LITMIR.BIZ

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coaches and male teachers had given him another perspective and helped him find his way. He wanted to do the same for his students.

      The loud ringing of a hard leather ball against an aluminum bat jerked him from these musings, and a smile spread across his face as he watched the ball sail over the right field fence. “Chase! Chase! Chase!” the other boys shouted, and Josh took up the chant. He joined the crowd that swarmed the boy. “I knew you could do it,” he said, hugging the six-footer tightly.

      “I did what you said, Coach. I just focused on the ball.” The boy grinned, dimples forming on either side of his mouth, making him look younger than his eighteen years. Then he was swept away toward the clubhouse by the rest of the team.

      Josh looked at the scoreboard in left field: Hartland Wildcats 9, Delta Panthers 6. “Congratulations, Coach.” History teacher and assistant coach Zach Fremont slapped Josh on the back. “You’ve really turned this team around.”

      “The kids are improving.” The baseball program had been in sad shape when Josh took over; he’d need a few years to develop a real championship squad.

      “This win didn’t mean anything. We’ve already lost a chance at the playoffs.” Math teacher Rick Southerland, Josh’s other assistant, fired a baseball he’d collected from the other side of the dugout at Josh

      Josh caught the ball awkwardly with his left hand, balancing it against his chest with his hook. “You can’t go from a losing record to a championship in one year,” he said. He wanted to take back the words as soon as he’d said them; he should know better than to let Rick bait him.

      “You’re just a regular ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” Zach said.

      Rick scowled at them both and made his way out of the dugout, across the field toward the clubhouse. “What is it with that guy?” Zach asked.

      “He’s mad because the district cut his wife’s position as an elementary reading aid when they hired me.” Josh added the baseball to the duffel of gear at his feet. “He thinks I played the vet card to get my job.”

      “So what if you did? We owe you something for what you did over there. It’s not like a lousy job is going to give you back your hand.” Zach added a pair of batting helmets to the duffel. “Besides, the school board didn’t hire you because they felt sorry for you. They hired you because they wanted a winning baseball team, and they needed a science teacher.”

      With school districts cutting budgets all over the country, plenty of coaches and teachers with more experience than Josh were looking for work. He wasn’t naive enough to believe his position as a wounded veteran and the son of a local rancher hadn’t influenced the school board’s decision to choose him over half a dozen other candidates for the job. The knowledge didn’t sit easy with him. He’d always wanted to be judged on his accomplishments, not his circumstances or his name.

      “Coach, do you have a minute to answer a few questions?”

      The feminine voice made both men turn around. Josh found himself staring into the warm brown eyes of Amy Marshall. He felt again the little jolt that had hit him when he’d looked into those eyes yesterday at her grandmother’s produce stand. “Hello again,” he said.

      “Where’s Cody?” Zach asked. “Not that you aren’t an improvement.” He grinned.

      She ignored the compliment. “Cody’s out sick. I’m covering the game for the Herald.” She extended a mini recorder toward him. “What’s the significance of tonight’s win?”

      Zach clapped Josh on the shoulder. “I’ll just leave you two alone.” He slung the strap of one of the equipment duffels over his shoulder and shambled away.

      Josh focused his attention on Amy once more, and shifted into interview mode. “Some people might say this win is meaningless, since we’re already eliminated from the finals,” he said. “But I don’t look at it that way at all. The team has overcome a lot this season, and the players have worked together to improve. Every win builds their confidence and skills—things they’ll take forward with them into next season, and into life.”

      “Had you ever coached baseball before you were hired to coach the Wildcats?” she asked.

      The question surprised Josh, but he didn’t let it rattle him. “I hadn’t had that opportunity. But I played for many years.”

      “Since you don’t have any experience coaching, to what do you attribute your success?”

      He shifted from one foot to the other. What did these questions have to do with tonight’s game? The focus should be on the players, not him. “I’m working with a great group of kids,” he said. “I try to teach them what I know, but they’ve done the rest with their hard work.”

      “Would you say luck had anything to do with your winning record?”

      “Luck always plays a part in this game, but I give the credit to the team’s hard work.”

      She punched the button to switch off the recorder. “Thanks. If I have any more questions, I’ll give you a call.”

      “Don’t you want to ask anything about tonight’s game?”

      “I got a copy of the official scorecard from Dirk Fischer and a nice quote from Chase Wilson, so I think I’m good. But I’ll let you know.” She turned to leave. By this time the area around the field was all but deserted, the stands and most of the parking lot emptied.

      Josh followed her up the steps out of the dugout. “Let me walk you to your car,” he said.

      “You don’t need to do that.”

      “No, but it goes against my grain to let a woman walk off into a dark, deserted parking lot alone, so humor me.”

      She looked out across the parking lot, which was indeed dark, and empty save for a few cars. “All right. Thank you.”

      He followed her across the gravel-and-dirt lot to a dusty blue Subaru. She paused beside the door, keys in hand. “Thanks for seeing me to my car,” she said. “I forget sometimes how dark it can be out here, away from the city lights.”

      “We see more stars here, though.” He looked up at a sky filled with sparks of light, as if some kid had spilled a whole bottle of glitter.

      She tilted her head back to join him in admiring the sky. “Beautiful.”

      “The stars are like this in Iraq, too, at least with the blackouts for the war.” Why had he brought up the war, a subject she probably didn’t want to discuss, considering she’d lost her husband over there? But she regarded him calmly, as if waiting for him to continue. “When I had guard duty I’d stand at my checkpoint and stare up at the sky and imagine I was back here at home,” he explained.

      She tilted her head up toward the sky again. “Afghanistan has stars like this, too.”

      “Your husband was in Afghanistan?”

      “I was in Afghanistan, before the war. Well, he was, too. We were in the Peace Corps there. That’s how we met. When the war broke out, he wanted to help. He thought with his familiarity with the country and the language, they could use him in Afghanistan, but the army had other ideas.”

      “Where did you live before you came back here?”

      “Chloe and I were in Denver. Then my grandmother fell and broke her hip and I knew she needed help with the orchard. And I needed a place to pull myself together and decide what to do next.”

      “This is a good place for that kind of thinking.” He’d spent plenty of hours in his cabin on his parents’ ranch trying to answer that same question.

      “Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To decide what to do next?”

      He told himself it was a logical question. But he couldn’t help feeling her quiet gaze assessed him more accurately than he was used to. Amy Marshall had an air of perceptiveness

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