Conviction (22 page)

It lasts an hour. She must have combed through the past ten years of his archives to find them. Laila’s so thorough, and it feels so vindictive, that it makes me think she had some kind of
personal vendetta. I can’t believe they let her play all that out of context this way. What my dad believes about illegal immigration is irrelevant; it has to do with laws, not race.
Colin’s half-Mexican and my dad likes Colin more than he does anyone else I’ve ever played with. And he likes Cardy, and he’s Mexican, too. Cardy’s short for Cardenas. But
how is the jury supposed to know any of that?

I remind myself that Mr. Buchwald told me it’ll always feel the worst when the prosecution’s making their case. But even that’s not the part Mr. Buchwald fought the hardest to
keep out of the proceedings; that part comes next. On January 12, the day after I went to LA, my dad called the administrative office of the La Abra Police Department, and the jury hears the
message after Laila’s done with the clips from his show.

“Yeah, listen, I’m calling to make a complaint about Frank Reyes.” His words are slurred, but the voice is unmistakably my dad’s. “Listen. I could buy your whole
department if I wanted to, and I want to see him gone. I don’t need trash like him telling me I’m a bad father. Coming to my house like he’s better than me and saying to my face
I’m a bad father. Saying to my face I’m the reason my kid took off. None of them get away with talking to me like that. You hear me? No one gets away with that.” And then a
clattering, like he missed the receiver hanging up.

F
riday, just under a month before my court date, I turn seventeen. I wake up before my alarm and listen to Trey downstairs in the kitchen. My dad
always gets doughnuts for breakfast on my birthday; I hate how they make your fingers sticky, but I never had the heart to tell him I don’t like them. He’d always get me a bunch of
gifts, too, and give a big talk about what my last year was like, and at night we’d go get steaks and then stay up late watching a movie or something.

Seventeen. I hope this year ends better than it starts.

When Trey brings in the mail that morning, there’s a letter from my dad, the envelope marked with the correctional facility’s return address. Trey sets it down in front of me without
a word, and I tear it open right away, expecting I don’t know what—I don’t know what you say to someone after all this. But when I open it, it’s just a birthday note, split
into the same columns as his birthday cards always are. I don’t read it, because I can feel Trey watching me. Instead, I fold it back up, and that’s when I see the note on the back:
In the hall closet there’s something I bought you a couple months ago. Behind the towels. Happy birthday, B, I love you.

Trey says, neutrally, “What’d he say?”

“Nothing,” I lie. “Just happy birthday.” I’m not in a gifty mood, but before I leave for school, I get up and go to the hall closet. In back, I find the 1920
Baseball Almanac
, the year that covered the Black Sox Scandal. It’s in a plastic sheet to protect it, and he wrapped the box in a pillowcase so I wouldn’t see. It must have cost
him thousands.

I carry his letter around in my backpack, where it feels radioactive, and finally read it at the start of lunch, standing at my locker, ignoring all the people streaming by me; sometimes, in a
crowd, that’s when you’re the most alone. I fold the letter up again and shove it in my pocket. The words feel carved into my skin.

I have some vague idea of going out to the track to run sprints or do pushups until I feel like collapsing and nothing else, but on my way down the hallway, I nearly collide with Maddie.
I’m so wired already it feels like atoms sparking, rubbing against each other like flint.

“Hey,” she says, stepping back to look at me. “I’ve been looking for you. What are you doing for lunch?”

I never told her it was my birthday, but when we sit down in the quad on a concrete planter in a corner away from where either of us usually eats, she says, “I got you
something.”

She reaches into her backpack, then hesitates. “I thought about getting you something basebally, but I have relatives who don’t know anything about music except that I’m into
it, and they buy me stuff like—violin magnets carved out of walnut shells, or these long books about Beethoven’s childhood, and you can totally tell they tried to get something they
thought I’d really like, and then I feel too guilty to ever get rid of any of it. So I thought maybe you didn’t want baseball oven mitts or whatever I’d get for you. So instead, I
got you—um—I got you—” She rummages in her backpack. “I got you this.” She pulls out a small, used-looking bottle of sunscreen and sets it down in front of me.
Huh.

“Sunscreen,” I say. “Ah—thanks. Always a good thing to have.”

“Yeah, I thought since you’re outdoors all the time, you could probably—” Then she shakes her head, trying unsuccessfully to fight off a sheepish smile. “Braden,
you really thought I got you
sunscreen
? And didn’t wrap it or anything? For your birthday?”

“Was I not supposed to think that?”

“That would be the worst gift ever. I just panicked at the last minute and the sunscreen was what I happened to pull out of my backpack.”

It makes me laugh. And I feel guilty, a little, but sitting there with her, I forget for a while about my dad. “I’ll keep it forever,” I tell her. “What’s the real
thing?”

“The actual thing I got you is, um—okay.” She turns serious again and takes a long breath. Over the neckline of her shirt where her skin is pale and smooth I can see her chest
rise and fall, then she glances around to see if anyone’s watching. (A few freshman girls are, actually, Dutch’s little sister Shannon and her friends, but they turn away quickly when
Maddie looks at them.) She reaches into her backpack again, and this time holds out two of the tickets the senior officers have been selling for prom on April 19. “I know you have a lot
you’re going through and you don’t have to or anything, but I thought maybe—”

“Wait, wait.” I grab them from her hand. “This isn’t—wait. I was going to ask you.”

“Were you?”

“I know you were sad about missing the one at your old school, and I thought you might want to go. I just wanted to do something nicer than—well—”

“Oh, nicer than me thrusting them in your face on your birthday like this, you mean?” she teases. “This isn’t nice enough for you?”

“I didn’t mean
that
,” I say, then I grin. “Well, maybe I did. But, yeah, if you wanted to go…”

“Do you want to?”

“I do if it’s with you,” I say, and the way she smiles at me suspends the rest of the world all around me, makes me feel like I’ve borrowed another life.

“My parents will want to meet you before prom, by the way,” she says when the bell rings at the end of lunch and we both get up. “Also—do you care what color your
boutonniere is? I was looking at different ones online, but I thought I should see what you wanted before buying one.”

“Ah, whatever you think is good is okay.” The flowers aren’t exactly what’ll occupy my imagination between now and then, that’s for sure.

“Okay. You’ll come over beforehand, though, right? My mom will want you to come have dinner with us.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Good.” We start walking back in toward the building, and she says, “I always thought flowers were kind of dumb, to be honest. It seems like such an unromantic thing to give
someone.”

I could read a lot into her use of
unromantic
just there. “Why’s that?”

“It feels kind of wishy-washy, don’t you think? Because they don’t last.”

We round the corner toward the math classrooms, and Maddie brushes against me then, her hand lingering next to mine in a way I think might have been on purpose. There are people in the hallway
who can see us, but I reach out and take her hand. I feel electric.

This won’t last, either. But it feels the way it does on the field when you dive for a ball you aren’t supposed to catch, and you make it—how you’re bigger than yourself
in that moment, how for that breathless second there you’d swear you were created for exactly that very moment, that unexpected heat against your palm.

For dinner that night, Trey offers to cook, but I tell him it’s all right. He says maybe that’s better anyway; he’s been working on a menu to serve with the
ortolans and everything’s felt off. He lists a couple places in Stockton and one in Sacramento he says he wouldn’t mind trying, but I tell him I’d rather just go to Jag’s
instead. He’s here on what probably feels to him like an extended babysitting trip; I don’t want him to think I’m more work than I already am.

Jag’s is run by Mona Delgado, a widow from church, and the place is like her love letter to the town. She knows everyone. Everyone I know has a spot they always sit in when they come, and
if you grew up here, there are probably pictures of you framed somewhere on the walls. She has a whole baseball section; there’s pictures of my dad from his minor league days, and some framed
articles about me, too. By the register, there’s a picture my dad signed for her with his show slogan.

In the car, on the way over, Trey says, “Should I tell them it’s your birthday?”

“Ha. Yeah. Please.” He knows I don’t like birthdays.

“Have them sing?” Trey says. “Bring candles?”

“Do it. You’d love that even more than I would.”

“In my place, I make my waiters dance for birthdays.”

“Really?”

“The hell, Braden.” He smacks me on the knee. “You think I’d do that ever?”

It’s crowded when we walk in, and Mona makes a fuss over us, especially Trey. We order burgers, fries, and water. When Mona’s gone, I say, “You don’t want a beer or
anything?”

“You know I don’t drink.”

“Not even beer?”

“Gateway drug.” He glances around the restaurant. “I hate going places where you might run into someone you know.”

I haven’t been here since my dad’s doctor said he had to watch his cholesterol, but it has that exact same familiar greasy smell and the same stale air and clinking of silverware
against plates, and there’s a little kid a few tables over who keeps peeking up over the booth to stare at us and then getting shy, and it makes Trey smile, and things with Maddie were so
good earlier and I should be happy. But I can feel my mind dissecting everything, someone chipping at the moment so I see all it really is: I’m sitting around a scratched rectangular slab of
Formica where there are silver napkin dispensers shipped in from China or somewhere, and I’m waiting for someone to bring me ground-up dead cow in a second-rate restaurant that looks and
feels like the dusty attic of a half-crazy woman who has nothing and no one else. It’s that same dullness when you suddenly see through a magic trick or a movie set or a room full of people
you suddenly realize you’d rather not be in. But what’s most terrifying is there’s not a single place I can imagine going that I think would make this feeling lift.

I shouldn’t have opened my dad’s letter. I should’ve known to just not read it. What did I think he was going to say?

Our fries come. Trey offers them to me first, eats some after I do, then grimaces. “We should’ve gone to Sacramento. How can you have bad fries at a
diner
?”

“I like this place.”

“Really, Braden? You need to get out more.”

When Mona comes to refill our waters, she leans forward and puts her hand on my shoulder. “You know,” she says, “every single morning I wake up and I think, Lord, I miss your
daddy’s show. Oh, honey, I always listen to him
religiously
. My day isn’t the same without it, and I just
miss
him. It’s sure not getting any easier. I can’t
even imagine how it is for you.”

“Probably about like it is for you.”

Trey gives me a look like
Behave
, and under the table he knocks his foot into my shin. I stifle a yelp. To Mona, he says, “Great fries.” When she’s gone, he says,
“The hell was that?”

“I don’t like people talking about him like that. She doesn’t even know him.”

“Well, what do you want, a soapbox to stand on?”

“No, I just want—”

I don’t know exactly where I’m going with that one, but before I can work it out in my mind, a girl’s voice says, from behind us, “I hope you got the burgers, Martin. I
hear they’re the best thing on the menu here,” and I stop because Emily Zilker is the only person in the world who’s ever called Trey that. When I turn around, she has the same
pretty smile and kind eyes, but she looks older, and she’s holding a baby on her hip. (A baby with a patch over its eye.) I say, “Emily. Hey.”

She looks, if anything, even better than she did back in the day. For a second I’m positive Trey’s going to get up and bolt. But he recovers and says, “Em. Uh—wow. You,
uh, you look great.”

“And look at you, Mr. Restaurateur!” She shifts the baby in her arms, its head squishing against one of her boobs. “I heard you were back in town. I tried to call your house a
couple weeks and left a message. But maybe I had the wrong number, or…”

“Maybe you did.”

“Well, how nice you’re back.”