Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Logan
Ididn’t work up the nerve to ask Georgie out on a real date, but I did text her about meeting up today, because even though it’s a given in my mind that I’ll be here, I cannot and will not take her presence for granted, especially because I know the truth now.
Every day when she takes a break, she’s driving the ten miles here and ten miles back.
It’s probably eating up a ton of gas, and part of me has been debating running to Sugar Maple and dropping a hundred-dollar tip into her tip jar when she’s not looking.
But if the girl who doesn’t even want me knowing she works as a barista found out, she’d be humiliated. I can’t do that to her.
She’ll let me know when she lets me know.
I pull up to Meant to Bean and see Georgie in the coffee truck stopped at the light on Broad Street. I hop out of my truck and walk straight into the coffee shop so she doesn’t have to worry about me noticing. As always, my gaze goes straight to our window booth.
Where a couple is already sitting.
I blink at them, totally thrown. Then I look at Alma, who shrugs.
She passes me two drinks: Georgie’s Mexican Hot Chocolate and my vanilla Whip Smart, Georgie’s new name for her cold protein cozies.
Alma gestures to the outside door. It’s not the door I always go through, but rather the one on the opposite side of the shop.
I run into Georgie at the door.
“Sorry!” I say as she bumps into my chest. I barely manage to raise the drinks high enough to keep from splashing her.
“Sorry!” she says, putting her hands on my pecs, her face flaming. “I’m so sorry! I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
Her hands are still on my chest, and I can’t help channeling a bit of my cocky brother and smiling. “I’m not complaining.”
“Were you going out?” she asks.
“Someone’s already there.” She looks past me, her braid spilling forward over one shoulder so she has to flip it back.
“Someone’s there,” she says, half in shock. “No one’s ever there.”
“I know. Someone should really tell them they’re in our spot. Alma sent me outside.”
“Ah,” Georgie says. “I know the place.”
I follow her through the door and out into the mild morning to the opposite side of the parking lot, where a typical South Carolina urban forest lives, the cabbage palmettos and live oaks claiming every inch of ground the parking lot doesn’t strictly need.
I follow her out to a clearing where there are stumps on the ground, and Georgie rights two of them and pulls them toward what looks like a small house on a pole.
It’s a Little Free Library.
“I never realized this was here,” I say, handing her the drink but not sitting yet.
With my own cup in one hand, I run the other over the small wooden structure.
The paint is powder blue, and the brass hinge on the door has a shine that tells me it’s old, but cared for.
I open it up and look at the books inside—a Lee Child paperback that’s been read more than once.
A Southern cookbook that’s been opened less than that.
Kids’ books, a fantasy series, and a few more in between.
“Wow,” I say. “This is awesome.”
“You think?” she asks, her cheeks going inexplicably red.
I run a hand down the smoothed, painted wood. “Yes! Did you know this was out here? Whoever made this is a stud.”
She sniffs a laugh. “It’s a bit lopsided.”
“I tried to make a bookshelf for my mom for Christmas one year. It was an Ikea bookshelf, and it was way more lopsided than this.”
We both take a seat on one of the stumps. The sky is a dark, flat gray that filters the light, and the air is muggy. But a breeze sweeps past us, hinting at crisp autumn days ahead.
“Was there anything good in there?” she asks.
“A collection of Shel Silverstein poems,” I say. “So no.”
Her eyes go saucer wide. “You’re not a Silverstein fan?”
“I think The Giving Tree is a top-ten worst story ever told. You like it?”
“It’s a classic.”
“So is the Black Plague.”
A laugh explodes from her mouth, and she leans forward. “That’s a bit of a stretch.”
“The boy bleeds her dry and then chops her down so he can sit on her. He’s a plague.”
She makes a face, almost like she wants to argue, but that’s not what Georgie does.
She holds her mug up to her lips and wraps both hands around the mug the way she always does, unbothered by the heat, and I find myself watching her the way I watch a good pitch—trying to understand the mechanics of something so effortlessly beautiful.
“You seem unconvinced,” I tell her.
“I’m going to need more,” she admits.
“The boy is a monster,” I say.
“Why do you think he’s a monster?”
“He only comes to her when he needs something and ignores her when he doesn’t. That’s not how you treat someone you love.”
“I see what you’re saying.”
“But?”
She purses her lips. “But it makes the Tree happy to give.”
“Should she have to give him her whole self? What does she get back?”
“She gets the knowledge that she made someone happy.”
“Is that enough?” I ask.
Georgie pauses, like she’d never imagined it couldn’t be. And I use that pause to further my argument.
“She waits for him for years between visits, and he doesn’t even think about her until he wants to use her,” I say.
“Who’s to say she’s waiting that whole time? She could be living a whole life—free in the wind, no cares, plenty of birds and squirrels to keep her company.”
“That’s hardly canon.”
She chuckles. “True. It might be my hope for her.”
“So you think she lives a full, beautiful life and replenishes herself every time he’s gone? Maybe when it’s just apples, but what about when it’s branches? And then her trunk?”
Her phone rings before she can answer.
She pulls the phone out, looks at the screen, and the color in her face drains.
“Sorry, I have to take this,” she says, swiping her finger across the screen as she walks off quickly toward the trees.
She doesn’t get far enough away, though.
I can’t hear all the words, but I can hear what happens to her voice—the way it becomes higher, more solicitous.
Her shoulders hunch up in a way they never do when she talks to me.
She says yes twice and sorry once, then she promises she’ll be right there before ending the call.
When she turns around, she’s still reassembling her features.
“I’m so sorry. That was—that was work. I have to go.”
“No problem,” I say, standing up and reaching for her mug. “I can give that to Alma. I have more time than you have.”
Her eyebrows rise, and she blinks down at my outstretched hand. “Oh. Thank you.”
“I travel tomorrow for an away series,” I blurt before she can run off to work. We only got seven minutes, not the forty we’ve been getting. Seven minutes is not nearly enough with Georgie. “I’ll be gone Monday to Monday. Can we get together when I’m back?”
“Of course. I’ll be here at nine AM.”
“No, I mean like food. A real date.”
Her smile grows slowly, but it almost overtakes her face.
Almost.
“I’d like that,” she says.
“Me too.”
***
The drive to the stadium takes six minutes—almost as long as it takes to walk—and I spend five and a half of them thinking about how Georgie was holding something back.
The other half a minute was me yelling at a possum to cross the road.
She wasn’t holding back in some secretive way, but more like she knows what it’s like to run out of gas and would rather stop and walk rather than risk being stranded again.
Meanwhile, I hold on until the tank is empty because I’m afraid I’ll get gas at the wrong station, leaving me stranded and walking, anyway. Different method, same result.
I know something, though. Georgie made that Little Free Library. She went pink when I called whoever built it a stud and said it’s a bit lopsided. She would never criticize someone else’s work.
She built it herself and didn’t want me to know.
Maybe she was waiting to see how I’d react, and by then, she felt silly about it.
Or maybe she doesn’t want anyone knowing.
I hope she did it just for her.
***
I’m not pitching today, but I do get some practice in before the game. Fletch finds me in the middle of my flat-ground session and watches for a minute without speaking.
“Doug’s eager about Tuesday’s game,” he says finally. “You’re starting again.”
I swallow and wind up and release toward the net, keeping it easy, nothing on the ball. “Okay.”
“He watched tape of your game Thursday,” Fletch says. “Whatever was different then, we want it to still be different Tuesday.”
“You and me both.”
“And Doug.”
There’s nothing at stake during this particular drill, but Fletch isn’t trying to keep me steady. I think he wants me to feel the weight of what he’s saying.
I try the thing from the tank—expanding my awareness out past my skin to where the air starts, blurring the line between where I end and the afternoon begins. But then my mind jumps to Georgie’s hands on my chest this morning.
“I’m working on it,” I tell him, winding up and releasing.
The ball hits exactly where I wanted it.
“Good,” Fletch says, a ghost of a smile on his face.
I watch him walk off, and for a moment, I debate asking him to come back, asking him if it’s okay that “whatever was different” is because of a girl.
But I already know the answer. I know what Fletch would say, I know what Dr. Chang would say, and I know what I should say, even if I don’t believe it.
No.
I can imagine all the objections. It’s not going to last. It’s not fair to put that on her. Change has to come from within.
And I think about the brat in The Giving Tree, how he took and took, expecting the Tree to do all the work for him—
This isn’t the same thing.
I’m not making Georgie do the work for me, and I’m not asking her to take away my yips. I’m not taking anything from her.
I pause, evaluating every word in my head.
It’s all true.
Except for the part where I’m thinking about her when I’m stressed. Looking to her—even in my mind—when I want my problems to disappear.
Oh, crap.