Chapter Twenty-Five
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
COOPER
I never expected to find myself sitting on a snowplow made for two with Bruce Fischer as we clear his driveway on Christmas Eve.
But here we are.
At least he hasn’t run me over with the thing.
Of course, considering he told me to drive, maybe he should be lucky I haven’t run him over yet.
The sun is covered by clouds, but it’s still bright enough reflecting off the snow that I have to squint to see. The frigid air bites at my cheeks, and I cinch my hood around my ears and use the UTV’s joystick controller to shovel.
“Bruce, I?—”
“How do you know how to use this? Have you plowed snow before?”
“No. My dad worked for Builder’s Bench and he taught me how to drive some of the machines.”
“Builder’s Bench? The hardware store? What, does he own all of the franchises along the West Coast?” he scoffs.
“No, but before he retired, he was the warehouse supervisor at the store in Las Cruces,” I say proudly. “He’s the hardest working guy I’ve ever known. And my hero.” I feel Bruce's eyes on me. “But would it matter if he were wealthy? You’re not doing too bad for yourself.”
“I learned a long time ago what it’s like to sacrifice.”
I could clap back and make him eat his words, but I don’t. I toggle the joystick and push a huge mound of snow out of his winding driveway until he stops me at what must be his lawn. I throw the machine into reverse over the path I just cleared.
“Liesel told me some about your wife. I’m sorry,” I say. “That must have been hard.”
“ Hard ?” Bruce echoes in disbelief. “You have no idea.” He pauses long enough for me to plow another strip across his driveway and another. “It was so much more than hard. It was …” He pauses. “It was an honor . It was a privilege to get to help her, to get to serve her every day until she took her last breath. You can’t know what that’s like.”
The heavy emotion in his voice squeezes some of the air out of my lungs, and I’m reminded of a brutal playoff loss when I was twelve. I came home to one of my mom’s parties, like usual. I wanted to throw my glove—I wanted to break something after how badly my team played—but the nervousness on her face made me pull myself together.
“So?” she asked.
“You win some, you lose some,” I shrugged, stuffing down my indignation and turning my showmanship up to eleven. “But you should have seen Braden tonight. He was a beast on the mound, wasn’t he, Dad?”
“He was on fire. If everyone on the team had played as well as you two, you’d have a championship trophy.”
I told Mom a couple of stories, giving her the few highlights and some dramatic lowlights, but no matter how hard I tried, my heart wasn’t in it.
My mom reacted the way she always did—elation, frustration, and everything in between. And in the end, I braced myself for her inevitable question: “So, is it cake time?”
I’d never told her this, but I hated eating cake when I lost. Big losses took my appetite with them—still do.
So I braced myself for her to ask the same question she’d asked dozens of times in the past. But she surprised me.
“I gotta say,” she said. “I know we always eat cake after your games, but I want to … smash it more than I want to eat it. I can keep a piece aside for you, but?—”
“Let’s smash it,” my dad and I said it in unison.
The three of us went into the tiny apartment kitchen, and instead of cutting the beautifully decorated cake she spent hours on— a cake in the shape of a baseball, complete with stitching—she slapped it.
A glob of frosting exploded on her face, and I started laughing so hard, snot bubbled from my nose. And that made my parents crack up. Dad took the next swing, smashing his fist down on it. And then it was my turn.
I punched the edible baseball player on top of the cake. My fist sunk into the thick frosting in the most satisfying way, so I punched it again, and soon, they both joined in. My parents and I pulverized that thing, and by the end, we were laughing so hard, we were in tears. We licked the cake from our hands, and Dad sent us both to hit the showers while he cleaned it up.
That was the start of a new tradition: winners eat the cake, losers beat the cake.
Bruce doesn’t think I know anything about sacrifice.
He doesn’t know my family.
“I told you to stay away from her, Coop,” Bruce says. “I can’t understand why a guy as smart as you would do something so stupid.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re not the only person who knows what it’s like to sacrifice for someone you love.”
“You don’t love my daughter.”
“No, we’re not there yet, but I care about her, Bruce. I care about her more than I’ve cared about anyone outside of my parents. Ever.”
“If you really cared about her, you’d leave her to find someone worthy of her.”
I laugh and flex out my fingers. The cold is already making them stiff, even through the gloves. “Who? Who could be worthy of someone like Liesel? Do you think there’s a guy out there who wakes up thinking of ways to make her laugh more than I do? Do you think there’s a guy who looks at her broken pieces and wants to help her put them back together more than me? Do you really believe there’s a man who loves the things she loves more than I do but whom she can’t steamroll with her intelligence?”
“She’s way smarter than you.”
“No argument here. But I’m just overconfident enough to challenge her, anyway. And she likes that. She doesn’t want a guy who worships at her altar. She wants someone she can tease. Someone she can laugh with and cry with and dream with. Someone who isn’t intimidated by her intensely overbearing family. If you know a guy who can do that better than me, I’ll step aside.” Bruce doesn’t answer. “I know I’ll never be good enough for her. Why should that stop me from trying?”
Bruce’s jaw grinds like he’s chewing boulders. “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard you say in eight years.”
I move the toggle, shifting more snow as the frosty air bites my cheeks. “You’ve officiated, what, maybe ten, twelve games per season since I came up? Do you think that’s enough to get to know a person?”
“I think your little nickname for me is.”
I groan. “Bruce, come on. It was a dumb joke in a heated moment. Can’t we move on?”
Bruce grunts.
I’ve always been respectful with umps. My GM is right: you don’t mess with the guys who can call a game against you. But when I first hit the pros, everyone had noticed that Bruce Fischer had pulled a Barry Bonds—he’d gone from being an athletic guy to going full WWE wrestler size over the course of only a couple seasons. The jokes started about him being on steroids. On juice.
Bruce doesn’t miss much on the plate, but in a particularly tense game, he called a strike on me that I thought should have been a ball, and like the idiot I am, I said, “Is that what we’re doing today, Juice?”
It was one time. One stupid slip of the tongue early in my career, and evidently, it’s stuck with him all these years.
I really have a habit of saying dumb crap in front of the Fischer family.
“My wife weighed a hundred and sixty pounds when she was diagnosed with ALS. She weighed a lot less at the end of her life, but she was sick for ten years,” Bruce says, his voice low but piercing. I don’t like where this is going. Bruce is shaking his head, staring at the snow, but I can tell his thoughts are far from here. Dread and regret gurgle in my stomach. “Do you know how she showered? How she was transported in and out of vehicles? To and from beds and chairs and up and down stairs? Me . So yes, I spent a lot more time at the gym, because I wasn’t going to be the reason my wife missed a single moment in our kids’ lives.”
I stop the UTV. I feel like I’m gonna be sick. “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry, Bruce. I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t care.”
“I do now.” I look at him, dropping every hint of bravado I have left in me. “We don’t know each other well, but please believe me when I tell you that I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it, regardless, but I never would have said something so callous if I’d known.”
“You disagreed with me on a call and threw my sacrifices in my face. That’s a punk move, but it’s not the reason I dislike you.”
I wince. “I know. Liesel told me about the game. I don’t have any excuse for what I said, but I do have reasons.”
“I know better than most how hard that first season must have been for you, but you have to understand that I can’t let someone near my daughter who can’t control himself when he’s upset about the game.”
“I would never have acted like that over a game.”
“You did .”
“No. That’s not the real reason I snapped at Liesel that day.”
Bruce squints through his sunglasses. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because my parents raised me better than that. My mom …” My lips purse as I clear my throat. “My mom has been sick most of my life. With mental illness, not physical, but it’s just as real.” I stare at the snow and start driving again. Some conversations are easier when in motion. “She had a big set back that day, and I didn’t deal with it like I should have.”
The plow stops where I dump the snow, and I should reverse, but I can’t. Bruce’s silence is giving me space to admit things I’ve only ever told one other person: Liesel.
“You’d like my dad. He’s a lot like you. Strong enough to carry every burden his family needs him to carry. He quit a higher paying job for one that gave him the flexibility he’d need to take care of my mom and me. He sacrificed to take me to games, get me on club teams, help me get to and from tournaments, and all while making sure my mom was taken care of, too.”
Bruce nods. I risk a glance at him, and his brow is creased. Then he looks back at me. “He sounds like too good of a guy to have a dope for a son.”
“He is. You two have more in common than you’d think.”
His lip twitches. “Apart from the dopey sons?”
I laugh before I can stop myself. “Uh, yeah, actually.”
Bruce’s snort sounds like a grunt. “Tell me more about your mom. She must be a saint to put up with you.”
I laugh again. And that’s how I find myself telling Bruce Fischer about my family.
All about my family.