Chapter 17
The pasta was wrong.
Beck stood in the kitchen of the rental and stared at the pot and knew it was wrong. The noodles were fine. The sauce was fine. Everything was fine. And fine was not what tonight was supposed to be.
He'd been cooking since three. The rental kitchen was small, a galley layout with a window over the sink that faced the trees and the road to the point.
The counter space was limited. He'd spread out onto the table, cutting board and garlic and a bottle of olive oil and the bread dough he'd started that morning before the sun came up because bread needed time and he'd wanted to give it enough.
He could cook. That had surprised people his whole career.
A center fielder from Ocala who could make his own pasta sauce and bake bread from scratch.
He'd learned in the minors, the first year in Double-A, when the meal money was sixty dollars a day and eating out every night was a fast way to feel terrible.
A teammate's wife had taught him. Cuban woman from Hialeah who told him the secret to everything was garlic and patience and he'd believed her and she'd been right.
He stirred the sauce. Tasted it. Added salt. Tasted it again.
The front door opened. No knock.
Morgan came through the hallway carrying something wrapped in brown paper in both hands. Brady was behind her carrying a bag of candles and a tablecloth.
"Stop tasting the sauce," Morgan said. She hadn't glanced at the pot. Hadn't glanced at him. She was walking straight through the kitchen toward the bedroom with the brown paper held against her chest.
"It needs something."
"It doesn't need something. You need to stop tasting it." She disappeared into the bedroom. He heard her set something down. Adjust it. Set it down again. She came back to the hallway and pointed at him.
"Don't go in there."
"Morgan, it's my bedroom."
"Don't go in there. Don't open it. Don't unwrap a corner. Don't hold it up to the light. Don't touch my paper."
"It's my gift."
"You'll see it when she sees it." She went back to the bedroom, adjusted something by what sounded like a quarter inch, and came back. "If that wrapping is disturbed when I come back tonight, I will know, and I will make your life very difficult."
Brady set the bag of candles on the counter. He pulled out a tablecloth, white, clean, and laid it across the table. Nobody had asked him to.
"Where'd you get a tablecloth?" Beck said.
"Jon," Brady said. "Don't ask."
Morgan was already placing candles around the living room, moving between the shelves and the windowsills with the efficiency of someone who arranged spaces for a living. She positioned each one, stepped back, moved one an inch to the left, stepped back again.
"The bread smells good," she said.
"Thanks."
"The sauce smells fine."
"You just said?—"
"I said stop tasting it. I didn't say it was bad." She lit one of the candles, checked the flame, blew it out. "You'll relight these at six forty-five. Not before."
Beck leaned against the counter and watched her work.
He'd called her the morning after the porch, sitting in the facility parking lot with the engine running and his mind not on the workout at all.
He'd told her he wanted to give Kirstin something for her birthday.
Not bought. Something real. Morgan had gone quiet for a long time.
Then she'd said "I'll handle it" and he'd trusted her because trusting Morgan with this was the easiest decision he'd made since turning right instead of left.
He didn't know what was in the bedroom. He knew what he'd asked for. He didn't know what Morgan had done with it.
"Beck." Morgan was standing in front of him, candle in one hand, lighter in the other. "You're making that face."
"What face?"
"The face you make when you're nervous. It's the same face you made before the workout and Brady had to tell you to breathe."
"I'm not nervous."
Brady, from the table where he was straightening the tablecloth: "You're nervous."
"I just want to get it right."
Morgan put the candle down. She put her hand on his arm. The operational version of her dropped for a second and the person underneath it surfaced, brief, clear.
"You already got it right," she said. "You got it right when you called me."
She picked the candle back up. She placed it on the windowsill. She checked her phone.
"Brady, let's go. We'll be back at seven." She kissed Beck on the cheek in the hallway. Then, loud enough for Beck and Brady both: "He couldn't have cared less about the workout. He wouldn't shut up about getting this right."
The door closed. The Sierra started in the driveway. The gravel crunched and they were gone.
Beck stood in the kitchen. The sauce was on the stove. The bread was in the oven. The candles were placed. The tablecloth was on the table. And whatever Morgan had carried into his bedroom in brown paper was leaning against the wall beside his dresser and he wasn't allowed to touch it.
He checked the bread. The crust was golden, the bottom firm when he tapped it. He pulled it from the oven and set it on the cutting board and the smell filled the kitchen, warm and yeasty, the smell of something made by hand that had taken all day.
He set the table. Eight places. He'd borrowed chairs from the facility and plates from Addison.
He placed them around the tablecloth Brady had laid down.
He stood back and it was right and he didn't know if the thing in the bedroom was right and he wasn't going to find out until everyone was here and Kirstin's hands were on the paper.
He trusted Morgan.
They came at seven.
Jon arrived first. Corona in hand, a bag of limes under his arm, a blender he'd brought from home because the rental didn't have one and margaritas were happening whether the kitchen was equipped or not.
He claimed the counter, the ease of someone who'd been making drinks in other people's spaces his entire adult life.
"Smells good in here," Jon said.
"Thanks."
"You make the bread?"
"This morning."
Jon studied the loaf on the cutting board. Then Beck. Then the loaf.
"My daughter's dating a man who bakes bread," Jon said. "I don't know what to do with that information."
"You could try the bread."
"I'll wait for the margaritas."
Luke and Addison came next. Luke carried a bottle of wine.
Addison carried a gift bag, small, tasteful, a card tucked inside.
They moved through the rental with the comfort of people who'd been in the space before, Luke finding the couch, Addison finding the kitchen, both of them finding Beck's eyes and giving him the look that said we're here and it's going to be fine.
Brady and Morgan arrived together. Morgan had a second bag of candles she'd apparently decided were needed and she placed them around the living room while Brady leaned against the counter and watched her do it.
"The sauce smells good," Morgan said.
"I stopped tasting it."
"I know you did." She lit the last candle. "I texted you four times."
At seven fifteen, the 4Runner pulled into the gravel. Beck heard it through the open window. Hudson heard it from the couch and was at the door before Beck could get there.
He opened the door. She was coming up the steps. Jeans, a black top, her hair down, earrings he hadn't seen before. She stopped on the top step.
"Hey," she said.
"Happy birthday."
She came inside and the room received her as it always received Kirstin Green, with warmth and noise and the immediate sense that the person who'd been missing had arrived.
Jon made her a margarita. Luke handed her the wine.
Addison hugged her. Morgan said "uh huh" and Kirstin said "that's five" and Morgan said "I've got an unlimited supply" and the kitchen filled up with all of them and the bread and the sauce and the candles and the noise of people who liked being together.
Beck served the pasta at eight. He'd made penne with a slow-cooked tomato sauce, garlic bread from scratch, and a salad that Addison had quietly assembled while he wasn't paying attention because Addison couldn't help herself.
They ate at the table with the borrowed chairs and the white tablecloth and the candles Morgan had placed.
Jon poured margaritas. Luke told a story about a teammate who had tried to cook for the team Christmas party and set off the fire alarm in the clubhouse and the entire Red Sox organization had to evacuate to the parking lot in December in their socks.
"Beck, this is actually good," Brent said. He was on his second plate.
"You sound surprised."
"I am surprised. You're a baseball player."
"Brent, you literally eat cereal for dinner," Ashley said.
"I eat several kinds of cereal. It's diverse."
The table laughed. Beck sat at the head and watched them and felt it again, the same thing he'd felt at the Shrimp Festival and on Jon's porch and in the booth at Sailor Jon's the night of the release.
The rightness of being in a room full of people who weren't there because of who he used to be.
They were there because it was Friday and it was Kirstin's birthday and somebody had made pasta.
Kirstin was across from him. She'd been quiet all night, not withdrawn, just absorbing.
He watched her watch the room. The bartender's eye, reading the table, knowing who needed a refill and who was about to tell a story and where the energy was moving.
Except tonight she wasn't working. She was sitting at a table with a margarita and a plate of pasta and the people she loved and she was letting someone else run the room.
He caught her eye. She tilted her glass toward him. A tiny toast. Just the two of them.
The presents came after dinner.
Luke and Addison gave her a leather-bound journal, expensive, the kind with thick pages that took ink clean. "For whatever you want to put in it," Addison said, and Kirstin ran her fingers across the cover and said thank you in a voice that meant it.