The plate umpire walked up to break up our little pow-wow on the mound. Before the ump arrived, Don turned and headed back to the dugout without another word.
“Hey,” Dwayne said, patting my arm. “It’s all mental. It’s all up here.”
He pointed to his temple.
I nodded. “I know. That’s the fucking problem.”
The batter dug into the box. I took the sign and nodded. Curveball. Low and away.
I wound up and threw.
C’mon, ball, go down. Down and away.
It stayed right up in the zone. I swear I saw the batter licking his lips as it came to him.
He cracked a homerun so far into the seats, even our home crowd made a collective wow sound.
My manager called to the bullpen for Hugo, and I walked off the mound into the dugout.
Nobody talked to me once I took my seat, which was good. I wanted to give the world a haymaker punch. Fuck my life.
After watching Hugo win the game for us, I sat in my manager’s office with a load of ice strapped around my right shoulder and arm.
“So Coach, you called me in here. I know you got some bad news. Why don’t you just tell me?” I said, wanting this over with.
Lloyd sighed and pressed the intercom. “Mr. Yerac? He’s ready for you.”
I froze. “Mr. Yerac? Why the hell does he need to be here?” Though I was pretty sure I knew what this would be about. I just didn’t know to what extent I was in trouble.
“You know he’s always been a very hands-on owner,” the club’s manager reminded me. “And this is one of those times he has taken matters into his own hands.”
I had a very, very bad feeling about this. The doorknob opened, and the old man walked in slowly.
“Thank you, Lloyd,” Mr. Yerac said, his expression grim. “You can go ahead and leave me with Mr. Napleton.”
Lloyd nodded and left us alone. Mr. Yerac took a seat at the desk across from me. I stood.
“Why don’t you sit, Jake?”
“I’m fine. I like to take my bad news standing up.”
He nodded.
“Well Jake, we’ve had a good run, haven’t we?”
“Stop dancing around and just come out with it, Harry.”
“Fine. If that’s how you want to play it.” Mr. Yerac paused, and I braced for it. “The news that broke today. I don’t know how or where it came from, or if it’s true that you…kidnapped a child.”
I gritted my teeth. “It’s not true in the slightest.”
“Be that as it may, since the story broke this morning, there’s been a shitstorm from all kinds of organizations calling for your suspension from the league. And I don’t mean a five-game one like before. I’ve been on the phone with the league commissioner all morning. This is really, really, fucked.”
Mr. Yerac rarely swore, so I knew he was angry. I shook my head at him, frustrated. I couldn’t believe people thought I’d actually kidnap a kid. Marissa had done her best to field the press, but she wasn’t a PR pro like Andrea, who would have started pushing back on the negativity. Plus, she was personally implicated, which made it harder for her to fight back. “People like to run their mouths and they don’t do their research. I think if people knew who I really was, they would be surprised.”
“Would they, Jake? You’re a dirty player. That’s what you’re known for. You like throwing high and inside. You shove people’s faces into the dirt. Off the field, you apparently kidnap kids. Oh, and let’s not forget that you punch out fellow players at bars for no apparent reason.”
That really had me seeing red. “If you’re referring to Grant Newman, that man is an asshole and a bully,” I said, seething, “and I still don’t regret knocking that motherfucker out. I’d do it again if I had the chance.”
Mr. Yerac’s face hadn’t altered from its cold and stern expression. “You know what? I’m done here, speaking with a tattooed thug like you. I’ll just get to the point of why I’ve brought you here. You’re done in this league. I doubt you’ll ever play again. We’re letting you go.”
The air came out of me like I was a deflating balloon.
He’d said all this so calmly, like he’d rehearsed it. Maybe he had. God knew I’d been in trouble often enough, and it was ironic that it was all coming back to bite me in the ass. But I’d realized that possibility a long time ago.
“You’re…releasing me?”
“That’s right. Under clause 507b. Since you probably didn’t read that part of your contract, it means that you’ll get none of the money that’s due to you. As long as we can prove that your character is a financial damage to the team’s image, which we can now prove, it’s all become very simple, Jake. I’m told that charges are already being drawn up by the father of this boy as we speak.”
I took a step toward Mr. Yerac. “You think I give a shit about the money? Because I care about two things here: the truth, and the fact that I’ve worked my ass off to make sure we make it to the World Series this October. I’m the best pitcher we’ve got, and we can’t win without me. You know that.”
“Don’t try to challenge me, boy,” Mr. Yerac said with a frown. “You think I give a damn about winning the World Series? Or the rest of the team? I’m not saying I want to lose, but in the end, what’s important is our bottom line. And the money we’ll save by getting you out of your contract far outweighs what we’d make by getting into the World Series.”
My blood boiled. I wanted to smack the man.
But that wasn’t how things were done in the front office.
I didn’t care about the money. Though not playing baseball, and so close to the biggest prize in the game…at the moment, I knew none of it mattered. It was done. I also didn’t have any choice but to take responsibility for it. Whatever anyone said, I cared about the fact that I’d let down the fans and my teammates, but most of all, I cared that I was disappointing Tate and Andrea.
I was a dirty South Side motherfucker at heart, and now I was back to square one. If Tate’s father had a good lawyer, I could even end up losing all my money.
I was back to being the man I thought I’d grow up to be: the black sheep nobody wanted. As much as a man tried, getting away from his roots was impossible.
32
My mother arrived the next day to help me pack up my things into her van and my Prius. She had arrived so fast, almost too fast.
It was like she’d been lying in the weeds, expecting me to fail.
It was a long nine-hour drive from Sugar Tree to Chicago, and I knew my mother had probably practiced every piece of advice she would give me when she arrived. To her credit, she hadn’t made one comment about Jake, and I wasn’t even sure how much she knew. Maybe she knew everything and was waiting to unload on me once we got home, for fun. Or maybe she knew she’d won and wouldn’t bother with her forty lashes of motherly wisdom. God knew I was raw enough.
Mentally, I was exhausted, not having slept a wink. Emotionally, I felt dead inside. I’d spent most of the night before just walking around Chicago. I thought about Jake a lot, too often, and then Tate, sad that he was once again stuck in a situation that was even worse than before.
“You look awful!” she said to me. Again.
I sure felt like it. I was in sandals, jeans, and a fitted blue tank top. No makeup. My hair was down, still drying, and I didn’t care what I looked like. “Yeah, I know, Mother,” I muttered to her. If she noticed my depressed mood, she was making up for it by being way too chipper. She was in her Sunday best, like she had something to celebrate.
“Well honey, you’re not cut out for this fancy life anyways. You belong in your place back home, and it’s good that you learned your lesson now, when you’re young,” she said to me as we put another bag in her van.
“Yes, lesson learned,” I said dejectedly. Whenever my mother was around, she pulled me into her orbit. I couldn’t defy her, and I wasn’t sure why.
It was a little pathetic that it’d only taken me a few hours
to pack up. One of my neighbors, Kyle, a retired corporate type, had even come out to help me with the larger items, not that there was much. I hadn’t known him long or very well, but it was nice of him, and it made me a little teary-eyed. I was just starting to feel like Chicago was home.
It was barely even 10:30 a.m. Most of the large furniture pieces had come with the apartment, and I’d contacted my super that I’d mail him back the keys once I got back home. I didn’t care about the deposit. I didn’t care about anything. Everything had turned out so wrong, and I felt helpless in changing it. I was giving up. I knew that, and I needed to be away from this city that reminded me of Jake.
Last night I’d had several missed calls and texts from Jake. I didn’t listen to his voice messages or read any of his texts. I couldn’t. This was all my fault, and it killed me. If it weren’t for my involvement with Grant, none of this would have ever happened. I still had a hard time thinking about facing reality and telling him the truth about Grant blackmailing me.
Then this morning, I had seven missed calls from Amy.
“I made a hair appointment at this place I like in Lincoln Park,” my mother said, shutting her van door after Kyle had fit in the last large box. “Do you want to go with me?”
After I said my goodbye to Kyle, who wished me well, I looked back at my mother.
“Well?” she said.
I shook my head at the ridiculousness that only my mother would find a hairstylist she loved in Chicago after just a couple of visits.
“I don’t really want to tag along.”
“Oh please. It will only be a couple of hours.”
A couple of hours? Is this a joke? I had made my decision, and I was ready to get out of Dodge.
At that moment, my phone conveniently rang, interrupting the flow of the conversation. I picked it up.
“Amy. Hey.”
“Hey yourself. What the hell? A goodbye text! You weren’t even going to say goodbye to me in person?”
My mother stood next to the van, smiling at me while she eavesdropped on the conversation.
“I would love to get together one more time. Want to meet at South Bottle?”
“Sure. When?”
“In about twenty minutes?”
“Done. See you soon.”
I hung up and turned to my mother. “I have to say goodbye to my friend Amy before we go. I’ll meet you at the hair place. Give me the address.”
She rolled her eyes, wanting me to just tag along with her, but she gave me the address. I drove to South Bottle to meet up with Amy for what would be my last couple of hours in Chicago.
We sat down over beers, nachos, spinach dip, and fish tacos. I went all out since this was my last Chicago meal.
For once, my shy self did almost all of the talking, and Amy just smiled, nodded, and shook her head in disbelief. I told her about how I’d followed Jake, fallen for him, and gotten mixed up in the whole Jake-and-Tate routine that had been two of the best weeks of my life. How I had finally felt whole. And last but not least, I told her about Grant and how badly he’d messed me up. And how it was all my fault that Jake was in this mess, and I needed to go far, far away to make it all stop.
When I finally finished telling her everything, she bit into one of the last nachos on our shared appetizer plate, then took a decent-sized swallow of her beer to finish it off.
Amy wasn’t usually so quiet. It was odd seeing her like this.
“So Grant. He’s basically blackmailing you.”
I hated to admit it, but I nodded. “Kind of.”
“Please. You’re being too nice about this and making it so damn easy for Grant. He’s holding you hostage, telling you that if you don’t play by his rules, he’s going to keep releasing stuff on Jake.”
She had a point. “Not if I leave,” I reasoned.
Amy looked like she wanted to throttle me. “None of this is your fault, Andrea! It’s that asshole, Grant Newman,” she said loudly. “You’re running scared! You are literally running away, pretending this problem will just simply go away, and I get it, but you’re letting him win. I know his type. Been there, made that mistake. He’s a controlling asshole. And I have news for you, honey. Maybe you’ll get away from Grant for now if you go back to Tennessee. But if you don’t confront him, he’s going to keep coming back to you.”
Damn. She was right. How had I not realized that? As I knew full well, Grant wasn’t one to just give up, and he’d proven to me he’d go to extremes. I nodded and spun my phone around in my hand, a nervous habit I’d picked up in just the last day.
“So what are you suggesting I do?”
Amy looked around to see if anyone was within earshot, then she leaned toward me, her elbows on the table.
“I’m suggesting,” she said, speaking with a tone of seriousness in her voice, “that you do something you don’t normally do with Grant. The Bulldogs are here for their three-game series with the Jaguars that starts tonight. So Grant wants to play it like this and post these ridiculous photos on Yawper? Fine. But you’ve got to show him that you can play dirty, too. But my question is, can you, Andrea, play dirty? Because you’re the most wholesome girl I know.”
I nodded. I rarely uttered a dirty word, let alone thought about retaliating against someone. But desperate times called for desperate measures. “What did you have in mind?”
33
A few minutes past noon, I sat nervously at the De Maupassant Hotel bar, waiting for Grant to come down. I checked my purse and tried not to fidget. Amy had lent me makeup she kept in her purse, and I’d kept my hair down, just the way Grant liked it. I wasn’t wearing the cutest outfit ever, but it was tight, and the tank was low-cut.
I had arrived earlier than we had arranged, and after picking my seat because it was right in front of the security camera, I made seemingly innocuous conversation with the bartender, being sure to repeat my first and last name and leave an impression on him.
I took a sip of my soda water with lime and turned to the entrance to see Grant walking toward me with that cocky smirk on his face, the same smirk that once upon a time Jake had punched right off. I’d wasted so much of my time on him. Had I ever wondered what our kids would look like? What kind of father he’d make? I couldn’t recall. All I could picture was Jake and how he was with the boys he coached, and how much Tate looked up to him. I already knew what kind of father Jake would make. I knew the kind of man he was, and he was a better man than the one walking towards me. That gave me strength.
He took a seat next to me.
“Hi, handsome,” I said in my best flirty voice.
He looked at me suspiciously, squinting his blue eyes in my direction. “What’s up with you? Why’d you invite me down here?”
“Well, I’ve been doing some thinking,” I said. “And, I went through a rough patch there, but I’m ready to forgive you.”
Grant ordered a beer from the bartender and turned his attention back to me. “What on earth would you be forgiving me for?” he asked with a laugh.
“Oh please.” I leaned in and lowered my voice. “You used to hit me. And here you are, trying to slander my good name and ruin Jake’s reputation? I don’t think so. If word got out about what you did to me, I doubt you’d find that very funny.”
Grant didn’t even flinch.
“So what if I did hit you? You deserved it. Besides, you could never prove anything.” His expression turned ugly. “And you wouldn’t dare tell anyone about that,” he said. “You know what the social repercussions would be. You’d forever be known as ‘the victim girl.’ I still text with your mom on a regular basis. She loves me. You’re going to marry me, Andrea. You know it.”
I looked into his eyes, the windows to his soul, and I saw an empty vessel staring back at me. The man was delusional. I wasn’t sure how he’d arrived at that conclusion or why he had chosen me to be his Southern belle trophy wife. I felt sorry for him, because he was living in a world separate from reality. Maybe he had never
been turned down by someone he’d wanted, and I’d have to spell it out for him. “You hit me when I confronted you about your cheating, and when I wouldn’t sleep with you. You hit me so hard sometimes that I thought I needed to go to the hospital. I’m saying I forgive you. This isn’t even for you, it’s for me. I need to let go of the angst I’ve been holding onto. And you won’t even accept my forgiveness.”
“I would, except for the fact that I don’t need to say anything. I did nothing wrong. I was just putting you in your place.”
I stared at him. Initially, I’d been angry, but now I truly felt sorry for him. He believed what he was saying. Anxiety built in my stomach. “You’re saying you never hit me or cheated on me?”
“Who cares? Men cheat. That’s what we do. Especially someone like me, who has options,” he said matter-of-factly. “And you’re blowing that other thing out of proportion. A couple slaps aren’t anything to whine about. When we’re married, telling me no won’t be an option, Andrea.”
I stared at him, horrified. “Married? To you? Never. Never…” I whispered sharply, beyond shocked and numbed by his words. Grant truly was a monster.
“Yes, we’re going to get married. That’s going to happen. And if you’re not used to it yet honey, get used to it.”
As he said the words, his expression changed from grin to grim. He took a nice long sip of beer and looked into my eyes. I wanted to see something good—God knows I tried—but all I saw was a man whose soul had been taken over by greed and entitlement. He would never truly love a woman the way she deserved. And perhaps even more tragically, Grant seemed to not love himself at all.
He put his hand on my wrist and gripped it tightly. It reminded me of the night at McBanners, and his touch sickened me. I wished Jake were here to punch him in the jaw again.
Calmly, I took out my phone with my other hand, pressed the “end audio recording” button, and fired the file off in an attachment to Amy, as we had agreed. This had almost been too easy, but as Amy had pointed out, Grant was so arrogant and egotistical that he thought he was above it all. The mighty, I knew, usually fell the hardest.
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