I followed Sam up the back steps into the house. He closed the door behind us, but kept his hand on the door handle for a moment. “Thank you,” he said. He released the handle, running a hand over his head. “I know they’re a lot.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone so in love with baseball.”
Sam huffed out a sound that might have been a laugh, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “Yeah.”
“Or you playing baseball.”
Sam closed his eyes briefly. “My dad’s living in this weird time loop. On one end it’s twenty years ago and me playing ball is literally the only thing that makes him happy. On the other, he’s picking me apart for it not being that time anymore.”
“And then your mom makes up for it by obsessing about the specific details of every other part of your life.”
Sam shoved his hands in his pockets. “You noticed that, huh?”
“She’s sweet,” I said. “But I can see how she’s trying to love enough for two people. And doing it in a kind of… self-serving way.” I tried to be soft in my tone, but it was weird.
“Damn, doctor.”
“Hasn’t your therapist said anything similar?”
“We haven’t really gotten there yet. Therapy’s kind of a new thing for me. Also I haven’t been in a while. Life’s too good.” He smiled.
This made my chest heat unnecessarily, since he had to be talking about Henry. Right?
I looked out to the backyard, where Sam’s mom had Henry on her lap, waving his hand at the laptop. “It sounds like Cora’s got your back? You seem close.” They’d spelled each other off during dinner, rescuing each other when the conversation started veering somewhere the other didn’t want. It made me happy for them, and broke my heart a little, thinking of how Anthony would just agree with everything my dad complained about.
“We don’t talk about our childhood much,” he said. “It’s more of a ‘tacit support as adults’ thing.”
That surprised me.
Sam noticed. “Cora had it rougher than me,” he said. “Shewas basically ignored. Meanwhile, I got that.” He pointed his chin toward the living room.
I walked into the space to see what he was talking about.
Out of a wall of photos, at least three quarters were of Sam. And three quarters of those were Sam playing baseball. He was extremely cute. Photogenic, too, with an adorable grin. But God, I’d never seen so many photos of a living person in one place. It was like a shrine. Especially when there was another kid. Poor Cora. And Sam, too. This was such a strange thing to do.
“There’s more there.” Sam indicated the bookshelf below, where several photo albums with his name on them and various dates lined the shelves. There was one for Cora. One.
“Everyone thinks it’s funny, or cute. But I don’t… I never asked for this. I actively tried to get them to stop. By the time I was a teenager I fucking hated baseball.”
“I’m shocked you went to college for it at all,” I said.
Sam dropped onto the arm of the couch. “I was good at it. That was it. And I didn’t have any other plan.”
“Just because you’re good at something, doesn’t mean it’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Sam bunched his brow, then looked at me. “That’s very smart, Ellie. Sounds like something a therapist would say.”
“My mom told me that, after my high school science teacher kept pushing me toward a career in medicine my senior year.”
“Ellie, you were a science nerd?”
“That’s the thing, I wasn’t. I just happened to be good at Chemistry, specifically. I don’t really know why those equations clicked for me. But I didn’t dream about medicine. I loved putting things together. Working with my hands. I was good in shop class, too, but the teacher never pushed me to become an electrician. I did that all on my own.”
I felt Sam looking at me from his perch.
“Anyway. That’s when she said that. She told me she was good at working as a VP, but it didn’t mean she needed to keep doing it. Not when it was suffocating her.”
I peered at a photo of Sam and Cora together, his arm looped protectively around her shoulder. Then, at a little league photo where Sam, maybe ten years old, was poised with a bat, his eyes squinting in the sun. He looked… stressed. Which was a weird thing for a ten-year-old to be.
