The Prospect by Eliot Parker (epub ebook reader .txt) 📖

hill onto the lower half of Central Avenue.

VII.

The hollow leading to the Triplet home was an isolated journey. With only two other houses occupying the area, the deteriorating two-story white Triplet home sat on a small hill overlooking the other homes. Aside from the house which was never maintained, a large, flat field lay west of the home, and it was Shane’s responsibility to keep the grass mowed and fertilized. Because Joann Triplet was always working, nobody else was available to maintain the field. But with baseball season underway, Shane had little time to do anything that was not affiliated with the Sheaville Loggers, much less take care of three acres of green grass.
The hollow was dimming into darkness as the sun set on another day in Sheaville, West Virginia. Shane raced up the dirt street, thinking about nothing other than his mama. Since the previous episode with Chaz and Olivia, he did not know how his delay would ultimately impact his mother.
Shane did notice the Charleston Gazette newspapers had not been picked up from the front porch, probably because Joann did not take the time to notice they were out there. When he reached his home, he opened the rusting fence gate and skipped up the crumbling sidewalk towards the front door. After swinging open the wooden screen door, his eyes were blinded by the bright lights in the kitchen.
As Shane’s retinas and corneas adjusted to the lumination, a plate slammed against the white cabinet next to the front door. Shane jumped with fright as the pieces of the blue plate made smaller secondary breaks once it hit the wooden floor.
Shane looked up, his jaw hanging and his body tense. “What the…!” he yelped.
“Your late!,” said Joann Triplet. The 39-year old chunky woman was sitting at the round table in the center of the kitchen, with her blazing red hair sticking out from her scalp in many different directions. Her violet eyeliner had trickled down her face and her pink lipstick had faded. Her waitress uniform appeared to be hanging off her body, and part of her bra was showing. Leaning back in the metal chair, her feet were propped on an adjacent metal chair.
“Mama, what happened to you today,” questioned Joann’s son. “I came to say goodbye to you at the diner and Jack said you left because you were sick. What happened?”
Shane crouched toward the floor and made an attempt to pick up the large chunks of destroyed plate. But his mama’s answer would halt that procedure before it began.
“Yea, no thanks to you. I am sick because of you. I have been sick because of you, and because of you, I will probably always be sick.”
Shane dropped the small pieces he had in his hands and rose slowly. By now, his blue shirt was lying in the floor and sweat was running from his forehead. His chest was soaked and his head began to throb. Stunned, he caught a whiff of whiskey, which had permeated throughout the kitchen.
“Mama,” he whispered, “your sick. Why don’t you go and lie down and get some rest.”
“I am not getting ANY rest! For one thing, I am not tired. Secondly, I am just dandy right where I am. Why don’t you get your ass moving and get the hell outta here. I will be just fine on my own…always have been, always will be. It’s all about baseball, right?”
“That’s not fair. You know I do not want to go, but this is how it is. This is how my life is and will be for quite some time.” Shane watched as his mother eyed him coldly, almost indicating she did not know or trust her son.
“Mama, I hate to see you like this. Please tell me what happened that got you like this today. I mean, you were doing so well.”
Joann scoffed. “I have not done well since we moved back to this rotten town. I cannot believe that all the teams in baseball drafting last year and this is where you end up. I mean, I left this town once thinking I would never return, and low and behold here I am back here once again.”
Shane gingerly approached his mother sitting at the table. The rest of the kitchen, like the rest of the house, was in ruins. The wallpaper was peeling from the corners of the room and the refrigerator barely kept food cold. The pipes underneath the kitchen sink leaked constantly, and the dripping water was the perfect paradox for the dirty dishes piled high in the auxiliary sink, which were in need of cleaning. As Shane inched closer, his mother jerked backwards and dropped her resting leg to the floor. Her eyes were bloodshot and the wrinkles on her cheekbones were suddenly thick and defined.
Joann reached below her chair and pulled out a half-empty bottle of whiskey and placed her lips around the rings of the open end, engulfing a large amount of the brown liquid. “Don’t move, I swear…you had best stay away from me!”
“Mama, please, this is no way to treat yourself. I know you have that borderline personality disorder, but please, leaving work and getting drunk are not ways to handle this. Maybe we need to go back to Charleston to the hospital and have you checked out.”
“So what,” Joann qualmed, totally ignoring the second half of Shane’s sentence. “You like your smoked tobacco, I like my whiskey. You know what, you can thank this town for that. That’s right. Good ol’ Sheaville, West Virginia. Your father use to smoke those blasted cigarettes like they were going to run away from him. I guess it was because there was nothing else to do in this town but saw trees and smoke. Sure didn’t help him any.”
Shane was aware of his mother’s propensity to redirect every problem in the life of the Triplet’s to Roger Triplet. Although he was killed in a sawmill explosion back in the late 1970’s, partly because Harlan Shea had failed to keep his equipment updated and inspected, Shane barely knew his father. Shane was three years old when Harlan Shea gave his family a $100,000 settlement for the accident. His mother, being the opportunist she is, fled Sheaville and moved to Pittsburgh. Roger Triplet was from the Pittsburgh and he and Joann had been there many times after they were married. When Shane was conceived, the trips north ceased. It had always been Joann’s intention to return to Pittsburgh permanently, and when Roger was killed, she and Shane moved there.
With no central father figure, Shane sought comfort in baseball. Like most kids, he progressed through t-ball, little league, senior league, and finally completed with an outstanding three-year high school baseball career at Carrick High School. While Joann never supported Shane’s decision to play baseball, she tolerated his choice because it gave him a reason to maintain good grades and it kept him, for the most part, out of trouble.
One unfortunate consequence of Shane’s decision was it left him somewhat introverted as a person. He was always popular with girls, yet he never paid much attention to them. Shane’s friends consisted mostly of his teammates and since they spent a lot of time together throughout the school year, he developed some meaningful relationships with some of them. However, the majority of Shane’s spare time was spent practicing the fundamentals of baseball. Seldom did friends come by the house or call to ask Shane to go someplace. He never discussed the issue, even when his mother probed him about it again and again. In fact, Joann would often come home after working as hostess for a nearby Bob Evans restaurant and catch her son throwing baseballs into an old fishing net that was tied between the branches of two trees. On certain evenings, Shane would be swinging a bat into the humid summer air, working on improving his stance and the fluidity of his swing. His idol was Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players in Cincinnati Reds history. “Pete always works on the fundamentals of everything,” Shane would always tell Joann.
When Shane graduated high school, the nightmare scenario Joann Triplet had envisioned but hoped would never happen materialized. Shane was courted by several colleges and universities to play baseball for them in exchange a free college education. Instead, he opted to enter the Major League Baseball Draft, and was selected in the 2nd round by the Cincinnati Reds. Parliamentary procedure for all Major League Baseball Draft picks is eventual minor league baseball system, which for Shane, meant being sent to the Appalachian Baseball Association to play for the Sheaville Loggers. Joann was mortified. Since moving back to Sheaville, she was never the same.
She found a waitress job at Ruth’s Diner, mainly because Ruth Busby was ready to slow down from her frantic work schedule and her son Jack needed someone to wait tables at the restaurant. With few friends except the everyday customers like Frank Miller and Phil Rodney, Joann always felt alienated in this town. After a few months being in a town and place she loathed, Joann Triplet’s moods changed. She was becoming increasingly irritable, and was moping around the diner and the house. In her absentmindedness, she often forgot to cash her paychecks or pay the bills. American Electric Power threatened to cut off electricity to the Triplet home and West Virginia American Water Company shut off water in the house twice. If it wasn’t for Shane discovering what had happened, he and Joann would have been homeless for sure.
After several weeks of this behavior, Shane became concerned and tried to talk to Joann about her problem. She remained stubborn and secretive, and she refused to share her feelings with her son. Finally, Shane asked Ruth Busby what to do. Ruth recommended taking Joann to Charleston Memorial Hospital to have her examined by the psychiatric physicians at the hospital. After tricking his mother into going to Charleston by promising her a trip to the Charleston Town Center Mall, they wound up at the hospital. Ruth called and warned the hospital of her arrival, and Joann was admitted for observation. After two weeks of analysis and tests, the doctor’s diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder. Shane new very little about it, but following consultations with the medical staff, he became familiar with the severity of the illness.
Borderline personality disorder describes long-term disturbance of personality function. Disturbances suffered by those with the disorder include a pervasive instability in mood, extreme “black and white” thinking, chaotic and unstable personal relationships as well as a disturbance in the sense of self. Joann developed this disorder over the death of her husband and not coming to terms with her personal grief, at least according to the doctor in Charleston.
After heeding his mother’s instructions, Shane froze. He was now three feet in front of the table, and within arms-length of his mother. With the right conditions, Shane could grab her or the whiskey, but given Joann’s behavior, the idea was risky at best.
“Mama, our situation has nothing to do with Dad.” Shane’s tone became more rigid. “We are here because I am trying to do well, trying to get to the big leagues so that we can have a better life for ourselves.”
Joann snorted at her son’s objectives. “You listen here and you listen good! Nobody ever comes to this town and leaves with any hope. Look at all the families still stuck here. The ones who did not move away when the mill was shutting down were lured to stay here by false promises. Now look at them and look at us. We are stuck here. No hope, no future, no life… just an existence. Now don’t tell me you have bought into