Half Court Press

by A. J. Stewart

  “Like what kind of motivation?”

  “Maybe we can all get together and explain it to her.”

  “I plan on doing that. Tomorrow afternoon at the high school gym.”

  “Who’ll be there?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Perfect, that’s perfect.”

  “So you’ll be coming down?”

  “I’ll fly out of Huntsville first thing tomorrow. We gotta make it count though.”

  “We will,” I said.

  “Oh, and Jones, keep her safe.”

  “Yeah, I plan on it.”

  I ended the call and turned east to cross over Flagler Memorial Bridge, and as I did, I made one more call.

  “Miami,” said Tania. Finally, someone who had saved my number.

  “Hey, Tania. You all right?”

  “I’m okay, why?”

  “Just checking in. Listen, are you training tomorrow morning?”

  “No. I was planning on going down to the club for some pickup games, that’s all. Why?”

  “I’ll be passing by, I can give you a ride if you like.”

  “Sure, okay, I guess. But Mom mentioned something about you wanting her at the school gym tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I’ll explain what that’s about tomorrow when I see you.”

  “Okay. About eleven?”

  “Done. I’ll see you then.”

  I ended my call in time to turn onto North County Road. I was at my destination within a minute, which gave me next to no time to think about why I was really meeting Penny Morgan for dinner at the swankiest place in town.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I had a love/hate relationship with The Breakers hotel. I loved it because of its clubby, old-world charm, expansive dining rooms, and patio overlooking the turquoise of the Atlantic Ocean, and the service that made the most conscientious mother in the world look heartless. I hated it because it was way above my pay grade. A single night’s stay wouldn’t just dent my wallet, it would put a mortar round through it. So I contented myself with the occasional drink with Ron and the Lady Cassandra, who frequented the Seafood Bar like regulars.

  The valet took my SUV and I wandered up the stairs to the lobby with all its dark wood and carpet. I strode right through as if I owned the place and not so much as an eye turned my way. That’s the thing about rich people now: They no longer dress the part. Once upon a time, you knew a rich guy by the cut of his suit, or the pearls around his wife’s neck, or the fact that they wore evening dress to dinner. Now rich people dressed like slobs. The Breakers even had to provide signage to remind their well-heeled clientele to wear shoes.

  So my Florida shirt and khaki shorts attracted no attention at all, but my boat shoes probably announced me as a commoner. I bypassed the dining room where I knew chic casual was the order of the evening, and headed to the patio of the Beach Club Restaurant.

  Penny Morgan was sitting at a table in the shadow of the hotel, the sun beating its retreat behind us. The water glistened, and the late-afternoon breeze kept everything pleasant. Penny was drinking something from a Collins glass that might have been a gin and tonic or maybe a half bottle of tequila. She saw me coming and smiled but didn’t get up. I didn’t blame her. She looked damned comfortable.

  I bent down and pecked her cheek and she mine. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, so I put my hand on her upper arm as I did so, and felt that her skin was cool to the touch despite the warm day. Her arms were toned, like the rest of her, and I figured she could hit the court that moment and still be relatively competitive.

  “Good to see you,” she said.

  “Good to be seen,” I replied, taking the chair next to her so we could see each other without craning our necks but also take in the ocean view.

  “I hope this is okay,” she said.

  “The Breakers?”

  “No, the patio. I would have booked the steakhouse, but it’s the one place the hotel requires trousers.”

  “I prefer the view here, but I’m comforted to know they require pants inside.”

  “It’s just bar snacks and drinks out here.”

  “That’s my diet plan, so we’re in luck.”

  Penny smiled and I ordered a beer that arrived in a tall glass, and we ordered a platter of oysters—Connecticut Blue Points, no less—and some fish tacos, which all seemed beyond a bar menu to me.

  Penny slurped down two oysters while I sipped my beer. She was an athletic, attractive woman who had found success in her sporting career and then in her second career in real estate. She knew everybody worth knowing, and when she didn’t, she knew somebody who could make an introduction. She was stylish and intelligent. She made more in a month than I would probably make in a decade. Yet here she was, slurping down aphrodisiac bivalves with me, only days after we had done serious damage to a bottle of expensive tequila. I wondered what her angle was. I wondered why she had asked me to dinner. I wondered if I was overthinking it all again.

  I took an oyster, figuring it was hardly an injection of love potion. It was cool and briny, and not too big that I choked on it, but big enough that it didn’t feel like I had just paid ten bucks to eat a bug. I sipped my beer and looked at the ripples on the ocean and waited for Penny to say something.

  “You’re probably wondering why I asked you to meet me,” she said.

  “It had crossed my mind. I’m always happy to meet for a beer and a chat, but you always seem to be so busy.”

  “Yes, that’s what I am, Miami. Busy.” She sipped her drink. I could smell the gin from where I sat.

  “I’ve been thinking about the other night.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “We were talking over a few tequilas.”

  “We were.”

  “And a couple of things stuck in my head.”

  “Such as?”

  “To begin with, your client.”

  I nodded and picked up a taco. It was the size of one of those street tacos you get from a truck and that fits in the palm of your hand. Only, the price of this one would have bought the whole truck.

  “I can’t get her off my mind,” said Penny. “I feel like I might have come on a bit strong about not taking the opportunity.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “It’s just, tequila can bring out the melancholy.”

  “You just said there was an opportunity cost, and you paid it. That’s the case with everything, and I’m not sure Tania wants to pay.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s the homesick type.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “To the point of not nominating last year because the team was too far from home.”

  “Really?”

  “And not signing an international deal for the same reason.”

  “She misses Mommy and Daddy that much?”

  “That’s the theory I was working with, but now I don’t know.”

  “If it’s a someone, take it from me, she needs to confront it, and them.”

  “What happened to you?”

  Penny shrugged. “I had someone; it was serious. We had the conversations that couples have; we made plans.”

  She stopped and sipped her gin.

  “So what happened?”

  “I went away. I played basketball. I did my thing and he did his. Eventually the distance became too great, and the time apart didn’t make our hearts grow fonder.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You know, so am I. For a while after, I wondered if I had made the wrong choice. Basketball is a career that’s fleeting, and that was my reasoning for giving it my all, but later I wondered if I should have paid more attention to what was going to come after that career. The rest of my life. Because basketball was only for a short time, and life is long.”

  “It seems to have worked out okay.”

  “It has. I’m not complaining—well, not much. But for a long time I was lonely, and I blamed my decision to play for that loneliness. It took me a wh
ile to realize that wasn’t the problem.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “We had conversations, but not the conversation. We just assumed that I was going one way and he was going the other. We didn’t sit down and say, is there a middle ground? Could I have played WNBA and not Europe and saved my relationship? Maybe. I’ll never know. Would I have been happy with that? I don’t know, I never considered it. Could he have done his job in a city where I could have played for a WNBA team? Who knows? Sometimes when you have laser focus on a goal, you forget the art of compromise, and relationships are all about compromise.” She sipped her drink. “Don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “I do.”

  “So I kept thinking about your girl, Tania. There’s a reason she doesn’t want to play, and maybe it’s legit. Maybe she shouldn’t go to China or Europe or wherever. On the other hand, maybe she should. But maybe she’s forgotten how to compromise. Maybe she’s never learned how.”

  “I don’t know where her head is with that.”

  “So find out. I’m sure that’s not your job. I’m sure you’re getting paid to do something more prosaic like protect her life, but you need to find out and you need to tell her. Success comes from focus, but happiness comes from compromise.”

  I nodded. I was going to put that quote up on my office wall.

  “I remember my time. I lived in a bubble where there was only ever one definition of success. Me, my parents, my coaches, my agent—we all had one view of success that involved maximizing my playing years. More games, more money, more trophies. Now that I’m older, I see the myopia in that. Maybe I could have had it all, if I’d been open to it. Maybe Tania is open to it. She chose UM over UConn for her happiness, but she still chose basketball and still went number one in the draft. She might have the brains to figure a way through, if the voices with their singular definition of success get out of her head. You have to get them out, Miami. Out of her head, and out of yours.”

  I was about to sip my beer but I stopped.

  “Out of mine? How did this become about me?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking about you, too.”

  This was the part of the evening I had been dreading.

  “Why have you been thinking about me?’

  “Because your case has made me do some soul-searching. I feel like Tania is me twenty years in the past.”

  “You had quite a tan in the past.”

  “That’s beneath you, Miami Jones.”

  I said nothing. I felt like a schoolboy who had said something stupid to impress the cheerleader.

  “I started thinking about what the younger me might do if she had the knowledge I have now.”

  I still felt the sting of her rebuke so I kept my reply to myself.

  “First up, I have to admit that there’s every possibility I would just make the same choices—and the same mistakes—all over again. Maybe sometimes they’re written in our DNA, just like height or speed. But then I considered that knowledge was the DNA of mistakes. Better knowledge means better decisions, and that’s why wisdom is such a prize.”

  She slurped through her straw as her drink dried up. She made no move to order another.

  “So I started thinking about what I had then, and what I might have done differently. And as I said, I came up with compromise. I don’t think we even tested the theory, and I regret that. But there was another thought—that one of us could have given up our dream for the other. I’ve learned since then that people do that, and sometimes they learn to live with it. But he didn’t even propose it, and neither did I, and that made me question the nature of our relationship. Maybe we weren’t destined to be.”

  Now I had to speak. “That’s not wisdom, Penny, that’s second-guessing. You don’t get to run the play again. You take the shot or you don’t, but there’s no currency in reliving it.”

  “I agree, but I realized I wasn’t thinking about these things in isolation. Your girl, Tania, kept coming into my mind. And so did you.”

  “We’re back there.”

  “We are. We come from the same place, Miami. Sports was all we dreamed of, but that’s gone now. As we sit here today, I don’t know what your dreams are, but I do know you are one half of a wonderful team. And I know from experience that the bonds that hold that team together can only take so much tension. Eventually the bonds give, the bridge collapses.”

  “You’re being very poetic, Penny, and I think deliberately obtuse.”

  “You can’t go on like this, unless you recognize that the cost will be you losing Danielle, and she losing you. She’s focused on her career, too tired each day to put any smarts into her thoughts about it. She’s like me. Too focused, not even considering the possibility of compromise.”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  “No. I don’t need to.”

  “But you’re saying she wants out?”

  “I’m most definitely not saying that. I’m saying she isn’t in a place to make a good call. The voices in her head have one definition of success, and she can’t see anything else.”

  “Okay, so are you saying that I should give up all I’ve worked to build so I can be in a dark little studio cell in Little Havana?”

  “I’m not saying that, either. I’m saying you have the benefit of normalcy. You are doing, day-to-day, what you do. She’s not. She’s in a brand new ocean, and she’s swimming so hard to keep afloat that that’s all she can do. You on the other hand, are floating. You’ve got the time and space and, hell, the wisdom, for want of a better word, to make a good decision. But you’re not seeing compromise from her, so you aren’t even considering it yourself. And that’s not a criticism, it’s just a statement of how we make things so complicated when, in fact, they are quite simple.”

  “I really don’t see a solution, Penny.”

  “I know. I didn’t, either, back in the day. But you solve crimes, fix problems, find solutions. It’s what you do. It’s what you’ve always done. You used to find the weaknesses in batters and throw the pitches they wanted least. You saw deficiencies in your own game and learned new pitches. And you do the same thing now. You put your mind to problems and you solve them. So I’m just telling you to solve this one.”

  I nodded. It was a lot to chew on, and I felt like my brain was already full. I sipped my beer.

  “Now,” said Penny, “there is one part of this equation I can help with. Danielle can’t stay in that little studio. I won’t have it, and neither should you.”

  “I don’t love it, but I don’t have a down payment for another place.”

  “You’re looking for reasons you can’t rather than ways you can. I’m a realtor, remember? And if I say so myself, I’m a pretty good one. I know how these things work. I do deals. Will you trust me on this?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Good. I have a two-bed apartment I just acquired in my investment portfolio. I bought the mortgage from a banker I work with here and there. It belonged to a failed dot-com guy who’s probably going to end up in prison, but that’s by the by. I need a trustworthy tenant.”

  “Danielle?”

  “Can she be trusted?” Penny asked with a smile.

  “Most days. So you’re saying we sell the studio and rent from you?”

  “No, I’m saying keep the studio and rent it to a student. You need to build your portfolio, Miami. You’re not getting any younger.”

  “I’m not sure I’m slumlord material.”

  “So outsource the management. I have a team in my office that handles rentals for our out-of-state clients.”

  “And this place has actual natural light?”

  “It has some. I wouldn’t be suggesting it otherwise. Now, another thing, do you guys do personal background research?”

  “Sure. I mean, not me so much, but our agency does. Ron and Lizzy do most of the heavy lifting in that department—mostly for insurance clients.”

  “Good.”

  “You need someone chec
ked out?”

  “No.”

  I frowned. She was wrapping me up in my thoughts to the point of strangulation.

  “What can I do for you, then?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re doing so much for me. There must be something I can do for you.”

  “You know that’s not how it works. I’m not doing this for you because the timing is good for me to offer. I offer because the need is there. Just like you take on cases from local cops not because you have time but because he needs you now. Maybe one day I need a business partner or a client checked out. It happens.”

  “I’d be happy to help, and thank you,” I said.

  She smiled. “Thatta boy. Now, shall we get one for the road?”

  “Are you driving back to Miami tonight?”

  “You worried about me?”

  “Yes.”

  The smile faded, as if it had been forever since someone had worried about her.

  “I appreciate it,” she said. “But no, I’m staying upstairs tonight.”

  “Well, all right, then. One for the road.”

  “Just one, though. You do have to drive.”

  I nodded. She wasn’t propositioning me, and she wasn’t inviting me up to her room. I had nothing to worry about. In the grand scheme of things, she wasn’t remotely interested in a scruffy ex-jock with a thing for flamingo-clad shirts. She was just doing me a good turn, and I suddenly felt very childish for thinking otherwise.

  We ordered another drink but no more food, and watched the water grow darker, and then the sky followed suit.

  “What happened to your guy, from back when?”

  Penny gave a wistful smile. “He’s a lawyer in Raleigh. Married with kids, you know the drill.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. I don’t want to live in Raleigh.”

  She smiled again, but I saw the darkness of lost opportunities between the plates of armor.

  “You haven’t met anyone else?”

  “Are you asking if I’ve had a boyfriend in the last twenty years?”

  “My mother died when I was a kid. I didn’t get etiquette lessons,” I said with a grin.