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  “Got you a soda.”

  “Thanks.” She cracked it open without glancing at the can and drank. “What is this? Did you ever notice how you can’t tell what kind of soda you’re drinking if you can’t see the label?”

  “They’re all the same. They just use different coloring.”

  Someone turned on the field lights. Bugs gathered, and moments later the bats started swooping through, snapping them up.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” Louise asked.

  Chad almost said, Doesn’t David want to go home? Some saving mercy prevented him from being that stupid. “Yes,” he said, and they turned up the sidewalk toward town.

  The sidewalk was narrow. Their shoulders brushed again and again. Tonight she wore sandals, and she didn’t seem that much taller.

  “There isn’t room,” she said, and threaded her arm under his, around his waist. There was nowhere for his arm to go but around her. He drew a breath that seemed to come in forever, and they both laughed. They pressed against each other as if their bodies wanted the same thing at the same time and went a little zigzag up the sidewalk.

  “I stink,” Chad said.

  “You do. You certainly do.” Louise pressed her face against his shoulder and made a choking sound. “Phew! So this is how a baseball hero smells?”

  “If I hadn’t batted in that run, would we be doing this?”

  “What are we doing?”

  “I don’t know!” Chad said. “I’m just a hometown boy!”

  She stopped laughing. In a minute she said, “Tomorrow at this time I’ll be in New York.”

  Chad stopped feeling like laughing, too. “When does school start?”

  “Next week.”

  “Guys in leotards,” Chad said. His mouth was just saying things. It was sort of interesting to watch what kept coming out of him. “Guys with muscles where I don’t even have places—”

  “A lot of them are gay, Chad.”

  “Yeah? Well, a lot of them aren’t.”

  She gave his waist a little squeeze. Chad couldn’t believe how good that felt. She was silent for a minute. “Look, I’m not—I can’t—Look! You’re a whole year younger than me!”

  It mattered. Chad knew it mattered. Even though it was silly, it made a difference. But …

  “When you’re twenty-five,” he said, “I’ll be twenty-four.”

  She gave a startled little laugh, because that was ridiculous, the difference between twenty-five and twenty-four. He felt her body go still against his.

  Then she leaned into him, really hugging him. “We’ll know each other then. We will know each other.”

  They swung around to turn back, as if they each wanted to. No telling who decided. “We will,” Chad said, after a while. It was too long a pause; he’d been hearing her words again: “We’ll know each other then. We will know each other.” And we’ll know each other in between, if I have anything to do with it!

  He knew better than to say that. Shaping didn’t work on people if you announced your intentions.

  As they reached the edge of the ballfield’s light, she slipped out of his arm and stepped away. A second later she was laughing again. “Now I stink! What am I going to tell Daddy?”

  The next morning from his lookout Chad watched her leave. The mother, a thin figure in black, waited behind the open driver’s door of a white car, while Louise and David clung to each other in a hard hug. Then quickly Louise turned away, got in the car, and it vanished down the green tunnel of trees. She never looked uphill, though he’d shown her the place, and she could have guessed he was there.

  The car was expensive and nearly silent and faded quickly from earshot, leaving an emptiness on the air that was almost shocking. Chad felt his fingers, far down at the end of his arm, smoothing and smoothing and smoothing the top of Queenie’s head. His throat ached.

  Had he made too much of yesterday? It had kept him awake half the night, but maybe it hadn’t meant anything. Louise was older. Last night the difference in their ages had been almost nothing, but this morning it was back, big as ever, and in a week, a New York week, it might be colossal. Nothing had been said about keeping in touch.

  David turned on the doorstep, bumped into the lintel, and put his hand out to steady himself. He looked hollow, like an empty peapod. Chad felt heat rise in his face. He turned away.

  But at the first step something stopped him. “We have to go to her,” Louise had said when Julia was crying in the field. Chad had felt then as he did now. But Louise had been right.

  He took a deep breath, hoping that would help somehow, hoping he was up to this. “Queenie, let’s go.”

  When David opened the door, he looked blank, as if he hadn’t known anyone in the world was left alive. “Chad.”

  “Hi.” After Chad said that, there was nothing left to say. He probably looked as bad as David did.

  “Come in,” David said, and they followed Queenie to the kitchen. She tested the air. To Chad, it was full of Louise, a sort of aching absence, the barest whiff of violets. The kitchen felt emptier even than that first day when they’d brought the stove in. It wasn’t bare now; it was missing something.

  David stood pinching the bridge of his nose. Was he trying not to cry? If Chad weren’t here, he could cry. This was wrong. “Sorry. I’ll go—”

  But from the yard came the sound of a truck engine. Chad looked out the window. Jeep let himself down from the cab and walked around to the back. He opened the tailgate and rolled out the red goat cart.

  It was dusty still, spattered with bird poop and shedding a few feathers. Jeep wheeled it around the front of the truck and disappeared from sight.

  Knockknockknock.

  David started, again confused to find that life remained on the planet. Slowly, as if all his nerves were disorganized, he went to the door.

  Queenie followed, and Chad would have, too, but as he turned, a folded square of paper on the table caught his eye. The paper was pale green and looked handmade. There were yellow flower petals pressed into it, and a short word, in purple ink. Chad took a step closer, and yes, it was his name.

  Outside in the yard Jeep was saying, “Found this in the back of the barn this morning. I remember when all I wanted in the world was a goat to pull it.”

  David’s heavy voice lifted in an effort at courtesy, a question, and Jeep said, “I’m seventy years old. Better snap to and do it if I’m going to.”

  “Chad,” the purple ink said. It was for him.

  “You ever train a goat?” Jeep asked, outside the window.

  “Do you have a goat?” David was starting to sound a little interested.

  Jeep lured him along. “Know where I can get one! Oh, ’fore I forget, Mother thought you might feel kind of all-on-your-ownsome. You’re to come up to supper tonight. But this goat: Is a doe all right? I can come by a culled milker pretty easy.”

  “A doe should be fine.”

  Next Jeep would take David off in his truck, that magic solace for all ills. When Julia’d outgrown her pony, when Chad was pinched by being the middle child, when no one wanted to play with Sky, Jeep had taken each along in the truck, and things had gotten better. He’d go off with David, and David would forget this note until at least tomorrow.

  Chad couldn’t wait that long. He couldn’t. “Chad,” it said in purple letters, her handwriting, which he’d never seen before, and so the square of paper belonged to him already, and here in the empty kitchen was the place to open it. It was probably one more iteration of the math problem: No matter how it’s calculated, you are one year younger than I am, and so goodbye. He’d turn red at the very least.… Best open it alone.

  He unfolded the paper square.

  For a moment he thought there was nothing. Then he saw the small track across the center of the square, written in green felt-tipped pen barely darker than the paper, as if she weren’t quite sure she wanted to do this.

  [email protected]

  Her e-mail address.
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  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The quotations on pages 81–82 are from the 1978 American Horse Show Association Rulebook, quoted in Guide to Dressage by Louise Mills Wilde (A.S. Barnes & Co., 1982). Copyright © 1982 by A.S. Barnes & Co., Inc.

  The quotations on pages 87–89 are from Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training, rev. ed., by Karen Pryor (Bantam, 1999). Copyright © 1984, 1999 by Karen Pryor.

  Other sources of information about clicker training concepts include:

  Clicker Training for Obedience, by Morgan Spector (Sunshine Books, 1999).

  Clicker Training for Your Horse, by Alexandra Kurland (Sunshine Books, 1998).

  Communicating with Cues, by John Lyons (Belvoir Publications, 1998).

  Copyright © 2002 by Jessie Haas

  Cover design by Jessie Hayes

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-6255-1

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  EBOOKS BY JESSIE HAAS

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