Chapter Eight Jimmy

Chapter Eight

Jimmy

T WO WEEKS PASS LIKE THAT, A UGUST SEEPING SLOWLY INTO S EPTEMBER . Jimmy works out. He plays baseball. And on the nights Lacey Logan is allowed to talk on the telephone, he lies in his bed in whatever anonymous four-star Bonvoy property he's currently calling home and tells her, in precise, exacting detail, all the things he would like to do to her, given the time and opportunity. He tells her all the things he wants her to do to herself.

It's not all filthy. They talk about other stuff, too: their Sweetgreen orders and Bruce Springsteen's best albums and what Bruce Springsteen's Sweetgreen order might be, if he has one. The games they liked to play when they were kids. One night they watch Bull Durham on cable together in mostly complete silence in their separate hotel rooms, the hiss of her sheets faintly audible on the other end of the line. It's Jimmy's favorite part of the day, talking to her. He's dated plenty of women, but he hasn't liked just shooting the shit with somebody so much since Rachel. He's never been so interested in what a person might say .

"So here's a question," Lacey posits, late at night on the Monday of Labor Day weekend. "What's the deal with your ex-wife?"

"What's the deal with her?" Jimmy repeats, laughing a little nervously. He's lying in bed watching a Friends rerun on mute, the picked-over remains of a room service club sandwich on a tray on the dresser across the room. They played a one o'clock against the White Sox and won. "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean." He can hear her rustling around in her hotel room, the going-to-bed noises he's started to recognize the last couple of weeks. "Like, why did you get divorced?"

Jimmy snorts; he can't help it. It's interesting, how blunt she is. He would have thought she was the kind of girl who would beat endlessly around the bush, who would obfuscate indefinitely, but instead she is generally, disarmingly, direct. "A lot of reasons."

"Was one of them that you were a bad husband?"

"That was the main one, yes."

"Did you cheat on her?"

"I did not," he says truthfully, "but I got pretty close a few times."

"Gross."

"Yeah, well." Jimmy shrugs into the pillows. "I was gross. We were fighting a lot by that point, not that I'm making excuses."

"Fighting about what?"

"All kinds of stuff," he hedges, which is true, though the big one was what Rachel described to the therapist as Jimmy's continued refusal to pursue emotional availability or grapple in any real way with his grief over what happened to his brother . "About my schedule, about kids—"

"She didn't want them, or you didn't want them?"

She didn't. "Neither one of us should have been having them at that point anyway," Jimmy says instead of answering. "And it's a good thing we didn't, in the end, because I failed with great aplomb at couples therapy and we split inside a year."

"Do you still talk?"

"Nah." Jimmy clears his throat, swallowing down a stale-coffee mouthful of guilt. "Not for a long time." It's not that he doesn't want to. It's not that he hasn't tried. He did Al-Anon a few years ago—or started it, anyway, stalling out spectacularly somewhere around the fourth step and deciding the whole thing wasn't actually for him after all. He needed to reach out to Rachel, he knew—needed to tell her she'd always deserved better, that he was sorry for how it went—but he never quite managed to pick up the phone and do it. He keeps telling himself he's going to. He keeps telling himself he still could.

"What about you?" he asks now, shaking out his aching hands before tucking one arm back behind his head. "You still talk to your many famous exes?"

"Uh-uh. Hang on a second there, buddy," Lacey says. "If anything, you've got more famous exes than me."

"Did you go looking?" The thought of it makes him smile.

"Of course I went looking," she tells him, sounding utterly unselfconscious. "I needed to make sure you hadn't been with anyone I truly hate."

"Have I?" Jimmy asks, not uninterested in her answer.

"Wouldn't you like to know," Lacey shoots back. "And anyway, no. Generally I don't talk to any of my exes anymore."

"You write songs about them instead."

He's still joking around, but Lacey doesn't laugh. "Wow," she deadpans instead, "what a groundbreaking take on my extremely successful career as a multiplatinum performer. You should consider a second act as a music critic for CosmoGirl ."

Jimmy considers that for a moment, surprised by the sudden heat in her voice. "You know what?" he says. "Fair enough."

"You know who else wrote a lot about his own life without anyone giving him shit about it?" she continues as if he hasn't spoken. "Ernest Hemingway."

"Point taken," Jimmy agrees easily. "His pop songs are truly spectacular."

"Shut up," Lacey tells him, but he can hear that she's smiling again, that she's forgiven him. "Anyway, you're just salty 'cause I haven't written one about you yet."

"Is that something I should anticipate for the future?"

"Maybe," she says, in a voice that he happens to know means she's about to wriggle out of her pajamas on the other end of the phone. "If you're lucky."

"Oh," Jimmy promises, "I think we both know I'm lucky."

***

H E SEEMS TO BE, ACTUALLY—ON THE FIELD, AT LEAST. J IMMY wouldn't say their season has turned around , exactly, but it's objectively looking a hell of a lot better than it was a couple of weeks ago. "It isn't luck, fuckheads," he reminds the guys over and over, standing up on the bench for his pregame captain sermons while Hugo scratches his balls through his uniform and Jonesy shoves more nicotine gum into his cheek. "It's hard work and dedication and grit, and we've got it. We always have."

Whatever it is, all at once the Birds are hitting more baseballs than they have all year long, a string of tidy wins lined up one after another like freshwater pearls on a church lady's necklace. "That's seven in a row," Tuck points out when they beat the Pirates 8–5 a few days later, the two of them ambling back down the tunnel toward the locker room. The air smells like grass and sweat and popcorn. The hum of the crowd is still audible from the stands.

"Is it really?" Jimmy asks. That surprises him, not because he hasn't noticed they've been winning but because he hasn't let himself think of it as a streak until right this moment. Streaks, after all, are made to be broken. "Huh. Okay," he says, answering his own question. "I guess it is."

Tuck snorts. "What are you—don't act like you're so fucking cool, you piece of shit," he says, shoving Jimmy not-that-gently in the shoulder. "Do you remember the last time we won seven in a row?"

"Nope," Jimmy lies. He does, actually; it was six years ago, the first and only time they ever made it to the Series. "I do not."

"Well then," Tuck says, glancing at Jimmy sidelong. "Whatever you're doing, keep on doing it."

Jimmy ignores him, peeling off at the door to the locker room to go hit the showers. He hasn't told anyone, obviously. What would he even say? I'm having a middle school phone call situation with the most famous woman on the planet, and it turns out she's got the dirtiest mouth I've ever heard? It sounds insane. Jimmy has no idea what she's after with him: If it's an ego thing for her, the need to be perpetually admired. If maybe she's just killing time. He could ask, he guesses—he would ask, if it was any other woman he liked as much as he finds himself liking her—but again: she's Lacey Logan. And he is, for all his famous girlfriends, a leather sack full of grass stains and spit. It seems wiser, in Jimmy's estimation, not to draw any more attention to that than is absolutely necessary. It seems smarter to play it cool.

Also—and not that he's ever going to say this out loud in a million years—he can't be 100 percent certain that whatever he's got going on with Lacey isn't part of why he's playing so well all of a sudden. Jimmy doesn't like to think of himself as superstitious, but he's been in this game long enough to know that at the end of the day, most of it is mental. And a person doesn't spend almost a decade and a half in the major leagues without getting a little funny about his good luck charms.

It's fine, Jimmy tells himself when they win their eighth game in a row the following evening. Whatever. He's not complaining.

Ike takes the train down from New York to see him, and they go to lunch at the Capital Grille. Ike has been Jimmy's agent since Jimmy first got called up, a deeply unflashy Bronx native with a Peter Falk haircut and a face like a jack-o'-lantern two weeks after Halloween. "You still thinking you're done after this season?" Ike asks, as they're eating their steaks.

"Yep," Jimmy says immediately, then thinks of what Tuck said the other night in Pittsburgh. Eight games in a row isn't anything to get a hard-on about, but it isn't nothing, either. It felt easier to be sure he was done back when they sucked. "I don't know. I mean. Yeah, probably. Yes."

Ike raises his bushy eyebrows. "So you don't want to announce yet, I take it."

"I don't know," Jimmy says again. "No. Not yet, I guess."

"Well, since you seem to feel so strongly about it," Ike says mildly, shaking a truly eye-popping amount of salt onto his mashed potatoes. "Look, Jimmy, can I ask you something? And first of all, you know I'm saying this as a person who would be delighted for you to stay out there on that field until the day you keel over in the middle of extra innings and we have to shoot you in your head like a used-up racehorse—"

"Thanks for that."

"—but. Is it possible your, ah, reluctance to call it has anything to do with how it all went in Miami?"

Right away, Jimmy shakes his head. "What?" he says, reaching up reflexively to rub at his throbbing shoulder. "No. No, of course not. That was six years ago, Ike. I'm not losing sleep over that shit anymore."

"You sure?" Ike presses. "Because I could understand not wanting to be definitively done without getting another shot at it. Nobody's going to fault you for that."

"Maybe not," Jimmy says, trying not to think of the night sky in Florida in October. Trying not to remember the sear of muscle torn from bone. "But that's not what this is."

Ike looks at him for a long time. "Okay," he agrees, shrugging at Jimmy across the table. "Eat your steak."

***

J IMMY SPENDS THAT NIGHT PACING THE CONDO, RESTLESS IN A way he can't quite name—a feeling like he's missing something, a feeling like there's something important he was supposed to do that he forgot. It's the retirement thing, he guesses: he's known he was running out of road for years, but now that he's about to reach the cliff he can feel himself slamming the brakes, wanting to stretch it out for a little while longer, wanting just a little more time. He always figured he'd know what he wanted to do next by the time he was finished playing baseball. He always figured at some point he'd manage to win a ring.

Still could, he reminds himself, then immediately feels like a boner for letting himself think it. Embarrassed, even though there's nobody here to know. Wanting that kind of shit, telling yourself you have a shot at it, is exactly how a person gets his heart broken. Better to just keep your head down and call one pitch at a time.

They've got a home game against Kansas City the following night. In the locker room at Camden he gets changed into his kit and stretches for a while, doing his best to warm his quads and his screaming hamstrings and trying to shrug off the weird uneasiness that's been dogging him for a full twenty-four hours now, an edginess he can't manage to shake. After all, Jimmy reasons, it's not like he's retiring right this second. After all, it's not like the season is already done. And after all, it's not like he thinks they've been winning all these baseball games all of a sudden because he's been playing you hang up first with Lacey Logan before he crouches behind the plate every night.

At least, he doesn't really think that.

In any case, she's got her first run of shows in Montreal this weekend, so he shoots her a good luck text as the crowds fill the stadium up above him; his phone dings with her reply a few minutes later, just before he needs to head out onto the field. At least, Jimmy thinks it's going to be a reply from Lacey, but when he digs his phone out of his gym bag he sees it's actually a message from his mom, which is unusual. Hi, sweetheart , she's written. Just thinking of you today. Went to the cemetery this morning to lay some flowers. The weather was beautiful.

"Oh, fuck," Jimmy mutters before he can stop himself. It's Matty's birthday, he realizes suddenly, the horror swooping deep and sickening inside him. He completely fucking forgot. He's been so distracted with—what, exactly? Dicking around on the tele phone? The end of his middling career? He didn't even text his mother on what would have been the forty-second birthday of her dead fucking son.

"What?" Jonesy asks, looking at Jimmy askance from the other side of the locker room. "You all right?"

"I—yeah," Jimmy lies, clearing his throat a little, dropping his phone back into his gym bag. He can feel the panic sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. "Yeah, I'm good."

"You forget to take your arthritis medication or something?"

"Fuck you." His voice is almost normal. He rakes a hand through his tangle of hair, jamming his cap down over his eyes and turning back to his locker. Trying to remember what he came over here to do. Trying not to think about his brother, who died of a heroin overdose alone in the bathroom of his shitty apartment three weeks before Jimmy got called up to the majors and is buried in the cemetery at Saint Monica's in Utica, the same church where both of them were baptized as babies. Jimmy hasn't been to see him in years.

"Yo," Tuck calls now, making him jump; when Jimmy turns around to look at him, he realizes the locker room is mostly empty. "You planning to play any baseball this fine evening, or do you have a prior engagement you forgot to tell us about?"

Jimmy hesitates. For one insane second he imagines saying it: It's Matty's birthday, and I forgot like a piece of shit , before immediately dismissing the idea. He loves Tuck like family, but he doesn't want to talk to Tuck about this. He doesn't want to talk to his mom, either, to be confronted with the enormous hole in her heart and her life he knows he's not big enough to fill, no matter how many baseballs he sends flying into the stands.

If he's being honest with himself, the person he actually wants to talk to is—

"I'm coming," Jimmy announces, zipping the bag shut and tossing the whole thing into his locker. He shouldn't have been looking at his fucking phone in the first place. He needs to get his head in the game. What does he even think he's going to say to her, anyway? I know you're busy single-handedly improving the value of the toonie, but I'm feeling sad and vulnerable about my dead brother ? That's not what they're doing, him and Lacey Logan. That's not even remotely what this is. "Let's go."

They squeak it out against the Royals, 3–2 in extra innings. It doesn't feel like much of a victory at all.