Chapter 24
REESE
TRACK: Gretta Ray, “Vienna” (Billy Joel cover)
The boy and his father are waiting for Eli when we pull up to the community center. I tell them I can wait in the little seating area outside the indoor cages, but Eli shakes his head. “It’ll be good for you to practice in front of a spectator, Alvin. You’re ready, right?”
I can tell it’s not pressure Eli’s putting on him, or at least, not the kind he doesn’t need. I know what that feels like. This is gentle. A prodding just outside the kid’s comfort zone.
The dad, meanwhile, is taking his “keep quiet” mandate seriously, and settles on the bleacher a good ten feet away from me to watch Eli with his kid.
We both watch, rapt, as Eli walks Alvin through his swing.
“Just like we talked about, Al. Loose in the hips”—Eli does a little hip dance that I know is exaggerated and meant to crack up the kid, because he wins himself a tentative smile from the shy boy.
Eli spends a full ten minutes warming Alvin up so by the time he turns on the machine, and the ball thwacks out for the first time, Alvin’s ready.
With each hit, the kid’s confidence clearly grows.
Each time, he stands up a little taller between sessions.
Eli’s patience with the boy is incredible.
He knows just what Alvin needs to hear, and just how hard to push him so he doesn’t tighten up again.
By the time we’ve been there forty minutes, Alvin’s cracking jokes right back at Eli.
We can’t hear them from here, but at one point, both of them are howling with laughter.
I feel like my heart might explode. It doesn’t help that every time Eli looks over at me, he gives me a wink that makes my insides flutter.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” I ask the father as the machine roars to life again toward the end of the hour.
The father doesn’t say anything, and at first, I think he didn’t hear me. Then he looks my way. “He’s what a dad should be.”
I blink, looking back at Eli. He is, too. I could see him like this with his own kids, taking his time, making helping them his whole job.
I think back to that date we went on with Kelly and Neil. Where Kelly asked Eli if the property stuff was what he’d always wanted to do. And where Eli said he’d left everything for his family.
Eli wants a family, I realize. More than any job. He can do anything, and he can do it well. But his career has never been important to him. It makes sense—his own father was a stay-at-home dad. He grew up knowing it was the most important job in the world.
Then the world came at him. But he’s figured out how to live without one.
This time, when Eli smiles at me, I smile back with tears in my eyes. This man. This decent, loving, gorgeous man. How could I have ever thought anything else of him?
“Come to the studio,” I say, when we’re getting back into his truck.
“You sure?” Eli asks, looking for all the world like a sweet boy in a big man’s body.
“I’m sure,” I say. And I really am.
I think it’s going to take me some warming up to get me comfortable singing in front of Eli, but somehow, the man makes me feel almost as comfortable as I do singing alone.
I do start with covers, an eclectic mix of my favorites: Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes, “Vienna” by Billy Joel.
Eli’s in the live room with me when I start, but by the time I get to Sarah McLachlan’s “When She Loved Me,” he’s at the recording table, messing around with the dials.
I’m not sure if he’s actually figured out how to record, but once again, the thrill of Eli doing this feels better than doing this for my lonesome.
It’s only when I start singing my own songs—the ones I wrote years ago and the new ones I’ve been working on last week, that I know why.
I love to sing, yes, I love the sound I can make, but I love seeing it affect other people.
It’s not hubris, the way Simon said it was.
It’s the joy of making them feel the way I do.
It’s the magic of music—a direct conduit of joy, sorrow, love, pain, and happiness between people.
And Eli helped me find it again.
“Do you want to hear it?” Eli asks as he wraps his arms around me hours later. He’s somehow got his hands on a thumb drive. “Because the world needs to hear you sing, baby.”
I laugh, feeling like I’m skating on air. “No,” I say, my lips at his ear. “I want you to make love to me.”
“What, right here?”
I close my teeth onto his earlobe. “Right here.”
Eli tosses the flash drive over his shoulder and pulls me, laughing, into his arms.