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“It’s dealt with,” I said. “I tore my rotator cuff. The surgery was botched. The end.”
“The end?” he said. “You know you have a whole life ahead of you, right? You’re thirty-two. Life’s just getting started.”
“I dunno,” I said.
I was uncomfortable, but I knew he was probably right. He generally was. Ryan was always the one who knew how to get to the heart of things. He didn’t deal in bullshit. He went right to the subject and attacked.
Fact was, he was right. I hadn’t really dealt with it. The rotator cuff surgery was scary enough, and when I went under the knife, I was sure I was gone for the year. It devastated me. A whole year, right at my contract year, right before what would be my last chance to have a big contract and sign with a team destined for October baseball.
Then I woke up with hushed whispers from nurses and sheepish doctors explaining how there were complications. At first, they refused to admit fault. My lawyers got the truth out of them eventually.
The money I settled for was a far cry from what I was projected to make in free agency, but that wasn’t the point. I was done as a player. Not just ‘done for now’ or ‘done until there is a surgery that can fix the surgery.’ Done. For good. I would never take the mound against a major league hitter with the pennant race in the balance. I would never again make a home run champion whiff on a slider down and away or a rising two-seamer upstairs. It was over. I was done.
I had no choice but to come home. The money I’d saved was good, but I spent a lot of what I had made on trainers and making my body a machine. I sold the mansion three weeks after the surgery, sold most of everything else right after, put it all in a savings account, took the one car I couldn’t part with, and drove south. To Murdock. To Ryan and Murdock High. Home.
“You talk to Principal Runnels yet?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, he seems cool,” I said. “Really excited to have me on board and didn’t ask me to sign some stuff for him to sell yet, so there’s that.”
“He’s a good man,” Ryan said. “You’ll do fine. Did you talk to him on the phone or just over email?”
“Email,” I said, getting a grin from Ryan.
“Just be prepared. He has a lisp. He’s a pretty funny guy but can be hard to understand sometimes.”
“Got it,” I said. “I heard his son plays ball too?”
“Dustin, yeah. Kid’s a natural.”
“Is that why he wanted me to come in so bad?” I asked, laughing. “Because he wants his kid to get to the majors?”
“Probably,” Ryan said. “But you are still a hero around here. You threw a no-hitter against Houston on the road, man.”
“I remember,” I said, nodding. It was my finest performance in the majors and at least one thing I could go to bed knowing I had accomplished. I might not have ever gotten more than a week into October, but I put twenty-seven batters down in order one hot night in Houston. And got cheered for it, at that.
“Well, fuck all that serious stuff,” Ryan said, finishing his beer and standing up to go for another. “You’re going to have a blast here. No worries. Life is good, man.”
“I won’t be here long,” I said. “I’ll get my own place soon. I’ll start looking tomorrow. I just needed to get out of that town today.”
“Hey, I get you,” Ryan said. “But you can stay as long as you want.”
“I appreciate that. Anything I should know about town now? It’s changed a bit since I was here last,” I said.
“Yeah, they built up Broad with some tiny little shops,” he said. “It’s nice, but I don’t know how they cut a profit. Other than that, nothing much else has changed. Especially the pizza.”
It wasn’t like New York or Detroit or Chicago. But it was familiar. We sat and ate for a while before I turned in. His place had a whole apartment downstairs, something Ryan had apparently worked on in his spare time for a while. It had its own bathroom, its own shower, and its own living and bedroom. For something I was only going to hang out for a day or two in, it wasn’t bad.
It was where I was now. The page had turned. A new chapter was ahead. I just wish I knew what it held.
17
MALLORY
Tessa was beside herself waiting for me to get to the coffee shop. She had texted me over a dozen times, almost all of them a stream of consciousness single sentence. She was good at that. Or bad at it, depending on how you viewed texting etiquette. After several years of living in New York and dealing with Tamara, Dale, and Steven’s obsession with texting in a group chat, I could handle anything.
A pang of sadness swept through my heart, and I tried to shake it off. I didn’t have time for it. I had a million things to do on Saturdays, one of which was to go to coffee with the girls and gossip about whatever small-town bullshit was going around that week. It was something I cherished, and a remnant of my past that I was glad to have back to when I moved back to Murdock.
It wasn’t that they forgot me. Tamara especially still kept in touch, texting me all the time and sending me pictures from set. She was successful by her own standards, which was what was important. She wasn’t starring in Hollywood movies or headlining plays on Broadway, but she’d found her niche. She was often the comic relief, which fit her so well, and was a regular on the sappy romance movies that came on women’s channels all the time. It was fun to turn on the TV and see my friend quip her way through a bad movie and chew the scenery up while she was at it.
