The Window
The baseball went through the Delgados’ garage window ninety seconds after the caseworker’s car stopped, and somebody inside the garage screamed.
Nico Bell stood on the curb with his arm still out, the way a pitcher’s arm stays out after the ball is gone. Glass was still falling. It made a small, bright sound on the driveway, like ice dropped in a sink.
Ninety seconds. He had counted them, the way he had counted everything on the drive. Two homes before this one. Two families who had said, in soft voices, that it just wasn’t working out. His caseworker never said what came after a third. She didn’t have to. Strike three meant a group home until eighteen.
So when Priya went up the walk alone, he had waited at the curb with his trash bag and his one baseball. And on the garage door someone had taped a strike zone, black tape in a perfect rectangle, with a red stripe down the middle and green on the corners.
He had thrown at it because he could not stop himself. The ball had sailed two feet high, straight through the only window in the door.
Now the scream stopped, which was worse.
The side door banged open. A boy came out in a catcher’s chest protector, blood running from a cut over his eyebrow. He was Nico’s age, and he was holding Nico’s baseball.
“Who threw this?” the boy asked.
Nico put his hands where people could see them. It was a habit.
“From the street?” The boy looked at the curb, then the window, then the curb again. “From the actual street?”
“I’ll pay for it,” Nico said. “I’ve got eleven dollars.”
The front door flew open and a big man came down the steps two at a time. “Theo! Theo, are you cut? What happened to my window?”
It was a whole-body voice, and Nico’s body answered it before his mind did. His knees bent. His arms came up over his head. He was crouched on the sidewalk with his face in his elbows before he knew he had moved.
Nobody spoke.
“Okay,” the big man said. His voice had dropped to almost nothing. “Okay. Nobody’s in trouble, son. I’m just loud. I’m Manny. Ask anybody, I’m loud at funerals.”
Nico stood up slowly, face burning. Priya was writing on her clipboard. *Startle response.* It would go in the file, and the file would follow him to the next place.
Then the boy in the chest protector started to laugh.
“Dad. Dad, he threw it from the curb. That’s like ninety feet. Through the window. Into my face.” He held up the ball like a trophy, grinning through the blood. “Do it again.”
“He is not doing it again,” said a small dark-haired woman, coming down the porch steps with a first-aid kit. Not a phone. A first-aid kit. “Sit. Head back.”
“Mom, ow.”
“Don’t ‘Mom, ow’ me. You were standing behind a window in a strike zone.” She pressed gauze to his eyebrow. “Manny, get a broom.”
“I’m not sweeping it,” Manny said. “I’m leaving the hole. It’s a monument.”
“Mrs. Delgado,” Priya said carefully, “I want to be clear about what just happened.”
“It’s a window, Priya.” Rosa Delgado looked over her son’s shoulder at Nico. She had a teacher’s face, the kind that missed nothing. “Hello, Nico. I’m Rosa. Are you hurt?”
He shook his head.
“Good. Then we’re all fine.”
Priya walked him back to the curb for his bag, which was her way of getting him alone.
“Nico,” she said quietly. “This is a good one.”
“It’s a window.”
“It’s the first ninety seconds. I’ve got forty-one kids and one car, and there’s nowhere else tonight. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Strike three,” he said.
She didn’t answer that. She never did.
Behind them, Theo was standing at the garage door with his father, holding gauze to his head and squinting at the tape.
“Dad, which stripe’s the red one? He was aiming at the red one, right?”
“Middle,” Manny said, too quickly. “Red’s always the middle. Go inside, you’re bleeding on my driveway.”
* * *
Dinner was chicken and rice and a kitchen radio arguing about the Giants’ bullpen. Theo had three butterfly stitches and had told the story of the window four times. Each time, the throw got longer.
“So what else do you throw?” Theo asked, pointing his fork. “Curve? Slider? Something with a name?”
“Just that.”
“Who taught you?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody teaches that,” Manny said with his mouth full. “You don’t get that arm from nobody. What team were you on last?”
“I haven’t been on a team.”
Theo put his fork down. “Then where did you learn to throw a ball ninety feet through a window?”
Nico thought about lying. Then he thought about the eleven dollars, and how little they would cover.
“At walls,” he said.
Rosa looked at her husband, and something passed between them that Nico couldn’t read. Then Manny pointed his fork at the radio and said, “That bullpen should try walls,” and Theo laughed, and the moment closed over like water.
“Your room’s at the end of the hall,” Rosa said. “It’s small.”
“I’ve slept in smaller.”
“Like where?” Theo asked.
“Theo,” said Rosa.
“What? I’m making conversation.”
“Tomorrow I’m putting a radar gun on him,” Manny said.
“Tomorrow he’s coming to Target with me for sheets that fit,” said Rosa.
“After Target.”
“Manuel.”
“She said Manuel,” Theo told Nico in a loud whisper. “That’s two Manuels. He’s done.”
Manny threw up his hands and appealed to the radio. Rosa went on eating. Nobody got hurt. Nico watched the whole argument the way you watch a dog you don’t know, waiting for the part where it bites, and it never got there.
When the plates were empty, Nico stood up to be useful. He stacked all four and carried them toward the sink at once.
The top one slid. It hit the tile and broke into three clean pieces.
He knew how this went. First came the soft voice, saying it was okay. Later, when the company was gone, came the other one. The real voice. Low and sure and in no hurry at all.
“Oh, nice,” Theo said. “Now it’s even. One window, one plate.”
“Is that how we’re counting?” Manny asked.
“We are not counting,” Rosa said, reaching for the broom. “It’s just a plate. We have eleven more and a Costco card.”
“I’m sorry,” Nico said. “I’ll pay for it. I’ll...”
“Nico.” Rosa waited until he looked at her. “In this house, a plate costs a broom and a sorry. You already paid.”
He didn’t believe her. He waited the rest of the night to find out what it really cost, in the room that used to be her sewing room, with pins still in the carpet. He lay on the blanket in his shoes.
Much later, someone knocked.
“It’s me,” Theo said through the door. “Can I ask you something? Were you actually aiming at the zone?”
“Yes.”
“You missed by two feet,” Theo said.
“I know.”
“At ninety miles an hour.” Theo said it the way other people said *at the Olympics*.
“I know,” Nico said again.
“Okay.” A pause. “Tomorrow. Five a.m. My dad’s batting cages. You throw, I catch. Before he wakes up and makes it a whole thing.”
Nico looked at the door. “Why?”
“Because nobody’s ever hit me in the face from the street before,” Theo said. “I want to see what it looks like on purpose. Goodnight, Window.”
The footsteps went away. The real voice never came up the hallway. That was worse. If you knew when the hit was coming, you could get ready for it.
* * *
At one in the morning, Nico went to the kitchen for water. A freight train was going through the crossing east of town, its bell ringing and ringing.
The refrigerator was covered in the usual things. A pizza magnet. An old Little League schedule. Theo’s school photo, no front teeth.
And in the corner, half hidden behind a dentist’s card, an old photograph. Two teenage girls in Rio Linda softball jerseys on a dugout bench, arms around each other, squinting into the sun.
One of them was Rosa Delgado, twenty years younger.
Nico knew the other girl too. He had a picture of her in his trash bag, the only picture he owned. The same crooked smile. The same chipped front tooth.
His mother was seventeen, and she was smiling, and Rosa Delgado had her arm around her.
---
