The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 Read online

  Roque knew that Erick loved baseball. Did Roque like baseball? It was doubtful that he cared even a little bit—he didn’t listen to games on the radio or TV, and he never looked at a newspaper. He loved boxing, though. He knew the names of all the Mexican fighters as if they lived here, as if they were Dodgers players, like Steve Yeager, Dusty Baker, Kenny Landreaux or Mike Marshall, Pedro Guerrero. Roque did know about Fernando Valenzuela, as everyone did, even his mom, which is why she agreed to let Roque take them to a game. What Mexican didn’t love Fernando? Dodger Stadium was close to their apartment. He’d been there once with Albert and his family—well, outside it, on a nearby hill, to see the fireworks for Fourth of July. His mom decided that all three of them would go on a Saturday afternoon, since Saturday night, Erick thought, she might want to go somewhere else, even with somebody else.

  Roque, of course, didn’t know who the Phillies were. He knew nothing about the strikeouts by Steve Carlton or the home runs by Mike Schmidt. He’d never heard of Pete Rose. It wasn’t that Erick knew very much, either, but there was nothing that Roque could talk to him about, if they were to talk.

  If Erick showed his excitement when they drove up to Dodger Stadium and parked, his mom and Roque didn’t really notice it. They sat in the bleachers, and for him the green of the field was a magic light; the stadium decks surrounding them seemed as far away as Rome. His body was somewhere it had never been before. The fifth inning? That’s how late they were. Or were they right on time, because they weren’t even sure they were sitting in the right seats yet when he heard the crack of the ball, saw the crowd around them rising as it came at them. Erick saw the ball. He had to stand and move and stretch his arms and want that ball until it hit his bare hands and stayed there. Everybody saw him catch it with no bobble. He felt all the eyes and voices around him as if they were every set of eyes and every voice in the stadium. His mom was saying something, and Roque, too, and then, finally, it was just him and that ball and his stinging hands. He wasn’t even sure if it had been hit by Pete Guerrero. He thought for sure it had been, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t watch the game then—he couldn’t. He didn’t care who won. He stared at his official National League ball, reimagining what had happened. He ate a hot dog and drank a soda and he sucked the salted peanuts and the wooden spoon from his chocolate-malt ice cream. He rubbed the bumpy seams of his home-run ball.

  Game over, they were the last to leave. People were hanging around, not going straight to their cars. Roque didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to end it so quickly, Erick thought, while he still had her with him. Then one of the Phillies came out of the stadium door and people swarmed—boys mostly, but also men and some women and girls—and they got autographs before the player climbed onto the team’s bus. Joe Morgan, they said. Then Garry Maddox appeared. Erick clutched the ball but he didn’t have a pen. He just watched, his back to the gray bus the Phillies were getting into.

  Then a window slid open. Hey, big man, a voice said. Erick really wasn’t sure. Gimme the ball, la pelota, the face in the bus said. I’ll have it signed, comprendes? Échalo, just toss it to me. Erick obeyed. He tossed it up to the hand that was reaching out. The window closed. The ball was gone a while, so long that his mom came up to him, worried that he’d lost it. The window slid open again and the voice spoke to her. We got the ball, Mom. It’s not lost, just a few more. When the window opened once more, this time the ball was there. Catch. There were all kinds of signatures on it, though none that he could really recognize except for Joe Morgan and Pete Rose.

  Then the voice offered more, and the hand threw something at him. For your mom, okay? Comprendes? Erick stared at the asphalt lot where the object lay, as if he’d never seen a folded-up piece of paper before. Para tu mamá, bueno? He picked it up, and he started to walk over to his mom and Roque, who were so busy talking they hadn’t noticed anything. Then he stopped. He opened the note himself. No one had said he couldn’t read it. It said, I’d like to get to know you. You are muy linda. Very beautiful and sexy. I don’t speak Spanish very good, maybe you speak better English, pero No Importa. Would you come by tonite and let me buy you a drink? There was a phone number and a hotel-room number. A name, too. A name that came at him the way that the home run had.

  Erick couldn’t hear. He could see only his mom ahead of him. She was talking to Roque, Roque was talking to her. Roque was the proudest man, full of joy because he was with her. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t an engineer. Now Erick could hear again. Like sparrows hunting seed, boys gathered round the bus, calling out, while the voice in the bus was yelling at him, Hey, big guy! Give it to her! Erick had the ball in one hand and the note in the other. By the time he reached his mom and Roque, the note was already somewhere on the asphalt parking lot. Look, he said in a full voice. They all signed the ball.

  Alice Mattison

  The Vandercook

  WHEN MOLLY AND I had been married for thirteen years—splendid Molly, difficult Molly—she took over Conte’s Printing, a New Haven business my grandfather had started in the thirties. My father ran it when I was a child, and I spent much of my time in the shop. A teenage boy, Gilbert, ran errands for my father after school and also kept an eye on me. When I was in college I fooled around on the letterpress printer my grandfather had used, and Gilbert, who still worked there, teased me for caring about something old-fashioned. He was a shy black kid from New Haven’s Hill neighborhood who had grown into a moody guy who worked closely with my father all week and played the saxophone at New Haven clubs on weekends. A few years ago, Dad finally had to retire when he broke his hip carrying a box of newly xeroxed pages to a customer’s car. By then, Gil had been his manager for years.

  “We’ll have to sell the store,” I said, when we heard about my father’s accident, and Molly said, “I want it.” We were living in California, where Molly had done well marketing software, but money was becoming less plentiful, and she was angry with her boss. This was shortly before money—and what it may buy, including a sense of adventure and possibility—became less plentiful in other places; the software industry had trouble first. Molly’s instant certainty delighted me. I wanted to save the family business without running it myself, but the thought of her running Conte’s Printing hadn’t occurred to me. I was teaching a history class and assisting a letterpress printer—I’d retained my interest in letterpress without getting good at it—but I could find a teaching job in Connecticut. I missed New Haven and my old widowed dad. Our boys, Julian and Tony, would grow up near their grandfather.

  But I was cautious. “Is this because of what happened at work? You’ll forgive him.”

  “I won’t forgive him,” Molly said, and I knew that might be true. She and her boss had had a bad fight, and I’d told Molly I thought he was right.

  Dad was an ascetic-looking man, small and neat (I’m tall and disheveled) with pale, closely shaved cheeks and dark hair that had grown thin but never gray. People thought he looked like a priest. Starting a joke, he’d lower his voice and touch your arm, like someone delivering bad news. Sometimes he irritated me, but I respected him and was glad he respected my wife, a businesswoman who deserved his admiration. Still, I was surprised when Molly reported after a long phone conversation that Dad was ceding her full control of Conte’s Printing. Despite what Molly had said, I’d imagined all of us conferring. Then I realized that given Molly’s background, any other arrangement would have been insulting.

  “And what about Gil?” I said as she turned away.

  “The manager? He’ll stay on,” she said. “I can work with anyone.”

  Molly was restless—she did not rest. She had messy brown curls I loved touching, muscular arms and legs, and firm convictions. Now and then her hair flopped over her face and she flung it back with a look of surprise, as if this had never happened before. She was blunt, sometimes critical—often outrageous. Once she came to a decision, she was alone with it; even if the decision made everyone unhappy—including her—her det
ermination was unwavering. The two of us mostly shared political beliefs, but it was Molly who went online and made the donation, led me and the kids to the protest march, phoned the senator. Occasionally Molly marched on the wrong side. For a couple of months she had unaccountably believed George Bush about Iraq, and would not hear me. When several events in my life with Molly might have made me take heed, I did not take heed.

  A day or two after that long phone call with my father, Molly asked, “Can you work that old printing press?” In the back room, Dad still had the Vandercook that had been the foundation of my grandfather’s business, along with a cabinet of type cases, each full of hundreds of pieces of type in different fonts and sizes, though everything was either photocopied or offset by now.

  “I guess so,” I said. The California press where I’d worked printed literary books in small, well-crafted editions. I couldn’t do that, but I could print a little. She wanted the business to offer letterpress printing. I’d have a reason to be in the store, and to work with Gil—who might tease me again, something I’d always enjoyed.

  Conte’s Printing had thrived during the forties, then gotten less trade as demand for sales brochures and wedding invitations disappeared into the suburbs. When photocopying came in, Dad prospered, but then he had trouble competing with chain copy shops, and struggled further when computers made photocopying less necessary. But more recently, savvy Yale professors had used our dusty little establishment for putting together course packets. Conte’s seemed to honor Gutenberg in a way big copy shops didn’t. And then Yale and New Haven decided to change people’s image of my hometown from a scary place where you might not want to send your kid to the coolest little city in the Northeast. Yale bought derelict buildings in the store’s neighborhood and fixed them up. The city chipped in with Dad on a new facade. Upscale businesses wanted good stationery, and people moving into expensive downtown apartments used Conte’s Printing for party invitations. There was even a demand for letterpress.

  New Haven had become all but trendy in my years away, and the downtown we arrived in with our children seemed not glamorous, but less dingy than it used to be. Molly began learning the printing and copying business, and I got a job at a nearby prep school. I set about refurbishing the Vandercook and learning to use it on weekends, and took pleasure in my father’s pleasure, and just in his continuing life and his delight in my boys, who were eight and ten when we arrived. To my surprise, Dad came to the store every day, and sat on a straight chair at one side, greeting old customers.

  Gil, who’d been quietly running the store for years, was reserved, but welcomed us. He was in his fifties now, with the world-weary air of an expatriate musician in Paris in the twenties. He had a wife one rarely saw, and one son who had some kind of unspecified problem. Gil’s formality contrasted with Molly’s brashness. She’d thump her hands on the counter for emphasis, and he’d become that much quieter, until he spoke in whispers and communicated with raised eyebrows. He called her Molly Ann, though that’s not her name.

  Two years later, I’d completed some modest letterpress jobs when I could find time around my teaching job, and Molly had attracted enough new business that she had to hire several part-time workers. But during the third summer after we moved, I sensed that something was different. It wasn’t that Molly spoke to Gil in an angry or even exasperated tone. But she spoke to him quickly, as if he weren’t present and she were leaving a message. He rarely spoke to me, even though I was in the store more often because I had a tricky letterpress job—tricky for me—with a deadline. A foundation had asked me to print a book of poems written by inner-city children in a program it funded; it would be distributed at a fund-raiser. The poems were short, but the work went slowly. The shop in California where I’d worked was run by a quiet woman who had taught me and kept me steady. There, I wasn’t trying to accomplish something while Molly talked on the phone in the background, my father made familiar jokes, and customers explained complicated needs. The store had two back rooms, one with the Vandercook, one for storage, but the rooms had no doors and opened onto the area behind the counters where the copying machines were: it was really just one big space.

  One cool night late in that summer, Molly and I began joking and touching in bed, and ended up making love. Sex and laughter were closely connected for Molly.

  I was easing into sleep at last when Molly said, “There are people I could kill if I had to, and people I couldn’t kill, no matter what.”

  “Where do I fit?” I said. I was used to being startled by what she said, but she still regularly startled me.

  “I think I could kill you,” she said. “I mean if I had to—say, to save the life of one of the children. I could shoot you or stab you.”

  “How would killing me save them?” I turned on my side to look at her.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Zo—I’m not talking about that.” My name is Lorenzo but she made up this nickname when we first met.

  What Molly had said seemed funny, but it wasn’t simply funny. The next morning, working on my big job at the back of the store, I was still thinking about her cool assessment as to whether she could kill me. I knew she wasn’t a murderer and wouldn’t become one: what interested me—and, okay, scared me—was her freedom of thought. I tried to get myself to imagine killing Molly—I chose a gun—but I couldn’t. So I was distracted, and then Doris, the flower lady, arrived. She sold sturdy carnations, a dollar apiece, on the same block as the store. My father and Gil were nice to her. She’d leave her flowers in a bucket of water in our bathroom, then wrap them individually in sheets of spoiled copy paper, so a flower might come in a fragment of someone’s dissertation on the Holy Roman Empire. Now Doris began wrapping flowers in the storage room, talking. I liked her, but soon became impatient. I’d already made mistakes setting one of the poems. Spacing words evenly requires mental arithmetic and I kept losing track.

  “You hear there’s gonna be another movie?” Doris called.

  The state offered reduced taxes to filmmakers, and the city administration had been courting them with closed streets and considerable freedom. Harrison Ford (or his double) had ridden a motorcycle through the Yale campus not long ago; Robert De Niro had been spotted emerging from a house in my father’s neighborhood. According to Doris, in a movie that was about to be made, an actor she’d heard of would be shot to death in front of our store. Surely Molly was getting irritated with her chatter. Abruptly, I decided to go home—maybe so that if Molly said something I wouldn’t hear it. Anyway, I was getting nothing done. When I washed my hands and started toward the door, my father called, “Lorenzo?”

  “Should I drive you home?” He tired lately. We walked slowly to my car, my father in a gray cotton hat. Driving through the dusty, late-summer streets of New Haven, where brittle leaves bordered with brown were beginning to accumulate near curbs, we were silent.

  “You have to understand,” my father said, when we were a few blocks from his house. “Gilbert has problems he may not mention.”

  “You mean with his son?” I didn’t know why we were discussing Gil.

  “Well, that. His son is doing better.”

  I’d never been clear on what was wrong with Gil’s son, maybe a learning disability.

  Again my father began, this time as we neared his block. “Of course, Molly is a wonderful girl …”

  I realized he was telling me something—or, maybe, telling me there was something that wouldn’t be told. I checked my rearview mirror to make the turn. Next to me, my father seemed the size of one of my boys. He didn’t take up the width of his seat, and he slid a little with each turn. He’d always been slight, but I couldn’t get used to the way he’d diminished in old age.

  “I don’t know how much you know about Gilbert’s personal life,” he said.

  “Very little.”

  “He doesn’t say much, even to me,” he said. “But of course I know there’s a secret. Some people—no secrets. Molly. No secrets. Maybe temporary se
crets or minor secrets. You and I have always had some secrets, and I don’t just mean you from me, me from you. This is to be expected, between father and son.”

  “But Gil?”

  “I don’t pretend to understand his life,” my father said.

  I couldn’t think of a reason to drive around the block again. We reached his house and I went inside with him and stayed for a little, but he didn’t say anything more.

  That evening, Julian, our twelve-year-old, told me he planned to audition to be an extra in the movie that was being made downtown. Day camp was ending and the filmmakers wanted boys his age. “How did you find out about it?” I said. I was cutting up zucchini with my back to him, but I knew how he’d look as he answered, his thin, long upper lip quivering slightly as he tried to keep from smiling, to seem cooler.

  “Internet.” He had Molly’s unruly hair, but darker. He hadn’t had his growth spurt. Maybe they’d think he looked too young for the movie. I wasn’t sure about his being in it. Too much standing around, part of an enterprise created by adults for their own benefit.

  I turned as Molly came into the room. Tony was behind her—wider than Julian, with a chubby face. She set the table while I began stir-frying our dinner.

  “Mom, I want to be in the movie,” Julian said, and Molly said, “Fine!” as I had known she would.

  “What movie?” Tony said, and for the rest of the evening it was all we talked about. Molly had become interested. People from the film company had come through that afternoon, talking to the merchants. They wanted to replace the CONTE’S PRINTING sign on our facade temporarily. The movie would take place in the thirties, and they planned to hang something like the original sign, which they’d seen in photographs. I remembered its sober lettering.