Chapter 4 #2
It’s just that right now, looking at an empty booth, the words feel like they’re echoing around inside a chest that has a little more room in it than usual. Like all the padding I’ve propped up inside myself has worn thin and needs to be replaced but hasn’t been yet.
It’s okay, I tell myself.
Even if it doesn’t feel okay.
I go to the counter where Alma is wiping down the espresso machine. She looks up.
“Mija,” she says. “I guess you can make it home during the day if you have someone good enough to talk to?”
I tut. “Don’t say that! I see you five days a week.”
“Yes, but not at nine in the morning, and you never put on lip gloss.”
I’m trying not to think about the empty table behind me. “Alma, did you want me to wear lip gloss to see you?”
“No. That’s weird.”
I laugh, but it dies too fast on my lips as I slump forward on the counter. “I really wanted him to show. Isn’t that silly?”
“Yes.”
I hang my head in my hands, and my braid falls in front of me, brushing the counter. “I knew it. Why did I get my hopes up?”
“He’s the kind worth getting hopes up for.”
I look at her through my lashes. “You don’t actually believe that after meeting him last night.”
“I met him last year. He comes to the window all of the time.”
“What? You never told me?”
“Why would I tell you?”
“Because I’ve had a huge crush on him since the first time he got caught reading a book in the bullpen during a game!”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Alma! Why couldn’t you have had me work the window?”
“Because the people are rude, and rude people hurt your feelings.”
“They hurt everyone’s feelings.”
“Not me. Their rudeness feeds me. Besides, that was last year, and this year, you’ve worked the truck.”
I give a pained laugh into my hands. “He’s really been coming here for a year?”
“A year and a half. He’s good. Cares about people. Sticks up for people.”
“And he ghosts them, too,” I say, frowning.
She rolls her eyes. “He’s been here since eight thirty. He was in the restroom.” She looks over my right shoulder. “And he’s back.”
I stand straight and see her eyes crinkle with a smile that won’t show anywhere else. She picks up her cloth and wipes the counter where my arms left an impression and where my braid hit.
“Go sit down, mija,” Alma says behind me.
I walk over to the table, where Logan is already sitting, his eyes burrowing into me. I can’t see what he’s wearing apart from one of those sweat-wicking tees athletes always wear and a powder blue Mudflaps baseball cap. And in his hands is—
Oh my gosh, it’s his copy of Robert Frost’s poems.
I’m swooning so hard, I need a fainting couch.
“You came,” he says, and I think from the twitching in his lips, he’s trying not to smile.
I hold mine back, too. I’m already pushing it by letting myself be excited at all. If I start throwing out smiles, I’m going to start hoping.
I can’t start hoping.
Crushing, on the other hand …
“So did you,” I say. “I thought you might forget.”
His light blue eyes turn steely for a second. “That’s not my style. My dad was big on ‘Be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there.’”
Of all the things my dad has never said—
“That must have been nice. Growing up with a dad who felt that way.”
He nods. “Yeah, it was. My dad’s an umpire in the Majors, so he was gone a lot.
And, I don’t know, there’s a lot of … cheating that happens in professional sports.
Umps aren’t immune to that. He saw his buddies lose their families because they would go out, be places they shouldn’t be.
He always said he loved our family too much to do that.
So after a game, he’d send us a picture from dinner, a picture from the gym, and then he’d go straight to his hotel room to FaceTime us, and that’s how he’d spend the rest of the night. ”
“Wow,” I say. “What devotion.”
“Yeah, my dad’s my hero for a lot of reasons. That’s one of them.”
Emotion tightens my throat, but I swallow it away, because this isn’t about me or my dad. “That sounds like more than one reason. He’s been an ump your whole life and did that every day? That’s … thousands of reasons for him to be your hero.”
“Huh. I’ve always seen it as a single event, but you’re right: It’s a new choice he made every day, thousands of times.” He shakes his head. “Freaking Bruce Fischer. That guy is impossible to live up to.”
“He sounds amazing,” I say as two drinks appear. I look up to see Alma already walking away. I didn’t order anything, but Alma always knows I want hot chocolate. Growing up in a coffee shop, you’d think I’d be a borderline addict.
I am.
It’s just for cocoa beans instead of coffee beans (sorry, Mama).
“Yeah, he is,” he says. “My mom was sick for a long time, and he made taking care of her look like an honor. A privilege.” He clears his throat. “Watching that kind of love in action formed us.”
“I can’t imagine,” I say in a dramatic understatement.
“I wouldn’t want anyone to have to.”
I don’t tell him there are things worse than seeing true love in action because it would mean me elevating my loss above his.
I want to hold the pain he’s shared with me close.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say. “Can I ask what your mom had?”
“ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease. She always joked she loved baseball so much, she even got the baseball disease to prove it. She insisted she’d live long enough to see us get drafted.” He shrugs. “She did.”
Without meaning to, I press a hand over my heart. “Wow. What an incredible woman.”
“Yeah. She really was.”
I don’t want to compare pain, but I do want him to know I relate. “My mama passed when I was thirteen. Lupus nephritis. She was the best, too,” I say, remembering her hooked up to the dialysis machine, somehow chatting with the nurses like they were old friends, smiling at everyone she saw.
“I’m sorry.” It’s his turn to give me a sad smile. “What a crappy club to be a part of.”
“Yeah. But my mama said that it would make me a more compassionate person. She said, ‘Think of all the people you’ll be able to love better because you understand their pain.’”
Logan’s eyes well up immediately and he shakes his head. “Shoot. I don’t think I can handle your mom’s wisdom at nine oh nine in the morning.”
I laugh—hard—and hold my mug up to him. “I’ll drink to that.”
He chuckles. “Unless Alma made yours a lot stronger than she made mine, I’m not sure it’ll have the right effect.”
I laugh into my mug, letting the steam from the hot cocoa fill my lungs.
“That’s where you’re wrong, 49.” He smiles hearing me calling him by his number, but he lets me keep talking.
“A couple of days after my mama passed away, I walked over here—to Meant to Bean—and Alma said, ‘You need chocolate. Chocolate makes everything better. Even grief.’” I smile, thinking about how she served me in this exact teal mug with the yellow and coral flowers Mama so painstakingly painted.
“She was right. For a few minutes, everything hurt a little less.”
Logan is pinching the bridge of his nose right between his eyes, and the sound coming from him is that strange mix of crying and laughing that only the initiated know. It’s somehow dark—so, so dark—but light at the same time. A contradiction unique to those who’ve seen beauty in the ashes of loss.
He sniffs. Looks at me. “So about that Robert Frost—”
I laugh so hard, I choke on my hot cocoa.
I grab a napkin and press it to my mouth, trying not to turn this into a full spit take.
Logan’s laughing on his side of the booth, too, and I can’t look at him, or I’m going to lose it completely.
I hold up my other hand as I swallow. Then I laugh out loud.
“‘About that Robert Frost.’ Wow.”
“It seemed like a natural transition,” he says, his shoulders shaking even more than mine.
“Yeah. So natural.” I’m still smiling as I catch my breath. “It’s a good thing you brought your copy. I left mine in the truck.”
“You drive a truck?” he asks. “Me too.”
Whoops!
“It’s borrowed,” I say, which is technically true, because Marlowe is leasing the truck. “I usually drive a 2010 Nissan Sentra. Try not to be too intimidated.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “That’s a big ask.”
I fold my legs up crisscross on the bench. I could talk to this man forever.
How much forever can I fit into eighteen minutes?
“So, are you ready to talk poetry, Logan?”
“I was born ready, Georgie.”
Hearing my name from his lips sends a thrill through me.
I watched him play a handful of times last year when I was babysitting Lulabelle.
But I first heard about him from my current baseball seatmates, the Chicks.
The three men came in one day last April before a game and were arguing about which of the Fischers was better.
Chick Hanks said, “If Logan would put his book down in the bullpen and focus, he’d already be in the pros.”
Chick Parkinson shook his head. “It’s his grip, not the book.”
And they kept arguing while all I could do was wonder about this professional athlete who read books during games.
“What was he reading?” I asked.
“How should we know?” Chick Allen asked.
“Tuesdays With Morrie,” Chick Parkinson said.
“It’s a bit heavy for the bullpen,” Chick Hanks said.
“No, it’s a good book,” Chick Parkinson said.
“It’s a wonderful book,” I said, getting the men their coffee. Logan was reading the true story of a sports journalist who found out his beloved professor was dying of ALS and decided to visit him every Tuesday until he passed—and he was reading it in the bullpen?
I’m not saying I already had a crush on Logan without ever having seen him, but the idea of a pitcher reading such a beautiful book while waiting to be called to the mound—it did something to me.
Intrigued me. Filled my head with silly thoughts and even sillier dreams that I would never, ever entertain.
Now here I am, sitting across from the man himself—
Entertaining silly thoughts and even sillier dreams.
“Let’s talk Frost.”