From SPIRITS IN THE GRASS, a novel. University of Notre Dame Press, Fall, 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author. This excerpt may not be reprinted except with the permission of the U. of Notre Dame Press and/or the author.

From CHAPTER ONE

It's not the kind of thing you'd ever expect to find on the infield of a baseball field. After years of playing ball, Luke Tanner knows the usual things you find: cigarette butts, tarnished pop tops, frayed strips of cloth tape, the husk of a leather cover torn from a ball, or even a darkened Lincoln penny with the date worn off. But this object, partially buried beneath the dirt, looks thin and yellowish.
He drops his paint-chipped rake, kneels down on the dirt, and leans close to the infield. He pulls the object out of its socket in the earth, lifts it, turns it over and over. It's a small section of a bone, about four inches long; its surface is hardened, like the sun had dried it for a thousand years. He wonders why it feels heavy, and gives him a kind of tingling in his palm as he holds it. He thinks about dropping it, letting it go, kicking the soil with the toe of his worn leather cleats and burying it again. Instead, he just holds onto it, wrapping his fingers around it a little tighter, then stuffs it into the pocket of his T-shirt.
Luke turns and jogs to the middle of the ball field he loves already. It's a field he's dreamed of all winter, even though it's half-finished, just an expanse of bare soil surrounded by mounds of musty dirt, spirals of sod, and a flagpole balanced on concrete blocks, its chain clanking insistently in the wind. It's a field he loves not for what it is now, but for what it will be when it's finished. He can't wait for that day in June when he'll sprint from the dugout in his Lakers' uniform for the first time, the earth buoying him up on its taut green sea.