My Husband Kissed Another Woman on the Ballpark Kiss Cam, and the Friend I Called a Liar Was the One Running the Scoreboard novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Stand By

Beth sits in the video booth while Dani runs four innings without turning around, and the owner's call says what it is going to cost her.

The man with the towel walked me up a stairwell that smelled like popcorn and floor cleaner.

He punched a code into a keypad on a gray door, held it open, and said, "I've got a drag to run."

Then he went back down the stairs two at a time, and I stood in the doorway holding his towel.

The booth was the size of a walk-in closet, with a window across the front and more screens than a car dealership.

Dani sat at the console with her back to me.

She wore a black Foxes polo and a headset, and her brown hair was twisted up in a knot with a pencil through it.

She did not turn around.

"Dolan," she said. "You're in my sightline."

"Judd."

"Sit on the stool. Don't touch anything green. Don't talk to me."

"I called you a liar."

"You did." Dani pushed one slider up with two fingers. "And I'm running a baseball game."

I sat on the stool.

Through the window, the whole park lay below us in the dusk, bright and green and small.

Four thousand nine hundred people had gone back to their hot dogs, and about half of them were holding up phones.

"Camera two, wide on the visitors' pen," Dani said into her mouthpiece. "Graphic nine on my go. Go."

A pitching change flashed up on the big board in a blaze of red and gold.

The crowd clapped politely.

"Dancing grandma, after the next out," she said. "Somebody wake her up."

From a speaker on the desk, a woman's voice came out thin and fast.

"Judd, that was the cleanest cam I have ever shot in my life, are you insane, are you okay, I can't feel my hands."

"Comms," Dani said.

"Sorry. Comms."

Her phone lay face down by the switcher, and it buzzed against the metal without stopping.

She didn't look at it once.

Taped under the lip of the console was a strip of photo-booth pictures so old that the tape had gone yellow.

Four frames of two girls in college sweatshirts, with their tongues out, one of them me.

I looked at it for a long time.

I looked back out the window instead.

Down in section 128, a tiny man in a Foxes cap stood up and held a hot dog over his head.

"That's my dad," I said.

"I know who that is," Dani said.

She did not turn around, but her shoulders came down about an inch.

"He's eating the one that was mine."

"He's been eating for two since your mother's funeral." She hit a key. "Roll the grandma."

On the board, a woman of about eighty in a Foxes visor started to dance, and the whole park laughed at her.

It was a real laugh, loose and happy, and I realized that every person in it had already forgotten about us.

Dani had given them something else to look at, the way she had in college whenever somebody cried in the library.

"Did you send the tickets?" I said.

"Not on my floor."

"Judd."

"There are three open mics in this room, Dolan." She tipped her head toward the ceiling. "Everything you say right now goes to the ops director. Sit on your hands."

I sat on my hands.

It was almost funny.

I had spent three months sure I knew what Dani was, a woman who couldn't stand to watch me be happy.

She had spent those same three months doing this.

The red phone on the wall rang.

It was the old kind, with a cord, and the sound of it made the speaker on the desk whisper, "Oh no."

Dani took off one side of the headset and lifted the receiver.

"Booth," she said.

A man's voice came out of the phone, slow and calm.

I couldn't make out the words, but I could hear that he was old and that he wasn't shouting.

"Yes, sir," Dani said.

A pause.

"Yes, sir. After the last out. I'll bring it."

She hung up.

She put the headset back on and laid both hands flat on the console.

They were shaking.

I had known Dani Judd for seventeen years.

I'd seen her walk out of a smoking dorm kitchen and tell a campus police officer his hat was crooked.

I had never once seen her hands do that.

"That was the owner," she said. "He's been up in his box all night."

"Dani."

"He wants me in the box after the last out, and he wants the raw tape." She stared straight out the window. "Four more innings, Dolan."

"And then?"

"Then I find out what it cost."

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