Read Online Conviction by Kelly Loy Gilbert - Free Book Online

his shoulder so bad that he knew as he was curled on the ground, the field blurry from the pain, he’d never pitch
again.
    I don’t know what it’s like to have one real purpose in life and watch that fall apart in front of you on one bad play, but I know it messed him up. Within a few years Elaine left
him for someone else, and my dad won custody of Trey because Elaine failed a drug test. When his disability money ran out, the only job my dad could find was as a janitor at a radio station, and
even though that would turn out to be part of God’s plan for him, he didn’t know it then; faith always makes more sense when you can look back later on, but when you’re in a bad
place you don’t know that’s not where your story ends.
    My dad’s always told people my mom died in childbirth. He told
me
that, even, half my life. It was on Trey’s birthday the year I was in third grade—after Trey quit
coming home, my dad was always kind of a wreck on his birthday—that he told me the truth. What he said seeped into me like water into the land after a drought, something irrevocable, and
I’ve remembered every detail exactly as he told it ever since.
    Aureliana Stoddard-Huff. That was her name. (Later, when I turned thirteen and got a Facebook account, the first thing I did was look her up.) She showed up when I was four months old. It was
August, and it was the first Wednesday of the month. My dad remembered that part clearly because three nights before that had been the last Summer Special at the bowling alley. He’d planned
to go bowling with Trey and then get pizza, which he’d been saving up for, but that same day he’d caught Trey trying to buy a bus ticket to the airport. His own son had tried to leave
him. It had been maybe the lowest point in my dad’s whole life.
    “Hi, Mart,” Aureliana Stoddard-Huff said when my dad opened the door that afternoon. She was small, like a dancer, and less pretty now that he was sober, but definitely not bad.
“It is Mart, right?” She lifted the baby a little bit as if somehow he might have missed it, then said, “Yeah, he’s yours. And also, I know this is kind of late notice, but
I’m leaving and I can’t take care of him anymore, so I thought maybe you’d want him instead.”
    My dad stared at her, then at the baby, then back at her. He only half heard her explanation: she was going to Los Angeles to be a dancer, and she was going to split the rent on a studio with
her friend, and anyway she’d be too busy; the baby was a lot of work. Her cousin’s kid was much better behaved, but this one—
    “You’re serious,” he interrupted. “You want to leave your kid with
me
?”
    “Well,” Aureliana said patiently, “he’s your kid, too.”
    The stunning part wasn’t actually the kid; it was the girl showing up here to ask him this. Was she stupid? They’d met at a disgusting dive bar, for Christ’s sake, and half
those guys there lied about their incomes just so they didn’t have to pay child support. And sure, there was a time back before he got hurt when he seemed destined to really go
somewhere—he was going to rise above his crappy past and be someone—but now he was just a ruined ex–minor leaguer who drank too much and had a custodian job at the radio station
and a runaway kid who seemed to hate his own father and couldn’t even stand being hugged.
    “Well?” Aureliana said. “I can’t take him. But you’re a dad already. You told me you went to court to get custody of your other son. I could bring him to the fire
station, or something, but I thought he’d be better off with you.” And this, he’d told me—he was gripping his glass with one hand and my knee in the other—this is
something he’s always been proud of; this is who he really is: he never considered saying no.
    So they went together (in her car, because it was the one with the car seat) to the courthouse to change my name on the birth certificate from