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“You haven’t been from there since you left a million years ago. Your parents don’t even live there anymore. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.” Nick laughs, finishing off his beer and sliding the empty bottle across the counter to me so I can toss it in the trash. “Coach told me Doc was happy about the rehab you’d made on your knee and signed off on you returning to work right before spring training this season. We all assumed your injury was too bad to come back, and that’s why you wouldn’t talk to any of us or give any interviews, you asshole.”
Fucking Coach.
I love that guy to death. He was the closest thing to a dad I had here in Washington when my own father couldn’t be here at all times. I trusted him and the advice he gave, and he was always the first person I went to when I had a problem and my dad was busy. But he’s a bigger gossip than the entire small island of Summersweet put together.
“I had a lot of time to think during all this—”
“Of course you did,” Nick stops me, getting up from the bar stool and walking around the island to help himself to another beer from my fridge. “You locked yourself away in a condo in the mountains for six months and never picked up my calls or answered my texts. Do you even know how many funny memes I sent you during that time that you didn’t even appreciate?”
“Believe me, I saw all the Jesus memes you sent,” I deadpan as he comes back to his barstool and twists the cap off his fresh beer.
“Come on, that one with him knocking on someone’s front door that said Open the door, man; I gotta shit was hilarious!”
I give Nick a few minutes to laugh to himself while he thinks back on all the ridiculous messages he sent me while I was locked away feeling sorry for myself, before I continue.
“When I slipped on the bag at third base during that game, I heard the tendons and ligaments in my goddamn knee pop, and I knew it was bad before my body even hit the ground.”
Nick winces, but thankfully enough time has passed that I no longer hear that sound in my head every waking minute of the day, and it no longer wakes me up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I can only imagine how my teammates felt, being stuck in the dugout, watching the team funny guy—the man who never shuts up or stops trying to put people in a good mood, who has sucked it up and played through every injury with a smile on his face—writhe around, clutching his knee and screaming in pain. Nothing was funny after that, and I stopped giving a shit if anyone was in a good mood, myself included.
“All those days in the hospital, all that time recovering after surgery, and the months and months of rehab, I had no idea if I’d ever play again, and that scared the shit out of me,” I tell him, all the thoughts I’ve agonized over pouring out of me after being locked inside my own head for so long with no one to talk to about it. “But it didn’t scare me, because I was afraid of never playing again. It scared the hell out of me, because the thought of never playing professional ball again… it didn’t freak me out at all. It relieved me. So, I started making a list of all the things I love about playing compared to all the things I hate about playing. Let me tell you—that list looks a lot different now that I’m almost thirty-five from when it did when I was in my early twenties.”
“Well, obviously,” Nick rolls his eyes. “You were young and pretty back then and pulled in a lot of tail. Now you’re old and washed up, get winded by the time you make it to second, and all your tail is going to the rookies now.”
I drop the cap I’m still twirling in my fingers to punch Nick in the shoulder. Not hard enough to injure him, since he still has to be able to catch a fucking ball. Just hard enough to piss him off. And the punch isn’t about the loss of constant female companionship. I haven’t given a shit about that in…
Exactly two years, when I suddenly became obsessed with checking social media.
Nick is currently glaring at me while he rubs his shoulder, because even with the knee injury I went through, and even though I am considered “old” by professional baseball standards and actually at prime retirement age, my sprint time is still the best on the team. I can still catch or stop every ball that comes to me in the outfield. And I’m still a beast behind the plate. I have the skill after my injury; I just don’t have the heart.
