more stuff, or at least keeps them coming back to his store. He’s probably right.
The fact that he’s not a cop is actually just fine by my mom, who much prefers to think of him at the store rather than chasing down criminals. He’s been successful, too—had to move the store twice in the last twelve years into bigger spaces as the Pittsburgh sprawl grew. There’s talk lately of a big chain buying him out, but he’s only forty and says he isn’t ready to retire. Besides, he always wanted Chris and me, or at least one of us, to take over the business. The danger of hanging on, though, is that the chain could open a competing store and undersell him until he closes. Then he’d lose everything.
I can’t say I really want to take over the business. I had always expected Chris would do it; he’d always been the reliable one.
After dinner, in my room trying to focus on homework, all I could think of was Chris coming home. I stared out the window over my desk half the time, my eyes following the cars that went by the front of the house. Every time I started worrying that he’d be totally changed, some memory from when we were younger would push it out. Growing up? I wasn’t just the pest kid brother. Well, at least not all the time. It was like he wanted me to know where he’d stepped wrong so I could make better decisions. Sometimes he even made them for me.
Imagine this scene. My best friend when I was eleven, Charlie, had borrowed my baseball glove. His folks couldn’t afford to buy him one. Or so they said. Looking back, I think they had the money, but his dad spent it on booze. Anyway, he lost it. Or, he didn’t lose it, actually; his neighbor’s dog chewed the hell out of it, but he told me he lost it.
Furious, I marched right over to his house and searched all over the yard, in the basement, in Charlie’s room, every place that might conceivably hide a glove. I didn’t know whether to believe him that it was misplaced somewhere or whether he might be hiding it to keep it. I mean, you don’t just lose a baseball glove; it’s too big. And too smelly. But I couldn’t find it.
Just before I stamped off home again I said, “You better find it, or else!”
I was steaming mad when I got home and was all ready to go to my folks about it. Chris saw me first, though. He was reading some book, lying on the couch.
He looked up as I slammed the door behind me. “Hey, Paul, what’s that for?”
“Nothing!”
“You’re madder than a wet cat. Get over here.” He swung his legs off the couch and sat up.
“It’s Charlie. He stole my glove!”
“The fielder’s glove you got for your birthday?”
“What other glove do I have?”
“Are you sure he stole it? What did he say?”
“He borrowed it two weeks ago, and I’ve been asking for it back. I called him a little while ago, and he says he lost it.”
“Maybe he did. Did he—”
“Chris, you don’t just lose a glove.”
“Did he offer to replace it?”
“Ha. He couldn’t afford one for himself. How’s he gonna do that?”
“Well, let’s just think about this a minute. Charlie’s your best friend, right? And if you didn’t have good reason to trust him in the first place, would you have let him borrow it?”
I was trying to stay mad, but my steam was petering out. “Well…no.”
“So why don’t you trust him now? And why should he lie to you? His thinking is probably more like, if you let him use it once, you’d let him use it again. And wouldn’t that be better than losing you as a friend? Why take that chance? Besides, if he’s lying and he still has it, he’d never be able to use it anyplace you could see it.”
I wasn’t ready to give in. “How do I know what he’s thinking? People change, y’know. Maybe he figured it was the only way he’d ever have one of his own. Take someone else’s.”
“But it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it isn’t something that sounds like Charlie. Think of it another way: What if he weren’t your friend anymore?”
I blinked. Charlie? Not my friend? “Well…he won’t be, if he doesn’t replace that glove.”
“So that glove was worth more than being friends?”
This stumped me, but only for a few seconds. “All I know is I want that glove back.” I was afraid Chris was going to talk me out of my righteous anger, and I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I wanted to hang on tight and yell and curse. I stomped up to my room, turned on the radio, threw myself onto the bed, and sulked.
Later I found out that Chris went to Charlie’s and talked to him. Charlie showed him the tattered remnants that he’d managed to get away from Zodiac, the half shepherd, half Lab that lived next to him. What ended up happening was that Chris lent Charlie enough money to buy me another glove.
I didn’t know this right away, of course. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to call Charlie, or talk to him, until he did the right thing. But when he knocked on my door a few days later and handed me a brand new fielder’s glove—well, I didn’t feel that rush of vindication that all my fury had led me to expect. I didn’t want to say, “That’s more like it.” Or “Glad to see you came to your senses.”
I stared at Charlie, wondering where the hell he’d got the money. All I said was, “Thanks.”
We stood there, staring at our sneakers, until he said, “Well, I should go.”
“D’you have to?”
So we went upstairs and played records until dinnertime.
Two years later, just before Charlie and his mom had to move away after the divorce, to go stay with his grandparents for a while, he finally told me what had happened. He was all worried because he hadn’t been able to pay Chris back completely, and he didn’t know how he was gonna do it now.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Whatever’s left, I’ll pay him.”
“But that’s not fair.”
“’Course it is. He may have paid for the glove, but you and I both benefited, right? I mean, we stayed friends. Shake?”
“Shake.” And we hugged. We’d never done that before, and now we’d never have another chance. I never saw Charlie again, but I feel like I still have his friendship. Chris saw to that.
A few days after Charlie told me all this, I confronted Chris. “How come you bought that glove for Charlie to give to me?”
He chuckled. “Took you all this time to figure that out?”
“Never mind that. He says he still owes you.”
“He doesn’t owe me. You do.”
“Duh. I already told him that. But why’d you do it?”
“You were about to lose a friend. I’d been in that place once. Lost a friend over something really stupid. I vowed it would never happen again. And I didn’t want to see it happen to you.”
“How did it happen with you?”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes a second. “This is really embarrassing. But maybe it will be good for you to hear. It was winter, and there’d been this huge snowstorm. The plows had pushed lots of snow to the edges of the playground. I was about the same age as you, when you lost that glove.
“At recess, we were playing King of the Mountain. Only we had teams. I was on the same team as Dean Pendleton. You probably don’t remember him. Redheaded kid. Anyway, I was always really good at this game, climbing up the snow mountains and pushing kids on the other team back down. But this one day they had more kids than our team, and we were really struggling. I managed to claim the top, and I decided I