2. Nick
Nick
Last Spring
My father’s headstone is flat, gray, and cheap, and he would’ve approved of exactly one of those things.
Third row from the fence. No dates worth bragging about, no engraving beyond the name, because he pre-paid for it years ago and refused the upgrade the way he refused every upgrade of his life.
Réjean Lachance. Twenty-two seasons of minor-league towns, a body he spent like it was somebody else’s money, and a promise I made him at a kitchen table when I was fourteen.
Five months since we put him here. I still dressed for it. Funeral shoes on cemetery grass, because you dress for him, that’s the rule, he’d have noticed.
I crouch and clear a maple leaf off the granite. My hip weighs in. It used to wait for the second period to complain. Now it doesn’t even want me crouching.
The offer is on my phone. Has been for eleven days.
Denver wants me back for one year, and the word they keep using in the emails is farewell, like it’s a selling point, which it is, which is the problem.
One last season. The thing he never got, on a platter, and all it costs is the body I’ve been lying about for a decade.
Tu finis ce que tu commences. His voice, the kitchen table, every year of my life.
“I know,” I tell the stone. “Working on it.”
* * *
The red-eye out is delayed twice, which would’ve bothered me back when I was somebody.
Cap low, three days of beard, gate B47. A man my size doesn’t disappear, but you can smudge the picture.
People see the gray at the temples and the cap and decide I’m a rancher or a fed, but either way nobody asks for a photo.
Boarding, the flight attendant recognizes me in half a second flat. Somebody in her family has season tickets, or there’s a jersey in a closet somewhere, I can see the whole thing cross her face. I meet her eyes and shake my head once. She resets like a pro. I’ll tip like one.
Seat 3B. What I want out of the next few hours is a dark window and nobody in 3C.
“Hi. Sorry. Hi.”
What I get is a woman fighting her own tote bag and losing, who elbows me on the way down, apologizes to me, then to the armrest, then tells me if she uses the wrong fork it’s the airline’s fault. She points at herself and says, “Frankie,” like we’re being introduced by a third party.
Talker. Three hours of it.
That’s my scouting report, and it holds right up until we push back and her hands go white on the armrests.
Not nervous-flyer white. Afraid, breathing through a system, eyes running the exits.
She catches me watching and makes a joke of it, the takeoff, the landing, also the middle, and I revise my report.
Not a talker. A scared person talking. There’s a difference, and I know it better than most, because when I’m scared I count, and counting is just like talking with the sound off.
I don’t do comfort. Ask anyone in three time zones. But fear that specific deserves facts, so I give her the truth about wings, that they flex because rigid things snap, and the strange part is it works. Her shoulders come down. She breathes.
We lift off, and I go back to the shade, and I can feel her there beside me, vibrating at a frequency I already recognize.
The chicken comes. I look at it too long, and she asks if there’s a problem, and what comes out of my mouth is, “The chicken lied to everyone.”
His line. Papa’s. Twenty-two seasons of team dinners in towns nobody drafts out of, that was his review of every road meal ever served, and it’s out of my mouth before I know I still own it.
First joke I’ve made since the funeral. She laughs like it surprised her too, a real laugh with the whole face involved, and something in my chest shifts weight from one skate to the other.
Then she steals it. Phone out under the tray table, angled away, thumbs going. She’s got a tell when she lies, thumbnail straight to her teeth, and I catch myself adding it to a list I have no business starting.
“Did you just write that down?”
“No.”
She wrote it down. Fine. He’d have liked being material.
Somewhere over Nebraska she starts guessing what I do, and she’s wrong in ways that tell me everything about her and nothing about me, which suits us both.
Contractor. Bodyguard. Disgraced chef. That one almost gets me.
She reads people for a living, she says.
Professionally nosy. She reads the scars on my knuckles and the watch and the wrist I keep rotating, and she gets close enough that I give her the only true thing I can afford.
Retired. The word comes out worse than I mean it to. It always does.
She asks from what, and I tell her it doesn’t matter, and here is the thing that decides the whole night: she lets it go.
Leaves it. Puts a pin in the one door everybody else pulls on, and goes back to her drink, and starts telling me about happy endings and warranties instead, and how she reads the last page of every book first because if the ending’s safe she can survive the middle.
Nobody lets it go. Reporters, teammates, the front office, the kid at the car wash. Everybody pulls.
The turbulence hits somewhere past midnight, hard, air that drops the whole cabin a floor, and she goes somewhere bad at full volume, third person, the woman regrets the chicken, the woman has a cat.
So I do what I do behind the bench, in the room, at two a.m. in a hallway in a bad year: I put my voice underneath somebody and hold still.
“Frankie.”
She comes back to me by inches. Breathe in. Slow. Good. Again. And then my hand is over hers before I’ve even thought about it. Understand: I don’t touch people. My hands have been scheduled for twenty years, taped, iced, examined, insured. They don’t freelance.
This one’s freelancing. It stays through the next fist of air, and hers turns under it, not away, and when the sky lets us go, I take my hand back and it keeps her warmth.
She asks my name and I give her half of it.
“Just Nick?”
“Just Nick.”
Okay, Just Nick, she says, and settles, and I sit there in the dark next to a stranger who has no idea who I am, and it is the quietest room I’ve been in since the desert.
Which is maybe why I open the door myself.
“You asked what I retired from.”
Her head turns. She doesn’t pounce. “You said it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s the only thing that ever mattered.” The words come out in the order I least expect. “That’s the problem.”
I’ve run this conversation in my head a hundred times with a hundred people and never once had it out loud.
My agent knows the shape of it. One man on earth knows the whole thing.
And now, apparently, a woman with a stolen line of mine in her phone, because she has no idea who I am, and that makes her the one person for whom saying it doesn’t cost anything.
Except it does. It just costs differently.
“I played a game for a living.” Careful, even now. Even wrecked, I keep the brand off it. “Played it for a long time. Played it hurt, mostly, because that’s the job. Anybody tells you differently, they didn’t play.”
“Hurt how?”
“Hurt always.” My thumb finds the bad wrist. Rotates. “You manage it. Ice. Needles. Tape. And then a year comes when managing it has a bottle attached, and the bottle works, and that’s the worst thing about it. It works.”
She doesn’t say anything. Her whole body is listening. I watch the seam of light under the window shade and keep going, because there’s really no use in stopping now.
“Last winter I told everyone I was done. Bad hips, too many miles. True enough to print.” Man, my neck. My hand’s up rubbing it before I notice, and I make it quit. “The rest of it —”
The rest of it. Twenty years of saying hard things plainly to rooms full of men, and I stall here, in the dark, beside a stranger. She doesn’t fill the silence. All night she’s filled every silence there was, but this one she leaves me, and that’s what gets me through it.
“There’s a place in the desert. Sixty days.
A different kind of camp.” Slowly now, every word pulled against the grain.
“The team announced a procedure. My agent said personal matter. And I’ve never once said the real word out loud to anyone who didn’t already know it.
” It sits in my mouth like a rotten tooth.
“Rehab. I went to rehab. The whole sport watched a press conference about my hips while I sat in Arizona in a bathrobe, learning to say dependent without flinching. Learning I could stop, and the sun would come up anyway.”
Her hand finds mine on the armrest. Quiet, no ceremony, the mirror of an hour ago. She doesn’t say anything. Good. There’s nothing to say, but everybody else would have said it.
“I came out clean. I’ve stayed clean.” It’s the first time that sentence has been said anywhere but a folding-chair circle. “But the man they think retired never existed. That guy was managing.”
“And now?” Soft. No pity in it, which is the only reason I’m still talking.
“Now they want me back for one last season. And I stood at my father’s grave this afternoon trying to figure out if I want to continue or if I just don’t know how to be a nobody.
” There it is, the sentence I couldn’t finish for a therapist in the desert at four hundred dollars an hour.
“Because if I’m not the guy who —” and it hangs there, unfinished, the way those sentences always hang.
She could ask which game. She could ask my last name, my team, my number, and unravel me with a search bar. She asks none of it. She just looks at me in the dark.
“Then you’d be the man who told a stranger the truth at thirty thousand feet,” she says. “I’ve read a lot of nobodies. That’s not one.”
“Calisse,” I say, quietly, to no one, in my father’s language, and I kiss her.