Page 89 of On the Ropes
“Always,” he said. “Are you having fun with my good friend and worker, Dean?”
She reached down and tossed a fistful of fresh dirt at his feet.
He jumped back with a laugh. “Hey, don’t start shit with a pitcher.”
Tabitha smirked behind the camera. “Okay, we’re rolling. Dean and Rowan, are you two comfortable with being in the background of this shot?”
I nodded and settled back against the fence, arms crossed, without my usual fear of the spotlight or jumble of nerves. Probably had something to do with Tabitha falling asleep in my arms five nights in a row. Or the fact that I was happy fucking around with Rowan and my neighbors with dirt under my fingernails. It had been a long time since my home had felt like home to me.
“So where do you want to start?” she asked.
“Ah, we were just shootin’ the shit,” Eddie said. “Remembering how Annie used to sit out here on her stoop every night and every morning, long as it wasn’t too hot or too cold, and read for hours. She’d take breaks to talk to neighbors or watch the kids running around for a little bit. But I swear to God it was a stack”—Eddie held his palm out about three feet from the ground—“just like that. Paperbacks. Would pick one off the top like she was taking a chip from the bag.”
“And she would lend her books out to the whole street,” Alice said. “Especially her romance novels, which she ordered from her Harlequin catalog. She was a woman who preferred the allure of the cowboy.”
“Gave me a book with so much sex in it once, I thought I was having some kind of heart attack,” Eddie said.
“I still have many of them,” Alice said regally.
Next to me, Rowan scoffed. “Where have you been keeping this box of illicit romance in the house?”
“A woman should always have her secrets,” she replied.
Tabitha was pressing her lips together, trying not to laugh. “What if the park had one of those little free libraries installed? Especially for kid’s books. Might be a nice way to honor her legacy of book lending.”
Eddie rubbed the top of his head. “Yeah, I like that idea.”
“Annie would love it,” Alice said.
“Back in the day, who had the best stoop on Tenth Street?” Tabitha asked.
“Eddie,” Rowan and I said in unison.
“Wow,” Tabitha laughed. “No hesitation at all.”
Eddie looked smug. “When you’re the best, everyone knows you’re the best.”
I watched Tabitha angle the camera toward the two of us. Rowan elbowed my arm. “Until we started going to the rec center, Dean and I had too much energy to be inside those tiny houses. Every other minute some adult was like—”
“Get the hell out of here,” I said. “And Midge meant it, you know, affectionately.”
Rowan started laughing. “Aw, man, we terrorized this street when we were, what, nine? Ten? If Dean and I hadn’t gotten into boxing and baseball a few years later, we would have ended up being those kids who set trash cans on fire.”
Eddie shrugged with a twinkle in his eye. “I was on day shift at the plant, so I wasn’t around that much. I told the kids on the block they were welcome to sit on the steps or hang out long as they were respectful.”
I rubbed my hand across my jaw. “It was a capture the flag headquarters. A freeze tag neutral zone. A general hang to eat ice cream or water ice.”
“Or to sneakily play video games if, say, you were grounded and not allowed to play video games.”
“Rowan O’Callaghan,” Alice said with a shocked look.
Eddie raised his hands. “I didn’t know, I swear.”
Tabitha arched an eyebrow at me. I knew, I mouthed with a wink.
I thought about summer days that seemed to last longer than humanly possible. And running a five-block radius with Rowan knowing that, in some way, we were safe. Someone had their eye on us. Someone had snacks or Gatorade already prepared. Someone had left sunscreen on the bottom step in case we needed it.
“Things really changed for us once we were on the professional sports track,” I admitted. “We were young, but our days were more intense with training and matches.”
