Page 98 of Running Home to You
“You heard right.” Abby grabbed the cigar from his mouth, took a long drag, and exhaled into his face.
“Good.” Audie grabbed another cigar from the inner pocket of his tuxedo jacket. “You are doing well?”
“What do you care?”
Audie winced. “I suppose I should apologize for our last meeting. I shouldn’t have put hands on you. Or said the things I did.” He contemplated his cigar. “I suppose you know how to push my buttons better than anyone. But it helped me to make some changes.”
“Yeah, like what?” Abby narrowed her eyes. She’d heard the same song and dance before. “Isla told me you moved back here to work for the Padres, but that’s for you. Everything you ever do is for you.”
“I’ve stopped drinking. I should’ve done that a long time ago. To be there for you and your sister.”
“Well, we’ll see how long that lasts.”
Abby blew a delicate ring of smoke to hide that the revelation surprised her, and that it gave her a rare smidge of hope. It was too late to talk to her mother, too late to sort through her complicated childhood, but, just maybe, Audie wasn’t entirely bad. Just as she wasn’t. Because whether she admitted it or not, they were more alike than different.
“I saw where you grew up when I was training in Puerto Rico.”
Audie chortled bitterly. “I do everything in my power to get away. A generation later, you choose to go back.”
“Have you?” she asked. “Gone back home?”
“No. Have you?”
“Where’s home?”
Audie frowned. “Well, I won’t keep you.”
“I’m sorry too.” Abby closed her eyes and sighed. “For my part in our fight.”
Audie’s mustache quirked with a half smile. “Do you want to dance?”
“Seriously?”
They watched the wedding guests twist and sway to music.
“Do you have someone special?”
Abby shook her head. “No.”
“But someone you wish was here.”
She bit her lip and allowed him a full glimpse of her face.
“I let her go,” Abby whispered.
Audie canted his head, and it reminded her of Isla. That tender curiosity. “Why?”
“Because I didn’t know how to hold on to her.” Abby threw back the rest of her drink. “I wonder where I get that from.”
Audie shrugged, a teasing sparkle in his gaze. “Beats me, mija.”
“This was great.” She strapped her heels back on and patted his shoulder. “Let’s do it again in three years.”
Abby moved to Japan next. The league offered an actual paycheck, something she didn’t need her trust fund to supplement. Its fan base grew every year, sponsorships, even television deals. It was the closest she ever felt to a true professional career.
Tokyo was also like nothing she’d experienced. The neon signs stacked atop each other, the honking traffic, motorcycles gunning by, smoke and smog, all reflected in the stretch of skyscrapers that spanned as far as she could see. And people everywhere, at every hour, a constant tide that she failed to swim in. Abby always considered herself rudderless, but never had she been this impossibly lost.
She struggled to communicate with her teammates, with anyone really, mostly just nodding along in the locker room until they took the field. Fortunately, that was the same in every language. Fielding, hitting, listening to the ball. She was fluent in it across the globe.
