Home, Away. Jeff Gillenkirk
was his last night.
He pulled on a pair of frayed khakis and the sweatshirt he’d worn the past two nights. He was in the bathroom brushing his teeth when the front door opened.
“Glad you could make it!” he called sarcastically. Vicki ignored him and tip-toed into Rafe’s room. She leaned over the railing and kissed him lightly on the lips. She smiled as Rafe’s eyes fluttered and the corners of his mouth lifted sweetly.
Then Jason loomed over her shoulder. “You said you’d be home by nine.”
She gazed tenderly on Rafe, his soft corn silk hair pressed against his temple. “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling the blanket away from his chin. “Something came up.” She turned and hurried from the room. Jason reached over and yanked the blanket back up to Rafe’s chin, then followed Vicki into the kitchen.
“What do you mean something came up? It’s over, right? This is the last day.”
She took a blueberry yogurt from the refrigerator and sat tiredly at the kitchen table. She ran her hand through her long, shimmering hair. “I really wish we could talk once without you yelling.”
“I’m not yelling! I’m frustrated. I’ve been waiting for two hours … two years!”
Vicki breathed deeply and closed her eyes. “It hasn’t been two years.” When she opened them he was leaning over the table, his head thrust towards her.
“What is it now?”
“I was trying to change my Bar Boards schedule. They put me in the afternoon class by mistake.”
“Bar Boards? What are Bar Boards?
“I told you — I’ve got two weeks of prep classes for the Boards. These last three years are down the drain if I don’t pass.”
“No, you didn’t tell me.” He glared at her. “I’ve got practice tomorrow. You said you’d take Rafe.”
“It’s just for tomorrow.”
“Naw, Vicki, naw — this is your time now. You promised.”
She shrugged. “It’s the best I could do.”
The red numerals of the digital clock burned into his eyeballs — 10:49. “No, that’s not your best,” he said. “You gave your best to constitutional law. You gave your best to Professor Hairpiece. You give your best to everyone but me. I get crap.”
“That’s because all you know is crap. You dish it out all the time.”
The argument wasn’t new, only the circumstances. They both had waited for this moment since Rafe’s birth — the end of law school, the pursuit of some kind of normalcy in a marriage that had never really had any. It was that promise, that distant hope that had held them together for the past two years. Now, it was suddenly clear that that point could just as easily be an end as a beginning.
He snatched her tub of yogurt and threw it as hard as he could. It exploded high above the stove, showering rays of pale blue cream across the wall and down the side of the refrigerator. “I’ve fuckin’ had it!” he shouted. “This marriage is over!”
Vicki scrambled from her seat and backpedaled towards the door. “Then get out! Get out — nobody wants you here!”
He stepped towards her. Their altercations had never been physical; the sound, the spray, the audacity of the exploding yogurt shocked them both.
“Stay away from me!” Vicki cried.
“I wouldn’t touch you if you paid me!”
Vicki’s foot hit a pool of yogurt and she slid hard against the wall, banging her shoulder. “You asshole!” she screamed. Jason stood over her, uncertain what to do.
“Get away from me!” Vicki screamed louder. “You hear me? GET AWAY FROM ME!”
Rafe was crying now. The day Jason had dreamed about for more than a year somehow had turned into a nightmare. He grabbed his Stanford jacket from the living room chair and fled down the front stairs two at a time, striking out on a run across the dark lawn towards East Campus Drive. The sound of Rafe’s crying chased him like a siren.
THE STANFORD DAILY
CARDINAL FATE HINGES ON DAD’S RETURN STANFORD ACE HITS 1,000 (DIAPERS) IN OFF-SEASON
When “JT” Thibodeaux takes the field today in the opening practice of the Cardinal’s baseball season, for the first time in a year he won’t be playing with a Nerf ball. A two-time high school All-American recruited out of Henry Beaumont High in Galveston, Texas (where he was known as “Heat”), JT elected to take a leave of absence to raise his one-year-old son while his wife completed Stanford Law.
“I’m ready to play,” Thibodeaux told the Daily on the West Campus playground, where we caught up with him on the swings with his fledgling Cardinal, Raphael. “I wouldn’t trade this year with my boy for anything,” JT said, though he is looking forward to trading in his diaper bag for a duffel bag.
Thibodeaux was an overpowering 16-1 as a junior in the Cardinal’s near-trip to the College World Series two seasons ago. With the birth of his son to second year Stanford Law student Victoria Repetto, Thibodeaux red-shirted his final year of eligibility in order to take primary responsibility for raising him.
“I can always pitch,” the hard-throwing 6’4” left-hander said. “But I won’t ever have the opportunity again to raise my son. It’s just something I decided to do. I think it worked out great for both of us.”
A Sociology major in the School of the Humanities, Thibodeaux managed to earn three credits towards his degree on his year off. Working with department staff, he turned his fathering experience into a year-long sociology tutorial, recording his son’s developmental progress. Thibodeaux estimates that he read nearly forty books on child-rearing — in addition to “changing a thousand diapers.”
Thibodeaux’s coaches and teammates are happy to see their ace return. “JT has always done things his way,” one teammate said. “I don’t care what he does off the field. I just want to go to the World Series.”
THE MORNING session was hell. The new conditioning coach, Brad Sievert, started them with a half hour of calisthenics, then running drills and wind sprints from line to line before shagging flies. Pitchers and catchers took fielding drills with the equipment manager, Donnie Burt — or “Toast,” so named because two seasons ago one of the dryers caught fire and burned the team’s uniform pants — rolling simulated bunts onto the infield grass. At eleven o’clock the pitchers practiced covering the bag on balls hit to first.
Jason worked as hard as he’d ever worked in his life. His legs ached. His t-shirt was soaked. His thighs screamed from sprinting from the mound to first base. He loved it. Men being, trying to be, pretending to be the fastest, the most powerful, the most prolific players in a game that Americans had played for as long as most Americans could remember. He was embarrassed for ever giving it up. But that was the past. He could forget the year he had taken off. He could forget his blow-up with Vicki, the sound of Rafe crying, the yogurt sprayed across the wall and floor of the kitchen. Here, inside the sanctuary of Stanford’s legendary stadium, it was all baseball, only baseball, a wholly self-contained and self-referential world.
Lunch was catered, with mounded platters of pasta, risotto, baked chicken breasts, buttered green beans and biscuits with honey, all passed up and down the table. Jason sat with the other seniors — Jeremy Asher, his battery mate since freshman year; Barf Connolly, the baby-faced infielder from San Diego with the social mores of John Belushi; Damon Lister, the stuck-up world government major from Perth, Australia, who played center field like a roadrunner; John Corliss, scion of Corliss Software; Artemio “Artie” Garza, the son of a real Texas Ranger from San Antonio and premier base stealer on the team; wide-body first baseman Brent Seligman. Jason had searched his teammates’ faces for any sign of disapproval and found none.