Chapter 3: Ghosts in the Dugout
To fully comprehend the specific brand of rage that was currently crystallizing inside my veins, I need to take you back to a dilapidated baseball dugout. Because that miserable Monday was far from the first occasion a Sorenson girl had been left sitting on a wooden bench, waiting for a ride that wasn’t coming.
I was barely twelve years old, playing right field for a pitiful recreational softball team that held its practices on a dusty, uneven field way out past the towering agricultural grain elevators on the edge of town. My father was explicitly scheduled to retrieve me at 7:00 PM sharp.
By 7:15, the cacophony of the other girls piling into their parents’ station wagons had faded to silence. By 7:40, my exhausted coach approached me, jangling his keys, explaining he was already late for his grueling night shift at the manufacturing plant. He knelt in the dirt and asked if I was absolutely certain I was okay. I looked him dead in the eye and swore my dad was just around the corner. He believed the lie because I believed it with every fiber of my being, too.
By 8:30, the sky had bruised into a deep, impenetrable black. I sat completely alone in the concrete dugout, the worn leather of my fielding glove resting heavily in my lap, and I simply listened to the massive, halogen field lights emit a rhythmic, metallic tick-tick-tick as they slowly cooled down. This was an era before cell phones existed in every pocket. There was merely a vandalized payphone bolted to the side of the shuttered concession stand, and my pockets were devoid of even a single silver quarter.
It eventually came to light that my father had spontaneously decided to take my little sister, Lindsay—who was a precious eight years old at the time—out for a celebratory ice cream sundae following her amateur dance recital. They had bypassed the local dairy dip and driven all the way to the “good” parlor across town, the expensive one boasting the retro jukebox and the red vinyl booths.
And he just forgot. That was the entirety of his grand explanation. He simply forgot I existed.
The person whose headlights finally swept across the dirt parking lot wasn’t my father. It was my grandmother. My father’s own mother. She had repeatedly dialed our home phone, received endless ringing, and finally tracked down the coach’s frantic wife, who relayed my grim location. My grandmother drove her rusted, paneled station wagon out to that desolate field, wearing nothing but a faded floral housecoat and slippers, and drove her heavy tires right up onto the pristine outfield grass—a sacred act you were absolutely forbidden to do.
She didn’t offer a dramatic, tearful speech. She simply popped open the heavy passenger door, the hinges screaming in protest, and ordered, “Get in the car, sugar. You’re coming up to the lake with me for the entire weekend.”
Her sanctuary was a modest, weathered cabin situated directly on the murky edge of Stockton Lake, roughly an hour’s drive north of the city limits. It boasted two cramped bedrooms, a sprawling screened-in porch that smelled perpetually of damp pine, and a wooden dock out back that leaned precariously to the left, as if tired of standing upright. Every single sweltering summer after that specific night, I spent every conceivable weekend she would tolerate my presence out there. She meticulously taught me how to thread a squirming worm onto a barbed hook without flinching. She taught me the ruthless strategy of Gin Rummy. More importantly, she taught me how to sit perfectly, flawlessly still on the edge of the water long enough for the skittish blue herons to entirely forget a human was occupying their space.
One muggy night when I was fourteen, the crickets screaming in the dark, I gathered the courage to ask her why she was always the one who came searching for me when nobody else bothered to look. She paused dealing the cards, peered at me intently over the top of her reading glasses, and delivered a truth that anchored my soul.
“Because you are the one who actually shows up, Shelby,” she stated, her voice like gravel. “And people who put in the effort to show up, fundamentally deserve to have someone show up for them in return.”
When the cancer finally came for her, I was twenty-nine and working punishing graveyard shifts at the trauma center. I drove my beat-up car up the winding highway to that isolated cabin three times a week for eleven agonizing months. I gently changed her weeping dressings. I meticulously sorted her endless mosaic of colorful pills into plastic organizers. I slept fitfully on a rigid, plastic lawn chair out on the screened porch, just so I would instantly hear the weak rattle of her voice if she called out for water in the suffocating heat of the night.
My father visited exactly twice.
Both times, he paced nervously around the living room and made sure to leave well before supper was served. And both times, he made a point to pull me aside and complain about how incredibly difficult it was for him to see his strong mother reduced to such a fragile state.
She left the entire property to me. Her last will and testament dictated it in one blunt, unadorned sentence.
My father read that legal document sitting in the stuffy, wood-paneled office of her attorney. He set the crisp paper down onto the mahogany desk with terrifyingly deliberate care, stood up, and refused to speak a single word to me for an entire month. My mother, ever the eternal appeaser to his ego, tearfully labeled the will a blatant act of favoritism. My sister, Lindsay, whined that it simply wasn’t fair to the ‘rest of the family.’
So, I did what the designated ‘capable one’ in a dysfunctional family always ultimately does. I swallowed the injustice and kept the fragile peace.
I paid a locksmith to cut a shiny new brass key for my father. I handed it to him and explicitly told him he was welcome to utilize the cabin whenever he desired a weekend away. Meanwhile, I quietly continued paying the exorbitant property taxes and the hefty hazard insurance entirely by myself. It equated to slightly over three thousand dollars a year ripped straight from my nursing salary, because the legal deed was firmly printed in my name, and those demanding envelopes were mailed to my mailbox.
Within a single year, my father was casually referring to the property in casual conversation as “my little place up at the lake.” Within two years, he had permanently nailed his battered, lucky fishing hat onto Grandma’s iron hook right by the front door.
I let it all slide. Because in the Sorenson family dynamic, letting massive transgressions slide is the only currency you have to keep the emotional lights turned on.
That history is exactly what you need to comprehend about the nature of my “interference.”
Just last winter, during a brutal freeze, the brakes on my sedan gave out completely. I desperately needed a meager four hundred dollars to get them replaced before my next hospital paycheck cleared. I swallowed my pride and asked my father for a temporary loan.
He placed a heavy, calloused hand sympathetically on my shoulder, gave a sad sigh, and said, “I really wish I could swing it, Shell. But you know your mother and I are on a strict fixed income now. Things are tight.”
I rode the public city bus in the freezing, sleet-filled mornings to the hospital for nine miserable days.
That very next spring, he proudly drove home hauling a meticulously refurbished, pre-owned bass boat.
Who is playing who? I wondered bitterly as I stared at the dark road.
