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 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Section 112
The kiss cam finds Todd in section 112 with another woman wearing Beth's late mother's ring, Beth sets her hot dogs down and stands, and up in the booth the friend she called a liar gives her one slow nod.
The kiss cam found my husband in section 112, and the man two rows ahead of me said, "Oh, that's rough," without knowing it was my husband.
I was in section 128 with a hot dog in each hand.
It was Dollar Dog Night at Fox Field, and all 4,900 of us were holding something in a bun.
Both of mine belonged to my father.
He was on his fourth and had asked me to hold the next two.
Dad sat beside me in his Foxes cap with his bad hip stretched into the aisle, happier than I'd seen him since Mom died.
The team had mailed two tickets to my school on Tuesday, the way they do every August, with my name handwritten on the envelope.
I run the front office of an elementary school, so free tickets are the one perk of the job.
At 4:10 that afternoon, Todd had texted me from Kansas City.
"Sales summit till Sunday. Signal is awful. Jeweler says your mom's ring is ready Monday, I'll grab it. Love you, Bean."
I'd sent him a heart and a picture of Dad in his cap.
In the home half of the fifth, the music changed, and the big screen in left-center filled with a cartoon heart.
The heart landed on a man in a gray polo and a woman in a Foxes jersey, nine rows up behind the home dugout.
Forty-nine hundred people said, "Awww."
I said it too.
For about a second and a half, I was one of them.
Then the man turned toward the camera, and he was forty feet wide, and he was my husband.
Todd laughed with his head back.
The woman took his face in both hands and kissed him.
He didn't push her away.
He put his hand on the back of her head.
The crowd roared, and somebody behind me whistled through his fingers.
Then Todd opened his eyes and saw himself on the board.
I watched it reach him.
First he saw the heart, then the park, then his own face.
When you are forty feet wide, nobody can miss what your face does.
The roar thinned out, and that was when the man two rows ahead of me said it.
The kiss cam normally lasts about five seconds.
I counted, because counting was the only thing I could do.
At seven, Todd pulled back and put his hand over his mouth.
At nine, the woman laughed and waved to the crowd with her left hand.
At twelve, the camera pushed in on that hand until the whole screen was a hand.
At fifteen, I saw the ring.
It was a small diamond in a worn yellow-gold band.
It sat crooked on her finger, the way it had sat on mine after the funeral.
"Bethie," Dad said, very quietly. "That's your mother's ring."
I knew it was.
I had known it since the camera started to push in, and I'd been waiting for it to be somebody else's.
My father had put that ring on my mother's hand himself, in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen in Nixa, in 1982.
I looked at my phone.
Todd's last message was still the one from 4:10, and he had not answered my heart.
Around us, people had their phones up.
Nobody had looked at me yet.
In about ten seconds somebody would.
Then I would be a woman holding two hot dogs while her husband kissed someone else on a forty-foot screen.
I could sit there and let that be the whole story.
So I stood up.
I set both hot dogs on my seat.
Dad looked at them.
"Those are a dollar each," he said, and picked them up.
I went up the steps toward the concourse with my knees not working right.
At the top I turned around once.
The glass booth over home plate is where the team runs the video board, and my best friend used to run it.
A woman in a headset stood at the window with her face aimed straight at section 128.
I couldn't make out her face from that far.
I knew the way she stood, though, with her weight on one hip.
Three months ago, Dani Judd had called to tell me she'd seen Todd at a lake restaurant with a woman who wasn't me.
I told her she was a jealous liar, I blocked her number, and I said never to speak to me again.
Up in the glass, Dani gave me one slow nod.
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