An American Girl

ONE

It happens every time. Without fail, every single time. Every time Emma parks beside the homeless tents under the I-83 bridge, she gets choked up, has to pause and pull herself together before climbing out of her little blue Honda. And so it is today, a crisp Saturday morning in mid-spring, her son in the passenger seat, his mitt on his hand and orange Little League cap pulled low over his eyes. Usually she comes alone, but today she overslept and didn’t want Thomas to be late for his game, so she figured she’d bring him along as she delivered her weekly care package.

Deep breath, and she calls him, hoping he has enough charge left on his phone this morning.

“Dad,” she says. “I’m here.”

“Where?”

“The usual spot. On the street.”

A minute later she sees him, walking with a hitch toward the car, the hood of his camouflage sweatshirt over his head. She feels a knot tighten in her gut. This is never easy. It’s why she waits on the street—the only time she went to the tent, saw his grimy sleeping bag, cardboard flooring, crushed cans of Coke and Bud Light, a milk crate full of his belongings, she broke into sobs.

She tells Thomas to wait, gets out, engine still running, and closes the door behind her—she doesn’t want Thomas to hear anything her dad might say. She opens the trunk, lifts out four white plastic grocery bags. She brings these care packages once a week. This week it’s toothpaste, hand sanitizer, applesauce, pretzels, SpaghettiOs, bottled water. She drops the bags on the dirt curbside, then stretches out her back.

Her dad appears beside the car, eyeballs Thomas through the window.

“Who’s the little gook boy?” her dad asks.

“Don’t,” she scolds. “He’s your grandson, and I hate it when you say things like that.”

“I didn’t have no gook kids.”

“Stop it. He’s Pakistani, and his name is Thomas. Please call him Thomas.” She slams the trunk. “I’m tired of asking you that—please call him Thomas.”

He flips his hood off, rotates his head, squints eastward into the morning sun.

“Can you get the bags?” she asks. “My back is bothering me.”

“Yeah,” he says, and he bends down and gathers them, two in each hand.

“And what about your phone? Does it need charged?”

He gives her a befuddled look.

“Your phone,” she says. “Is it in your pocket?”

He sets down two of the bags, pats the pocket of his baggy faded jeans.

“Yeah, I got it here.”
“Give it to me,” she says.

He hands her the phone, and she sees only six percent power remaining.

“Take those bags back to your tent, and I’ll wait here and charge your phone,” she says.

She opens her car door, reaches inside and plugs it into the dashboard charger. He lumbers off with the bags.

“How are you doing, buddy?” she asks Thomas.

“Okay.”

“We’ll go in about five minutes. Don’t worry, you’ll be there in time for warm-ups.”

She pushes the door closed, crosses her arms and leans back against the car. She heaves a sigh. So much to deal with. The I-83 traffic pulsates up above, and a spring breeze carries the skanky smell of the nearby trash bags piled on the curb. The sun tries to slide underneath the bridge, just a sliver of it angling onto the pavement.

Emma Muller-Farooq has been back home for nine months, and this is her life. After her mom died, after her marriage blew up, after she realized that she couldn’t afford to raise her son and work as an adjunct professor in New York, she decided to move back to Central Pennsylvania, look for an affordable apartment and a couple of new adjunct gigs, and make a go of it here. Closer to friends and relatives. Lower cost of living, and family friendly, supposedly. But really, what other choice did she have? Then she learned her dad, who’d always been hard-headed and insensitive, had descended into a mental abyss: He stopped going to work, quit paying his bills, lost touch with reality, and the house was gone to sheriff’s sale.

He reappears, plodding down the hard-dirt path to the tents. Emma pokes her head inside the car, checks the progress on the phone. Only 55 percent.

“Let’s give it a few more minutes to charge,” she tells him.

“Give what a few more minutes?”

“Your phone. It’s charging in my car.”

He nods. Then there’s silence between them. Emma crosses her arms again. He picks at his ear.

“I’d really like to make a doctor appointment for you this week,” she says.

“I’m not going,” he says.

“He won’t bite.” She immediately regrets her tone—too cutting—but sometimes she can’t help herself.

“Don’t matter.”

“You’re so stubborn,” she huffs. “And you frustrate the hell out of me.”

She lowers her chin, sees a soiled Q-Tip beside her feet, kicks it aside.

He sticks his hands in his pockets. More silence between them.

They never did have much to talk about. Emma was always closer to her mom, who died during the early days of the pandemic. A nursing supervisor at Harrisburg Suburban Hospital, she was short and plucky, a lot like Emma, and she contracted the virus a year before her planned retirement. She’d married young, worked hard her whole life, and sometimes Emma wondered why she stuck by her father, who drove a beer truck for the biggest distributor in the Harrisburg area and who never seemed to do anything to make her life easier.

Emma checks the phone again, and now it’s at 85 percent, and she decides that’s enough for now. She unplugs it and hands it to her dad without saying anything.

“We have to go,” she says. “Don’t forget the van from the mission will be here Monday morning, so be sure to come out for coffee and donuts and anything else they have.”

“They’re good people,” he says.

“Yeah, they are,” she says. “And remember, you have a grandson, and his name is Thomas, and he’s a good kid, too, a really sweet kid.”

***

Her back aches. She’s sitting on those rickety bleachers watching the Astros rout the Cubs. This is the Cumberland Little League. Or, as far as Emma’s concerned, the grass-and-dirt arena where grown men and even certain women spend their afternoons and weekends hoping their boys turn into gladiators—or at least find a path to a college baseball scholarship. It’s in Cumberland Borough, her hometown, ten minutes west of Harrisburg, if you catch most of the lights. It’s home to the state maintenance and highway workers, and the folks who operate the feed plants and other farm industries that supply the fruit farms down in Adams County and the cornfields out in Lancaster County. Sitting right next to the affluent inner suburb of Misty Hill, where most of the lawyers and lobbyists live, it’s a town with an inferiority complex.

The Astros usually win—they are one helluva a Little League team. Unfortunately, Thomas is the weak link—he’ll never be a gladiator. He has two strikeouts again today, two innings in the outfield with no balls hit his way, which is a relief, in a way, because at least he didn’t have the chance to commit any errors.

Thomas inherited Emma’s athletic ability—meaning, none. And probably his father’s too, though Emma doesn’t know exactly what athletic talents he might have. Clearly, she doesn’t know as much about him as she’d thought. She met Abid Farooq eleven years ago at the wedding for a college girlfriend. She was immediately smitten with his splendid green eyes and dark wavy hair. He was a digital marketing consultant from New York, smart and progressive, radiating self-confidence, a guy who knew the ways of the world and could navigate it with ease. But when it comes to judging guys, Emma tends to make some really bad errors.

Top of the sixth, last inning, and Thomas comes to bat once more, the Astros holding a 12-3 lead. Emma tries stretching her back, but it doesn’t do much good. It’s the curse of large breasts on a small frame: Double D, five-foot-three. If she could afford a reduction, or had time for one, she’d do it in a snap, but that’s not happening anytime soon.

She pats the pocket of her jeans. In her pocket is a miniature, corked bottle with gold glitter inside. Her friend Tracey, a childhood friend she reconnected with when she moved back home, gave it to her for good luck this semester, called it magic dust, after Emma told her about her semester from hell in the fall: She taught four classes of freshman composition at two different colleges, which meant the usual headaches with two different commutes, two different sets of expectations and everything else, plus all the usual crap like skipped classes, late papers, texting in class, and the mind-numbing repercussions of grading so many crummy papers, and then on top of everything else one kid turned in a plagiarized paper that was available for sale online, then claimed he had no idea because his friend was supposed to write it for him, and when Emma filed a plagiarism case, the dean supported the student, thought he deserved another chance. So yeah, Emma’s been carrying her magic dust in her pocket lately.

Contact, she thinks, hopes, pleads. Just make contact. Bat on ball. Is it really that hard? It might be—what does she know? Even a little dribbler to an infielder would be fine, because at least it wouldn’t be a strikeout. And just then it happens: the ball dings off of Thomas’s bat, rolls slowly to the first baseman, who jogs forward, scoops it up and tags Thomas out as he’s sprinting for the bag.

“Yeah! Thomas!” Emma hollers, clapping her hands above her head.

Confused looks come from the other moms in the stands.

After the game, Emma waits for Thomas at the car, her trusty little Honda, 160,000 miles and still going strong, the perfect car for an underemployed adjunct professor. The sun is high in the sky, and the crispness in the air is gone. Emma feels warm in her gray Princeton sweatshirt. Thomas walks straight from the dugout to the car, black bat bag strapped across his back, his aluminum bat handle sticking out of the top. His jersey is untucked.

“Do you want something from the concession stand?” she asks.

“No.” He’s mopey.

“Good game,” she says, her tone deliberately upbeat.

He shrugs, takes off his bag and shovels it into the back seat.

“You had a nice hit at the end,” she says. Same upbeat tone.

“That wasn’t a hit,” he says. “That was an out. It’s only a hit if you get on base.”

“Oh.”

They get in the car, but she waits to start the engine.

“Do you want to go out for lunch?” she asks, keys still cupped in her hand. “How about pizza?”

“I guess.” Still mopey.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“Nothing.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“The game?”

“No. Kind of. I don’t know.”

“Kind of?”

His shoulders droop, and he tilts his head toward the window, looking away from her. “What’s a towelhead?” he asks.

“A what?”

“Justin called me a towelhead.”

Emma’s jaw drops, her mind buckles.

“He said towelheads can’t play baseball,” Thomas says.

Her mouth hangs open. She clamps her keys inside her fist. Her chest swells, outrage rising up in her like a mushroom cloud.

“Justin—the coach’s son? He said that?”

He nods reluctantly, turns to look at her. “Don’t do anything about it.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m doing something about it.”

She pops out of the car, strides across the parking lot to the Ford F-150, red with tinted windows, parked in the shade under the big tree in the back corner. Scott Bass, six-feet-tall and beer-bellied, is loading a bag of baseball gear into the pickup’s bed.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Coach?”

“Yeah?” He bangs the door of the bed shut with two beefy hands, turns her way. His orange cap is tilted upward on his large, sweaty forehead.

“I’m Emma Muller-Farooq, Thomas’s mom.” Her eyes burn into him.

“Uh, huh.”

“We need to have a word.”

“Why is that?”

She squares her shoulders, takes a collect-yourself breath. “I just heard something very disturbing. I mean, very disturbing.”

“What might that be?” He wipes his brow with the back of his hand.

“Thomas just told me—” She pauses and gulps. “He just told me Justin called him a towelhead.”

“Kids say things,” he says.

“Yes, they do, and sometimes they say things they shouldn’t say. That’s my point here.”

“I’ll have a word with him. I’ll tell him about being politically correct.” He pulls his keys out of the pocket of his baggy cargo shorts.

“Um,” she says, as her eyes dart back and forth. “I think it’s about more than being politically correct. That’s a derogatory term, just like the N-word.”

Maybe that caught his attention.

“Yeah, like I said, I’ll talk to him.” He steps past her, toward the front of the pickup.

“I’m just curious,” she says. “Where does a boy that age learn a word like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you use it at home?”

He stops, one hand on the door handle. With a half-turn of his head, he looks at her from the corner of his eye.

“Listen, I’m just coaching baseball here,” he says. “I don’t have to answer questions about our home life.”

“In that case,” she says, “is there a league president or someone I can talk to about this? Because I think it’s pretty serious.”

“Yeah,” he says, opening the pickup door. “His name is on the Web site. Do whatever you want.”

TWO

Monday morning, and the sun is warming the playground. Sweatshirts and windbreakers are strewn along the fence. It’s the beginning of fourth-grade recess, and Buchanan Elementary’s two fourth-grade classes have combined under the not-so-watchful eye of two teacher’s aides. Some kids run and shriek, some climb onto the jungle gym, some form groups and start heated debates over who picks teams and who’s it.

Thomas’s group plays tag. Danielle Fossberger stands at the center of the group, about to take charge, but there’s a dispute over whether it’s her turn to pick who’s it. Ryan Webster alleges that Danielle picked last week, so it’s his turn today. Ashley Clay claims she didn’t pick last week, either, and it’s her turn today because Ryan picked after her the previous week. Thomas hasn’t picked in weeks, but it doesn’t matter to him, so he lets the other kids hash it out.

Finally Danielle steps aside, concedes to Ashley, who tells Ryan he can pick tomorrow.

At the basketball hoop, a small faction of kids breaks away from the team-picking process. Justin Bass leads them, marching across the pavement after spotting Thomas Farooq.

Ashley points at Michael Baxter: He’s it, and the rest of the group scatters. Thomas turns and bumps smack into Justin.

“You’re a snitch,” Justin says.

“Nuh, uh,” Thomas says.

Michael Baxter notices that Thomas has stopped, an easy prey. He whacks Thomas on the shoulder. “You’re it,” Michael announces, and runs off.

Thomas rotates his head and watches Michael dash away, then turns back to Justin. His shoulders sag.

“I got in trouble because of you,” Justin says, chest out.

Across the playground, the two aides, one middle-aged woman and another thirty-something woman, are engrossed in conversation.

“I told my mom not to say anything,” Thomas says.

Ashley, Danielle, Michael, Ryan and the other kids playing tag slow to a jog, circle back toward Thomas. “You’re it,” Michael reminds him.

Thomas’s eyes dart back and forth, between Justin and Michael.

“You’re still a snitch,” Justin says. He steps forward, into Thomas’s face.

The other basketball players have abandoned team picking, have followed Justin, and they’ve formed a semi-circle behind him. The tag players start to rally behind Thomas. “Why aren’t you playing?” Ashley asks.

Justin shoves Thomas, who staggers back two steps, then regains his balance. He feels a jolt of righteous anger, then lunges at Justin, fists flailing. Justin falls under his weight, and they collapse onto the pavement together as the boys and girls around them shout a medley of surprise, outrage, and encouragement.

The aides see the scrum. They run toward it, both of them yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!”

Thomas keeps swinging wildly, and Justin covers his face, blocking his punches with his forearms. One of Thomas’s punches grazes Justin’s arm and smacks into the pavement, and he stops, screams in pain, and Thomas wraps his arms around him, wrestles him face-down into the ground.

The younger aide arrives, grabs Justin by the back of his collar with both hands, pulls at it, and he rolls off of Thomas. The middle-aged aide arrives next, clamps both hands onto Thomas’s shoulders. She orders him to get up, and he slowly climbs to his feet, the fingers of his sore hand folded into his other hand.

Justin wiggles free from the younger aide’s grasp, pops onto his feet, and the aide scoots between him and Thomas, hunched like a linebacker.

“I didn’t do anything,” Justin pleads. Snot is smeared across his mouth and chin.

“Yes, he did,” Thomas says.

“We saw exactly what both of you were doing,” the aide says.