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“So then it’s full steam ahead with Michael?”
Yes.
“I’m going to talk to him tomorrow.”
It’s done. Decided. Michael is the man I belong with. Despite everything I feel for Grant, I’m going to follow my carefully laid-out plan and accept that date with Michael, and not to drop a huge spoiler, but the pieces are going to fall perfectly into place. Sophia and I might just have a joint wedding!
Dum dum dee dum…
NINE
GRANT
I push open my hotel room door and toss my keycard and bag onto the entry table. The luxury suite is empty and quiet and clean. A maid has come and done turndown service, leaving a little square of chocolate on my pillow. I don’t want it, still full from our postgame dinner in the Guardians’ clubhouse. Our manager has gone all out this week, treating us first to all the other good food Baltimore is known for—Maryland blue crab and pit beef—and then switching it up once we got to Cleveland with pierogies and extravagant spreads the guys and I have devoured. It almost makes all the travel worth it.
I slide my shoes off as I reach for my cell phone to call my dad. It’s a ritual I perform after every game.
He knows to expect my call and answers after the first ring.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Boy, tonight was not your night.”
I groan and sit down on the edge of the bed, rolling out my neck.
“I got a hit,” I argue, albeit it was only a single.
“Sure, sure. And that catch in the bottom of the fifth was damn good. If you’d let that ball slip past you, Alvarez would have made it to second.”
“Yeah. I have the bruised ribs to show for it though,” I protest.
He chuckles. “I’m not surprised.”
“You getting to bed soon?”
It’s 10:30 PM in Phoenix and I know he’ll have to be up early to get to the garage. My dad has worked at the same auto shop for over thirty years. It’s not his; he never did break away and start out on his own like he wanted. He said it’d take too much of his time, and when I was young, he wanted to be able to focus on my baseball, not some fledgling business. His pay isn’t great, but he’s always managed to eke out a living just fine. He’s still in a small apartment, the same one where I grew up sleeping on the couch in the living room. I send money back, but he won’t let me do much else. I tried to buy him a car, back in my first year in the majors. I wanted to surprise him with it, but it didn’t go quite as I’d planned. When he saw the truck in his driveway with a big red bow, he threw his hands up and started cussing me out in Spanish, made me return it to the dealership that same day. “You think I want you wasting money on me? I have a car and it works just fine. You be smart about all that money you’re earning. You better be socking it away, you hear me? Don’t be a fool.”
“I’ll go to bed in a bit. I’m watching the game highlights.” I can imagine him sitting there in his favorite old leather recliner with his TV tray set up in front of him, the remnants of a microwave dinner beside a mostly empty can of Coke. “They take care of you after the game?”
“Yeah, I saw the trainer after. He made me take an ice bath.”
He hisses then clucks his tongue. “For how long?”
“Just a few minutes. It wasn’t too bad.”
“Tomorrow it’ll be better, yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll call you after the game.”
“Get some rest.”
After we hang up, I toss my phone onto the other side of the bed and fall back onto my pillow, exhausted. Six days on the road has me eager to get home soon. We’ve been going nonstop since we left for Baltimore. One day stretches into another. Tonight, our game against the Guardians went late. Afterward, I hung back and showered, ate dinner, watched SportsCenter with the guys in the clubhouse for a bit and then headed back here to the hotel. A lot of them are still going and won’t crash until 2 AM or later. It’s part of life on the road.
In New York, it’s easier to justify going home to your family, or at the very least, going back to your apartment with all your stuff versus going back to another lonely hotel room.
Two nights ago, I went out with Nick and Dustin to a little bar near our hotel. We shot the shit for a while and then Nick disappeared with a girl he met on Raya, the app some of the guys use for hook-ups and dates. I tried it last year and found it’s not really my thing, but I understand the appeal. During the season, there’s so little time for a personal life. It’s not like most of us are going to meet women in the grocery store or at the gym. I don’t even know anymore—is that where people meet? I haven’t dated the traditional way since college. The second I donned my first MLB jersey, any sense of normalcy in my social life went up in smoke. People I hadn’t talked to in years suddenly wanted to be buddy-buddy with me. Girls I knew from middle school were sliding into my DMs, asking if I wanted to reconnect, and if it wasn’t old friends, it was total strangers reaching out with clear, explicit “requests”.
