Soft Sounds of Pleasure by Eden Connor

hadn't seen them since the day she'd buried Pete? Maybe they were shocked to see her with a man, but she'd been just as shocked when they'd all melted away after the funeral.
    Murphy's Law virtually guaranteed a few people had a kid both Charlie's age as well as Jonah's, but did they all have to play for these two teams? She wondered as she spoke to several, most asking about Charlie, and she cut off their questions and insincere remarks about her loss by introducing Colton, smiling grimly when that shut them up.
    She wrapped herself in the insulation of the rituals she'd observed since Charlie had been five. Selecting a spot near home plate, so she could see the pitches cross the plate, she unfolded her chairs. She asked Reggie's wife for a look at lineup cards so she could fill out her score book.
    "Oh my God, Lila Walker!" Reggie's wife was far too loud to suit Lila, but the screeching woman obligingly held out the pair of cards. "Here, you can have the scorekeeper's job; I know you're a better one than me. Thanks so much for getting us a pitcher, we sure needed another one. It's so good to see you, how have you been? I'm so sorry we didn't know poor Pete died."
    Anyone listening would never have guessed that the last time Lila had seen Reggie's wife, she had been spitting at poor Pete from the back seat of a police cruiser, under arrest for getting into a fight with another mother at a game.
    "Thank you. Nice to see you too, Janine. I don't mind keeping score, thanks. It's been years since I've been to Berry, the field looks nice, doesn't it?" She snatched the lineup cards and scurried back to her seat beside the fence.
    But the minute the umpire yelled "Play Ball", Lila let the game she loved draw her in, more than willing to be seduced anew by pageantry of the pitch, the hit, and the run.
    For just a second, the tall, tow-headed kid on the mound looked like Charlie, and Lila's lips moved in her usual prayer.
    * * * *
    Colton watched Lila with something akin to awe as the evening unfolded. She'd sauntered through the gate as if she owned this place, and her credibility transferred to him in some indefinable way. From the comfortable folding chairs she'd brought, to the scorebook on her knee, it was plain that Lila was in her element. She knew the woman running the concession stand and had introduced him. She knew the umpires and spoke to Reggie's wife as well as several of the other parents, from both teams, calling them all by name.
    And the parents spoke back, including him for the first time. He was happy to note that she met their inquiring looks with steady eyes. He relaxed, forgetting his concerns about Jonah and his worries that she would become upset if anyone brought up Pete. Some had, and Lila had thanked them for their sympathy, but their mention of him didn't make her look sad. She wanted to sit next to the fence between the house-shaped white rubber plate and the big circle lined off next to the fence a few feet from the dugout, front and center to anyone who was watching them or whispering about her. Serving notice that she did not care what they thought, he suspected.
    He hoped.
    Colton didn't understand most of the marks she made in the book, but he figured out by the top of the second inning that she was accurately marking balls and strikes in her book before the umpire yelled out those calls, along with some other shorthand he couldn't make sense of at the end of every at-bat. She spoke phrases he couldn't translate. She began to give Jonah and his teammates advice as they stepped up to the plate, and as the game progressed, he realized the young players had begun to look to her for that, too.
    "He took you to school last time," she said to one kid, who had "gone down looking"—whatever the hell that meant—in his first trip to the plate, loudly protesting the umpire's call of "strike three" as had exactly half of the onlookers. Reggie was yelling for all he was worth on every pitch, but Lila kept up a