The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  “He’s our driver.” Marvin smiled.

  “Where’s Ernie?”

  “Long story.”

  Marvin stepped up into the bus and the first base coach followed. I came in last of all and sat in the driver’s seat. I had driven such a bus before; Marvin’s memory of that was right. It had happened during my time playing with the St. Lucie Mets, when after a rainout and a bottle of tequila our permanent driver became temporarily incapacitated. I had been part of the group of guys who had cajoled him into all the misery he subsequently found himself in, and I felt a responsibility to ensure he didn’t lose his job. So I had hit up the driver of a tourist coach full of Germans who were staying at the same hotel and got him to give me the fifteen-minute version of how to drive a bus. I didn’t have a license for it, not then and not now, so I wasn’t planning on making a career out of it.

  It was like driving a car, only longer. And wider. Like an RV with more lives at stake. I closed the door and fired the bus up and gently pulled away, hoping that my brief experience more than a decade earlier would hold me in good enough stead.

  I slowly edged the bus out to the end of the driveway and waited until the road was good and clear before pulling out. As I did, my phone rang. My first instinct was to leave it where it was. I didn’t feel that having a conversation, let alone taking my eyes off the road, was the prudent move in the circumstances. The phone rang and rang, and then it rang out. Then it started up all over again.

  A player who was seated in the front row of the bus leaned down and spoke to me over my shoulder. “You gonna answer that?”

  I wasn’t sure what it was with people and answering phone calls. It wasn’t like we got fined for not getting it on the first ring, or at all. But I glanced up at the guy, and he gave me a look that suggested it would be mighty rude to let it ring out a second time, so I slipped the phone out of my pocket and hit the little green icon. Then I hit the icon to put it on speakerphone so I didn’t have to hold it, and I set it on the console in front of me.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Is that Mr. Jones? Miami Jones?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Nurse Gabriela Martinez, from the hospice.”

  “Nurse Gabriela. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I just wanted to call you to tell you that Dr. Castle is awake and alert.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m glad.” I was glad, even though I didn’t really understand why it warranted a phone call.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, he’s lucid. He knows where he is. It’s a good day, you know? For that thing we were talking about.”

  “It’s not a great time,” I said. I understood what Nurse Gabriela was saying, but I wasn’t sure there was much I could do, given my current circumstances.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “He’s back, but I don’t know if he’ll ever be back again. It’s been days since he’s been this good. It might be now or never.”

  The player sitting behind me leaned over my shoulder again. “What’s now or never?”

  I glanced up at him, slightly annoyed. I couldn’t quite see how the hell it was any of his business. But I had to concede that I was having the phone call by speakerphone on a motor coach full of people.

  “It’s my fiancée’s father,” I said. “He’s got ALS.”

  “What’s ALS?” asked the player.

  A player from the other side of the aisle leaned out. “Ain’t that Lou Gehrig’s disease?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  That’s one of the things about baseball players. They’re generally young, and generally young men don’t really care too much for history. They’re doers, inventors. They don’t look back for inspiration. Except that in baseball, they do. Most guys know all the stories about Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson and Pete Rose. They know about Barry Bonds and Greg Maddux. The hitters know all the home run record holders, and the infielders know all about Derek Jeter. The pitchers have all heard the stories of Phil Niekro’s knuckleball or Nolan Ryan’s heater. Baseball players aren’t just students of the game, they’re students of the history of the game. So despite their youth, everyone on the bus knew who Lou Gehrig was. They knew he had been a hall of fame player and had only quit the game when his body failed him, and that he had died from the debilitating disease that had taken on his name.

  The player in the first row was still leaning over my shoulder. “Is he dying?” he asked.

  I nodded. I told them about how we were visiting, and what I had planned, and why the nurse was calling me in the first place.

  The second player, the one who had known about Lou Gehrig’s disease, stepped out of the seat and into the aisle.

  “Are you serious?” he said. “You gotta take care of that, man.”

  “Let me get you guys where you’re going and then—”

  “No way,” he said, turning to the rear of the bus. He whistled loudly, drawing any eye that wasn’t already on him. The serious conversations and joking and guitar playing stopped. Those wearing bulky headphones pulled them down around their necks.

  The player called his teammates to attention and told them who was on my phone, and what was happening, and what I needed to do. When he was done he turned his attention to Marvin Tibbs, who had taken a seat halfway into the bus. Everyone looked at him.

  I felt for Marvin. He didn’t call the shots. The team manager called the shots, but bench coaches like Marvin were left to pick up the pieces. They did the serious work, like making sure that everybody got where they needed to go, that training ran the way it should, that batting practice was done, and that the pitching coaches were taking care of prized arms. If the team didn’t make it to the ballpark on time, if the manager was left alone sitting in the dugout, chewing on sunflower seeds all by his lonesome, it was the bench coach who would lose his job. He was an important cog in the machine, but not a million-dollar one. Easily dismissed and even more easily forgotten.

  Marvin Tibbs didn’t miss a beat. “Let’s do this thing,” he said.

  The bus full of athletes erupted into a cheer, and the guy sitting behind me slapped my back and told me to get where I needed to go.

  “Nurse Gabriela,” I said. “We’ll be right there.”

  “We’ll be ready,” she said.

  I drove away from the ballpark, pedal to the metal like a bat out of hell.

  I hit the button to end the call with Nurse Gabriela, then I hit another icon on the screen for an app that Sal’s guy, Julio, had me install. It was a very basic app, but it looked like the sort of thing that held the nuclear launch codes. It was simply a black screen with a very large red button. I was relieved that the button didn’t say fire. It said send. I hit the button, and with an electronic blip, my text alert went out into the ether.

  Then I left the phone alone. I kept my foot hard to the accelerator and tore along North Center Street toward the hospice and a sick old man suffering from a disease named after a baseball player.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The bus skidded to a stop in front of the hospice in a cloud of burning rubber. I released the door with a hydraulic wheeze and jumped down without using the steps and dashed inside. Nurse Gabriela was waiting for me in the lobby. I looked in her eyes to get a sense of whether the situation had changed and Ryan Castle had gone downhill and left us again. But she smiled the easy smile that she was so adept at, the one full of hope.

  “We’re ready to roll,” she said.

  “How is he?”

  “Better than I’ve seen in weeks.”

  I looked around the lobby for Danielle but saw only family and friends of other patients, some sitting, some standing, some pacing anxiously.

  “Danielle?” I asked.

  “I called them. She’s on her way.”

  I nodded and turned toward the door at the sound of energetic baseball players disembarking their bus. As I did, I saw Danielle and Jane wander in. The day had presented itself a few degrees warmer as Phoenix began i
ts steady and relentless climb into the hundreds. Danielle had gone with a light summer dress that made me think of picnics in Central Park.

  The women stopped by Nurse Gabriela and me. Jane offered me a wink, and Danielle gave Nurse Gabriela a frown.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “How’s Dad?”

  Nurse Gabriela gave her the easy smile and told her that her father was just fine.

  Danielle shook her head and looked at me. “What?” she said.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  Danielle shrugged like she didn’t really understand what was so urgent, but she said nothing as her attention was taken by the busload of men coming in through the front door of the hospice.

  They looked exactly like that which they were. Fit young athletes, all wearing matching uniforms—warm-up jackets and track pants and polo shirts. But it was the ballcaps that gave them away. The iconic yellow and green of the Oakland Athletics.

  Danielle turned back to me with a frown. “What is going on here?” she asked as the lobby filled with baseball players.

  “Come with me,” I said. I took Danielle’s hand and dragged her away, past the antiseptic corridor that led to the rooms and into a small room that was off the corridor to the admin offices. It was about the size of the meeting room at the hotel where I had slugged Ricky Spence. But it wasn’t set up for meetings or business lunches. It was set up as a small chapel. It was nondenominational in nature, accepting of all comers, but lined with benches acting as pews and a small pulpit at the front that might have been confused with a lectern in a different environment. There were unlit candles on a table to the side. Someone had set a tripod up in the middle of the aisle that ran down the center of the room. I stopped short of it and turned to Danielle as the door sucked closed and the hubbub of the lobby dissipated.

  “What the hell is going on, MJ?” asked Danielle. “I need to know what’s wrong with Dad?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing? So why do I need to be here all of a sudden?”

  I stepped close to her and took both of her hands in mine. “So I can ask you to marry me.”

  Danielle’s frown deepened. “You already asked me that. I’ve got the ring, remember? Did you get hit on the head?”

  “No, I didn’t get hit on the head.” I shrugged. “I did the hitting.”

  “You what?”

  “Don’t worry about it. What I’m saying is, I’m not asking you to marry me. Not in some general sense, at some future time. Not like I did before.”

  “Then what on earth are you doing? You’re talking like a crazy man.”

  “I didn’t ask you in here to ask you to marry me. I asked you in here to marry me. As in right now. Right here.”

  “Have you gone insane? Of all the times and all the places . . .”

  She was right. Outside the door and down the corridor, her father lay dying. It really wasn’t the ideal place and time for nuptials. But if I’d learned something in my long and winding life, it was that sometimes the best time is right now. Sometimes the picture postcard, the fairy tale, had to be thrown out the window in favor of just getting the job done. Because if there was one thing more important than what a person did on their wedding day, it was the memory of that day they held for the rest of their married life.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” I said. “But hear me out. It’s your dad.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, and everything. He’s fine—in fact he’s great. Nurse Gabriela says he’s having one of the best mornings he’s had in some time. He’s awake and he’s lucid.”

  “MJ, we’ve been together for ten years, and now’s the time you get a bee in your bonnet about tying the knot?”

  “Exactly. Because right now your dad can be here. He can be part of it, and for however many days he has left, he can remember it.”

  Danielle dropped my hands and took a step back. She was shaking her head as she spoke. “This is about my dad? After everything I’ve told you, after all I’ve been through. You want my wedding day to be about my dad?” Danielle turned and stepped to the door of the chapel and then looked back at me. “Sometimes I think you really don’t understand me at all,” she said, and she pushed the door open and stormed away.

  I didn’t move. I didn’t know where to go. The smart part of me wanted to chase her down and explain to her what I so inarticulately had already tried to explain. But my legs didn’t seem so eager. I was still standing in the same spot when the door opened again and Jane stuck her head in.

  “We okay?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, my mouth dropping open.

  Jane didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll talk her down.”

  She disappeared as the door closed again and I was left in the quiet chapel, wondering where exactly I had gone wrong. There were so many possibilities. Everyone’s life took wild and unexpected turns, and it wasn’t until time had passed that we could look back and understand where we should have gone right and where we should have gone left.

  As I stood there, it became obvious to me. I could see a fork in my past road that made me feel like it was the root of all my great mistakes. I couldn’t connect the moment with what had gone on since in any logical form. It was more symbolic, mental. But I saw it in my mind’s eye, as clear as a bright spring day, as I stood in the quiet chapel.

  It was the day I had locked up and left my home on Singer Island. It was a misfit of a place that didn’t quite gel with its neighbors along the Intracoastal waterfront. I had come about it almost by accident, a serendipitous chain of events that led me to becoming a homeowner of a house that, like me, was all seventies and thoroughly unfashionable. But I couldn’t help but feel that everything good that had happened since had revolved around that building, and having given it up, everything seemed to slide. I was probably reading far too much into it, but such is the nature of a melancholy mind. I heard the knob turn and watched the door open again. This time it was one of the players.

  “So, is the game called off or is it just a rain delay?”

  I shrugged. “I guess we’ll know in five.”

  The player looked at me uncomfortably and then retreated from the room. Finally my legs decided to develop some gumption, and I followed him out into the lobby. There was no sign of Danielle or Jane, just the large gathering of people who all looked unsure about what to do with themselves. It was an eclectic group, a mix of young athletes and older people in their final days. We mulled around in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds those of wheelchairs being pushed from one place to another.

  I heard footsteps behind me but paid them no heed, until I heard the voice. It was Jane.

  “There you are,” she said.

  “And?”

  “She’s in the chapel. Looking for you.”

  I headed straight back into the chapel room from which I had just come. I found Danielle standing where I had been, in the aisle between the makeshift pews. She had her arms crossed and was leaning her weight on one leg, which wasn’t the most encouraging look.

  “Jane says I should listen to you.”

  “I’m sorry I’m such a ditz,” I said.

  “That you are.”

  “But I want you to understand that this isn’t about your father. Well, not entirely about him. It’s about you. And me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either. But here’s the thing. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have allowed it to come to this. I wouldn’t be standing here in a hospice asking you to get married. I would’ve asked you, and I would’ve done it, and all that would’ve happened ten years ago. Because the thing is, I knew. I knew the first day you turned up at my house—our house—on Singer Island. After I’d lost Lenny and I really didn’t know which way was up or which way was down. Do you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “You turned up with a si
x-pack of beer, uninvited. And I knew right then. At least the smart part of me did. The dumb part of me, the main bit, has spent all these years trying to convince myself that it couldn’t get any better, that us being married would somehow ruin everything we had. Honestly, I was afraid. I lost my mom, and I lost my dad, and I lost Lenny. Always after something good happened. I couldn’t lose you, too. But the fact is, I’m an idiot. I should’ve asked you that day. I shouldn’t have waited.”

  “If you had asked me that day, I would’ve thought you were crazy.”

  I stepped toward her. “So it wouldn’t have taken you all those years to figure out how crazy I was. But I can’t go back. I can’t go back and change it, I can’t go back and say to you that I want you to stay and I don’t want you to go, and I can’t go back and tell you that nothing that I ever do from this moment on will be any good unless you’re part of it. I wish I could go back and do that, but I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to go back,” she said. “I’m here now, and I will be when we get back to Florida.”

  “I know that. But when we get back to Florida, it will be you that won’t be able to go back. You won’t be able to come back to this moment in time, to this place, right now. You won’t be able to have a do-over, the opportunity to be walked down the aisle by your father. And I know that won’t erase all the ill will, all the conflict you feel. It won’t change the past. It won’t rewrite your history. But if we wait until we get back, and he’s not part of it? I can’t help but feel you’ll regret not taking the opportunity to do it while he can remember. It’s hard to believe that letting this go, not taking the chance, won’t keep you up at night for the rest of your life.”

  For a moment we stood eye to eye but feet apart. I could see the cogs turning, but I didn’t know which way they would go.

  “I should’ve done it ten years ago,” I said again. “And I should’ve done it every single day since then. I should do it today. And if you don’t want to, then I should do it tomorrow, and I should do it every chance I get every moment thereafter. I don’t care when we get married. I just care that we’re on this journey together. But something in my gut tells me that more than any other day, this is the day that we both need a memory like this.”