“You’re lucky we’re playing right now or I’d straight whoop your ass,” taunted Dallas.
“No, you’re lucky we’re playing a game right now,” I said.
“Oh really”—Dallas laughed—“you think you can take me, huh? All right, we can do this in the locker rooms right now. We can do this in the hotel, bitch. We can do it anywhere, anytime, fucking pussy.”
The other guys in the pen had turned to inquire why Dallas was screaming at me in the outfield. They saw me standing there, frozen and unable to call Dallas on his bet to fight. They say the bigger man walks away, but I knew from years of experience on a team that you can feel pretty small when the occasion you didn’t stick up for yourself is shared by a team of onlookers. But I didn’t want to fight, at least not as bad as Dallas. I just wanted to see him get what he deserved. I wanted him to see himself for what he was.
“Fucking pussy,” he said again when I failed to move.
“I feel sorry for you, Dallas.”
“Why’s that, pussy?”
“Because you need this game. You need it to save you. If you didn’t have baseball, you’d just have your fucked-up life off the field with no way out. If you wanna fight later on, that’s fine, but no matter what you do or say to me, it’s never going to be as bad as what you’ve done to yourself. You might kick my ass, but it will never hurt me as bad as it must hurt to wake up to the life you live every day.”
Fish had to stop warming and pull back a rabid Dallas. That’s when I walked away, to the safety of the dugout, with Dallas shouting slurs and challenges at me from behind. I acted like I didn’t feel his words hit me, not from the outside at least. I felt them inside, where they practically begged me to turn around and spear him and beat on him until we were separated by teammates with both our faces bloody from trading blows. I felt them all the way into the dugout, where I sat down, calm and controlled like I’d just been pulled from a bad outing. I felt them after the game had finished, after I talked to Bonnie, and every time Dallas and I passed each other in silence the next day. However, I did take some small satisfaction in knowing that as frustrated as his words made me, it wasn’t half as bad as what my words had done to him.
Chapter Forty-two
Abby held the door open for me as I walked into Ready’s office in the Fresno visitors’ locker room. The whole of the visitors’ locker room was a small space, including the offices, but Ready’s office was large enough to sit the three of us for our private, closed-door meeting.
It was at least an hour before stretch, and there was no rhyme or reason for this meeting that I could think of beyond the possibility I was getting sent down or, dare I say it, I was getting called up. The thought of the latter had me on the edge of my seat.
“We’ve already sent up Myrow, Luke, and Estes, and we’re real happy about that,” said Abby.
“Me too,” I said, anxious to hear if I was going to be joining them.
“The problem is, they were our selections fer the All-Star game. Now we have to find someone to replace ’em with.” Abby’s smile widened as he nodded to me. Mine shrank as I sat back in my seat, knowing full well what was coming next.
“We get to choose who the substitutes are and we both were a think’n you’d make a fine replacement. You’ve pitched real good all year, that’s what I said to Ready, didn’t I?” Abby turned to Ready. “Didn’t I say he pitched real good for us?”
Ready raised an eyebrow. “Yep, that’s what you said, Abby.”
“We’d like you to go on account of you earning it, but it’s up to you if you wanna do it. I don’t see why you wouldn’t, though.”
Making an All-Star team is great news, except when you’ve bought plane tickets to head home over the break. Like many of the other boys on the squad, I was planning to skip town and get away from the baseball scene for a couple of well-earned days off. Besides, Bonnie had lined up visits to the wedding and rehearsal party venues, and tours of potential apartment complexes where we might make our home. After all she’d done solo, I couldn’t leave her hanging now.
On the other hand, this was the Triple A All-Star game, not some A ball hoopla for youngsters with several seasons ahead of them and the big league roster. This was the best players in Triple A, a roster representing players who could help a big league club right now—maybe I’d be helping Bonnie more by going to the All-Star game than going home.
“How big for me is this, really?” I asked.
“It would be a real feather in your cap,” said Abby.
“Would it help me make the big club?”
“It wouldn’t hurt.”
I gritted my teeth. Abby had been so supportive of me all year; I felt guilty for not taking his offer as soon as he gave it. I was hoping he’d tell me the All-Star team wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. It was just a show team, after all; everyone would only pitch one inning and it didn’t matter who won the game. Hell, I wasn’t even the first choice! I searched the room for an answer other than the one on Abby’s face.
“But I made this promise to my fiancée months ago, and we already bought the tickets. They’re nonrefundable.”
“Have her change ’em and come see you. I’m sure she’ll be proud.”
“She’s got work, and, well, we were going to look at wedding decorations together.”
Abby looked at Ready with a baffled face, as if asking him if he really heard me say I was giving up an All-Star game bid for a chance to look at wedding décor.
“Maybe if this wasn’t last minute, I could have planned for it better,” I said, trying to recover.
“This only happens so many times,” said Abby. “When other teams come looking at ya, they’ll always see this. It means more than ya think.”
I dropped my head. “I understand.”
“So you accept?”
“No. I can’t.”
Abby and Ready exchanged looks of astonishment.
“Yer sure?” asked Abby.
“No. But this is what I’m going to do,” I said.
After a long stretch of silence and a resigned sigh, “Alright then,” said Abby, his demeanor suggesting I just did something really, really stupid. “Well.” He picked up a stack of papers and shuffled through them. “Send Dallas in here, would ya please?”
I swallowed hard and bitter at his words. “Sure,” I said.
I left the office, found Dallas, and told him that Abby wanted to see him. Then, faintly, I added, “Congratulations.”
“You should have gone!” said Bonnie, driving us from the airport to her parents’ house on the east side of Cleveland. I was going to stay there, in their guest room under their watchful eye for the break. Bonnie picked me up early the morning of the fourteenth as I’d flown through the night, leaving as soon as our final first half game against Tucson ended.
“Oh, don’t say that now. I already feel terrible.”
Bonnie shook her head. “I feel like I did this to you. It’s my fault.”
“You didn’t do it, honey. It just happened at a complex time, that’s all.”
“I would have understood if you had gone. Next time, you should go.”
“There might not be a next time.” I thought about the finality of my own statement, then, as if to combat it in my own mind, “I wanted to set the precedent that baseball doesn’t get between us. It was a hard decision, but we made plans, and I don’t want to break our plans for baseball if I can avoid it. Besides, the title of All-Star next to your name is nice but it doesn’t really mean anything.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.” I wasn’t. “How many people do you know who don’t have to pay taxes because they made a minor league All-Star team?”
“None.”
“Exactly.”
“But if you could have gone, if we didn’t plan this visit, would you have? Would you talk about it like it was a great accomplishment that was going to really help your career?”
“Absolutely
.”
“Now I feel bad again,” said Bonnie.
“Honey, one of the best skills a baseball player has is his ability to rationalize things in his favor so he can always be on the winning end. For example: Missing the All-Star game was a key maneuver in my ascension to the Bigs. It’s a chance for me to recharge and come into the second half fresh.”
“Do that again. Rationalize something else,” said Bonnie.
“Okay. Here is a classic one: Pitching badly today will help me in the long run as it exposes the things I need to work on to make me better. I’m actually glad I failed because now I can improve. Winning just covers up opportunities for improvement.”
“But what if you don’t improve?”
“Then you’re just lying to yourself. That’s the key to rationalizing, you have to follow through.”
“Okay then, we need to make the most of the experience while you’re here.”
“Agreed. So, let’s relax, see the venues, and find a great place to live.”
“I think you should talk to your parents,” said Bonnie.
“Excuse me?” I rolled my eyes over to her.
“I talked to your mom about the guest list a week ago as she was upset.”
“With what?” I barked, my tone one of irritation.
“I know you don’t like to deal with them, and I didn’t want to bother you with this while you were playing, but she’s mad you didn’t call her to tell her this. She feels like you don’t want them to be a part of the wedding.” Bonnie cringed at how I might respond to the news.
I slapped a hand over my face. Oh, the irony, I thought, first Mom doesn’t think it’s going to happen at all, now she’s upset because I’m not making her a bigger part of it.
“I’ll never understand her. It’s like whatever she says to me, I should assume the opposite.”
“I think she’s just upset you haven’t called to check in on your dad. She dropped a lot of heavy hints about it.”
“She’s not very subtle,” I said and stopped there, choosing to sit in silence for a while instead of talking about what I might do concerning my parents.
“Families are a big part of the wedding process, babe. I know people say you aren’t marrying the family, but you kinda are. I think you should at least try and make peace with them beforehand, just so they can all enjoy it. It’s important they feel like they’re a part of it. You do want them to be a part of it, right?” She let the question float for a second before tacking it down with, “You don’t want to look back and have any regrets.”
There was that word again: funny how it seemed to be showing up so much lately. “Would you regret it if my grandmother wasn’t there? Do I have to go make peace with her too?”
“I sent your grandmother an invitation to my bridal shower, then she called my mom and told her she was pissed we even considered her. We can leave her out of this process. But I think you should go see your dad.”
“I came here to see you, honey, not to go fight with my parents.”
“You’re not going to fight with them.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re right, I don’t, but if you go when your mom is out of the house, you and your dad can talk without interruption.”
“Can’t I just call them?”
“If they find out you came home and didn’t visit, your mom will be twice as pissed, and since I’m the one who has to run all the wedding details past her and listen to her complain, I want you to do this for me.” She reached one hand across the car and took hold of mine. “Do it for us.”
“Fine,” I said. “But this is not going to help me with the restful, recharging part of my rationalization.”
“I know, but it will help me with my I made you come home for reasons bigger than an All-Star game rationalization.”
I gripped her hand. “Well played, Mrs. Hayhurst, well played.”
Chapter Forty-three
I pulled into my parents’ driveway in Bonnie’s borrowed car. My Corolla was parked under the tree next to the house, covered in buds and twigs from the onset of spring. I’d asked my parents to watch after it since I was afraid of my grandmother sabotaging it like she did my last one. I’d also asked my parents to drive it every week or so, but it looked like that direction had been forgotten, or at least I suspected it was until I peeked in the window and saw empty fast-food wrappers scattered around the backseat.
Neither my brother’s car nor my mother’s was in the drive. They were both at work, allowing my dad and me to be alone without any interruption. When I came through the front door, I could hear music playing from the stereo in the living room. It was a Bob Dylan album, my dad’s patron saint.
He was surprised when he saw me, but before he could talk I explained that it was the All-Star break, and that I’d come home to help Bonnie with the wedding arrangements.
“Your mom never told me anything about you coming home,” said Dad, surprisingly conversational but still sitting in his customary chair at the kitchen table, complete with a cigarette in his hand. He didn’t get up to turn the music off.
“That was by design,” I said.
“Ah,” he said.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Better than I was,” he said, taking a pull and puffing it out.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t feel like me much before.” He took another pull of his cigarette. “You ever feel angry ’cause you’re hungry? You know why you’re angry, because you haven’t eaten, but you can’t stop feeling mad even when you tell yourself not to be. Well, I felt like that a lot, but there was nothing I could eat that would make it feel better. Nothing I could buy, or say, or do. I felt angry, irritated at everything, and knew I had no reason to be. Just real mad at everything. And then, when I’d blow up and get it all out, I’d feel so terrible about what I’d done I couldn’t stand myself. I’d see my life and how I had no control and I’d wanna be dead, ’cept I was too scared of it to do it.”
“You don’t feel that way anymore, right?”
“I don’t feel such highs and lows, but I still feel the pull of it. Your brother still does stupid shit. The dog still won’t shut up. Your mom still nags me. Your grandma still gets on my nerves. It ain’t like your mother and I are smoking dope by the fish tanks again, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Maybe you should try that.”
“Yeah.” My dad laughed. “Maybe I should.” He took a final pull from his legal cigarette and mashed it into the ashtray in front of him. “I gotta stop smoking these anyway.”
“Your mom told me, after the last time she talked to you, she expected you to get married and never come home.”
“That was my plan.”
“Why the hell are you here, then?”
“Bonnie,” I said. “She talked me into it.”
“She did, huh?”
“I didn’t want to come back. I had it all justified in my mind. I still do, honestly. I’m tired of this place.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” he said. “Most days none of us want to be here.”
“Then why are you? Why don’t you guys just move, turn over a new leaf?”
“Where else would we be, Dirk? We had some bad luck, and now we’re working it out. That’s how life is.” My dad’s hair was brushed and flipped up on the side like he’d combed it with a balloon. He passed one of his crumpled hands over it like a paw, trying to smash it down, but it wouldn’t be beaten. “There are some things we could have done differently, I suppose.”
“You mean, like when you got up on the roof?”
“No, not that. That was an accident. Wish it had never happened, but it did. I couldn’t control it.”
“Then what?”
“The stuff after. Stuff I said. To your mom, to your brother ... to you.”
I looked down at the floor. “It’s all right.”
“It’s been so long since I’ve felt normal,
or close to normal, Dirk. I don’t much know who I used to be. The music helps, though.” We sat there for a while, listening to Dylan saw away on his harmonica. Then my dad said, “I knew you’d come back, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your car.”
“I got keys of my own, I could get that anytime,” I bluffed.
“I got all your crap in the basement,” countered my dad. “All them childhood toys and stuff you couldn’t live without.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I’d miss my old toys, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t miss any of us, but you’d miss them toys,” said Dad. “And you’d miss this place. You don’t realize how much things mean to you when you’re young, but when you get older, it’s funny what sticks and what don’t.”
I didn’t say anything. Instead, as if testing his words, I got up and strolled around the house, absorbing it in a way I hadn’t been able to do for a long time. We didn’t have central air-conditioning in the house, just windows that were open now to let spring air in. I walked to each of them and gazed through them, like I was looking back in time. This was the first time I’d seen my home in the summertime in seven years. I forgot about what the lilac bush looked like covered in blooms, what the broken concrete driveway looked like with grass shooting through the cracks. Then, there was the old mound in the backyard, covered in grass instead of snow. Not since I threw off it in 2003, before I finalized my contract and left to play, had I seen it in such a state.
“You remember the last time I saw you pitch?” I asked Dad, looking through the window.
“What’s that then?” asked my dad. “Back in slow pitch softball?”
“No, that day in the backyard. After that start I had in high school?”
“Oh yeah. That day you thought you were gonna knock that wall down on account of Central beat’n you up?”
“Yeah.”
“I remember.”
“I shouldn’t have stopped you from throwing.”
“Ah, that don’t mean nothing,” said my dad.
“It meant something to me. You just said it’s funny what sticks with you and what doesn’t, and that moment has stuck with me for years now. I think of it more than you know.”
Out of My League Page 22