by KD Casey
Womack texts him one day in August. The Swordfish have sunk even further, at the bottom of the division and digging southward. Zach’s gotten a handful of texts aimed at him on the group chat, mostly ribbing him for getting the hell out of there and asking about his life in New York. He sent back pictures of food, of his stall at Union Stadium, then muted his notifications against the inevitable roasting.
It’s before a night game, Zach sitting at his stall, the clubhouse milling around him. A few of his teammates are playing Casino, some discussing the pitcher they’re about to go face.
I’ve been looking at arbitration stuff, Womack says. Zach’s expecting more details and sends back a set of question marks when none come.
Just working up to asking a rude question.
You wanna know why my salary got cut my fifth year
Because the Elephants gave him an insult of a salary offer, one his mother, his agent, and anyone with common sense told him to decline, and he took it. The full twenty percent pay decrease, the largest decrease allowable under the collective bargaining agreement. His playing time went up, not that it really mattered. Long story short if your agent tells you not to sign something don’t.
There’s a delay, the message marked as read, and he can see Womack begin typing and then reconsider. And there’s no real way to explain that Zach took a pay cut because he wanted to stay in Oakland, and wanted to stay in Oakland because of Eugenio, at least not over text message.
Zach toggles to the browser on his phone, pulling up the numbers from Womack’s last start—a three-hit gem of a game that the Swordfish still managed to lose through sheer incompetence. You surviving ok down there?
Yeah, it is what it is. Pinelli’s got me working with some of the other pitchers on their mechanics. Don’t know if it helps but I guess it can’t hurt.
That happened to me my fourth year playing. Took a while to see it as a compliment. And Zach tries to imagine how his life would have turned out if Courtland and D’Spara didn’t order him to fix Johnson’s habit of tipping or to work with Eugenio on his framing. Use it at your arb hearing. They like that leadership stuff.
Yeah, we’ll see.
They’ll make you feel greedy just for stating your value. It sucks. Don’t let them get to you
He pauses writing, wondering if he should put Womack in touch with Eugenio, what that might say about their relationship other than that they’re friends. He’s been practicing with Henry for what to say—to Womack, to Johnson, to other former teammates.
And he takes a breath and then another, naming all the fears he has: that Womack could stop talking to him or, worse, try to convince him he’s somehow mistaken, the way players subtly, and then not so subtly, invite him to Bible study groups. That Womack is unlikely to do any of that. That Zach could probably survive it if he does.
When you’re up playing the Gothams next month, Zach writes, I’ll buy you dinner and tell you the whole story about my contract.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A month into Zach’s tenure with the Union, Eugenio sends him a real estate listing for a loft two floors up from his that one of his neighbors is subletting while they’re out of the country.
“Are you sure?” Zach says.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t. It’s a temporary lease. We’ll see how things go.”
The media has caught on to them being friends. There are pictures, sometimes, in the local tabloids, always with the implications they’re about to go pick up women together or, once, have a threesome with an actress neither of them knows.
Maritza corners him about it one morning. “I thought you said you were boring.” She holds up a picture on her phone of the two of them out, Eugenio with his arm around Zach in a corner booth.
“I didn’t say my friends were boring.”
“Morales is definitely not boring.” And her cheeks go a little red.
Zach nearly falls down laughing when he tells Eugenio later, who also goes a little red. “I told her you and Brito should do a photoshoot. Like, you both in pinstripes. It’d sell magazines.”
“Brito? Really? I didn’t think you were into pitchers.”
“Yeah, well,” Zach says, rubbing the back of his neck, but he laughs too.
He plans to move into Eugenio’s building the first weekend in September, his meager suitcases supplemented by his belongings from storage. His parents insist on driving up to help, despite him saying that he can just hire movers. For once, they accept his offer to put them up in a hotel. Which was an argument or at least the beginning of one, until his mom said, “I worry that people think we’re taking from you,” with the same expression she got after meetings with his teachers when he was in school, her eyes shimmering. Something that made him sit down, heavily, before assuring her that no one at the hotel would think anything of it.
Now it’s early evening. Eugenio and he both had day games, the Union losing, the Gothams winning, though neither by a wide margin. “My parents’ll be here on Saturday,” Zach says.
Eugenio pauses where he’s eating, setting down his fork, and then going to pull a glass of water from the sink, Zach following. “I’ll swing by Monday, I guess. Once you’re settled in.” Eugenio’s voice is tight, shoulders rising, expression carefully shuttered.
“That’s not why I was telling you.” Zach takes the glass of water from Eugenio’s hands and sets it behind him on the counter. “I wanted to know if you were going to be around on Sunday, either before or after the game, so you could see them. If you want to.”
“Oh.” Eugenio looks genuinely surprised at that, his eyebrows up above the frames of his glasses.
“I was gonna tell them on Saturday. Um, to give them some time to get used to the idea. That I’m gay. That I’m seeing someone. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to mention you.”
“Oh,” Eugenio says, again.
“You don’t have to decide right away. Henry says that processing time is important.”
“Tell Henry that I appreciate that.” One of Eugenio’s hands is gripping the fabric of his sweatpants, and Zach covers it, feeling his fingers relax, Zach threading his own between them.
“I don’t want to rush you. It’s not fair that I asked you to wait all those years and not fair if I ask you to rush now. I’m just excited, I guess, or scared. A lot of things I didn’t spend time articulating before, and I figured I’d just shove ’em in a dark cabinet and come back to them when I was done with baseball. It turns out that’s not how that works.”
“It isn’t.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.” And Eugenio’s smiling, a pleased smile.
Zach looks down at their hands, fingers curled loosely together. “I thought about this when we were together, before. After you left. I used to watch you smoke, and I’d be sitting in the bullpen in Arizona trying not to think about what your hands might feel like.”
“I might have noticed you looking,” Eugenio says. “I might have smoked more because of it.”
Zach tips his forehead to Eugenio’s, breath mingling, Eugenio’s hand still interwoven with his. “I know it’s early, but I’m serious about this.”
“It’s been three and a half years,” Eugenio says, with a laugh Zach can feel.
“I’m told processing time is important.” And he kisses Eugenio, on his mouth, on the incline of his neck, the callus on the rise of his palm, on the knuckles of his left hand.
* * *
Zach’s parents drive up on Saturday and text him from every rest stop on the Delaware and New Jersey turnpikes, pictures of tourist shlock and the world’s last Roy Rogers. They bring Aviva, who’s five months pregnant and cranky in the September humidity, her hair a halo around her head.
Zach has a game that night, one the next day, and there’s a schedule up in the clubhouse, a bulletin board counting down thei
r magic number until they clinch a postseason berth. His family arrives in late morning. They spend a few hours unpacking, his mother insisting on putting shelf liner in all his cabinets, his father rearranging books Zach didn’t read in Miami and probably won’t read in New York.
Aviva is miserable enough in the heat of his under-air-conditioned loft that he drags her to the little shaded park across the street from him, buys her a gelato that he watches her eat, and then another when she finishes the first.
“Better?” he asks.
“Yeah. How does anyone live in this city without AC?”
“I can go get you a cup of ice.”
“Zach, I’m fine. Just, I don’t recommend being pregnant and in a car that Dad’s driving.”
“Noted.” There are only a few other people at the park, and he has a ball cap on, not a Union one, but an Elephants one old enough to be stained with salt from sweat. “Aviva, I wanted to tell you something before I tell Mom and Dad.”
She doesn’t say anything, but gets up from the park bench they’re on, tossing her gelato cup in a nearby trash can. “It sounds like it’s serious. Are you sure you want to talk about it here?”
Around them, people are walking dogs, wading off late-morning hangovers, moving with the kind of ferocious purpose particular to New York. No one glances their way. “Here’s fine. When you told Mom and Dad about Ivan, how’d that go?”
She fiddles with her wedding band, twisting it around her finger. Near it, her tattoo, uncovered. “You mean, when I had to explain that the Orthodox guy I wanted to marry was Ukrainian Orthodox and not Jewish? About as well as you’d expect.” She curves a hand on her stomach. “Everyone says they’ll be happier once the squidlet here arrives.”
“They were at the wedding.”
“Yes, the fact of which they’ve reminded me several times,” she says. “But they’ve come around to him now that they know he’s not going anywhere. Including conversion class but that doesn’t stop Mom from emailing him.”
And Zach wishes he got something to drink, a soda, a pregame bourbon, something to settle the frenetic feeling of his heart against his ribs as he says, “The guy I’m seeing, his parents are religious studies professors. So he probably already knows what they talk about in those classes.”
There’s a moment of her looking at him in slight disbelief before she hugs him, her hair in his face, a hard big-sister hug. “We do this training, for when students come out to us. What we’re supposed to say to affirm their identity.”
“I have a coach for this. We talked through it a bunch. It didn’t really go like I planned it.”
“It’s okay.” Her hair is soft when she leans against his shoulder. “I’m glad you told me.”
“I probably should have, years ago.” Something that feels easy to say, if only in retrospect.
“I worried about you. Mom did too.”
“Worried that I’m gay?”
“Worried that you seemed really depressed after Oakland. It was hard to talk about with her because she was so convinced that you just had to meet someone. You know how she is. She wants everything a certain way.”
“He and I broke up for a while. He wanted to tell his family, and I wasn’t ready for that. But I am now. Or I think I am.”
And Aviva’s looking at him now, an assessing look that she probably uses on students. “I figured it was someone new.”
“No. It’s been on and off for, uh, about three and a half years.”
“Three and half years?” Something about that hits her, and she brings up the shoulder of her voluminous pregnancy dress and starts dabbing at her face.
He looks around for the pile of napkins that came with her gelato, but she must have tossed them with her cup. “Let me go get you some tissues or something.” He starts to get up, when she tugs on the back of his shirt.
“Zach, don’t worry about it. It’s just, you could have told me. I wouldn’t have told Mom and Dad. I thought we had a brother-sister pact or whatever.”
“I didn’t want you to have to lie to them. It didn’t seem fair.” And he’s not going to cry, not in public, but can’t stop the tightness in his chest either. “I just didn’t want to keep disappointing them.”
“You are literally rich and famous.” She hugs him again, punctuating it by tapping him lightly upside the head like she did when they were young. “When you’re not there, it’s all, ‘Zach did this, Zach did that, did you see Zach’s hit the other day?’”
“I’m not that rich. And I’m definitely not that famous.” He glances around to see if they’ve attracted onlookers, if there will be photos of him sitting on a park bench, Aviva crying, in the Post later. “I’m gonna tell Mom and Dad tonight. And my publicist probably later this week. And maybe some other guys on the team. I haven’t decided.”
“That sounds like quite a list.”
“I owe it to him. To myself. I was worried for so long it’d be the end of my career. Or his.”
“His career?”
“You’ve met him. Eugenio—he came to that fundraiser Mom and Dad had for the local park or whatever.”
Aviva goes through a series of expressions, from surprise to something like recalculation. “I wondered about that. When you were there, and we were playing basketball in the yard.”
“I was trying not to be obvious. I guess it was risky bringing him. But it felt like it was too much to go home without him there.”
“God, all I remember about that party was getting blisters from my shoes and being pissed off at you for Mom not making you run around and do shit. And how happy you seemed.”
“Happy?”
“You just, I don’t know, you seemed like you had this weight off you for once. And you kept smiling when you thought no one was looking at you.”
“Mom found us,” he says, adding, “no, not like that,” when Aviva gives him a shocked look. “They tried to set me up with someone, and I escaped upstairs to talk about it with him. She walked in. We were sitting pretty close.”
“And she never said anything about it?”
Zach shakes his head. Something accepted and not mentioned, either because his parents thought nothing of it or everything, enough to trap his voice in his throat. He breathes through it, purposefully, intentionally, as useless as trying to stave off the tide. “I don’t know how it’s gonna go, later. I’m supposed to list out all my fears before I do this, but it’d be easier to list the things I’m not worried about.”
She hugs him again, the kind of hug where her fingers dig into the muscles of his arm like she can keep him together. “Hey, it’s gonna be all right.”
“Thank you.” He pulls back, wiping his eyes with the heel of his palm. “I wish we’d talked about this. I could have used, I don’t know, an ally. Sounds like you could’ve too.”
“Well, you got me now. How do you want to tell Mom and Dad?”
“I was gonna do it after the game. Just be there. Make sure their blood sugar is level. If we get crushed by the Spiders, they’ll be in a mood.”
“I can do that.” She looks across at the gelato shop. “Having a third one is probably a mistake?”
“Probably.” He gets up. “What flavor do you want?”
* * *
They don’t get crushed by the Spiders. Instead, it’s a nail-biter of a game, New York’s magic number in double digits, Cleveland playing like they have nothing to lose, their season over in all but name.
Zach goes out to the batter’s box when he’s up. The crowd is a vague blur of faces, an indistinct sea of noise, his parents and Aviva among many, somewhere in the low infield, with tickets they insisted on paying him back for.
Cleveland’s pitcher is a changeup specialist, and Zach resists the urge to swing at pitches that look deceptively hittable, instead trying to prolong his at-bat. He doesn’t offer at the first p
itch, which comes in below the zone. The second arrives similarly; Zach waits for the umpire’s silence indicating a ball. And the third drops just a hair low, bringing the count to three balls, no strikes.
Another pitch. Zach lets this one go by him, a fastball right up the middle, one so perfectly gift-wrapped for a hit that he should have swung at it—and didn’t. One of the many times when he’s chosen to stay still, not punished for his indecision but not benefiting from it either.
He could go back to his loft after the game, eat cake and drink wine, then send his family back to Baltimore the same as they arrived, Eugenio kept distant from his life. He could promise him he’d get to it later, a date that always lives just over the horizon.
Sixty feet away on the mound, the pitcher throws. The ball releases from his hand, and Zach watches the arc and pattern of its movements as it nears its “commit point,” when he has to decide whether to swing or stay put. It’s a choice he’s made thousands of times, with incomplete information, before a curveball bends or a changeup tumbles. One guided by his experience and instincts but also the confidence that his decision will be the right one.
So Zach watches and considers and swings.
And hits a screaming line drive, one that tears past the Spiders centerfielder, hopping off the grass and bouncing up and into the stands for a ground-rule double.
He pulls into second base as slow as his catcher’s legs will carry him, stripping his batting gloves and shoving them into his back pocket. He asks the Spiders second baseman how his day is and if he’s liking New York.
“Liked it better before y’all were winning,” he says. Zach laughs at that, feeling lighter than he has in a long time, like he might float above the field if not for the grip of his spikes in the costly infield dirt.
After the game, there’s a text from his parents telling him they took the train back “for the experience.”
Aviva meets him by the clubhouse door and spends the ride to his loft relating things her husband says via text in a rapid chatter and wondering if she felt the baby kick in the fourth inning or if she ate too much dairy.