Dockside by Susan Wiggs

of the houses behind him, a porch light switched on.
    He felt a surge of panic. This might look bad, Nina Romano getting out of his car. He quickly turned and went to pull her bicycle from the trunk. She got out, but seemed to be in no hurry to go home.
    “It’s after ten,” he reminded her. “Maybe you should run along.”
    “Don’t worry about my curfew,” she said. “There are nine kids in my family. I’m right in the middle. Sneaking in and out has never been a problem.”
    Nine kids, Greg marveled. His own family felt big with four. Nine was…a team. “So,” he said, attempting a joking tone, “stay out of trouble and have a nice life. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.”
    She wasn’t fooled by his lame attempt to lighten the moment. She seemed to understand as well as he did that something had happened during the drive into town, something mysterious and important and impossible. She gazed steadily up at him and he felt as if he was drowning. He wished he didn’t know anything about her, not her age, her last name, or the fact that she cried when he told her to respect herself.
    He was glad he held the bicycle between them because otherwise, he might prove to be as stupid as a cadet named Laurence Jeffries. She was that attractive. And no, she didn’t look her age.
    An extremely knowing smile curved her full lips. “What are you thinking, Greg?”
    “If you were older, this could…turn into something.” He blurted it out, just like that. No thought, just words. Girls like Nina Romano were apparently a leading cause of brain damage in guys.
    “Someday soon, I will be older,” she reminded him with a soft promise in her voice.
    “Then maybe someday, it’ll turn into something.”
    She laughed a little. “Right. Like you’d really wait for me.”
    “You never know,” Greg said, leaving the bicycle in her hands. He got in the car and put it in gear. She stood there, looking so beautiful that his eyes ached. Don’t say anything else, he admonished himself. It didn’t work. He offered her his heart in a smile. “I just might surprise you.”

Part Three
    Now
    Since 2005, the town of Avalon has been the home of its very own independent baseball team, the Hornets, a member of the Can-Am League. Independent baseball leagues are known for a high quality of play and fierce competition. A baseball game on a warm, clear night is one of the chief pleasures of summer. General admission tickets are six dollars, available from the inn concierge. In baseball, as in life, every day brings a new opportunity.

Six
    G reg pulled into the ball field parking lot just as Little League practice was winding down. From a distance, it was an idyllic scene, the surrounding forestland rising up into the hills, the golden light of late afternoon slanting over the green diamond, dotted with laughing, chattering kids shouting to each other as they gathered their things. Greg wondered if anything could be as good as it looked, or if that was just wishful thinking. Then he picked out Max, sitting by himself on the bench in the dugout. Great, he thought. His kid was benched again.
    There was no torture quite so searing as seeing your kid in emotional pain. It was torture because it made Greg feel helpless. This wasn’t the kind of hurt you could fix with an ice pack or a Band-Aid. This injury was invisible, particularly when it came to Max, who tended to keep things hidden.
    Greg sat in the truck for a minute, dissuading himself from interfering. Popping off at the mouth to the coach would do Max no good at all. The kid needed to learn to fight his own battles, and for all Greg knew, Max was sitting out by choice. Or worse, he was sitting out because once again, the kid had blown his temper. It wouldn’t be the first time.
    Through no fault of his own, Max had been at the tail end of all the drama surrounding the divorce, the move from the city, Sophie’s job in Europe, Daisy’s pregnancy. Max was swept along