The Mourning Hours Read Online Free Page B

the field just then, and there was a general roar from the hundred or so of us in the stands.
    “Well, I should probably find my seat,” Stacy said.
    “Good to meet you,” Mom said a little dismissively. She turned her attention to the game, and Stacy winked at me. I winked right back, glad I had perfected the technique during a particularly long sermon last winter. It felt as if we were secret agents with the same mission: to get Johnny to fall in love with her.
    With Stacy for me to watch, softball was much more interesting. She sat next to a friend or two, girls who seemed boring compared to her. I couldn’t help but notice how Stacy watched Johnny while she pretended not to, distributing her gaze equally among all the players, and then homing in again and again on Johnny at shortstop. When he was up to bat, she joined the crowd in chanting, “John-ny! John-ny!” She cheered when he broke up a double play at second and whooped with pleasure when he crossed home plate.
    During the game, Johnny was all focus, an athlete’s athlete. He had always been a competitor, no matter what the sport. It was clear, watching him, that he had a natural talent—he could hit farther, run faster, field better, throw harder than anyone else. He also took failures more personally than anyone else, cursing when Dad dropped a throw to first, kicking divots in the dirt to shake off a bad swing. If he noticed Stacy Lemke watching him, it didn’t show.
    It was Stacy who approached him first after that second game. I know because I was watching, holding my breath, clutching my fists to my side like the freak Emilie always said I was. If asked, I couldn’t have explained why their meeting was so important to me, but maybe it had something to do with ownership. In a way, I owned a part of Johnny Hammarstrom, who was star athlete for the Lincoln High Shipbuilders, but my own brother, too. And since I’d met Stacy first, since she’d sought me out under the bleachers that day, I felt I owned a part of her, too.
    Stacy had walked right down the bleachers, not on the steps but on the seats, confident. She moved with purpose around the chain-link fence and out onto the field, her legs creamy white in her short shorts, a checked shirt pushed up past her elbows. She was headed right for him, and Johnny must have realized that at some point, too, because he froze, his cheeks flushed with sweat, his jeans filthy along the left side from a slide into third base.
    I don’t know what she said to him and what he said back to her, but my mind filled with a million possibilities, talk of baseball and school and plans for the rest of the summer and deep dark secrets. Well, maybe not that—it was hard for me to imagine that Johnny, who most of the time seemed as complicated as a June bug, could keep any kind of secret. But something was being said, and something was happening between them. At one point Stacy gestured to the stands—to me? —and Johnny followed her gaze, scanning the crowd. Before she walked away, Stacy reached out her hand and touched him on the arm, just lightly, such a small and insignificant touch, but I reeled, gasping. This was flirting. This was something.
    “What’s wrong with you?” Emilie asked, joining me in the stands.
    I shook my head. Nothing. Everything. The way I was sweating, it might have been me out there, falling in love.
    Mom turned from the conversation she’d been having with an internist from the hospital and studied me. “I think you’ve been having too much sugar, Kirsten.”
    “No, I haven’t—” I protested, and by the time I looked back, Stacy was gone and Johnny was standing with the guys in the dugout.
    It was like this at every game for the rest of the tournament. Bud Hirsch led the team in a cheer for the competitors, and the men worked their way through the line slapping sweaty hands: “Good game”...“good game”...“good game.” Then Stacy and Johnny began a slow, purposeful wandering