The Heart Of The Game

by Pamela Aares

  The woman serving their table poured coffee into the mug Cody held out to her. “What’ll it be?” she asked.

  Aderro ordered a double stack of pancakes and French toast. Cody ordered oatmeal. His stomach hadn’t settled down since the tasing.

  “How do you eat like that and stay in shape?”

  Aderro tapped his head and grinned. “My brain needs a lot of power.” His grin faded. “I’m going to the Red Sox. It was a tough decision, but Boston is a good place for me right now. Wanted to tell you in person.”

  Cody wasn’t sure what to say.

  Aderro tapped him on the arm. “Rumor has it you’re slotted.”

  Cody raised his brows. “Slotted?”

  Aderro had slang on top of slang. It was a good thing catchers’ signs were fairly universal, or no pitcher would understand him.

  “For starting. I’ll be seeing you in the show.”

  The implications of Aderro’s news began to sink in. The cells in Cody’s body started buzzing in a dance of jacked-up joy.

  “Don’t expect me to go easy on you.”

  Aderro laughed. “Never would.”

  Cody looked down into the bowl of gray oatmeal the server had brought him and suddenly felt hungry. He called her over. “I’d like what he’s having.”

  The woman grinned. “You betcha.”

  “Atta boy.”

  Aderro called any player younger than him boy. It irked some of the guys, but not Cody. He understood the implied affection.

  “You earned your spot, Bond,” Aderro said as he poured half a carafe of maple syrup over his pancakes. “I’ll be seeing you on the other side. We’re playing against you in the second exhibition game.”

  “Be strange to see you in red,” Cody said, taking a deep draw from his mug of coffee.

  “Yeah.” Aderro nodded. “Good thing I’m color blind.”

  After saying goodbye to Aderro, Cody called his dad from his truck and told him the news.

  “We’ll see you in Scottsdale, son.”

  “We?”

  “Your mother and me. Heard the desert can be romantic in the spring. By the way, Kat’s coming too. You need to find that girl a date.”

  He was glad his dad had stopped asking about Zoe.

  But he couldn’t deny that she’d reached into him, had taken her place in his heart, shining there with a power almost as strong as the sun.

  Even if he hadn’t had to report to spring training, he wouldn’t have gone to her gallery opening. It would have been like pouring bleach on a cut.

  He needed to focus on his own damned challenges and stop focusing on things he couldn’t change. He hadn’t let himself feel when he’d split from his family and now, now that Zoe had cracked him open, he was feeling too damned much. No doubt about that. Missing her felt like a death. He wouldn’t have been able to describe the feeling of grief if she hadn’t first described it so exquisitely... if he hadn’t seen it in her body, her expressions. It was an empty feeling, like someone had hollowed out his abdomen with a dull spoon and left cobwebs in the place where life used to throb.

  Cody returned to his condo. In his hurry to call Alex and tell him about Aderro’s decision, he tripped on a box of books. He stared at the boxes. Maybe he’d unpack this year.

  Maybe have a real life.

  Loving Zoe had made him want to do the work necessary to secure love, family and a future that wasn’t lonely.

  And now he was awake to possibilities, but aware and miserable too. Doomed. He’d never meet another woman like her. What made Zoe amazing, fascinating, ball-rocking and heart-breakingly irresistibly perfect was exactly what would forever keep them apart. Having her in his life would mean one of them giving up what made them tick, a form of dying to self, like in the old tales where one lover can only live in the dark or on the land while the other lover can live only the opposite way.

  He kicked at the box. Zoe had opened up a space, moved in, then left a vacancy that wouldn’t be filled. No unpacking of boxes, no filling of the spaces in his apartment, would fill the gaping space she’d left.

  Loving her meant letting her live the life she’d chosen. End of story. He’d just have to live with that reality.

  He’d have to be the lover who didn’t get the happy ending.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Zoe backed away from the curb, barely managing to avoid being splashed by a Vespa speeding along the Via di Santa Maria dell’Anima. The motorbike driver put a hand out, palm up in apology, but didn’t slow down. Romans were accustomed to spring rains, so the light drizzle wouldn’t keep people away from the gallery opening. But Zoe didn’t have time to change or even to clean up from the careless moves of Roman drivers.

  Her family and friends were due to arrive any minute. And though Sabrina hadn’t been able to clear her schedule, Sabrina’s friend Cameron Kelley managed to fly down from where she was filming in Paris. Parker was ecstatic—Cameron was a darling of the press and her presence would bring them out like wolves to a campfire. He wouldn’t hear of sending a car to pick Cameron up at the airport and had insisted on going himself.

  Zoe checked her phone as she approached the gallery. One hour before the doors opened, and Parker was half an hour late. He was her rock, had been throughout the last weeks of finalizing all the details for the opening. She’d battled back a nagging case of nerves all afternoon, as if the exhibition featured her works instead of her mother’s. And now she might have to open the gallery without Parker. She folded her umbrella and ducked inside.

  The caterer had set up food tables along the front wall, each with flower arrangements featuring the soft color schemes of the paintings lining the gallery. The lights illuminating her mother’s work were perfectly aimed. The bar near the back of the main room was staffed with smiling, uniformed waiters ready to greet guests with the beverage of their choice.

  Every detail was perfect.

  Except one.

  Cody wasn’t attending.

  She’d wrestled with herself for weeks and in a weak moment had sent him an invitation. He’d returned the reply card with no note—he’d only checked the box that said regrets. It hadn’t made her feel any better when Alex had called to tell her that no ballplayer would be in Rome in February and that pitchers and catchers reported to spring training early in the month.

  The bell at the door sounded, and she looked up to see Alana, with Sophie in tow.

  “I’m cutting school, Aunt Zoe,” Sophie said with a big grin.

  “And she has to write an essay about her trip to make up for it,” Alana said as she helped Sophie out of her yellow raincoat. Alana kissed Zoe on both cheeks. “Chloe sends her best. She couldn’t get away and—”

  “I know. Spring training.”

  Alana eyed her. “It’s the price we pay for having loved ones involved in baseball.”

  Zoe wasn’t in any shape to protest that Cody wasn’t her loved one. Even if she had been, Alana was perceptive; any weak argument Zoe could dream up wouldn’t fly.

  She turned her attention to the guests and members of the press pouring through the entrance. Rafe and Gaetano entered, with Coco trailing them. Rafe held a bouquet of white lilies out to her.

  “For you, bella Zizi,” he said with a sweet smile. He took in the gallery with a long inspection. “Mama would be so proud.”

  She took the lilies from him with a smile of thanks. She’d forgiven both Rafe and Gaetano for their part in keeping their father’s secret. She’d come to understand that they’d had little choice in the matter.

  “And I am equally proud,” Zoe’s father said as he stole up behind her. He kissed her cheeks. “Some of these paintings I’m seeing for the first time.” His bittersweet smile said more than his words.

  Zoe looped her hand through the crook of his arm. “Then let me show you, one by one—I’ll be your personal docent.”

  By the time Parker arrived with Cameron nearly forty-five minutes later, the gallery was a crush of collectors
and well-wishers.

  The opening was a complete success.

  Or was it?

  After she’d seen the last of her family and guests off and told a disappointed Parker that she simply couldn’t go clubbing with him and Cameron, she wandered the space as the caterers cleaned up and packed away their equipment. Something wasn’t right, and yet she couldn’t grasp what troubled her. Maybe she was just tired. The effort of fast-tracking the opening, of tending to all the details—even with Parker’s expert and excellent help—had been exhausting. Maybe it was just the letdown after the party. Whatever it was, she hoped a good night’s sleep would sort her out.

  She didn’t want her memories of the successful opening of Mama’s exhibition to be marred by her attitude.

  The next morning, Zoe stared out the window of the apartment she’d rented in Rome. Though it would’ve been more financially prudent to buy a condo, she wasn’t ready. Not yet. Later that afternoon she’d drive up to Villa di Fiore and join her family for a celebratory luncheon.

  She straightened a down pillow that rested against the window seat. When had she bought that fabric? Events since she’d returned had begun to blur. She rubbed at her eyes, still fuzzy from the late night.

  Snippets of her dreams returned to her as she watched the cars in the still-wet streets below her window. Before she’d gone to bed, she’d flipped through the pages of a wall calendar she’d bought for her mother a few months before she’d gotten really sick. They’d sat together looking through the pages and filling in some of the squares with events that they planned to attend. Zoe hadn’t known it at the time, but the inked squares on the paper had been her only defense against a future she wasn’t able to imagine. A future without Mama.

  Her mother’s words that afternoon floated back to her now. She’d taken Zoe’s hand and told her that they couldn’t hold off what was going to happen to her with a calendar. Zoe wished she didn’t remember that moment so well.

  But in her dream her mother had held out a blank calendar. And then she’d smiled and said: Never turn your back on love, Zoe. It can leave—if you ignore it, it will leave. And it may not come again.

  Her mother had said those very words to her just before she died.

  The memory and the dream fused, shifting and turning like pieces in a kaleidoscope—dancing and spinning in her soul. Emotion sneaked into her, pulling strongly and drawing awareness from her, brushing across the secret wishes of her heart as a painter might dip a brush into pigment and paint out a vision of a future not yet lived.

  Zoe, sitting in the quiet stillness of her rented apartment, sipped in a breath. Her thoughts rushed in and with them—always, always—her thoughts and questions about Cody.

  The urge to love him lodged in her with an insistent power, with a demanding restlessness calling her to admit the deep longings of her soul.

  After last night she knew the truth, that home wasn’t a place at all. It was a belonging. Her heart was crying out for her to listen, telling her that love was her heart’s true home. That a place without love was only a place, a confining box, beautiful but deadly.

  Her home was with Cody. Not necessarily in California, although that’s where he now was. And not in Rome, where she was. But in that place where their hearts made a home for them, where love carved out walls of protection and offered a sanctuary where its power could flourish.

  A belonging. She could live anywhere, make a physical home anywhere. Because she had finally found a belonging for her heart.

  Cody had stolen into her and nothing she could do in Italy would change that truth or make it go away. It was as though in busying herself with the activities of the gallery and trying to ignore her feelings for him, she was walking around outside of herself. All the work she’d done to decorate her apartment, to construct and open the gallery, to create a space for her life, hadn’t filled the hole that ate at her.

  She could no longer feel at home in a place that was no longer home. In turning Cody away, in turning away from him, she had torn herself from her true home.

  The shock of the revelation stunned her.

  She pounded at the pillow next to her and then pulled it to her chest, stroking the fabric. Stroking her shattered heart.

  She knew in that quiet moment that if she didn’t open fully to the possibility of making a life with Cody, if she didn’t make an effort to see if they might make a life together, that she’d always feel the deep homelessness coursing in her, calling, taunting, telling her that life had worked hard to offer her the gift of love—the opportunity to love—but that she had to make the effort to unwrap that gift and to live with whatever she might find inside.

  But it had been weeks since she’d left, since they’d last talked. What if he’d moved on? She wasn’t blind—she’d seen how women at every turn reacted to him, women at restaurants, at the polo match, even her own sisters at family celebrations. By now he could have found a woman far less trouble than she had been. Maybe he had. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t written a note on the reply card.

  After all, she had left him, told him she wouldn’t be back. She had rejected his love without giving him any reason to suppose she’d change her mind.

  But a soft voice whispered in her, stoking her glimmer of courage. If she didn’t try, try to find out... she’d never know.

  Her buzzer rang, snapping her thoughts back to the room.

  “Are you receiving guests?” Anastasia’s honeyed voice asked through the intercom.

  “You’re hardly a guest.” Zoe said as she buzzed her in.

  “You and the gallery are the talk of Rome,” Anastasia said a few moments later, handing Zoe a bag. “Espresso. A triple. And a pastry. I thought you might need both.” She walked to the window seat and plopped down amid the bright-colored pillows.

  “This is a lovely apartment, Zizi. I love what you’ve done with the fabrics and colors.” She fluffed a down pillow, put it behind her and leaned into it, then pulled her feet up on the seat. “Are you thrilled with your success?”

  Zoe took the coffee out of the bag and sipped at it. And wanted to tell her sister the truth.

  She walked to the window seat and draped an arm around Anastasia’s shoulders. “Good thing you brought coffee.” She offered Anastasia a sip. “You’ll need it when you hear what I’m about to do. And I’m going to need your help.”

  The next afternoon Zoe drove to the art class she’d signed up for. She told the teacher that she could keep her deposit but that she wouldn’t be taking the class. Then she drove toward Villa di Fiore.

  Anastasia had agreed to stay in Rome to oversee the gallery until her fellowship started in May. Zoe was free to return to California. But with each mile she drove, uncertainty coursed in, bringing with it a heavy, dark cloud of doubt. She gripped the steering wheel. If only she could direct her life as easily as she could steer the car. If only she had some guarantee that her hopes and the plans she was making were well grounded.

  She turned off the two-lane road and drove the familiar curving country lane that led to the villa. As she neared the turn leading to the estate’s driveway, a man stepped into the road and waved at her. A truck sat just off the pavement.

  “Do you have a phone, signora? My tire is flat, and I need to call for help.”

  Zoe handed the man her phone. While he made his call, she looked closely at the truck. Five horses and a cow were crowded into the back of it. The horses were older and not in good health. One of the horses stared out the back of the open truck. Old eyes. Lovely eyes. And they drilled right into Zoe’s soul.

  The driver handed back her phone. “Grazie. They said it will be half an hour.”

  “Where are you taking them?” She gestured to the animals.

  “To the Fattoria Minzoni.”

  The glue factory. Her stomach churned as the reality sank in. “How much are they paying you for them?”

  “Three hundred euros,” the man answered, looking away from her and down at his sho
es.

  “I will pay you six hundred.”

  The man lit up. “Certainly, signora.”

  “Stay here. I’ll be back with my brothers.” She started to walk to her car, but turned back. “Don’t leave. I’ll be right back. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.”

  “Certainly, signora.”

  That three hundred euros could make such a difference in the lives of six animals was a horrible truth. She calculated the profit she could make when she sold the gallery. A man had offered her three times her investment the night before, so it was likely she could get even more. With the sale of the paintings and the building, she could fund the plan that was forming in her mind.

  Rafe was easier to convince than Gaetano. The horses he was willing to care for, but a cow? With her ponies in California—no longer using their stalls here—there was plenty of room for the animals in the estate’s barn, she had argued. When she swore to hire help and make sure that the vet bills were paid, he’d reluctantly agreed.

  By the time she and Rafe returned to the truck, the man’s flat tire had been repaired. Zoe handed over the euros and told him to follow her and Rafe.

  Gaetano grumbled but helped them unload the horses. Zoe had to coax the cow out of the back. The cow wasn’t that old, she just had an abscess on her foreleg. Nothing a good vet couldn’t handle.

  Rafe and Zoe were just heading up to the main house when a truck towing a horse trailer pulled up the drive.

  “Looks like word has spread already,” Rafe said in a joking tone, but Zoe heard the wariness under it.

  The driver hopped out. “Signora Tavonesi?”

  “Yes?”

  “I am instructed to deliver this horse to you.” He handed her a sheaf of papers.

  She knew the pedigree seal at the top. This prized animal would never be a candidate for a glue factory.

  “There must be some mistake.” She tried to hand the papers back, but he shook his head.

  “No, signora.” He handed her a gilt-edged envelope embossed with the Gualdieri family seal. “This explains your gift.”