Free Stef Ann Holm by Lucy gets Her Life Back Page A

well. Chalk lines marked the diamond, and the elevated pitcher’s mound was raked to perfection.

    An upcoming season always got under Drew’s skin like a bottle of Tabasco sauce. He was so hot for the game, he felt on fire. He lived for baseball season.

    He’d never been into football, not even in high school. He’d gone to the home games, only to see who’d hook up with whom and where the best parties were going to be that night.

    Reflecting on his youth, he furrowed his brow, and the thrill of an expanse of turf was momentarily forgotten as memories took him back in time.

    His parents had had to get married because his mom was pregnant. Drew wasn’t sure if they were ever in love with each other, even in the beginning. He’d been born in Alhambra, California, in 1960. They’d moved around a lot. His parents never got along, his dad going from one job to the next, always thinking that the new and improved place of employment would be the key to his happiness. Employment satisfaction was never there, and his mom would get so angry with him she’d sometimes disappear for a day or two, leaving the neighbors to watch Drew.

    He’d always wished he had a big brother, someone he could look up to. But that wasn’t the case, and he’d had to learn early on to fend for himself.

    Pop hadn’t instilled a hard work ethic in him, and the male-slanted values he’d learned held little weight. His dad had been a British Petroleum fire-fighter in Carson—a job that nobody ever quit from because firefighters were heroes. But Pop said the pay was lousy for having to smell oil refineries all day and being in one of the most dangerous jobs in L.A. County.

    It had been true. A main pipe busted and the place practically blew the Port of Los Angeles into the ocean. But Pop had been long gone when that happened; he’d gotten excited about making more money at Union Oil—which made no sense, since he’d said he hated the smell of petroleum. He eventually quit that because he disliked working a long shift. Ending up at the Department of Water and Power, he spent more years working for them than any other company. In fact, he’d put in a good word for Drew, and reading water meters had been his first job.

    Drew’s childhood had been pretty much just an existence. He was a body at the dinner table, a mouth to feed. Sometimes he was forgotten about, sometimes he stayed overnight with a neighbor when his mom took off and his dad was working the night shift. Not having a close family had never allowed him to warm up to people, to trust and to expose his emotions. He kept things locked inside, not one for sentimentalities.

    But he’d known at a young age that he was special. Special in that he had a charm about him, and when he turned it on, that charm could get him pretty much anything he wanted.

    Friends’ moms would have home-baked cookies fresh out of the oven on the days they knew he was coming over after school. If he needed to be somewhere, a ride was always available. When he had a question about homework, someone’s dad had the answer.

    Puberty hit and he was the most popular boy in school. Never mind that he had no home life. He hid the fact that he was lonesome and didn’t have parents who cared. Frequently, he steered kids away from his house and went to theirs so nobody would see how he lived.

    When Drew got his first girlfriend, he didn’t know what to do with her. He’d been eleven and she was thirteen. She’d already had sex and had hinted she wanted to experiment with him. One day they ended up under the crawl space of her house, on the dirt, and she took off her dungarees and let him look at her.

    She’d had a patch of downy soft hair between her legs and he recalled being excited about it. Seeing her had given him a woody like he’d never experienced with his dad’s bathroom magazines. He never had sex with her, didn’t have the education to really go about it. Looking back, he thanked God he