Page 75 of Levi

Saying it puts him back on that balcony in front of me, and he’s spent the day climbing off of it. Levi will figure out what the phone is for. He turns the phone over in his hands and doesn’t say a word.

“I don’t know who Freddie is,” I tell him. “I don’t care who he is. I don’t need to know one thing about the man to know what he’s doing is wrong. No one should be able to pull up a map and see you stopped for a sandwich. No one should know where you sleep down to the GPS of it. That’s not looking after a person. Whatever it is, it isn’t that.”

He shrugs. “It’s never been any other way. That’s how it is.”

“No. Don’t do that.” I’m up off the chair arm. My voice is too loud for the room, and my hand is cutting the air in front of me. “Don’t tell me that’s how it is, because that’s not how anything is. No one gets to put a — a collar on another man, and a little screen so he knows where he is every minute, and call that — Dios, what do you even call that, what is there to call it —” I hear myself rise, my hands going. I bring it back down. “It’s not right, Levi. It’s not normal either. That’s all I’m saying. You’ve got a phone now he can’t see.”

His eyes come up off the phone and onto me. They stay there.

The questions I’m dying to ask are right there.

Who is Freddie? What’s he got on you? Why in God’s name don’t you get rid of him and walk? Why won’t you talk to me?

“Why do you keep the phone on you?” It’s the one I let out, and it’s the smallest one I’ve got. I already know it isn’t really a question.

“Easier than the alternative.”

“Easier than what?”

“Than not.”

He looks back down at the little phone in his hands. He keeps turning the phone over and over and not looking up. When he finally does, there’s too much emotion in his face over a cheap prepaid phone. I wasn’t mentally prepared for the phone to matter this much.

“Nobody’s ever…” he starts, and doesn’t finish it.

My hand comes up off my knee. On its own, headed to grip the back of his neck, the way it would go to Benji’s, to anyone’s. I bring it back down. I know what it means now when my hand lands on him.

“Is that offer still good?” I ask. “For tonight? The ballgame? The pizza?”

His green eyes fly back up to mine. “You said you had calls.”

“All the calls are done for the day and I’m starving.”

“Sure, the pizza offer is still good.” He’s off the couch and already grabbing his old phone. The only one attached to anything that can summon a pizza. He’s pulling up a number already, alive in a way he wasn’t ten seconds ago. “How much pizza can you eat, Dante? Tell me the truth. Don’t get shy on me now.”

“Order enough for two hungry men,” I tell him, and sit down on the far end of the sectional.

“That’s not a number,” he says.

“It is where I come from.”

He orders extra everything and double whatever. Then he turns on the barn-door television to the game, the second night of the series, and cranks up the volume. He drops onto the other end of the sectional, a long cushion of room between us. I could tell you the length of that cushion to the inch.

For an inning neither of us says a word. Then, at the TV, out of nowhere, Levi says, “He’s tipping his changeup.”

“He’s what?”

“Tipping it.” He nods at the screen. “Glove flares when he’s throwing soft. Watch.”

Two pitches later the glove flares, the batter sits on it, and the ball goes off the wall in left-center. Levi doesn’t gloat. He just nods.

“You played baseball,” I say.

“Some.” A shrug. “You said before that you played. What position?”

“Second base. Little league, then JV, then the bench, then real estate. I could field and I could talk.”

“You left out hitting.”