His 47 Seconds of Silence Cost Him Everything novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Behind Home Plate

Coach Mike shows me the full video and I ask him to hold it, while Stacy tells the bleachers I was in on it and petitions the league to ban me.

I didn't answer him that night.

I answered him at seven the next morning, standing in Jen's kitchen in yesterday's cardigan.

"Don't post it. Can I see it first?"

He wrote back in under a minute.

"Practice is at ten. Come at nine. I'll be in the shed."

The equipment shed sat behind the third-base dugout, a green metal box full of buckets of balls and chalk liners and broken helmets.

Mike Brandow was sitting on an overturned bucket with his reading glasses on and a laptop on his knees.

He took the glasses off fast when he saw me.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

He was big. I'd always thought so from the bleachers, but in the shed he took up most of it.

Gray Wildcats cap. Sunburned forearms. A cheek full of sunflower seeds.

Out the open door, a girl of about ten was swinging on the swings by the playground, pumping her legs hard.

"Mine," he said. "She has a softball thing at eleven. She's very patient about my thing at ten."

He turned the laptop around.

"You don't have to watch it," he said. "I can just tell you what's on it."

"I want to watch it."

He pressed play and stood up and gave me the bucket.

The camera was high on its pole behind home plate, but the concession window was right in the frame, past the backstop.

There I was in my white dress.

There was Stacy, holding up the test.

And there, by the grill, in the corner of the picture, was Cory.

I watched his face this time.

I hadn't been able to look at it all the way through yesterday.

He wasn't smiling.

He wasn't trying not to laugh.

He looked at the test in her hand and then he looked at the ground, and his jaw went tight, and he stayed exactly like that.

Mike had a little counter running in the corner of the screen.

At forty-seven, I watched myself take the ring off.

At forty-nine, Stacy started laughing.

At fifty-two, Cory looked up, and I saw it on him, plain as daylight.

Relief.

I hit pause.

"I timed it too," Mike said. "Watching it last night. I got forty-seven."

"Me too."

"I watched it four times." He took his cap off and turned it around in his hands. "I kept waiting for him to do something. I've seen that guy argue a strike call for ten minutes. He'll stand on the fence and yell about a dropped third strike. He just stood there."

"Why are you showing me?"

He looked at me.

"Because I was at the grill," he said. "Because you looked like somebody'd hit you with a bat, and I let that forty-seven-second silence go on before I opened my mouth. That's on me too."

"You told the camera guy to get off your field."

"Late."

I closed the laptop.

"Can you hold onto it?" I said. "Don't post it. Don't send it to anybody."

"You sure? I could have it on the Neighbors page in two minutes."

"They laughed at me in person," I said. "They passed it around and laughed. I want them to see it in person."

He thought about that.

Then he nodded once.

"Okay," he said. "It's yours. Tell me when."

His daughter yelled from the swings. "Dad! You said you'd push!"

"I said I'd push in five minutes!"

"It's been five minutes!"

"It's been two!"

He looked at me and shrugged with his whole body, and I laughed, out loud, for the first time since the brownies.

It surprised both of us.

By ten, the boys were on the field in their gray practice pants.

Callen saw me from the bullpen and lifted his mitt.

I sat where I always sat, on the bottom row right behind home plate.

A few of the moms in the bleachers stopped talking when I walked by.

One of them was holding her phone with my face on it.

At ten-thirty, Stacy's white SUV pulled into the gravel lot.

She got out in a pink matching set with a ring light on a stand, and her cameraman got out of the other side.

"Hi, everybody!" she called up into the bleachers. "Don't mind us, we're doing Part 2!"

She set the ring light up right along the first-base line.

Then she turned it on me.

"Oh my gosh. She came." Stacy put her hand on her chest. "Bonus Mom. Sweetie. Are you okay? You were so upset yesterday."

On the field, Mike blew his whistle and stopped the drill.

"You guys," Stacy said up to the moms, quieter, like a secret. "She knew. We told her ahead of time. She was in on it, and now she's playing the victim for sympathy because it went viral. It's so sad."

Every head turned to me.

Callen had his mask down. I couldn't see his face.

I stood up.

"If I was in on it," I said, "then show them the whole thing. Not the part you cut. All of it."

Stacy smiled right into her own ring light.

"Gladly, sweetie. There isn't anything else."

"You're sure?"

"There's nothing else. That's the video."

"Okay," I said, and sat back down.

Behind the backstop, Mike spit a sunflower shell into the dirt and didn't say a word.

Stacy looked a little puzzled that I'd let it go.

Then she shrugged and filmed the boys running bases.

That night I was in Jen's bathtub with my knees up when two things came in at once.

The first was a link from the Wildcats parents' chat.

Stacy had started a petition to the league board. "Ban Renee Ritter from all Wildcats events, for the emotional safety of our kids."

Two hundred and twelve signatures.

The board would vote on it Thursday night.

The second was an email from my principal.

"Renee, forty-one parents have contacted the school about the video. Please see me in my office tomorrow at 7:30 a.m., before the children arrive."

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