Chapter 13 #2
“I never knew she was in love with someone else.”
Stone slowly shakes his head, and suddenly I realize my story might be a little too close to his own history.
“She’d been in a relationship with him before me.
I hadn’t known it was that serious. I mean, she told me she loved him, but it was over, right?
She was dating me, acting like my biggest fan, and we got married.
” At her suggestion. “Only she didn’t really want kids, and I did, and I didn’t see the signs. ”
“What signs?” Stone stiffens.
“She didn’t want to be a mother. She hired a lot of sitters.
Went out when she could. Didn’t like the kids messing with her stuff or her.
” Felicity never would have allowed June’s little fingers to touch her hair like Cadence had last night, and then to walk around with her hair sticking out in clumps . . . never.
“She hurt your girls?” Stone’s gruffness was endearing.
“Only by leaving them.”
“Get back to the divorce.”
“Apparently,” I emphasize. “She reunited with the guy. He wanted her back. They fell in love again.”
Stone nods once. His lips pressed tightly together while he drives us outside of town.
“He’s from the Dominican Republic and she’d learned she could obtain a divorce in a day by going down there.”
“Wouldn’t she have needed you present?”
“Not if she had an affidavit with my signature.”
Stone’s brows crease together, and he risks a glance at me while driving. “So, you signed off on the divorce.”
“She forged my signature.”
Stone’s creased brows shift from a deep divot between them to folds of his forehead layered on top of each other. “That is not legal.”
“I know.” I sigh, staring out the side window a second, watching as the trees slip by. The leaves are a variety of golds, crimson, and burnt orange at this time of year. The rain last night removed some of them from the trees but enough remain for an autumn rainbow.
“What will you do? Press charges? Contest the divorce?”
With heavy shoulders, I turn back toward Stone. “I might have considered a reconciliation if I hadn’t seen her having sex with him.”
Stone’s nose wrinkles. “How’d that happen?”
“Felicity was still in the house. I caught them in our shower.” I snort. “Celebrating, I guess.”
Stone side-eyes me once more, hard expression softening. “And you found out about the divorce then?”
I shake my head. “Certified mail. Came to me at the Anchors’ clubhouse. I’d gone in for weight training and got served, so to speak.” There was a formal letter of divorce approval along with a copy of documents with my ‘signature’ in the attachments.
Felicity and I were officially divorced.
“I don’t want her back. Not if she doesn’t want to be with me or the girls. It just—” My throat thickens.
Silence falls between us a moment, and I’m afraid to look at my brother. Afraid of what I’ll see in his eyes. Finally, Stone sympathetically states, “It fucking hurts.”
I hear compassion in his words. He feels sorry for me, not with pity, but because of the pain. He might know a thing or two about losing someone he thought was special.
My eyes begin to burn. The woods blur around me. My wife not only left me, she snuck behind my back and stabbed me. She could have simply asked for a divorce. Waited out the process.
I blink a few times before pinching my eyes with my forefinger and thumb. “She told me she didn’t want the house or the girls.”
Stone’s forehead furrows once more. “Who the fuck is the guy?”
“Here’s the additional punch to the balls. Romero Valdez.”
Stone’s head spins once more toward me, and the truck does a swift swerve. “The shortstop from Florida.”
“Yep.”
“Same guy who was traded to the Anchors last year?”
“Yep.” I let that sink in a second before adding. “That’s how Felicity and he reunited.”
“Fuck.” Stone hissed along with the word, scrubbing down his face with a beefy hand. “That is just . . .” He pauses because what words best describe the situation? “So messed up.”
“So now, I’ll return to Chicago and want to burn the house down, especially that shower. Need a nanny. And have to explain to the girls that Mommy is never coming back but she’ll be at all my games . . . for him.”
“Ford. You can’t keep playing for the Anchors.”
“Why would I quit? He’s the one who came after me.” Plus, I have two years left in my contract. I wanted to squeeze out playing until I was forty but making it to thirty-nine will be a stretch.
“How’s the shoulder?”
“It’s fine,” I lie. Throwing balls anywhere from seventy to a hundred miles an hour toward home plate has taken a toll on my left shoulder over the last fifteen years.
Stone doesn’t say more. He knows how hard I’ve worked. How long I have remaining. I’m not quitting my team because my wife quit me.
“Any chance he’ll get traded again?” Stone asks.
“I doubt it. We’ve got a new manager coming in. Things will already be rocky enough.”
“Heard about that,” Stone says. “Ross Davis is a good guy.”
Not that Stone knows Ross personally, but Ross has a reputation in baseball for being fair and well-liked.
He played for the Anchors years ago. Tragedy hit his family and he left the pitching mound to coach instead.
He recently managed in Philly, but he’ll be returning to the Anchors for the next season.
“I don’t envy his position. There isn’t enough space in all of Illinois for Valdez, let alone having to share the diamond and a locker room.”
Stone shakes his head once more and pulls into a parking lot. I recognize the space. Trails lead from here into the woods toward Sterling Falls, the namesake of our town.
Stone puts his old truck in Park but keeps the engine running. “Want to hike?”
I lean forward, and glance up at the sky, heavy with clouds once again. “Looks like rain.” I’m also not dressed for a hike, plus the girls are waiting on me.
I can’t keep disappearing on them. I won’t be going anywhere without them ever.
Silence fills the cab a minute as we both stare at the woods before us.
After a grueling practice or a tough loss, Stone would bring me here to walk it off.
He’d learned after our dad was gone how tough the man had been on us.
He knew I kept a lot inside me, and he never pressed me to talk.
But he also knew keeping anger or bitterness inside me wasn’t smart, and I had to let out the energy, even if I was already wiped from hours of playing baseball.
I had to let that bad practice or lost game go, because I wasn’t the failure that I’d once told Stone our father had called me.
Actually, on more than one occasion Dad called me a variety of names. Loser. Piss poor. Weak link.
“You didn’t fail,” Stone graciously states, as if knowing where my head has gone.
“My marriage didn’t work out.” I squint at the windshield.
“Doesn’t make you a failure, Ford. Sometimes things just happen.”
I huff to disagree, but Stone knows better than the rest of us.
Sometimes mothers die, and good dads turn bad. Sometimes you’re the only one left for six siblings. Sometimes you lose the love of your life to someone else. And all you can do, as Stone would say, is pick up the pieces. Make a mosaic. Repurpose what remains.
To use a baseball euphemism, he’d explain: sometimes you get a new position on the team.
You aren’t always comfortable with that spot, but you learn it, you practice it.
Like I’d once been first baseman, but now I played center field.
You might never perfect the position, Stone would say, but you don’t quit on the team.
Stone never quit on us.
I won’t be quitting on my girls.
And I won’t be leaving the Chicago Anchors.