Foster is quiet for a beat, and his jaw shifts. “Jealous.”
His honesty throws me for a second.
“Of your brother’s relationship with Mark Ripley?”
“Of the whole thing.” His gaze never strays to Decker.
“You had the same outcome.”
Foster’s shoulder lifts. “Yeah, sure, but he had someone looking out for him.” He pauses. “Dad didn’t give a shit about me, other than how well I played baseball. I was his trophy. Something to show off.” He says it without any self-pity, which somehow makes it sadder. “Ripley chose Decker. Chose to be there for him.”
The room quiets. There’s not even the sound of birds chirping outside, as though they too can feel the strained silence inside this room.
I turn back to Decker. A guilty expression crosses his face.
“Decker, do you want to respond to that?”
He runs his hands down his thighs, flexing them on his knees. “I spent a long time being jealous of you.” He turns toward Foster. “Not of your athletic ability. Of the fact that he showed up. That he packed a bag and took you somewhere because he believed in you.” He stops. “Ripley is the reason I got here. But he’s not my dad. He’s a man who was kind to a helpless kid.” He pauses again. “I’m not diminishing what he did for me, but Dad deemed you worthy and me not.”
“He was there to cash in on the fame he hoped I’d get,” Foster says quietly.
“He showed up.” Decker’s voice is firm, and I think this might be the first time they’ve truly grappled with this together. “That’s more than I had.”
Foster opens his mouth. Closes it. His thumb runs along the seam on the arm of the couch.
“I didn’t know it felt like that,” Foster finally says. “I thought you had the better deal. Mom, and then someone like Ripley?—”
“You thought I was fine?”
A sharp nod from Foster. “I thought you were fine.”
Decker sighs. “I thought the same about you. Until later in life.”
I’ve been doing this long enough to know when things are coming together. I inwardly clap my hands. Progress.
“When you made it to the bigs and Foster’s struggles became more public?” They both smirk at my use of the word bigs, and I can’t help but smile.
“Yeah,” Decker mumbles.
I stay quiet. This is the part where a therapist who jumps in does more damage than good. I want them to sit with the connection they just made, the raw honesty they gave one another, and really think about what the other one endured.
It’s Foster who breaks the silence, and his voice has lost some of its careful evenness. “He’s a good man. Ripley. I didn’t know all that. So, you and Penelope knew each other back then?”
Decker tears his eyes away from Foster. The pause before he answers is small, but I catch it. I file it away for another session.
“Yeah, Penelope and Ripley became… family.”
Foster’s expression says this is all a revelation. That he had no idea the role Ripley and his daughter played in Decker’s life.
The day will come when we’ll have to dive into that, but not today.
Today we’ve covered enough.
Some sessions have breakthroughs. Today was one. Two men, same wound—and for the first time, they looked at each other and recognized it. That’s a success, and we’ll take it.
Chapter
Fifteen
