Chapter Fifteen #2
He doesn’t call to tell me about the game.
He calls to invite me to Sunday dinner, the same way he always calls, the same standing offer that punctuates my weeks.
I say yes, the same way I always say yes, and show up at six with a bottle of red wine he’ll drink with dinner and a second one I’ll need afterward.
He makes pasta. We eat at the kitchen table with the television muted in the background, and my father asks about the studio, the backpiece I finished, and whether I’ve thought any more about the expansion I mentioned six months ago and have mentioned three times since without following through.
“The space next door becomes available in January,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Think faster,” he says, which is his version of encouragement.
Halfway through the meal, he puts his fork down and looks at me, and I recognize the look. It’s not the coaching look or the protective look, both of which I know well. It’s the father look. The one he used when I was sixteen, and he knew something was wrong before I’d said a word.
“The Steele situation,” he says.
I take a sip of wine. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
“It’s what the blogs are calling it. I’m calling it what it is.” He folds his hands on the table. “You ended it.”
“There wasn’t much to end.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and I can see him choosing his next words with the care of a man who has learned over several decades that the wrong sentence to his daughter costs significantly more than taking an extra ten seconds.
“How are you?”
The question sits between us, simple and enormous.
I look at my pasta. “Fine.”
“Ava.”
“I’m managing.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I set my fork down. The kitchen is warm, the same kitchen it’s always been, the one I grew up in, eating cereal on Saturday mornings while he read game footage on his laptop across from me. There’s a familiarity here that makes honesty easier and harder at the same time.
“I’m not fine,” I say. “I made the right call, and it was still the hardest thing I’ve done in a while, and I’m going to work through it.” If I look at him right now, I’ll cry, so I keep my gaze locked on the pasta. “Don’t make me say more than that.”
He nods. Accepts it. Pours more wine into both our glasses.
The silence that follows is a comfortable one for approximately forty seconds, and then my father does something I wasn’t expecting. He says, “His last three starts have been difficult.”
I stay very still.
“Not a collapse. His mechanics are sound, his command is there.” He turns his wine glass once. “But pitching is ninety percent mental. You can have a perfect arm and a wrong head, and the arm doesn’t matter.” He pauses. “He’s pitching with something unresolved.”
“Dad.”
“I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty.”
“It’s doing that anyway.”
“I know.” He looks at me directly. “I’ve been coaching for thirty years.
I’ve watched players fall apart over personal lives, watched relationships become the reason for every bad outing, watched very talented people make choices with the wrong part of themselves and pay for it in the standings.
” He pauses. “I’ve also watched players come into their best seasons because they found something worth pitching for. ”
I don’t trust my voice, so I don’t use it.
“When I spoke to him last week…” my father continues, “… I told him to stay away from your studio. I told him because I’ve seen this story before, and I know how it ends.” He turns the wine glass again. “I think I may have been telling myself a version of that story.”
“What do you mean?”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and in the quiet, I watch my father’s face do something I’ve rarely seen it do—work through something publicly, let the process be visible instead of presenting the finished conclusion.
“Reece Steele walked into my studio.” He stops.
Corrects himself. “Your studio. Walked in on a dare from his teammates, got shut down, and came back. Not for the tattoo. For you.” He looks at the table.
“I know this because I know him. I’ve been coaching him for two seasons.
I know how he is with things he doesn’t care about, and I know how he is with things he does.
” He pauses. “He came back to your studio the way he comes back to a batter he’s decided to study. Not casually. With intention.”
I breathe carefully through my nose.
“He’s my star pitcher,” my father says. “I’ve spent the last several weeks thinking about him in those terms. The contract, the ERA, the five-year window, the things that could compromise the investment.
” He meets my eyes. “I haven’t been thinking about the fact that he’s also a twenty-seven-year-old man who lost his father at sixteen and has been turning himself into someone that loss would be proud of ever since.
Who has been going through the motions of a career he loves without any of the things outside it being real. ” He stops again.
The kitchen is completely quiet.
“He’s a good man,” my father says, and the simplicity of the four words after everything else makes my eyes sting. “Not just a good pitcher. A good man. And I’ve been treating those two things as if they’re in competition when maybe they’re not.”
“Dad…”
“I’m not telling you what to do.” He raises one hand.
“I would never. You’re the most capable person I know.
You make your own choices, and you always have.
” He lets the hand drop. “I’m telling you, I may have been wrong to frame this the way I did.
And I’m telling you because you’re my daughter, and I don’t like seeing you not fine. ”
I press my fingers to my lips for a moment.
“You’re not supposed to do this,” I say.
“What?”
“Be reasonable about it.”
“I’m a very reasonable person.”
“You are not a very reasonable person. You’re a very controlled person, and those are different things, as someone recently pointed out to me.” I breathe through the tightness in my chest. “If you’re reasonable about this, I’m going to cry at your kitchen table, and neither of us wants that.”
“I have tissues.”
“Dad.”
He stands up and puts his arms around me from behind, the same way he did when I was small enough for it to be natural, and I grip his forearm, hold on, and let myself feel for approximately thirty seconds the full accumulated weight of the last several days.
He lets me. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t offer solutions or manage the moment into something more comfortable.
When I straighten up, he sits back down and pretends to be very interested in his pasta, which is his way of giving me the privacy while I recover without an audience.
I wipe my face with my napkin before taking a long sip of wine.
“He’s spiraling,” I say.
“A little.”
“Because of me.”
“Because of the situation.” My father points his fork at me. “Not the same thing.”
“It feels like the same thing.”
“It usually does.” He takes a bite, chews, and considers. “The question is, what do you want to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You do,” he says, with the calm certainty of someone who has been watching me make decisions my entire life. “You just need to catch up to it.”
I look at my father across the kitchen table. He’s the man who raised me to take no shortcuts and accept no reduction of myself, who has given me every tool I’ve ever used to build the life I have, who has also been human and afraid on my behalf, and sometimes gotten in the way of my living it.
“If I go back,” I say carefully. “If I figure out how to fix what I broke, you’re not going to make his life difficult?”
He holds my gaze steadily. “No.”
“His contract—”
“His numbers will speak for themselves. They always do.” He picks up his wine glass. “I coach the pitcher, Ava. The rest of it is his life.”
“When did you decide that?”
“About an hour ago,” he says, with the dry precision of a man who respects honesty over a comfortable answer.
And despite everything—the ache of the last several days, the tightness still sitting in my chest, the image of Reece’s face when he left my apartment on Sunday—I have not been able to stop turning over.
I laugh.
Short, raw, and entirely genuine.
My father looks deeply satisfied by this.
“Eat your pasta,” he says. “Then tell me about the expansion space.”
I eat my pasta.
The string lights in his kitchen are the same ones he’s had since I was twelve years old, warm amber, the same color as mine.
I’ve never noticed that before.
I notice it now, and it warms my heart.