Authors: Jessica Minier
“He left me the house,” she said
suddenly.
“I know. That’s great,” I said.
And it was. She gets the house, money for her children, and I get money and a
nightmare. Fuck him, I thought, and slid down the couch to sit with my legs
under the coffee table.
“It helps,” she admitted. “I’m
sorry, though. Do you want any of it?”
This was typical Lee. Tell me all
about her problems, show me the solution and then offer to share it with me at
her own expense.
“No,” I said and wiggled my toes
to see if they were still there.
“Thanks,” she said quietly and I
realized what an effort this was for her. No wonder she needed the alcohol.
“Are you okay with what you got?”
I couldn’t even begin to know how
to answer that question.
“I guess I’m satisfied with what
he left me, yeah.”
“Well, at least it was worth
something more than just cash,” she said.
“What are you going to do?” I
asked.
“It’s not what I’m going to do,”
she said. “Jake’s contract ends this year. He’s nearly thirty-five years-old.
Do you know how hard it will be for him to get picked up again after the
surgery? Hell, we don’t even know if he’ll be able to play again. Oh sure, if
he heals up well, he’s probably got a good five years left. But no one worth
playing for is going to pay for a lame first baseman. If he does get signed,
it’ll be by some penny-ante team like the Expos because they need seasoned
talent and can’t afford to buy anyone really good. A farm team for the rest of
the Major Leagues. Can you imagine? An experienced player like Jake on a crap
team full of rookies? I won’t let him do it. Fading away on no pay in Canada.”
She said Canada like it was the
black hole of Calcutta.
“What about announcing?” I asked.
She groaned and pressed the heels
of her hands into her eyes. “Don’t even remind me.”
“I didn’t realize he had...” I
began.
She interrupted me with a loud
exhalation.
“Let’s just say he won’t be on
air any time soon,” she said.
“I hesitate to ask what
happened.”
Lifting her glass and examining
the contents very carefully, she said, “It’s such a long story. You don’t want
to hear it.”
I didn’t have to reply.
She set the glass down on the
coffee table and leaned forward, the sharp ends of her hair almost brushing the
top of my head, she sat so close. “You know I tutored him in college, in his
ethics class. That’s how we met. The most honest man in the world, and he
couldn’t pass his ethics class. Can you imagine?”
I remembered that she had called
me in Seattle, shortly after I moved there. “I’m dating Jake Munsey,” she’d
said. “I know you won’t mind. I’m just telling you.” She wasn’t interested in
my opinion at the time, any more than she was interested in my response now. I
said nothing and she continued.
“The first time he kissed me, we
were sitting on the bleachers and I was trying to get him to understand the
nature of the Good Samaritan law and he just leaned over and planted one on me.
Then do you know what he said?”
I shook my head, unable to
imagine.
“He said, ‘You talk too much.
You’re so pretty, Lee. Let’s go back to my room.’”
God help me, I laughed. Lee
snorted and took another swig of her drink.
“No one ever accused Jake of
being obtuse,” I said.
“Daddy couldn’t stand him, which
really hurt Jake, since they’d been so close when Daddy was his coach. Jake
could never figure out why, if the man liked him as a player, he didn’t like
him when he was dating his daughter. But you know what I figured out?”
“No,” I answered, carefully.
“What?”
“I had realized that no one would
ever love me as unconditionally as Jake Munsey, because anyone smarter or more
perceptive would have seen my true personality and run like hell.”
“Lee…”
She saw right through me and
plowed ahead.
“In a few weeks, that team is
going to fuck him and leave him out to dry and we have no way of maintaining
this lifestyle. And I know,” she cut me off as I began to offer my advice on
her “lifestyle”, “that I could just live some other way, but damnit, I don’t
want to. I want this. It almost makes all the press and the traveling and the
loneliness and the crap bearable.”
“Lee,” I coaxed her gently. “The
broadcasting?”
“Well, of course I looked into
it. And I got him a spot, you understand, commentating on batting. Just for the
night. On hitting the ball, which is his goddamned specialty,” she said,
drawing out the word: spec-i-al-ity. “And he goes, and we’re feted around the
studio, given jackets and plates of cold cuts and told how great he is and how
honored they are. They keep reminding us, saying to us: this is live TV. Just
relax, you know, and be yourself, but this is live. Live, live, live, on
national TV. And I can see Jake nodding and taking it in and it’s scaring him,
and I know it is, but there’s nothing I can say. I don’t know how to comfort
someone. I have two kids and yet I don’t have a single word of comfort to offer
to him.
“And then they take him away, and
I’m in the green room, watching, nibbling on those stupid cold cuts and the
cameras start rolling and the regular announcers are joking and doing their
thing and they get to the part about hitting and Jake freezes. Just like a big
idiot, live, on national TV, he freezes.
“The announcers work through it,
you know, they’re so slick. And I’m sitting there in the green room, and my
assistant leaves and goes off to ‘do some stuff, Ma’am, I’m sorry’ and I’m all
alone there, feeling horribly embarrassed and ashamed of feeling that way. And then
I step out into the hall and all those people who were there before, giving us
gifts and patting on powder – they’ve all disappeared into all these doors I
never noticed before and all I can think is: why don’t I have a door to
disappear into?”
She was crying, in a Lee sort of
way, watering up and fiercely swiping the tears away before they could ever
fall.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, how you can live
with someone for fifteen years, and there can still be moments where they
dissolve into someone you don’t recognize? That’s what it was like. Jake’s face
was this combination of sadness and anger and fear. I think it was the fear
that upset me the most. And the assistant behind him said chirpily: ‘Oh look,
there’s your wife,’ and just retreated down the hall, probably trying to avoid
a scene.
“And I just stared at my husband, at the
man I had chosen above all others. This giant, bumbling, miserable man. And
from somewhere I felt this love rising, this unbearable love, so intense it
threatened to knock me onto my knees. And I opened up my arms and he came to
me, and I stood there in the hallway and I held my husband as he cried and I
hated those goddamned broadcasters so much I could have killed them, live, on
national TV.”
She ended her story with a
ferocity that both startled and somehow reassured me. It was good to know that
my corpse-like sister lived and burned beneath all that black shrouding. We sat
silently for a moment, listening to the grandfather clock ticking in the
hallway, to the whoosh and tick and purr of the air conditioner, to anything
but one another.
“Anyway,” she said finally, “we
can’t do broadcasting, and I won’t let him get traded or sent down.”
“Well...” I answered, searching
for something to say to her and failing. “What about coaching?”
She leaned back further into the
sofa.
“I saw Ben this morning,” she
said and my head rolled back of its own accord, till I was staring at her
ceiling, at the fan spinning. “He asked about you.”
“God,” I said, hardly able to
breathe all of a sudden. I could feel the weight of that damn ring in my
pocket, wrapped in my father’s new-found guilt.
“You should go out there and see
him, talk to him,” she continued, oblivious. “Before you leave. Tie things up
between you, you know?”
“Right,” I groaned. “Tie things
up.”
Sliding away from the coffee
table and into the embrace of Lee’s sweet carpet, I balanced my glass on my
breastbone and stared at the watery patterns of sunlight filtering onto the
ceiling from the pool out on the patio. Lee watched me for a moment, then came
to join me, still sniffling. It was then that she informed me that she
shouldn’t have told me any of what she had just said.
I wasn’t aware when she fell
asleep. Perhaps I did too, just for a moment. At any rate, that was where we
still were when Jake came home from the airport. He was shuttling to games
until the funeral was over and then it would be back to the road again for the
rest of the season. Lee was snoring lightly, her empty glass balanced on her
chest.
“Jesus,” he said, setting a bag
down by the couch and staring at us. “What the hell happened here?”
I struggled to sit up, my head
pounding. I had long since stopped drinking, especially since the entire bottle
was now somewhere divided between Lee and I, but it didn’t matter. I was still
drunk as a proverbial skunk.
“We went to the bank,” I said
vaguely and Jake just raised an eyebrow. “Dad left you guys the house.”
He bent down and retrieved the
glass from Lee’s limp fingers. “That’s good,” he whispered. “I mean, no
offense.”
I nodded. The couch seemed very
far away.
“Let me make you some coffee,”
Jake said and headed into the kitchen. I rose and managed to follow him there.
Sitting carefully on a bar stool at the counter, resting my head on my elbows,
I tried not to notice the whisky moving through my gullet. “So she told you,”
he said, slipping a milky-white filter into the machine and scooping out
something dark and comforting. I could smell it from where I sat and it was
heaven.
“Yes,” I said, sounding slurred
to myself.
He nodded and started the
machine. “I know she thinks I’ve got no idea...” he faded off and we both
watched the pot fill for a moment. “Well, I’m just glad she could talk to
someone, you know? Someone family.”
“Yeah,” I said. So who was I
going to talk to? Someone family sounded like the worst possible plan. “I hear
your contract is up soon.”
Jake and Lee owned a fancy coffee
machine, of course, the sort that allowed him to slip the pot out halfway
through the brewing while it paused politely until he replaced it. He poured me
a mug-full and handed it across the counter.
“Yes,” he said. “End of this
year.”
“So what are you going to do if
your knee is blown?” I asked.
He shrugged and leaned back
against the counter. Jake was a very big man, about five times my size, I realized
again suddenly as the coffee cleared some of the fog.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m no
good on TV.”
“So Lee says.”
“Well, it’s true, unfortunately.
I freeze up. I turn into an idiot.”
My mind, still jogging around in
circles after the coffee, stopped and shouted a warning. I ignored it.
“So, what else have you
considered?” I said.
“I’ve kind of thought about
coaching,” he answered, and I could hear that he was treading carefully. “I’ve
been great with the younger guys on the team. Clubhouse leader and all that,
but I don’t know... I’ve been thinking about you dad’s old job, but…”
“But?” I asked, ignoring the
frantic thoughts trying to flag me down. Jake watched me for a moment. “What?”
I said, indignant.
“What about Ben?” he said at
last. The sentence I had been waiting all afternoon to say myself.
“What about him?” Now I was
nonchalant. I was a disinterested observer, stamping down my guilt in one
drunken, wobbling step.
“I don’t know…” he said slowly,
narrowing his eyes. He poured himself a mug and then leaned over toward me,
looming into my limited field of vision. “You really think I should?”
“Uh, sure...” I gestured widely,
trying to move him back somewhere safer. “Like you said, clubhouse leader.
You’d be a great coach.” And he would. So would Ben. So is Ben, I corrected
myself.
He nodded and then withdrew.
“Thanks, Case. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have said that.”
“Why not?” I said, all innocence.
“Well, we have history...” he
said. Jesus, not that. All I could think was: Is there anyone here I don’t have
history with? Because I’d like to see that person right now.
“No we don’t,” I told him. “We
have one night, and it was just a couple kisses.”
“I know,” he said. “And I love
Lee. I’m just saying.”
“I hear ya,” I agreed. “I don’t
hate you, Jake. It was years and years ago.”
Seventeen years, to be exact.
That was such a popular number when I related to people. I was sick of it.
“I know. And I thought, after
what happened that night between you and Ben...”
“Nothing happened.”
He looked at me and raised his
eyebrows. I hated it when men did that.