Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Asher taped his wrists in a clubhouse that still didn’t feel like his and made himself a promise: he was not going to watch the expansion draft.
There was nothing in it to watch. Patrick was signed, protected, done—the whole thing decided before the cameras turned on.
Checking would just be his old brain doing its old job, waiting for the good thing to get taken back.
He made it to the second wrist.
The screen lit up, and it wasn’t Patrick. It was Briggs—still up in Appleton with the Fireflies, and apparently still close enough to deliver news like he was serving a subpoena. A screenshot, no message. A sports site, a headline in bold.
Zia Suns Select Syndicate Forward Kovacs in Expansion Draft
Asher read it twice. The second pass caught what the first had only registered.
The name was Kovacs. Not Patrick.
He set the roll of tape on the bench and didn’t move for a second, the locker stalls on either side of him belonging to men he’d watched on television a month ago. The clubhouse moved around him, somebody’s music low, a bat being worked over with a rag two stalls down.
Patrick had gone back to Chicago, wanting to be there when the announcement came. He’d assured them both, more than once, that he was safe. It had still taken seeing the headline for it to feel real. Kovacs had paid the price for Patrick to stay put.
Asher only knew what the name meant because Patrick had told him, in the hotel dark earlier that week, running down who the team would have to expose now that the no-move made him untouchable.
Kovacs, drafted by Chicago at eighteen, never another logo.
Protecting himself moved somebody else’s name up the list, and Patrick hadn’t been able to make it sound like nothing.
Asher felt a specific, useless sadness for a player he’d never met who’d just found out he was leaving the only team he knew. Then his phone lit up again.
Kovacs
The whole draft compressed into a surname. Anyone else would have sent a paragraph. Patrick let the context carry it.
Asher typed back.
I know. Briggs beat you to it. You’re losing the information race to a guy hitting .231 in Triple-A.
Fuck. I hate this. I watched as they read his name. I was really hoping it wouldn’t be him.
It was always going to be someone. You did what you needed to stay where you want to be. You’ve earned that.
The typing dots cycled, stopped, and started again.
Yeah. And he’s packing a house because I did.
Asher set the phone face-down on his thigh.
He sat there, breathing. Sometime in the last minute, his shoulders had come down from around his ears, and he was grinning at a roll of wrist tape like an idiot. A big-league clubhouse was the wrong place to cry, so he didn’t.
He’d already had his answer anyway. Patrick had given it to him in an empty parking lot before any list existed, back when staying still had a price on it. Today the league just caught up.
Asher picked the phone back up and called.
Patrick answered on the second ring. “Hey.”
“Hey. How do you feel?”
Patrick took his time with it. “Like I can breathe.”
“Yeah.”
“They were going to leave me off. Right up until I made it cost more to lose me than to keep me, and put a clause on it so they couldn’t choose.” He said it flat. “I bought my own way onto that list. I’m not going to forget what it cost.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“But I’m staying.”
“Yeah,” Asher said, and had to clear his throat. “You’re staying.”
Down the row of stalls, somebody turned the music up.
“So what now?” Asher asked.
“Now I have an offseason. Camp opens in September. Until then, I drive up to watch as many of your games as I can. Except now, you’re closer.” A beat. “And playing at your dad’s ballpark.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re smirking. I can hear it.”
Patrick huffed a laugh. “I have to go. I told Dev I’d meet him at the facility.”
“In June?”
“He and Lindy are doing extra skates this summer.”
“That’s a lot of voluntary ice time with your linemate.”
“Dev doesn’t think of it that way.”
“I know,” Asher said. “I’m just saying.”
“I’ll drive up tomorrow,” Patrick said. “I want to see your new place.”
“Home,” Asher said, trying it out. It still sat strange in his mouth, home meaning Milwaukee now, meaning a place his last name had walked into the room a half-step ahead of him. “Fair warning. The only thing I’ve unpacked is the shitty coffee maker, and it didn’t get better in the move.”
“I’ll bring the French press,” Patrick said, and hung up before Asher could get the last word, which Asher decided to allow.
Patrick drove up the next day and got there early. Asher heard him on the stairs and had the door open before he knocked. And then Patrick was inside, dropping his bag, taking Asher’s face in both hands and kissing him, his palms warm against Asher’s jaw.
“Hi,” Asher said when he could.
“Hi.” Patrick looked past him and took in the apartment: the couch, the boxes still taped shut along the wall, bare windows with the city behind them. The French press came out of his bag first.
They were still unpacking the second box when Patrick’s phone lit up on the counter. He glanced at the screen and went still.
“My mother.”
“You going to answer it?”
Patrick looked at the phone, then at Asher, and Asher watched him decide something. “Fair warning,” he said, reaching for it. “They’re enthusiastic.”
“They’re parents.”
“They’re my parents. It’s different.” He answered on speaker and set the phone back down on the counter. “Maman. You’re on speaker. Asher’s with me.”
Within thirty seconds, Asher understood.
“On speaker.” Sylvie’s voice filled the kitchen, bright and quick, a French Canadian accent moving through English at full speed. “Twenty-eight years, you have never put me on speaker.”
“I know, Maman.”
“Asher.” She said the name like she’d been saving it. “Finally.”
“We know your name and that you play baseball,” Patrick’s father said, somewhere behind her. “Our son gives us nothing.”
Beside Asher, Patrick had his arms crossed and one heel going. Asher had never once seen him fidget.
“Hi,” Asher said. “It’s really good to meet you. I’m a catcher—Milwaukee, as of last week.”
“The major leagues,” Sylvie said. “Patrick. He is in the major leagues.”
“I was there, Maman. I came to his first game.”
A silence on the line. Then, quieter: “You went to a baseball game.”
“I went to a baseball game.”
“In the stands. With people.”
“Maman.”
Asher looked over. Patrick’s ears had gone red. He filed it away.
The line went quiet for a moment, and when Sylvie spoke again the teasing was gone. “Mon c?ur. You sound different. You have for months. I kept deciding not to ask because you would give me one word and change the subject.” A pause. “Now I don’t need to ask. The answer is standing in your kitchen.”
“His kitchen,” Patrick said. “I’m in Milwaukee.”
“Even better,” Sylvie said.
The call ran forty minutes. Sylvie asked about Asher’s parents, and he gave her the rundown.
Two dads, one a former pitcher, one a former outfielder, both retired, both in Milwaukee, one of them with a history at the same franchise Asher had just joined.
Sylvie’s chief concern was whether his dads preferred red or white because she was already planning a dinner she had no date for.
Patrick’s father asked about the draft, framed with care, more curious how the waiting had been than whether Asher had worried. Asher answered honestly. The not-knowing had been worse than any outcome.
“He’s stubborn, our Patrick,” his father said. “Gets it from his mother.”
“I am flexible. I adapt,” Sylvie said.
“You rearranged the living room three times last month because you didn’t like how the light hit the couch.”
“That is responding to conditions.”
They said goodbye in three attempts, each farewell followed by one more thought, Sylvie remembering to ask about Patrick’s shoulder, his father asking whether Asher could explain icing to Maman, who had spent thirty years in hockey rinks and still didn’t understand it.
The indignation carried them another two minutes.
The apartment went still.
Patrick sat with his arms crossed, ears still red.
“They’re great,” Asher said.
“They’re a lot.”
“They’re great.”
Patrick tipped his head back against the couch and shut his eyes. The red was fading from his ears.
“I want to meet them for real,” Asher said. “In person, not propped on a counter.”
“That’s going to be hard.” Patrick’s eyes stayed shut. “They’re in Montreal. You play almost every day until October. I’m in camp in September.”
“Then we find a way. An off day and a flight. The offseason. I don’t care how.” Asher nudged his knee. “We’ll make it work. That’s the job now.”
Patrick opened his eyes and looked at him. “It’s a lot of miles.”
“Same direction though.”
“Same direction.”
Asher leaned into him, shoulder to shoulder, and Patrick’s arm came around his back without hesitation. The couch was too small for two men their size. Neither of them moved.
The pull was still in him somewhere. It probably always would be. The reflex that said the ground was moving, that the easiest move was to be the one who left first, to turn something this big into an exit before it could turn into a loss. He knew that voice better than he knew most of himself.
He didn’t get up. He sat in the middle of an ordinary afternoon: a hockey player on his too-small couch, a major-league season in front of him, his dads close enough to drop in on. He didn’t once look at the door.
“How long do I have you?” he asked.
“Through tomorrow’s game.” Patrick’s arm tightened across his back. “Then it’s a drive I’ll be making a lot.”
“I’ll leave the light on.”