Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In Cedar Rapids, Asher started a double play in the seventh, and the throw that started it was the best he’d made all year.
The batter squared late and dropped a bunt to push the runner to third, and Asher was on it before it stopped rolling.
Out from behind the plate, bare hand, no setup, he fired up the line to third on pure instinct and beat the runner by a step.
The third baseman swiped the tag and turned it loose across the diamond to first, doubling up the batter by half a stride.
It was two outs on one bunt, the kind of play a scout wrote down, that used to live in his chest for a week, and Asher jogged back behind the plate, reset his fingers for the next sign, and felt almost nothing.
Feeling almost nothing after a play like that hadn’t stopped being strange.
He was playing the best ball of his life and watching it happen from a distance, like footage of somebody who’d figured it out.
His arm was alive. His framing had gone quiet and exact.
He was calling games his pitchers didn’t shake off, and the org had noticed.
A month ago, that would have been the only thing in his head.
Now it sat off to the side, important and weightless, while the rest of him tracked a different scoreboard: how many hours since Patrick had answered, what the answer had said, how much of Patrick had actually been inside it.
He caught a clean game on top of the throw, called a near no-hitter into the seventh before the kid on the mound walked the bases loaded and lost it, stole a fistful of borderline pitches back over the corner for strikes, smothered a slider in the dirt with a man on third that would have scored in April and didn’t tonight.
Delgado said something low and approving about his receiving on the way into the dugout, the kind of remark that used to light Asher up for a week.
He nodded, said thanks, meant it, and felt it run straight off him.
The org was watching. He could feel it in how the staff talked to him lately, a half-degree warmer, a man being measured for a different uniform.
Four years he’d wanted exactly this. It was finally arriving, and it was arriving into a version of him that had both hands full.
The Fireflies won it in the ninth.
In the visitors’ clubhouse, the assistant trainer crouched in front of him, put his thumbs on either side of Asher’s right knee, and pressed. Asher looked at the ceiling and let him.
“Swelling’s up from Tuesday,” the trainer said.
“It’s a catcher’s knee. It’s supposed to look like that. It’s character.”
“I can get you an MRI when we’re back home.”
“You can get me an ice bag and an Advil, and we’ll call it square.” He said it easy, grin already up.
It worked on most people. They saw the grin and stopped digging. The trainer held his eyes a second longer, then let it go and went for the ice.
He didn’t joke about the knee. Everything else was fair game: his dads, his swing, his love life, the four years of being a prospect instead of a player.
But the knee sat too close to the one thing he couldn’t laugh off: who he’d be if his body gave out before his name ever got called.
He left that question where it was. He showered, let the trainer tape the ice on, and carried his bag out to the bus.
Briggs dropped into the seat beside him with a gas-station sandwich and the settled air of a man with opinions.
“You’re quiet,” Briggs said around a mouthful. “You’ve been quiet since Tuesday. Quiet Asher is unsettling. It’s like when the dog stops barking, so you go check the yard.”
“I’m conserving energy. It’s a veteran thing. You’ll get there around year eight.”
“You’re doing the bit, but your heart’s not in it.” Briggs chewed. “Is this about the hockey guy?”
Asher kept his eyes on the dark fields unspooling past the window.
Briggs knew there was a hockey guy. Most of the clubhouse didn’t.
Asher didn’t bring that into the room. But Briggs caught things other people walked past, and Asher’s quiet was one of them.
He’d listen if Asher wanted to talk. He was a good guy under all the bluntness.
But Briggs’s idea of help was a hand on the shoulder, a beer, a there’s-other-fish pep talk.
What was happening with Patrick didn’t fold into a clubhouse-sized box, and Asher didn’t have it in him tonight to go into everything that was, or more like wasn’t, going on.
Nobody had warned him about this kind of lonely.
He had friends, real ones, guys who’d run through a wall for him.
The baseball guys understood the grind and the depth chart and the waiting.
His friends back home understood what it cost to clock a room before you reached for somebody’s hand.
Almost nobody held both at once. He’d spent his whole life handing out different pieces of himself to different people and never setting the whole of it on one table because the whole of it weighed more than any single friendship was built to carry.
Patrick was the first one who’d gotten all of him at once. For a few months, Asher hadn’t had to hand somebody one piece and hold the rest back. And now, Patrick had gone quiet on him.
“Nah,” he said. “Just tired. Long trip.”
Briggs nodded and let it go. He held out half the sandwich. Asher took it. They rode the rest of the way without talking, which was its own kind of friendship, and Asher was grateful for it and a little ashamed of the gratitude.
The hotel was the same as every other in a minor-league city in the country: the polyester bedspread, the AC unit grinding under the window, the parking-lot light coming through the curtains in a stripe across the second bed.
Four years he’d done this: the bus rides, the box-spring beds, the road cities that blurred together until he couldn’t have named the one he was in.
He used to find a kind of peace in the sameness of it, one minor-league city dissolving into the next.
Now it just felt like being nowhere, repeatedly, while his real life happened without him.
He sat on the edge of the mattress with his phone and didn’t dial right away.
He knew how this went by now. Patrick answered texts.
He picked up calls, most of the time. He said the right words, or words that were close enough to right that you couldn’t hold the gap up to the light and call it a gap.
The withdrawal had no edges. There was no fight, no scene, no night you could circle on a calendar.
There was only Patrick giving back a little less every day, so slowly that Asher kept losing his grip on whether it was even real.
He called anyway. Because the alternative was not calling, and Asher wasn’t ready to be a guy who didn’t call.
Patrick picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hey.”
It came out flat, and that one word told Asher everything. A week ago in Appleton, that same voice had been warm and easy, close to his ear, laughing at something dumb he’d said. Now it was the one Patrick used on people he didn’t know.
“Hey,” Asher said.
“How’d the game go?” he asked like he was reading it off a card.
“We won. I threw a guy out at third I had no business getting.”
“Good.”
The old Patrick would have wanted the rest of it, every pitch of it, just to hear Asher tell it. Tonight, he took the score and let it go.
“How was your day?” Asher said.
“Fine. Trained. Nothing much.”
Asher knew Patrick’s fines by now. There was the one with a breath behind it, the one that meant something was weighing on him.
There was the one with his jaw tight, the one that meant he was angry and holding it down.
This was the third kind, the flat one he’d been getting all week, and it meant Patrick had pulled all the way back inside himself and nothing Asher said tonight was going to reach him.
“Patrick.” He kept his voice level. “You can talk to me. I don’t even need the details. I just need you to stop going quiet on me.”
“There’s nothing to tell yet. It’s a process. It plays out.”
“That’s not—” Asher stopped himself. Pushing had never once worked on Patrick. It only made him pull further in. “Okay. I’ll leave it. I just don’t want you going through it alone.
“I could come down,” Asher said, the idea out before he’d weighed it. “After the trip. I’ve got a day before the homestand. I’ll get in the car. We don’t even have to talk about any of it. I’ll just be there—”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I know I don’t need to. I want to.”
“Asher.” A pause, and in it he heard the last of Patrick pull back, polite and final. “It’s not a good week. Let me get through the draft. I’ll be better company after.”
Lately, it was always after with Patrick, after the draft and after the list, and the better day he kept promising never actually came.
The silence on the line had a weight to it, not dead air, just the quiet of a man on the other end with nothing to say to him. Asher thought about his running shoes, still by Patrick’s door, the ones Patrick had never once asked him to come get.
“I’m sorry,” Patrick said.
It was two words, quiet and true, and worse than if he’d said nothing because it meant he could hear exactly what Asher was offering and was choosing not to take it.
Asher held the silence. He didn’t fill it. A month ago, he’d have had a joke in the chamber before the quiet got uncomfortable, something to defuse it, something that let them both off the hook. He sat in it instead and let it be what it was. He hated every second, but he didn’t hang up.
“I should let you sleep,” Patrick said finally. “Tomorrow’s a long day.”
“You don’t have anything tomorrow.” He didn’t keep the hurt out of it. “It’s the offseason.”
A pause. “Goodnight, Asher.”
“Night.”
The call ended. Asher sat with the phone in his hand in the grinding cold of the hotel room and looked at the second bed nobody was in.
His knee throbbed under the melted ice, a dull insistent pulse he’d been outrunning for a week.
He thought about the trainer’s thumbs, the word MRI, and how his body had picked this exact stretch to start breaking down, right as the call he’d waited four years for finally edged into reach.
If the knee turned out to need surgery and months on the shelf, the call could come while he was laid up and no good to anyone.
He’d spent his whole life certain that baseball was the one thing that would still be there when everything else got complicated.
Lately, even the scoreboard had started to feel like it was on loan.
Patrick going quiet, the knee going loud, the call-up and the expansion draft loading into the same handful of days from opposite directions.
It was a lot of ground shifting at once for a man whose whole game was built on planting his back foot and driving through something.
He scrolled up instead of typing.
Farther up the thread, before the last week of careful, going-nowhere exchanges, the messages used to run long and stupid and constant.
Patrick had corrected his grammar at one in the morning.
He’d roasted the sad gas-station hot dog Asher sent a photo of, then a minute later told him to eat a vegetable.
He’d answered the one real zone-coverage question Asher asked with three careful paragraphs because talking about hockey mechanics was easy.
Somewhere in the thread was a voice memo, forty seconds of Patrick explaining gap control in that flat, certain voice with a hockey game going behind him, that Asher had played more times than he’d ever say aloud.
That was the real Patrick, under all the quiet. Asher had gotten all the way in for a few months, the dry humor, the patience, the way Patrick said his name like it was a whole sentence.
He locked the phone before he could do something pathetic, like play the voice memo again, and made himself set it down.
He should have texted something light. He had it half-written already, the kind that let them both off the hook and asked for nothing. No worries. We’ll talk when the dust settles.
And it would be easy. Go quiet, go busy, let it fade until it was over and nobody had to say so aloud.
The draft wasn’t even the worst of it. That morning, the injury feed had Navarro out, day-to-day with a bad wrist, and under the plain jolt of wanting the spot, some part of him had felt something uglier, something too close to relief.
Because the call-up everyone kept not-quite-promising would come from Milwaukee, his dad’s old club.
It would put his name on a big-league roster and make his life, finally, his own.
A guy with that in front of him didn’t owe anything to a man who’d stopped picking up the phone.
The best news of his life doubled as a way out, and he’d known it the second he read the injury feed.
He hadn’t taken it. But he’d seen it sitting there, and the fact that he’d looked at all turned his stomach.
He didn’t write it. He sat with his thumb over the empty keys, and what he finally sent wasn’t clever and didn’t protect him at all.
Thinking about you. No pressure, nothing you have to answer. I’m still here.
The read receipt came up inside a minute. The typing indicator didn’t.
Asher set the phone face-down on the nightstand and lay back on the bed in his clothes, the AC grinding, the parking-lot light striped across the ceiling.
Everything in him wanted to go quiet, drift off, get out before Patrick could leave him first. He stayed put.
Patrick could go as quiet as he wanted, for as long as he wanted.
Asher had decided he wasn’t going anywhere.