Collector’s Item
Collector’s Item
By Linda Petrucelli
The dial-up modem dings and the AOL metallic voice buzzes, You’ve got mail! You type in the CNBC address and fill out the form. The Suze Orman Show, not-to-be-missed Saturday night TV with Susan Lynn “Suze” Orman, guru to the fabulous but broke. The Tips for Prospective Guests advise, no run-of-the-mill financial question will do. The important thing is that there’s conflict so the audience can take sides.
The Trans-Pacific moving man, straining in his coveralls, swaddled the trunk with sheeting like Saran Wrap, and sealed the wooden chest into a spongy cocoon. It was the last piece of furniture to be removed from our East Village apartment.
“Take good care of this.” My husband laid his hand on top and let it linger. The trunk contained the bulk of his treasured baseball card collection.
“Time to say goodbye, Gary.” I was sitting on the floor in the front room.
The mover tipped the chest vertical on a dolly and wheeled it out the door. Gary leaned against the threshold and watched.
“Those aren’t just baseball cards,” he informed the disappearing moving man. He turned toward me. “They’re my childhood.” I put the sheaf of papers with the estimate back into its envelope. Insurance for the baseball cards was about three times what I expected.
The night before we left on the nonstop Newark to Honolulu flight, Gary loaded his carry-ons with his most valuable cards—keepers he’d saved since a boy and collected over the last thirty years. Each precious piece of cardboard lay nestled inside acetate sheets and organized into three-ring binders. His Jackie Robinson 1948 Leaf rookie card, he would wear hidden in the inner recesses of his belly bag.
While you wait in the phone queue, the show is in progress. The producer who greenlighted your question says, Relax. We’re live-to-tape. Bloopers can be edited out. You’re up next. Suze has become your money mentor since you moved and changed jobs, your income cut in half. In the background, a caller wants to co-sign a car loan for her twenty-something son. Suze interrupts, You’ve got to be kidding me! A bar of tinny muzak blares then fades.
And it’s Linda from Hawaii. Aloooooha! Or maybe I should say, Batter up?
I proposed to him on a snow-bound night in bed, with my eyes closed. We spooned and his fingers traced snowflakes on my shoulder. I didn’t want to become his wife but I’d very much like to be his partner forever. He was slow to understand that I had just asked him to marry me. The next night I made ratatouille and afterward, sitting on the sofa, he took my hand, kissed my lemon garlic fingers.
“1968 Topps, Red Sox,” he whispered and placed in my upturned palm, a baseball card. A fuzzy black and white photo caught a player in a body-twisting follow-through, bat flung wild over his left shoulder.
I read aloud: “Petrocelli Socks Two Homers.”
“I’ll never ask you to change your name.”
***
“Suze, I wonder if you could umpire a fight I keep having with my husband. It’s about his baseball card collection.”
Girlfriend, Suze pauses for dramatic effect. Do you mind my asking about how much it’s worth?
On top of the round oak table we had moved from New York to Hawaii, Gary laid out his baseball cards in a crazy quilt. He picked up a gaudy rectangle, brought it close for inspection then stretched his arm back for another view. “Warren Spahn!” Then he set the card on a tiny tripod, took out a Pentel pen, and began drawing. I was worrying through the mail on the other side of the table, but also watching him sketch.
He picked up another marker. “I learned how to draw the human form from baseball cards.” His pen soared across the page, a line drive.
You grip the telephone and can’t stop the fear from scattering into the receiver. “It’s crazy expensive here. We’ll never afford a house.”
On the sketchbook page, a lanky-legged pitcher takes shape, winding up to throw a fastball. “There were no Black people where I grew up in LaCrosse. Baseball cards were my first experience with integration. They are my history.”
“He won’t listen to reason, Suze. I want him to keep a few and sell the rest. Use the money for a down payment or maybe invest in a Roth. Don’t you think that’s the financially responsible thing to do?”
“Thank God my mother never threw them away!”
Girlfriend, you make sense, financially speaking, but you know what I always say: people first…
Gary walked into the study where I had been talking on the phone.
“The producer says she’ll email me the date when it’s scheduled to air.”
“So did she say to sell them?”
A lilikoi vine with new fruit breathed a sweetness through the jalousie windows.
“I’ll never ask you to change,” and a green abundance filled the room.
This was the ninth most-read piece of 2022.
Linda Petrucelli (she/her) is a writer obsessed with short form fiction and CNF. Her latest essays appear in Sky Island Journal, Barren, and Gulf Stream Literary Magazine—forthcoming in Parhelion. She won first place in the WOW! Women on Writing Fall 2018 Flash Fiction Contest and placed runner-up in the Santa Clara Review Fall 2021 Flash Nonfiction Contest. Linda lives on the Big Island of Hawaii where she writes and shares a lanai with one husband and ten cats.
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