I leaned back to doze while we inched along the Olympic Parkway headed towards the freeway onramp going home. I saw the blinking light of the parkway streetlights and thought about time weaving in and out so quickly. Jake so youthful on the baseball mound, both of us so carefree that we would sway at the sight of each other, so much of that changed now, the flickering streetlights following each other. Carefully built and placed yards apart like the two front seats Jake and I quietly occupied now. I wondered why we were not those two young souls anymore. We had been camping in the wild, gone to Paris, let his Dad move in with us after his Mom died and had generally been happy to be in Kensington these many years. Why did we both steal time back to the old days, why wasn’t our lives as is, where we would want to be in our mind’s time for wandering. At this moment, I just couldn’t say.

I had dozed while staring at Jake’s profile going in and out of the shadows and light. My foot was leaning against the glove compartment and I was comfortable enough to fall into a deep, short-known sleep. I might have snored and drooled while inching down the parkway for those in the inching cars beside us to see, I can’t be sure. All I know is I woke up later and wasn’t sure if I was still lost in a dream or if what I saw was real, but there I was sitting in the seat next to Jake who had driven us to the old ball field. There we sat looking at the field as if we were at home sitting on the couch watching television.

The field is old and in need of repair, the mound too high and the distance between the pitcher’s spot and home plate so short. Something I never choose to remember. The streetlamp barely throws light on the dugout placed mostly on the street for the houses and cars use and not the ball field. It looked like the old empty mansion in an old dusty novel where a glorious southern belle hides after falling into old age and poverty. I was in many ways as sad and worn as the field and as shelved as the old novel. I wanted to say to Jake, go run the bases, or let’s go, or say what I really wanted to. Instead, I leaned my head against the door window and saw the image of our sleeping children strapped in their car seats behind us, reflected in the car’s windshield. I wanted to doze but used my sleepy state as my advantage to say what I wanted to, when I wanted to, on that particular night – that short conversation.

“You ruin it when you do this, you know,” I said to open the blurry conversation with Jake.
“Ruin what?” he said deliberately.
“Everything,” which I surprised myself by saying.
“Stop.” He whispered.

I did not feel like an angry, scorned, aged housewife deprived of a life due to crying kids with crayons in their noses. I sounded like the truthful person who lives a constant lie that drags along a dark colored line like the crayon marks left on the wall before going into a nose. I hated my life, sitting in the dark with a handsome man who was an excellent journalist and accountant for his father’s shop on weekends. I hated the knowing that Jake had been unfaithful and cried every time I gazed upon his twin girls he’d fathered with another woman, while we were married. We didn’t have our own children. Instead, we played “patty-cakes” with her beautiful girls everyday since the day she decided to turn her dabbling with drugs and alcohol into an outright addiction. I leaned against the darkness outside the window for support while I cried at the sight of the field.

“I knew about you and her,” I said. Jake shrugged me off and looked out the front windshield, saying, “No you didn’t, and don’t bring that up again. Why do you always have to bring that up?” I set my eyes on the bleachers beyond the playing field while realizing Jake wanted to be here, but didn’t want to talk about being here.

The Kensington Car Boys, Part III – Tomorrow!