"Growing," a story (v)

He found Abby where she'd said she would be, at the basketball court behind the school. He sat in the van and watched the shapes of a half‑dozen kids against the school's block walls, all of them in the same bleached denim. Budge leaned against a pole, one of his hands jammed in a back pocket, his sleeves rolled halfway up his arms.

He wanted to go get her, just like he'd done with Gracie. But a whole baseball field lay between them. He got out of the van and walked up over the curb and sidewalk until he stood behind a backstop.

There were seven in all. Three girls circled Abby, huddled around her, their hands in their jacket pockets. Budge leaned up against the standard on the other side of the court, smoking. One of the girls yelled something, but Budge just looked down at his cigarette. She yelled again, something twisted. He could tell by the angry tone, even though he never heard the words.

Then, as if out of nowhere, Budge screamed something so vile that Gerald could have cut his fingers on the wire of that backstop. The kid took a long drag of the cigarette and flicked the butt at the girls.

He told himself he couldn't go after her, he shouldn't.

The way the three girls were bunched up around her, the way Abby hid in the circle they made, the way her head dropped, the way her hands stayed there at her eyes, he could tell there'd been a fight.

One of them yelled, loud enough for him to hear, "Let her alone for once," she said.

Budge turned around and picked up a handful of stones, started chucking them at the backboard.

Hate came up into Gerald's throat as he stood behind the backstop listening.

Budge walked toward the girls, lobbing stones up in the air, aiming them so they fell on them like spent bullets. They stood together, huddling, clinging to each other's jackets, but he came at them anyway, grabbed the tall one by the lapels and threw her to the blacktop. "Tell it to my face," he yelled. "I want to hear you say it," he said, poking his finger into Abby's face.

She turned away.

"Tell me," he screamed.

He stood there shaking the screen, the woven steel ringing like music, shook it harder and harder, in hate.

Budge stood there beside her. "I want to hear you," he yelled at her.

If the boy as much as touched her, he thought, he'd move.

Once more, the kid screamed, this time directly into Abby's face, screamed something so terrible that Gerald's stomach rose into his chest.

But Abby never moved. She stood in a kind of crouch, so that when he pushed her away, when he shoved her hard toward the end of the court, she didn't fall. Her arms flew out from her sides, but she caught herself, kept from sprawling on the stones.

She said nothing at all. Nothing.

Budge jumped, then scrambled around in front of Abby to stare in her face, and screamed out more obscenities, shards of steel that tore through the stillness. From right in front of her, he grabbed two or three stones, flung them up at windows that broke in a splash of glass.

Never in his life had Gerald felt such rich hate in his arms and hands and fingers.

Budge swore again, harder, louder, then turned away and walked past the corner of the building.

Immediately, the moment he was gone, the girls ran to Abby's side where she stood at the corner of the court, holding her, crying, like he could have himself.

He loosened fingers from the backstop and walked back around the van, opened the door quietly. Across the seat and out his passenger window, he watched the girls still holding each other on the basketball court.

He could tell Anita everything now. He could go home and tell her everything. He could tell her now, because he knew that Abby would be coming home. 

*

It was almost winter, and she had wanted that room in the basement‑‑ever since spring she'd talked about it. He had promised her that bedroom would be finished by winter. So when he got back, he hung his jacket from the hall tree and smiled toward Anita, who was still there at the kitchen table.

"It's over," he said. "I saw her."

"Did you talk to her?" Anita said.

He picked up his cup from the spot where he'd left it on the kitchen counter. "That's coming yet." He stood there silent for a moment looking at her to let her know that something, at least, was over.

"I sat here and prayed," she said. "I did--the whole time, honey."

"Send her downstairs when she comes in," Gerald said. "I'll be working down there. Send her down."

*

Abby's basement room still needed insulation on the outside walls and paneling over the Styrofoam. He pulled the nail out of the end of the glue in the caulking gun and put a bead of Maxibond in a straight line on a furring strip he'd cut to length a Saturday before. Then he placed it against the cement block, held it, pushed it hard to get it to set firmly.

He'd have to tell her that she couldn't walk out on them, not like she had. He'd have to say that. But he'd seen her stand up to a kid all the teachers were scared of.

Glue wasn't enough. He needed to hold those strips in place, lock them in there. He found the concrete nails in a bag at the end of the stack of paneling.

He picked up the two‑pound hammer he'd borrowed from Benny Gates, bent over so he could reach a foot or so from the floor, and slammed a nail through the furring strip and into the cement block. Four good hits it took.

The long, tapered concrete nails were blunt at the end. "Inch‑and‑a‑ half's," the guy at the lumber yard had called them. They don't split the furring strips because they bash through the grain. They break the grain instead of slice between it.

Another minute, he thought, and he would have broken it up, something he knew he couldn't do. But he would have. But Abby had done it herself, and she'd never guess he'd know.

Tomorrow, school would be in an uproar about the broken windows. They'd cost a fortune, and no one would know who did it. No one would ever know, and those that did wouldn't say.

He would be downstairs when Abby came in because already tomorrow there would be a room here for her, a place of her own to come home to.

He lifted a hammer, leaned over, and swung again, the nail blasting through the wood and into the block.