Page 20 of Off the Mark
I’d gotten drafted to pitch for a Triple-A team, the Syracuse Mets, right out of high school. They were a feeder team for New York, but until I got called up, I’d lived the typical life of a baseball player in the minor leagues. On the road for half the year, sleeping on buses and in budget hotel rooms.
In the off-season, I’d come home as long as we weren’t in training. But I still had the world’s tiniest apartment near where we practiced, a town called Sweetwater outside of Syracuse.
That’s why a bunch of players and I spent our nights at the local bar—long as we kept the actual alcohol intake to a minimum. Our coaches were happy to look the other way if no one was hungover at practice. But there was shit else to do, and we were broke on the pittance of a salary we made.
At Jolene’s, beer was cheap, the music was good, and they always had a game on.
And Charlie was the bartender.
Dean held up his finger. “She served us drinks the few times I went up to visit you. And I only knowonepro dirt bike racer. That’s Charlie. It’s not an easy thing to forget. But even more than that, Charlie was the only woman you ever called your friend.”
I pulled a face. “Theonly? That can’t be true.” I hooked a thumb toward the front room. “Tab’s my friend. Has been since, what, the eighth grade?”
Dean gave me a knowing smile. “Yeah, but Tabitha was my girlfriend, now wife, and even in eighth grade…well, you remember.”
I shifted, not wanting to admit he was right. It had been obvious from day one that Dean was into Tabitha Tyler. Even before she was his girl, she washis girl.
So yeah, I’d thought of Tabitha as my friend from the very beginning.
Because every other woman you get close to ends up being just a hookup.
“Well…whatever,” I grumbled. “It doesn’t matter what sheis, ’cause she’s only here for the next few weeks. Then she’s gone.”
Dean’s smile only grew more smug. “This is fucking hilarious. I said thesame exact thingto you when Tabitha came home for the summer. And what advice did you give me?”
Nope, I wasn’t gonna bite at that. I dropped my arm across the back of the stool. “I know where you’re going with this, big guy. Trust me, I’ve tried with Charlie Maddox so many times she thinks it’s funny now. She has zero interest in having sex with me.”
He went quiet, watching me. “But didn’t Charlie come to be with you in the hospital in New York City when you blew out your shoulder? I thought you’d told us she was there before Alice and I arrived.”
Memories of that night were still painful to sift through. Charliehadbeen there, showing up without a moment’s hesitation and refusing to leave my side.
She’d even slept curled up on the chair next to my hospital bed until I was discharged a day and a half later, into the expert care of the team’s doctors and surgeons.
“She was there,” I admitted. “It was…a really intense experience that we shared.”
An expression I couldn’t read flashed across his face. But then Tabitha twirled into the room, and his ability to focus on anything but his wife went right out the window I used to climb through after curfew. She wrapped her arms around his waist, and he smiled down into her dark red hair.
“You looked so grumpy, even as a first grader, and I didn’t know that was possible for a little kid,” she said.
I shrugged. “I’d probably done something super annoying to him at lunch.”
My grandmother shuffled in, holding a heavy photo album I immediately pulled from her arms. My breath caught in my throat when I realized which one it was.
“I see you’ve got one of our favorites out,” I said, gently helping her into the chair next to mine. While I held one side of the album open, she tapped on a picture of my parents sitting on the hood of their old car outside the Grand Canyon.
“I was just telling Tabitha about how your father was when he started dating your mother.” She smiled, looking as happy as she did heartbroken. “Your grandfather told him that he looked like he’d had an anvil dropped on his head.”
Dean pulled Tabitha closer. “I can relate to that.”
“I’m a very pretty anvil though,” she replied.
Alice traced her papery fingers over a picture of my parents I’d looked at with her hundreds of times. It was a special moment—it’d been taken on their honeymoon, the farthest either of them had ever gotten from the narrow streets of South Philly.
It was also an ordinary moment—a happy young couple looking dorky with cameras around their necks. I shared a startling resemblance to my dad, from our height to our red hair. Made looking at these pictures of him, frozen in time, strange sometimes.
“People are fools when they fall in love,” my grandmother said. “One day you’ll discover that too, Rowan.”
I laughed that off. “I’m still in mysowing wild oatsstage, but thanks. Not looking for anvils at this current moment.”
