Come Back to the Ballpark, Maisy Gray

by Cynthia Tennent

  Heather bumped her shoulder. “I’m late picking up Jacy. Stop by Comeback again sometime, Ry— Sam.”

  “Why did she call me that?” Sam asked after she left.

  “She thinks you look like Ryan Gosling.”

  “Ryan Gosling. Why?”

  “Because you kind of do.”

  Sam scratched his head and walked to the hill. He picked up his sports coat that he had shed. He looped it over his shoulder and started toward his car.

  Maisy picked up her bag and purse and followed him to the parking lot. “You still love the game.”

  “Of course.” He opened the back door of his familiar Cadillac. It was good to know he could handle it again. Sort of. It would be nice if he needed her to drive him around again.

  “It really doesn’t bother you that you never got to play in the big leagues?” Maisy couldn’t help asking. He had been such a natural on the field.

  He threw his sports coat across the backseat and slammed the door. He flashed her with those brilliant baby blues. “Sometimes. But I’m luckier than a zillion other guys who love the game. I get to work in Major League Baseball. It’s a dream to make it this far to the top of the organization. And they pay me good money to do it.”

  “Yeah, they do. But you have to handle a bunch of superstars like—” She stopped herself when Sam held his finger to her lip.

  “Let’s not talk about him.”

  She grinned. “You guys in the front office get the blame when things go wrong. No one ever celebrates all the people behind the stars who make them successful.”

  He took her bag from her and she led him to her car, where he tucked her things in the backseat for her. “Does it bother you that no one celebrates you when your students succeed?” he asked.

  “Never.”

  Maybe they were more alike than they knew. So much of what they did was about propping up others. Paving the way for their success. Standing behind the curtain as everyone else cheered.

  Sam stepped forward and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Maisy thought for sure he was going to kiss her. A little warning bell went off in the back of her head. This thing between them was starting all over again. She didn’t have a safety net underneath her heart yet.

  He surprised her by stepping back. “Want to go for a walk? You can show me around Comeback.”

  She paused.

  “Unless you need to get home.”

  She quirked her lip. “Dad and Mom are eating at Chad’s house tonight.”

  He held out his hand.

  “Don’t you have to get back to Indianapolis?”

  He shook his head. “I came early to keep an eye on Kevin while he did his obligatory PR with the kids and posed for his promo pictures. Zoom wants me here in the morning, too. I’m spending the night.”

  She tried to halt the victory lap her heart was running in her chest. But it was impossible not to be excited about spending time with Sam.

  “Coming?” he asked.

  She wanted to say no. She should. He shrugged and started walking in the wrong direction. She released a long, drawn-out breath. Then she ran after him and grabbed his hand.

  “This way.”

  ***

  Sam had never seen Maisy in her own environment. Watching her interact with the kids earlier had made him realize Maisy was made for this place. It was obvious her students loved her. She had a natural way with them and made their eyes light up with her presence.

  She clutched his hand as they walked through Comeback. Her dress fluttered in the breeze. Good thing he was out of school. He’d never learn anything with her around. He had barely been able to control himself in her classroom this afternoon. She was sexy and cute at the same time, a mixture that was unique and fascinating. And now Sam wanted to know everything about her.

  They traveled through a neighborhood of small bungalow houses with front porches and painted wood trim. Dogs barked. A lawnmower roared in the distance.

  “Was it hard to return home and teach in Comeback?”

  She paused. “Yes and no. It was really weird at first. Do you know, when I started, one of my old teachers was still in the building teaching first grade?”

  “That must have been a bit awkward.”

  “It was. Especially since she used to send me to the principal’s office all the time.”

  “I can’t imagine you getting sent to the principal’s office.”

  She laughed. “You’re joking, right? I thought she was going to duct tape me to the chair by the end of the year. In case you haven’t noticed, I have a little trouble sitting still for long. And then there’s my temper.”

  “Temper? I hadn’t noticed,” he teased.

  She made a face. “I assure you I am not violent. I haven’t hit someone since Brad Forrester pulled my bra strap in sixth grade.”

  “Good for you.” He’d never met a woman who was so open with her emotions. It was refreshing and one hell of a turn-on.

  A bicycle bell rang behind them and Maisy pulled Sam off the sidewalk as a little girl passed on a purple bike. “Hi, Miss Gray.”

  Maisy returned the greeting. A skateboarder turned the corner, almost running into them. “Hey, Miss Gray.”

  Sam looked warily down the sidewalk. “Should we be walking here? My toe was just starting to feel better.”

  “Come on, it’s safe,” Maisy said, pulling him along at a faster pace. Then she stopped. “Sorry. I move too fast sometimes. My brother says I’m hyperactive.”

  “You just need a little redirection and you calm down fine,” he said, guiding her to a normal stride. She tossed her hair behind her shoulder, and the sunlight through the trees sprinkled crimson flames in her dark tresses. He ached to run his hands through the glossy strands but was afraid he’d get burned if he tried. This kind of need was uncharted territory for him.

  “I wanted to play ball with the kids so badly this afternoon I could barely hold back,” she admitted.

  He wasn’t surprised. Even when she had been dragged to the stadium to watch Kevin play, he had seen the longing in her eyes as she gazed out at the field and the way her toe tapped when the innings were tense.

  They turned down Main Street and passed a cluster of shops. Store awnings in pink and yellow draped over the windows. Planters in purple and red lined the doors. Color was back in his life when he was with Maisy.

  “You still love baseball, don’t you?” he asked, running his thumb along the inside of her wrist.

  “It’s in my blood. When I was little, I wanted to play little league in the worst way. But girls weren’t allowed to play in our town. So, I committed myself to—” She stopped. “Damn. I hate it when I mention him.”

  He pressed his lips together, feeling like a jealous boy. He wanted to erase the asshole from Maisy’s life. But that would be like cutting out part of her. She’d been shaped by her years with Kevin. And their breakup. Nothing could change that. So, he let it go.

  Maisy gazed thoughtfully at Sam. “You know, I’ve realized lately that my love for Kevin was complicated. I loved the player he was. But Kevin, the man, was something I created in my head. Kind of a mirage.”

  He understood. Maisy loved baseball so much she’d nurtured one the of the best pitchers in the game and made his future more important than herself. If it weren’t for the business of baseball, Sam might have put his own life first, too. He might have a wife and kids. Lately he’d been wondering if it had to be this way. Fuzzy had kids. Many players on the team, even the young ones, had a family. Was it really that difficult?

  He couldn’t keep the crooked grin from forming. “ ‘It is never too late to be wise.’ ”

  Her eyes grew huge. “Robinson Crusoe!”

  He nodded. “I loved that book.”

  “Mr. Hunter! Are you sucking up to me with quotes from childr
en’s books now?”

  He had to be as honest as she was. “Maybe.”

  Suddenly, Maisy stopped. She yanked Sam down and planted a firm kiss on his lips. His surprise was quickly replaced with hope. He caught her face with his hands and captured her lips for a deeper kiss. Could he possibly be lucky enough to earn a second chance?

  It took them both a moment to realize that an older woman was standing in front of them. That person cleared her throat.

  Maisy jumped away like a guilty teenager. “Mrs. Cannib— I mean Hannibal.”

  Sam stifled a cough.

  “Uh, Sam, this is Mrs. Hannibal. My sixth-grade English teacher.”

  Sam held out his hand. The woman nodded and lowered her lids, inspecting him. She turned back to Maisy. “I hope this one can read better than your last boyfriend.”

  When she moved on, Sam couldn’t help himself. “My God, teachers everywhere.”

  Maisy walked backwards, craning her neck to make sure that Mrs. Hannibal was gone. “She used to hate Kevin. She hated baseball, too. She suspected that I did all his homework for him and once even kept me after school to lecture me about it. It was the first time I heard the word enable.”

  That sobered Sam. He should run after the lady and thank her on behalf of little girls and baseball managers everywhere. His best players were more than athletically gifted, they were smart. Kevin was either the exception to that rule or he might have a brain that had never been used properly.

  Maisy sighed and reached for his hand. “I feel kind of guilty now. Do you think Kevin is kind of, well…?”

  “Dumb?”

  She nodded. “Or uneducated?”

  It was rotten that she blamed herself for Kevin’s faults. “Maisy, I sign off on Kevin’s paycheck. I don’t think you need to feel guilty about him in any way. As long as he doesn’t blow it, he’ll be able to retire from baseball and live comfortably for the rest of his life.”

  Maisy was tapping her toe against the pavement. He rubbed his thumb along her wrist again and she stopped. Sometimes when he was around her, Sam felt like a lion tamer. Her energy was like a wild animal waiting to break free. Tristan said gum relieved anxiety. He’d give her a piece of his, but it might remind her of that lucky routine she did before sitting down at baseball games.

  She looked down. “Wait, why am I holding your hand?”

  He grasped her fingers more firmly. “Because I don’t know where I’m going.” He made a long face to exaggerate his helplessness.

  She bit her lip but didn’t let go of his hand. If he could do this every day, he’d never need a Fitbit or a piece of gum again. Speaking of which, he checked his Fitbit. It showed one hundred percent. Imagine that. A pickup game with elementary school students and walking with Maisy had done what nothing else had done all summer.

  “Do you think you’ll stay in Comeback?” he finally asked. He almost added the word forever.

  She looked up at the branches of a gnarly tree that hung over the road. “I don’t know. Dad is going to retire in a year or two. He and Mom tell me they’re going to kick me out soon. But I want to help if Mom needs me.”

  Of course. Helping was what Maisy did.

  “I want to keep teaching at Joy. But I miss the city.” She laughed at herself. “Honestly, running into my old teacher and my students happens all the time in Comeback. It’s a little weird. You should see how it is when I go grocery shopping.”

  They strolled through an older part of Comeback with yellow and white Victorian homes and latticework on the porches. Maisy showed Sam the old town hall that was a dance studio, the Italian restaurant that was run by German immigrants, and the stone church that was now a beer hall.

  She told him about her first job at the veterinary clinic. How nice the doctors were when she’d cried after an ancient dog had to be put down. And how she’d quit the next day. She described how her brother, Chad, had taken her father’s car out the day he got his license and how he’d rear-ended a police officer at a stoplight in front of the station.

  Sam was still laughing when they ran into Bobby Gray coming out of the Italian restaurant across the street. He held up two pizzas.

  “I didn’t know you were in town, Sam. Maisy, why didn’t you tell us?” He nodded to a minivan parked along the street ahead of them. A group of Grays waved. Chad, a pretty blonde who must be his wife, Jodie, an older girl who looked like Jodie, and Maisy’s mom, who had an odd expression on her face when she looked down at their joined hands.

  Maisy groaned. “See what I mean? It’s a really small town. I can’t go anywhere without running into someone I know.”

  ***

  Evidently, Mom and Dad’s dinner at Chad’s had been a wash. Chad’s wife, Betsy, not known for her cooking, had burned the roast chicken to a crisp. When she’d finished crying and then laughing, they’d ordered pizza to take back to Andrea and Bobby’s. Chad explained, with a teasing pat on his wife’s shoulder, that their house had to air out for a bit.

  When Sam was invited to join them, Maisy had to hide her pleasure at the prospect of spending more time together. As if he had been doing it for years, Sam helped her mother out of the car and handed her her elbow crutches. He greeted her nephew with a simple fist bump, like he had done with the kids on the field today. He shook her ten-year-old niece’s hand and sent her a smile that was crush-worthy. He showed her father how well his foot had healed. And best of all, he seemed to be enjoying the chaos of Maisy’s family.

  Halfway through the meal, her mother leaned in and told Maisy, “We didn’t mean to intrude on your night, honey.”

  Maisy shook her head. “No. It’s all right.” And she meant it now. Seeing Sam with her family was putting him in a new light. Gone was the aggressive, smooth-talking man who had tried to convince her to come to Indianapolis. In his place was a genuine and engaging man who was enjoying the lively discussion at the dinner table as if he’d been sitting with the family for years. With every moment, she was falling deeper into something she wasn’t ready to define yet.

  She wasn’t sure whether she’d lost the last threads of her anger when Sam knelt down to explain to the second-grade girl how to hit a ball or when he calmed her jittery reflexes on the walk with a single touch. How the heck did he manage to do what dozens of her teachers, and even her parents, had never been able to do?

  It was impossible to equate a man who seemed to genuinely enjoy being with kids and her crazy, loud family to a cold and calculating schemer.

  God, she was easy.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Maisy should be asleep. Working with preadolescent kids all day was an energy drain from the time she woke at five thirty a.m. to the time she finished grading the last papers at eleven thirty p.m. Even so, Maisy lay awake and watched the shadows waver on the ceiling. It was an unusually warm night for mid-September. She left both bedroom windows open to take advantage of the cross ventilation. Now the curtains played in the cross breeze, sending friendly ghosts around the room. That’s what her parents used to call them. Friendly ghosts. She’d never gotten rid of the image. It made a five-year-old girl feel better to know they wouldn’t hurt her. Now she wished those ghosts could talk. She needed help figuring out this thing with Sam.

  After Sam had left this evening, Mom and Dad made a point of telling her how nice he was. Their obvious attempt to push her in his direction was amusing. Maisy wondered what they would think if they knew the whole story. Would they trust Sam like she was afraid to do?

  All afternoon she had felt like she was walking through a world laced in glitter. That pixie dust Sam had mentioned earlier was like a drug. And she was in danger of becoming addicted.

  The faint sound of a birdcall tangled with the overpowering buzz of cicadas and crickets. Maisy had never heard the strange lilting sound. It called again, only louder. Before she could investigate, a shadow grew on th
e opposite wall.

  Definitely not her friendly ghost.

  “Maisy…psst.”

  Sam crouched on the porch roof, his hands cupped over his eyes, trying to see in through the screen. “Maisy? That better be you or else I’m about to get tackled by your dad.”

  She threw back the covers and padded to the window. “Sam? What are you doing on the roof? Careful!”

  Up close she could hear him struggling to catch his breath. “I don’t really know…One minute I was lying in my room at the Holiday Inn and the next minute I was getting dressed and driving back here.”

  “Why?”

  “I forgot to tell you something today.”

  “You are crazy. We talked all evening. Did you hit your head or something when you left?” It was sweet that he had driven all the way back from town and climbed her porch roof just to see her. And out of character. She couldn’t believe that this was the same person who made million-dollar deals on a daily basis. “Sam, if the press could see you now, they’d have a field day.”

  “That climb up the porch was a lot harder than it looked…and I feel really old right now,” he said.

  “Well, duh. You are old.”

  He made a protesting sound. The moon was bright enough to see his face. There was just one thin layer between them. She wanted to touch him in the worst way.

  Before she knew it, she was asking, “Do you want to come inside, or should I come out there?”

  He slapped something on his neck. “Definitely in there.”

  She was saving him from a mosquito attack, nothing else. She unlocked the screen and lifted it as far as she could. “You could have called me. I would have met you at the door.”

  “I wasn’t sure I was going to go through with this.” He tried to fit through the opening and was forced to crawl on his hands to get his legs and feet all the way through. “Besides… I always wanted to climb up to a girl’s window— Oomph!” He landed on the floor with a thump.

  Maisy closed the window and crouched down to help him up. “Is that what this is about? You’re ticking off a bucket list before you turn forty?”