Work Text:
Esti had a system. Two phosphate sodas –large, if she could talk Jess into it– one lime, one strawberry. Two straws –bendy, if they had them– one in each glass. And then she could sip both flavors at the same time to create a perfectly blended drink. For the record, don’t suggest mixing the two flavors in the same cup. It’s not the same thing.
Jess had a system, too. It was to buy Esti as many sodas as she asked for, and then ply her for information. It worked 100% of the time at least 70% of the time, and it rarely cost her more than ninety cents or a dollar, which was money well spent.
She sat across from Esti at the soda fountain and watched the young woman take careful, precise sips of her soda concoction, and when Jess suspected that she was teetering right on the brink of brain freeze or a sugar rush or both, Jess asked her, steady and direct like, because Jess was a straight shooter in all matters, especially those of the heart,
“Does Lupe have a boyfriend?”
This was a subject that had been weighing heavily on Jess’s mind, more or less, for the last month or so. Since they’d been back in Rockford, Jess and Lupe had had to decrease the time they spent together from 24 hours a day down to a piddly 18 to 20 or so, and in all that time apart, Jess couldn’t help but wonder if maybe they were seeing each other, but maybe they weren’t seeing only each other.
They hadn’t talked about it, not exactly. Not in so many words. Jess was a smart and logical enough fellow to realize that that was a subject they ought to avoid with a ten foot pole –too much room for things to go south. Too much opportunity to find out something she didn’t want to hear. It was better to stay in the dark about things like that, or else to go about figuring them out through more indirect methods. Jess was, if she did say so herself, especially good at playing things subtle and keeping a level head.
“What?” Esti asked her, playing like she didn’t know what Jess meant. Jess rolled her eyes. Esti damn well knew what a boyfriend was, but she supposed she had to play ball a little bit to get what she wanted out of her.
“You know. Has she been seeing anyone?”
Esti grinned diabolically then, giving away her game. This was serious gossip, adult gossip , and she had been waiting ages and ages to be included in that sort of thing. She didn’t want to give it all away, not right at first, because she wanted to prolong this conversation as long as she could. At least long enough to get her sodas refilled.
“Besides you?”
Jess rolled her eyes again. Esti wasn’t near as cute as she thought she was, actually.
“I don’t mean hanging around. I mean seeing . Going out with. Has she mentioned anything?”
Esti leaned in again to sip more soda, building suspense. She pretended to think on it, and swung her legs under the table just a little bit. She knocked up against the side of Jess’s ankle accidentally in a way that sent a sharp little burst of pain up her leg.
“Esti,” Jess pressed again. They weren’t getting near as far as she’d hoped they would with this conversation. Must be one of the 30% times, then.
“Try this, Jess,” Esti commanded, flicking the straws around to the other side of the glasses, so Jess could lean in and sip out of them. She did, and took the tiniest little sip humanly possible. The sickly sweet flavors of the artificial fruit made Jess’s stomach turn.
“Mmm,” she lied, complimentary.
“I don’t think so,” Esti finally gave over, content with having jerked Jess around enough. “She definitely hasn’t been dressing any nicer. Why, did she say something?”
“Not exactly,” Jess admitted. She felt chastised, and didn’t exactly like to be called nosy by a teenager who spent more time pouring over Hollywood Weekly magazines than Jess thought was humanly possible.
“I think Carson is seeing someone,” Esti tried. That was better gossip in her opinion, anyways, because Carson was always reading books about romance and marriage and was surely a better protagonist for a real-life story about true love than boring, stick-in-the-mud Lupe who didn’t have a romantic bone in her entire body and wouldn’t know true love if it bit her, if you asked Esti. “I saw her writing a secret letter the other day.”
“Don’t gossip,” Jess said sharply. Then, “Do you want a refill on your sodas before we go?”
The thing about Esti was, she was a fucking snitch. Maybe not in principle, maybe not always, but when it came to Jess, Esti sank ships every time. Lupe couldn’t so much as duck into their room to lift one measly smoke from her before Esti was running down the stairs, hollering for the whole team to hear, “Jess, Jess! Lupe is in our room going into your pants again!”
So, consulting her was definitely out of the question.
The next option Lupe settled on was Ana. Despite what people may accuse them of, Lupe and Jess weren’t actually attached at the hip, and they did, on occasion, deign to do things separately from each other. Their own personal hobbies, if you will. Like for instance, Lupe had Mass, and Jess had betting on horse races at the track. She brought Ana with her to do that more often than not, because Ana was lapsed, and Lupe, who was an extremely non-judgemental person, to almost a saintlike degree, didn’t have so much as a single solitary passing thought about that, actually.
Lupe cornered Ana in the kitchen, then, one afternoon. Ana was leaning over the sink with a quart of milk in her hand, inching it closer to her face to test if it was spoiled. Her smell test was inconclusive, and so she raised the bottle to her mouth and took one small, hesitant sip, and Lupe, the gentleman that she was, waited until Ana spit the sour milk out into the sink and rinsed her mouth twice before asking her,
“Say, has Jess been bringing anyone else to the track with you, lately?”
She’d been wondering, a bit, about that lately. Wondering, not worrying, mind you, because Lupe was far too calm and collected to worry about such a thing, and also, she knew how to mind her own business about things like that. They’d come to no agreement, set no terms, and so Jess was at perfect liberty to take liberties with whichever ladies she pleased. Lupe just wanted to know about it, because she was the type of person who liked a good view of the whole field before she decided on her plays. Just to have the information.
Ana turned from the sink and blanched at that question, because as a matter of fact, Jess had been bringing someone to the track with them lately, on occasion. It was Esti, and Ana had been threatened on pain of death, or at least slashed cleats, to keep that to herself. She was fairly sure that was what Lupe was getting at, because Jess had made it especially clear to the both of them that Lupe would not approve of the situation one bit.
The bottle of sour milk was still in her hand, and so Ana stalled for time to think of her best way out of the situation by recapping the quart and putting it carefully back into the refrigerator, closing the door firmly. It was no good, no great strategy appeared before her. She decided to go with the next best option: Keep it simple, stupid.
“Yes,” she answered Lupe, and left it at that. Lupe stared back at her for a moment, blinking, waiting for an elaboration. When she seemed to accept she wasn’t going to get one, she asked, just as simply,
“Who?”
Fuck. Now Ana was right back where she started. She wondered if there was anything else she could test in the refrigerator, spoiled or fresh, or if possibly there was a way she could pull a nice Irish exit.
“I don’t know,” she tried. This didn’t seem to work. Lupe narrowed her eyes, suspicious.
“Well, what did she look like?” Lupe returned.
Oh fuck. Lupe knew for sure. Ana was up a creek now.
“She had. Um. Dark hair.” Fuck, that was giving it away, wasn’t it. “Short hair. Blue eyes. Real quiet type.”
Lupe nodded. That was good information. She’d keep an eye out, the next time Jess and her went to the bar. Or just went anywhere, in general. Like for instance, sometimes they went to the corner store. Could be someone there, just for example.
“Good. Thanks.” Lupe clapped Ana on the shoulder, which was a move of Jess’s that people seemed to like, on her way out of the kitchen. Ana had been a big help, after all, and Lupe had a lot to consider.
Baker had refused to reinstate Lupe as co-coach this season, and so Jess had had to go around and strongarm the rest of the Peaches into voting her team captain, and also creating that position, and ponying up the fifty cents a week each for the corresponding raise. This meant that Lupe and Carson had been having a lot of Team Captain and Coach meetings lately, and therefore Carson would be in a prime spot to know exactly what Lupe had been getting up to lately. Plus, since Carson had found her and Lupe at The Office, she’d become an incorrigible gossip on social matters, a trait which Jess found to be exceedingly unattractive in a person, excepting when that person was Lupe.
“Shaw,” Jess started, from the doorway of Carson’s room. She was in a good position, tactically speaking, because she had Carson cornered, treed, practically, with control of the only exit. She didn’t expect Carson would be able to duck out of the window, after all, on account of her being in a skirt.
Carson was writing some sort of something in a notebook. Jess didn’t know what, she wasn’t interested in all of that namby-pamby literature nonsense. She slammed the notebook shut when Jess called her name, and then moved to sit on it.
“Hi, Jess,” she said, because she was playing it cool now, really covering her tracks.
“You going to invite me in, or what?” Jess asked, because she had good manners like that.
“Oh. Oh, yeah, sure. Come on in.” Carson sort of waved her arm awkwardly, gesturing her in. Jess figured she probably made Carson sort of nervous, which was not an experience wholly unfamiliar to her, nor wholly undeserved. “What, uh. What can I do for you?”
Jess stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. Then she took a cigarette out from behind her ear, stuck it in her mouth, lit it, shook her match out. Carson wrinkled her nose just a little bit. Carson wasn’t much of a smoker, which Jess considered to be a glaring character flaw in a person if there ever was one, excepting when that person was Esti.
“You talk to Lupe lately?” Jess inquired. This was a trick question, see, to judge Carson’s honesty on the subject –Jess knew that she had, just yesterday afternoon, for instance.
“Yeah, um. Why? Did she say something?”
Jess puffed on her cigarette. Something about Carson’s ever-present nervous energy sort of set Jess’s teeth on edge, but she tried not to hold it against her. Not too much, at least.
“Why?” she asked, let her unfriendliness hang in the air, just a bit. Sometimes she did it on purpose, you know. “What’s there for her to say?”
“Nothing!” Carson said quickly and firmly, because she could feel herself getting dragged into an argument, like being sucked into an undertow. She had enough coaching experience and street smarts by now to avoid that sort of thing. “We were just going over the batting order, that’s all.”
Jess hummed around her cigarette. She supposed that seemed harmless enough, as long as she didn’t end up batting after Shirley again.
“That’s all?” she asked again. With Carson you had to be sure –she liked to keep things close to her chest and then let them burst out at inopportune times.
“That’s all,” Carson promised, looking a little bit like someone who was afraid to be thumped.
“She seem funny to you?” Jess asked. That was about as plain of a way she could think of to phrase it. “Different?”
“No,” Carson said slowly. Something was going on here, she could tell. Her coachly instincts kicking in. “Why? What’s wrong with her? Is it her arm, again?”
Jess shook her head. Lupe’s arm was just fine, and she would know. She would know a lot of things about Lupe, actually, and it was just now striking her how ridiculous it was to expect that Carson would have a better idea of what Lupe was getting up to than Jess. Carson , of all people. She was almost embarrassed to have tried it.
“Her arm’s just fine,” Jess decreed, no room for doubt. “Don’t put me after Shirley.”
You wouldn’t know it to look at her, because Lupe carried herself with such an unaffected, devil-may-care attitude around authority, but actually, when she was a kid, she had been something of a teacher’s pet. It was a skill Lupe wasn’t above dusting off and putting to good use, after Ana’s tip-off had come to very little fruition, and she set off sidling up to Bev, all smooth like, the first chance she had to get the woman alone.
“How’s the war been lately?” Lupe asked, when she caught her in the back hallway one evening. That seemed to be Beverly’s biggest hobby, or at least the thing she liked to talk about the most. It would be, Lupe figured, a good way to get her going.
“The war, Miss García?” Bev asked, not sure that she’d quite heard the question correctly. But no, she had. Beverly was a grown woman, more accomplished than most, and yet these were the sorts of questions she was being paid to field from a band of women who knew more about baseball statistics than common sense, it seemed. “A lot of people have died, I hear.”
“Right, right. I knew that,” Lupe tried to backtrack. On second thought, engaging in small talk with Bev probably wasn’t the right move. Better to get straight down to business.
“You have the sign in logs, right? From when people go out at night?”
“I do,” Beverly agreed. She was, after all, a perfectly organized sort of woman, buttoned up nicely. She knew how to keep track of important things, and all the things Mr. Alan Baker Jr. wanted her to keep track of, besides.
“Well,” said Lupe, who was really reaching back into the furthest reaches of her memories to pull out the sort of tricks that had won her teachers over in the past. She clasped her hands together, for instance, and tried to look innocent. “Could I take a look at them, please?”
Beverly looked her up and down. Part of her job was to figure out when these ballplayers were up to something, which was usually easy enough. The other part was to figure out exactly what they were up to, and sometimes that proved a bit more challenging.
“What for?” she asked, because that was as good of a place as any to start.
Lupe hadn’t planned for an interrogation that thorough, but she thought quick on her feet, and said,
“I left my hat at the movies the other night, and I wanted to see when I was there last.”
Bev scoffed under her breath. She may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night, and she wasn’t falling for it. Not with her well-honed, tactical mind, her keen ability to sniff out bullshit, and the fact that Miss García was currently standing directly in front of her, wearing her missing hat right on her head.
All that said, sometimes it was easier to let the Peaches think they were pulling one over on her and be done with it, so she could hurry off to listen to her shows in peace and quiet. Especially a ruse as harmless as this.
“Alright then,” she agreed. They were standing just a few steps outside of her room now, and Bev retreated into it briefly to retrieve the log book off of her desk. She handed it over to Lupe easily enough, and was admittedly not disappointed to see her scurry off down the hallway with her bounty just as soon as she could get out her thanks.
Lupe took the log book into the sitting room and sat with it on the sofa. She cracked it open on her knee and flipped through the pages until she came to the current day, and then worked backwards from there.
Christ, were her and Jess really that bad at getting back to the house on time? She hadn’t realized they were so much worse than the other women, on average. They were in real danger of looking bad, Lupe figured, and so they should probably do the responsible thing and start encouraging the rest of the Peaches to stay out later, more often.
But all that was beside the point, really. All the nights she and Jess had been out together were hardly what she was concerned about. She wanted to know if Jess had been going out on her own, without telling her.
It was easy enough to sort out which nights those were. On nights they were going to go out together, Lupe would stop in the sitting room and sign the both of them in, preemptively, because she knew Jess would forget herself more often than not, and Lupe didn’t want her to get into trouble with Bev any more than she absolutely had to. Even on days when they didn’t go out, Lupe ended up signing Jess in plenty often, just to be safe. It wasn’t dishonest, exactly, because as Jess’s best friend, Lupe had the right to speak for her, on matters serious and trivial. Besides, Lupe had always kept the most thorough log of Jess’s whereabouts, out of everyone.
So all Lupe had to do to figure out which nights Jess had been out on her own was look for the nights when her name was actually written in her own handwriting, or the notes when her name was absent altogether.
She felt a little bit like a detective, actually, as she poured over the pages, carefully examining signatures. She wished she had a cigar, or maybe a secretary to fetch her a cup of coffee. Not to say so herself, but this was quite possibly Lupe’s most brilliant plan yet.
Or, it would be, if she could manage to find so much as a single incriminating signature. Her stomach fell as what at first seemed like such a brilliant plan was dashed with every flip of the page. The more she looked, the less convinced Lupe was that Jess had ever so much as laid a finger on this book. Every page was just JessandLupe, JessandLupe, JessandLupe, over and over and over again.
Damn it. Jess must have outsmarted her on this one. Lupe wasn’t exactly sure how, just yet, but she was more determined now than ever to get to the bottom of it.
If there was anyone in this entire house that had Lupe wrapped around her finger, clear and away, it was Maybelle Fox. Lupe was hung up on that girl, bad, and Jess could tell you that for a fact. Carson may have been a bust –an embarrassing bust– but Maybelle, well, Jess had no small doubt that Lupe would be more than willing to spill her guts to her. Plus, Maybelle was a ravenous smoker, and so clearly, a much more trustworthy source of information.
There was a special sort of snuff she liked, as a matter of fact, a girl after Jess’s own heart, and so she swung by the corner store on the way home from practice to grab a tin of it, in an attempt to butter Maybelle up.
“Hiya, girlie,” Maybelle grinned to her, as Jess sidled up to the porch swing where she was sitting, knitting happily. Maybelle was a woman who liked to stay busy, stay productive, and she always liked to have her fingers in as many different pies as possible, figurative and literal.
“Hey, Maybelle,” Jess returned happily. “Mind if I sit?”
Maybelle picked her knitting bag up, swung it around to the other side of her hips, making room.
“Sure thing,” she announced, picked up her needles again.
Jess handed over the tobacco with a little flourish, and Maybelle preened over it joyfully, tucking the package into her brassiere.
“You shouldn’t have!” she announced, with a giggle. “God, I can’t wait to knock those Comets’ teeth in this Thursday!”
“Here, here,” Jess concurred. They were more than due a nice, resounding victory. There were two new teams in the league this year, and they were no jokes. They were no Peaches, either, of course.
Jess set about rocking them, just a little bit, with the scuffed toe of her shoe. Maybelle knit a line of what was either a scarf or a pair of socks, Jess was pretty sure, and even if Jess didn’t care much for knitting, she had to admit the rhythmic clacking noise of the needles was rather nice. She could see why Maybelle liked it so much.
“Anyway,” Jess announced, because there was no point in stretching this out, after all, and she respected Maybelle too much to try and beat around the bush, “Do you know if Lupe’s seeing anyone lately?”
Maybelle giggled some at that, but she tried to cut it off before she hurt Jess’s feelings too much. She’d expected something like this was coming, because she considered herself to be pretty good at picking up on when something was going on between two people, romantically speaking, and also because Lupe had a habit of talking in her sleep.
“Oh gee,” Maybelle said, choking down the last little bit of her laugh. She pretended to think about it, about Jess’s question, and she let Jess continue rocking the pair of them until she got to the end of the round on her sweater cuff.
“Besides me, you mean?” Maybelle asked, innocent as could be. She very intentionally kept her eyes on her work, so Jess could imagine she’d missed the look that surely fired across her face. That girl was just as easy to wind up and twist into knots as her yarn, maybe even more so. Predictable, too.
“You?” Jess choked out. The rocking had stopped. Maybelle pretended not to notice.
“Sure, sweetie,” Maybelle confirmed. She crossed one ankle under the other, purled a few stitches. “Why, it has to have been going on five, maybe six weeks now.”
“Oh.” Jess responded dumbly. That was, to put it lightly, not what she was expecting to get out of this conversation. Not in the slightest.
It was good Maybelle had decided to be honest with her. She was glad she’d heard it, and from the horse’s mouth, at that. Not that Maybelle was a horse, of course. That’s not what Jess was saying.
She would just have to ask Lupe about it directly, was all. Sort it out between the two of them, man to man, and go from there.
Lupe had sorted it out, now, after her last resounding failure. The strategy had to be to go to the person on the team who was least like Beverly. She’d thought Bev, with her facts and her documentation, was the way to go. But clearly in this –matters of the heart or whatever you would call this whole mess– Lupe was best off going to someone adept in the arts of human emotion. The social arts. Being friendly.
Maybelle, in other words.
Maybelle, Lupe had come to learn, was an early riser. Lupe, as she’d long since known, was not. But this was very important, and probably her best chance of getting Maybelle alone, in private, and so Lupe set about doing the unthinkable –setting her alarm clock for six o’clock in the morning.
She’d woken up to it, regretfully, and then plodded to the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face, in an attempt to wake herself up. By the time she made it down the stairs, still in her pajamas, Maybelle was already fully dressed, hair and makeup done, sitting at the breakfast table, sipping her tea and reading the paper, bright and shining even at this unreasonable asscrack hour of the morning.
Lupe pulled a chair out next to her and plopped down, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Maybelle looked at her, pitying, over the sports section. Boy, this was getting out of hand. She’d expected Jess to have resolved it by now, but apparently not. She’d have to kick it up a notch, even. She allowed Lupe to collect herself, wake herself up a little, and continued her reading patiently until Lupe was ready to begin in on her.
“Maybelle,” Lupe paused here to take a giant, stuttering yawn, “can I ask you something?”
“Sure, chickie,” Maybelle responded. She folded her paper up politely and set it aside, giving Lupe her full attention.
“Do you think Jess is seeing anyone?” Lupe asked. Maybelle patted her arm sweetly. Why oh why she was cursed to be the only one around here with any common sense was beyond her, and yet here she was. Hopeless, the lot of them. She considered her next move. Maybelle was willing to help them, of course, but she wasn’t above having just a tiny bit of fun while she did so.
“Well, no, I don’t expect so. I don’t think her wife would approve of that, for one.”
Boy if that didn’t wake Lupe up, quicker and more effectively than if Maybelle had dumped a pitcher of ice water on her head.
“Her wife?” Lupe squeaked.
“Sure,” Maybelle replied, took another sip of her chamomile. She tried to think quickly, now, of a convincing Canadian city. “In Ontario?”
“Wife?” Lupe repeated again, stunned, more under her breath to herself than anything. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck , that was not what she was looking to hear.
“Why don’t you go talk that out with her, chickie?” Maybelle suggested kindly. Lupe nodded, then, still half shell-shocked, and set off to go and do just that.
Maybelle was glad to see her go. She did want them to work things out, after all, and she knew they would. But Mr. District Attorney was on break this week, you know, and a gal had to do something to get a little entertainment around here!