d be cashing in his life insurance. 

In the truck exiting the freeway at 200th, he remembered:  Ch’Rose’s face, her perpetual sly smile and deep brown eyes, didn’t appear during his panic attack.

She didn’t appear because she wasn’t one of them, one of the used girls who in turn used Greg, one of the stalking cougars who knew him from baseball or, worse yet, though it always seemed chest-expanding proof of his manhood, one of the stalking cougars who knew of his prowess from their friends and boldly came to get their share.  You’re Greg Fucking Rittmeyer.  Literally, one such 30-something Larkspur-manse-inheriting hootchie cooed to him a few years before, four days after he hooked up with her down-the-private-lane neighbor for the first time.

Ch’Rose wasn’t in those ranks.

She was special when she took up his days and later as she lived, almost perfect, in his memories.  She didn’t come back to haunt him at his moment of horrified epiphany.  What was she thinking when she spurned him, knowing things he didn’t, making decisions he knew nothing of for reasons he would have disputed?

If Geenie was the right one, Ch’Rose had been the righter one.

He’d been in love four times in 54 years for a total of no more than a dozen years.  Geenie was the forever girl. The first one, Willi, was one of two women Fans identified Greg with and she was still in plain sight along with the one who snatched him off that rebound, Ava. He got pro forma emails from Willi on congratulatory occasions and responded in kind.  Ava was a Facebook friend.  Both alive and well though neither had been a factor in 20 years.

Ch’Rose was gone and then she was really gone.  Now, in a very tangible way, she was back.

She left him fifteen years before.  How many bedroom doors did he ease shut since?  How many shell-shocked eyes did he look into when he soared above and beyond what the long, strong beauty under him, astride him, in his lap, held aloft her legs wrapped around him, had expected?  Too many.

Yeah, he was a stud. 

And he missed the entirety of his only child’s life to date.  Her mother, posthumously awarded the Love of His Life Trophy, died without him knowing it.

Yeah, he was an idiot.

The Doubletree at the Airport high-rose above him to the right.  Chuck swooped his Budget Hyundai into the valet parking entrance, part of his room rate.  Greg turned a sidewalk cut sooner and punched the button for a short-term parking ticket. 

There was no more rain this far north.

The air was fresh and cool though, the summer downpour had traveled International Boulevard earlier.  Greg gulped in a lungful.  He didn’t fear an actual fire and brimstone hell any more than he ever had.  Yet, he felt at risk; as though he was being tested; Marde telling the story of the general’s philosophic ramble; the rain stopping precisely as Grier flipped him her baseball card.

It reminded Greg of the closest thing to religious discourse Larry Pack ever offered:

Who knows why God put us on this motherfucker?  But one thing’s for sure, He didn’t mean for it to be easy.

Chapter 2

SeaTac, Washington

June 12, 2007

Grier sat on the queen-sized closer to the door, legs tucked close to the bed, hands between her knees, reacquainting herself with the dry indoors after spending a night getting rained on in Tacoma.

Her hair, freed from the baseball cap and frazzled by moisture, was a thicket of brown with natural red highlights.  Chuck stretched out on the other bed, back against the headboard, hands behind his head.  Greg sat on the desk and found himself glancing alternatively out the sixth floor window, down into the sporadically lit garden area between wings of the hotel, and around the room.

Grier's Longhorn cap sat on her bed, Chuck's purple football coach’s jacket lay on his.

Grier, a typical teen, had flipped the TV on the moment she entered the room.

SportsCenter.  Big doings pushed news anyone in the room cared about past the first few commercials:  the San Antonio Spurs had just about wrapped up the NBA title, knocking off the Cavaliers for the third straight game but Grier and Chuck were quick to hiss the result and proclaim themselves Rockets Fans. Justin Verlander had pitched a lickety-split two hour and 11 minute no-hitter for Detroit against the Milwaukee Brewers.  Greg waited for Stuart Scott to humorously paraphrase his own line from Mr. 3000 and say I’m not gonna say every Brewer got a hit tonight… cause none did, but he played it straight.  Verlander.  That kid could throw a little bit.  Rookie of the Year and now, oh by the way….

The two Texans whooped when Scott gave word of a 5-4 Astros interleague win over Oakland.  The Mariners beat the Cubs in Chicago, 5-3, in 13 innings for their fifth straight victory.  Greg winced.

Why’s that bad? Chuck asked, his coachly instincts reading Greg’s face.

Well, yeah, the club’s on a roll, Greg said. But, yesterday they gave up seven runs and the first game of the trip they went 11 innings.  Now they go 13.  They’re gonna need arms.  Probably dip down too soon for a few of our guys.  We're two-plus months into the season and they've already started the bullpen shuffle, bringing guys up and sending them down as often as the law will allow.  The guy you saw pitch tonight, Underhill, he's nowhere near ready, but no doubt he'll be in Seattle in a month.

Chuck laughed.

Oklahoma guy.  Course he sucks.

Greg allowed himself a smile.  No rivalry like a Southwest rivalry.

Mama always said you were my dad, but I couldn't see you cause you had a hole in you.  When I was little, I thought it was for real, but when I was in fourth grade and I started realizing it wasn't possible to actually have a hole in a person and live, I started asking her....

Grier Rosa? Chuck interrupted, his tone harsh.  Think we can kinda ease into that a little?  Maybe tell the man what became of your Moms in the first place before you start quoting her posthumously?

Grier gave Greg an apologetic glance .

Greg stood up from the desk and stretched out five decades worth of athletic mishaps as an excuse to stall for words.

Guys, he said, I am so sorry.  I'm sorry I was the kind of man Ch'Rose felt she needed to cut out of your life, I'm sorry she passed without me knowing it.

He slowed down and looked Grier in the eyes, more like his than her mom’s.  How do you do it?  How do you look at someone you've let down, if unknowingly, for her entire life and apologize with even an ounce of believability?  The echoes of Marde's forlorn general stabbed his heart.  All those women giving in, yielding to the glint in his eye, but here now he was a failure.... he didn't know how to look at the daughter whose mother went to great lengths to insure he never would. 

My sister got handed one shit deal, Rittmeyer, one shit deal.  No good deed going unpunished and all of that, Chuck said and Greg seized the chance to turn away from Grier and look in her uncle's direction.  "Every year our church goes down to Mexico, to this slum long side a Juarez, and helps build houses for people that otherwise are basically living open air in a dump.

I go, my wife goes, my kids go, Grier been.  Dozens of folks working for two weeks, living out of motor homes and such.  Good stuff.  Gives you a righteous feeling without feeling self-righteous. Humbles you before The Lord.   You know you're helping, you see a little town growing year by year outta what you do, but you know you're too small by yourself as only one man to ever help enough.  Every year we all gotta get checkups and shots galore to make sure we stay healthy down there.

Chuck stopped and swallowed.  He looked over at Grier, who by now was lying down on her side, staring out at them from one eye.  There was no tear, but her shoulders betrayed a small tremor.  Chuck took a breath.

"So we go out there in '05 and everything's great for the first four days.  On the fifth day, Ch'Rose is up on a ladder hammering nails like a machine when all of a sudden she says she's feverish and goes into one of the trailers to lie down.  The youth pastor runs up there an hour later and fills her up a pitcher of ice water and he said she was joking around with him, sick as a dog but lucid and talking about getting better and getting back to work.  Nobody ever talked to her again. 

"Grier found her.   Well, I mean, we knew where she was, but Grier found her not breathing.  An uncharted super germ got her, shut down her lungs.  Thought you might have read about it. The AP picked up the story, quoted the CDC, all that type of shit.  TV, too.  60 Minutes been around a couple times settin’ up a segment on it; there’s been more cases but it’s still rare.  Docs are trying to isolate what makes the victims susceptible to the symptoms while other folks just carry the bug around undamaged."

For the first time since his father's funeral eight months before, Greg started to cry. He fought to make it not seem theatrical, but he was horrified.  How did he not see the stories in the paper?  How could no one at LRU know?  Did any of her friends, his colleagues, keep Ch’Rose’s death a secret from him?

Cold-blooded. 

While he used up his days in search of Division II baseball victories and one more woman’s body not much different than the hundreds he already experienced, his 12-year old child and her mother, the woman he always knew was one who got away, built villages for poor people on behalf of Jesus.  Whereupon the child found the mother dead.

Greg closed his eyes tight on what seem like a pint of moisture.

Ch'Rose.... he managed, eyes still closed, voice choking.  I always wanted to go after her, but I always knew she didn't want me to.  Should have anyway.  Damn, Grier, that's so sad, I'm so sorry you had to.....

He opened his eyes to find Grier leaning against him, awkwardly, the body language perfectly clear – this is my dad, this is a guy I never saw before – her voice trying for reassurance.

It's fine, she said, skipping past a beat where she might say Dad.  It stung Greg that his daughter didn’t have the word in her vocabulary.  "Me finding Mama.  It's never seemed real, seeing a dead person, touching my mom and her not moving at all, so that's not what breaks my heart.  Not living in our condo, not hearing her upstairs talking on the phone and tapping away on her computer at the same time.  Not eating her enchiladas anymore.  People don't know.  Everyone, church people, my friends at school, they all think I must be scarred for life cause I'm the girl that found her Mama dead in a Mexican landfill.

I'm not scarred; I just miss her so bad.  She was always there, every day, and now she's not.

Greg stopped worrying about rushing and