“Really?”
Tanner’s face clouded to the extent his native sunniness allowed. “I mean—yeah. Definitely. She missed you.”
“Congratulations on everything. Marriage, fatherhood. Congratulations.”
“Thanks, it’s been amazing.”
“I want to hear about it, but—where is she?”
“Probably at Scofield, with Gracie. Jeannie Cross is in town.”
After a second hug, from the man who was now his brother-in-law, Clem headed up toward Scofield Park. The trees of New Prospect were a hundred percent alive, gripped jealously by their unblemished bark, and every house looked like a palace. The wet, emerald grass that a man was removing from a lawn-mower bag, discarding as waste, would have been the sweetest meal for an alpaca. Clem stopped to take off his sweater and knot it above his hips, and the man looked up from his mower suspiciously. Maybe he sensed the comparisons Clem was making, the implicit critique, or maybe he just hated hippies.
Becky wasn’t among the mothers at the Scofield playground, and she wasn’t at the picnic tables. Farther back in the park was a ball field with a backstop. Fully grown young men, several of them shirtless, were playing softball. The guy at the plate, connecting with a pitch and sending it high over the head of the left fielder, was a detestable jock Clem recognized from high school, Kent Carducci. He pumped his fist and gave a brute roar as he rounded first base.
The girls—where there were boys like this, there had to be girls—were grouped along the first-base line, around a set of aluminum bleachers. Becky was seated on the lowest bleacher with Jeannie Cross. Taller than the others, her old aura intact, she might have been a queen holding court. Lesser girls sat cross-legged on the grass below her, one of them holding up the arms of a little child who’d achieved a standing position.
Jeannie Cross spotted Clem first. She grabbed Becky’s shoulder, and now Becky saw him, too. For a moment, her expression was uncompre hending. Then she ran up behind the first-base line to meet him. He spread his arms, but she stopped short of hugging distance. She was wearing a corduroy jacket that had once been his. Her smile was perhaps more incredulous than joyful.
“What are you doing here?”
“Came to see you.”
“Wow.”
“Is it okay if I give you a hug?”
She didn’t seem to remember the joke, but she stepped up and put one arm around him, briefly, and pulled back. “Everybody’s home for Easter,” she said. “I guess you are, too.”
“I wasn’t thinking about Easter. I only came to see you.”
Kent Carducci shouted something abusive on the ball field.
“So come and meet Gracie,” Becky said. She ran ahead of Clem and scooped up the little child. “Gracie, I want you to meet your uncle Clem.”
The child hid her face in Becky’s neck. Clem probably looked to her like a hairy monster. He realized that, until this moment, he hadn’t quite believed that his sister had procreated. The child was perfectly formed, her hair fine and thin on top, thicker on the sides: a new little person, ex nihilo, with a mother scarcely past childhood herself. He could almost remember Becky as a one-year-old. His eyes filled again.
“Here, you can hold her,” Becky said. “She won’t break.”
Watched by Becky’s friends, he took Gracie in his arms. She was radiantly warm in her cotton sweater, squirming with vital energy, reaching back for her mother. He didn’t think he’d held a baby since Judson had outgrown being portable. He gently bounced his niece, trying to postpone the inevitable crying, but Becky’s gaze and smile were fixed on her, as if to remind her of where she’d rather be. She let out a wail, and Becky took her back.
The physics of their reunion were nothing like what he’d imagined: a ball field populated with guys whose muscles had been developed by athletics, not hard labor, eight flavors of pretty girl arrayed by the bleachers, some of them from Crossroads （Carol Pinella, Sally Perkins’s younger sister）， others from the cheerleading squad, most of them home from college, at least one of them still local, and none of them remotely capable of imagining the world in which he’d lived for two years. His shirt stank, his dungarees were stained with Andean mud, and his affinities were with the Cuéllars’ hamlet. New Prospect was still New Prospect, and Becky was evidently still at the social center of it, while he, who’d always been far from the center, had moved radically much farther. He would have liked to talk to Jeannie Cross, who was more sensationally desirable than ever, but his alienation was so extreme that he could only stand behind the backstop, watching people he disliked play softball, and wait for Becky to find a moment for him.