Oosterhout — Brooks

On the sixth day, somewhere south of Olympia, he found a roadside diner that looked almost exactly like The Rusty Spoon. He went in for coffee. The waitress had a streak of gray in her red hair and a tattoo of a baseball on her forearm. She didn’t ask for his order. She just set down a cup and said, “You’re Brooks, aren’t you?”

“You’re me,” Brooks said.

He didn’t take a car. He walked—through the Skagit Valley tulip fields, past the outlet malls of Marysville, across the floating bridge into Seattle. He slept in bus shelters and behind churches. People offered him rides. He always said no. He told himself he was walking toward something, but really, he was walking away from the person who had stopped throwing. brooks oosterhout

He blinked. “Do I know you?”

The old man nodded. “I’m the you that kept walking. Never stopped. Never went back to the mound. Ended up here, working as a groundskeeper for a stadium that hasn’t had a game in twelve years.” He stood up, joints creaking. “I sent the picture because I wanted to see if you’d come.” On the sixth day, somewhere south of Olympia,

He stared at it for a week. Then he quit the diner, packed a bag, and started walking south.

On the tenth day, he reached Portland. The address from the postmark was an old minor league stadium, half-abandoned, its outfield grass overgrown. A chain-link gate hung open. He walked in. She didn’t ask for his order

Home plate was still there. The scoreboard was the one from the photo. And sitting in the dugout, wearing a faded Mariners cap, was a man in his seventies with a familiar face—Brooks’s own face, aged forty years.