Angels Walking (12 page)

When draft day came, Tyler and a bunch of his teammates gathered in his parents’ living room and waited. The first three rounds came and the next three went, and then another three and another. With each passing round, Tyler felt himself sink a little deeper into the sofa. Why had the Reds scout lied to him? He was about to call the coach at UCLA and tell them he was coming when the phone rang.

“Sorry, Tyler. Things got shaken up a bit at the last minute. We still want you, though. Big money if you take the offer.”

Sure enough, the Reds called out his name in the twelfth round. Tyler and his teammates whooped and hollered and celebrated. But the next day the details of the contract came to light. His signing bonus would be $100,000 with a starting salary of just $24,000 a year.

There were a dozen incentives built in—which was what caught Tyler’s eye. If he pitched half as well as he’d pitched in high school, he’d make six figures every year. Even before he reached the pros.

What happened next was the closest thing to war Tyler had ever known. He couldn’t think about it, couldn’t run through those details now. No pain pills were strong enough to dull the memories of what happened next, the fighting and fallout.

Tyler brought the train of memories to a halt. Enough. As he drifted off to sleep in his car to the sounds of the tide and the Blue Wahoos announcer calling another winning game, Tyler was no longer behind the wheel of his Dodge Charger. He wasn’t broken or homeless or out of money. He had no regrets, no sullied past, no failed dreams.

Rather, he was seventeen and sitting on the roof of a mansion in Northern California, the summer stars close enough to touch.

And Sami Dawson at his side.

Not until he woke up the next morning, the summer sun burning through the windshield and sweat dripping down his face, did Tyler realize the whole thing had been a dream. His arm screamed for relief and he cursed himself for letting his heart go back in time. He didn’t need Sami Dawson. He needed a job and a place to live and shoulder surgery. And he needed Oxycodone in a hurry.

That most of all.

10

S
AMI WAS SORTING THROUGH
her closet, looking for proof that she’d ever dated Tyler Ames at all, when the doorbell rang. Mary Catherine was cleaning the kitchen. “I’ll get it!” When she was in a hurry Mary Catherine talked loud and fast, like a song. This was one of those times.

Sami backed out of her closet, stood, and stretched. “Who is it?” She wasn’t expecting Arnie. He had a legal conference all day. The girls had decided to tackle the apartment in the morning and later walk to the Farmer’s Market on Third Street.

“It’s for you!” Mary Catherine held out the last part of the word “you” with more sing-song than usual. “Come here.”

Sami dusted her hands on her jeans and wiped her hair back from her face. “Coming.” The doorbell was a reminder. She shouldn’t be going through her closet reminiscing. She had a bathroom to clean and sheets to wash. As soon as she rounded the corner she gasped. “What in the—”

“Beautiful, right?” The flowers took over the counter and stretched halfway to the ceiling. Three dozen red roses at least. Mary Catherine dug her nose in the arrangement and grinned. “Who are they from?”

“Very funny.” Sami walked over and snatched the card from the center of the bouquet. They were from Arnie, of course. They had to be. Still, her heart fluttered just a little as she opened the card. Her eyes darted to the bottom. “See? They’re from Arnie.” She raised her brow at her roommate. “He’s wonderful. I keep telling you.”

“Hmmm.” Mary Catherine hopped up on the counter and stared at Sami over the flowers. “What did he do wrong?”

“He didn’t do anything wrong!” Indignation filled Sami’s tone, but even so she started to laugh. “You always pick on poor Arnie. How come?”

“Someone has to.” She jumped down and hurried to the computer. “Proof of Your Love” by For King and Country was on. “I love this song.” She turned up the volume. “If I sing but don’t have love . . .”

Mary Catherine couldn’t carry a tune to save her life. But that didn’t stop her. She grabbed the feather duster from the kitchen closet and sashayed around the room singing every word. Sami smelled the flowers. They were lovely. She looked at the card again.

These are a week late. I should’ve sent them after dinner the other night. I was so focused on my good news I didn’t ask about your client. Forgive me. The future is ours, Samantha. Love, Arnie.

She smiled at the message just as Mary Catherine jumped on the living room sofa and held the feather duster to her mouth like a microphone. “Let my life be the proof, the proof of Your love.” She closed her eyes, fully committed. “Let my love look like You and what You’re made of . . .”

“I’m going back to my room.” Sami held up her card. “Thanks for dusting.”

Mary Catherine danced to the computer and turned the volume almost all the way down. “What’s the card say?”

“It’s not important.” She couldn’t keep a straight face around her roommate. The girl exuded pure joy.

“Come on!” Mary Catherine hurried back to the flowers and sat on the counter again, swinging her freckled legs, her eyes on Sami. “Tell me.”

“He said he should’ve listened better last week when we had dinner.” Sami smiled sweetly. “He just talked about the future. That sort of thing.”

“So he
did
do something wrong.”

“No, he just . . .” Sami looked at the card again and suddenly realized Mary Catherine was right. Something about that made Sami lose interest in the conversation. Enough about Arnie.

Meanwhile, Mary Catherine kept singing off-key—which made Sami start laughing. She tried to stifle her giggles at first, preserving some sense of dignity for her friend’s lack of talent. But she couldn’t stop herself, and after another minute, Sami fell on the couch laughing.

At first Mary Catherine looked offended. But then her voice cracked and she started laughing, too. “Okay, so I’ll skip
Fifteen Minutes
.”

“Definitely.”

When the song ended and they’d both caught their breath, Mary Catherine went to Sami and took the card from her fingers. After she read it she crinkled her nose. “Yuck.”

“What?” Sami should’ve been angry with her friend for dissing Arnie, but she was laughing too hard.

“ ‘Love, Arnie’?” She handed the card back to Sami. “That’s it?” She jumped on the coffee table and struck a dramatic pose. “Mary Catherine,” she said in a baritone voice, “my darling, my everything, I will love you with all I am until my dying breath.” She grinned at Sami as she jumped down from the table. “When it’s my turn, I want that or nothing at all.”

The thing was, Mary Catherine would get it. Never mind that she wasn’t particularly striking. She had so many freckles she called them her partial tan. But that didn’t matter. She was the most beautiful person Sami knew. The whole city couldn’t contain her joy for life, and her love for helping others. She would find her guy yet, because she believed God would bring Him. That was the other thing.

No one could touch Mary Catherine’s faith.

“Anyway.” Mary Catherine smiled and twirled across the room with the feather duster. “If you want Arnie, you can have him.” She stopped and for the first time since the flowers had arrived she settled down and her eyes grew soft. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean it.”

“Yes, you do.” Sami stood, her sides sore from laughing. “It’s okay. Arnie can take it.”

Mary Catherine was still breathing fast from dancing and dusting and singing. “I just wish I’d known you before. When you dated that other guy. The baseball player.”

“I was a kid.” Sami walked back to the flowers and studied them. “He grew up and changed.”

“But he called you Sami.” Her eyes sparkled again. “Right?”

“He did.” She uttered a tired laugh. “I need to get back to work.”

How did she do that?
Sami asked herself as she walked back to her bedroom, back to the old box in the closet. The one she hadn’t looked at in years. It was as if Mary Catherine could read her heart. She couldn’t have known Sami had been digging around her closet looking for proof of Tyler’s long ago fingerprints on her heart.
But still,
Sami thought,
after Arnie sends the biggest bunch of roses ever—she asks about Tyler Ames.

Sami understood why Mary Catherine didn’t click with Arnie. He was too safe for her, too predictable. When she found her guy, he wouldn’t be neat and tidy with a well-planned future. She’d probably meet him on a mission field in China or serving soup in a homeless shelter.

Sami sat on the edge of her bed and read the card from Arnie again. True, he didn’t actually come out and say he loved her. But by now that much was obvious, right? He talked about their future. What more could she ask? Sami set the card on her bed and returned to the closet.

So much of her childhood was stuffed in the box. Not until she reached the bottom did she find the photo album. She’d made two identical books the month they graduated from high school. One she gave to Tyler. The other she kept. She felt the corduroy cover and her heart soared. This was what she’d been looking for.

Easing it up between old papers and framed photographs that once hung in her room, Sami pulled the book free. Then slowly, like she was walking back in time, she sat on the edge of her bed again and stared at the cover. If someone had asked her back then how she pictured things ending with Tyler Ames, she would’ve had one answer.

She would marry him. She had no doubts.

But seeing his name in the news the other day made her wonder if she’d ever really known him. And if she had, then what changed him? Sami smiled at the photo book. The handmade cover, the carefully stitched words. The green fabric looked sort of ugly now, but not at the time.

She opened the book and smiled at the first two-page layout. Tyler in his Jackson High uniform holding a baseball with one word written across the front in Sharpie:
Prom?

Opposite that was a picture of Sami in his embrace, her arms around his neck moments after telling him yes. Of course she would go to his prom. One of Tyler’s teammates took the picture. By then their families frowned on their relationship. Tyler’s parents were convinced she took away from his intensity on the mound, and her grandparents worried that he was reckless.

“Much as we like baseball, your grandfather and I never saw you dating a ballplayer,” her grandmother had told her a number of times that year. “Boys like Tyler have lots of girls. They . . . expect things.”

Sami laughed again at the memory. Tyler never expected anything from her. They would kiss good night, nothing more. Once in a while he would linger before he left for the evening and something in his eyes would change. He would whisper
to her, “I don’t ever want this to end, Sami.” Or “Someday we won’t have to say good night.”

Sami turned the page of the scrapbook. Next was a picture of her and Tyler swinging over the edge of Castaic Lake on an old tire, both of them clinging to the rope. The picture was taken a second before they fell in the shallow water. Sami had bruises on her arms for weeks, but it didn’t matter.

At least she had the memory of a rope swing. Something she wouldn’t have if Tyler hadn’t been in her life.

The photos took her back. Sami and Tyler, barefoot in the rain one January night. He had come to her house to take her for a walk, but then the clouds came. She could still hear herself.
“We should take an umbrella. My grandma will worry I’ll catch a cold.”

Tyler only laughed. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Being cold is good for you.” He took her hand.

“How’s that?” She glanced at the angry sky overhead.

He grinned, pulling her slowly to his side. “It makes you walk closer to me.”

She tried to include only the best pictures, the ones that showed them doing something she never would’ve done otherwise. Roller skating at Venice Beach, sitting in the back of his friend’s pick-up at the last drive-in theater known to man. Sami ran her finger over the photo. She and Tyler had snuggled under a blanket. She couldn’t remember the movie they watched that night, but she remembered everything else. The other couple had made out the entire movie.

Not Sami and Tyler. He kept a running commentary going, making her laugh for reasons that wouldn’t have been funny without him. She turned the pages, reliving one memory
after another. The last picture was the saddest. A photo that had only made its way into her copy of the album. It was taken by a stranger minutes before Tyler stepped on the bus.

His bus to Billings was in the background.

Sami looked into the past and she could see it all again. Feel it. Hear their voices as they said good-bye. “You have to come home whenever you have a chance.” She had put her hands on either side of his face. “I’ll miss you too much.”

“Baby, I won’t be in Billings for long. I promise. It’s just a stop on the way to the Bigs.” He kissed her lips and then looked long into her eyes.

“I believe in you.”

“I know.” His smile had started in his eyes. “That’s why I’m so sure I’ll make it.”