Chapter 23 Four Years Post-Graduation #4
“They make quite the pair,” Audie said to her as Isla and Luca cut the cake.
Abby avoided him during the wedding. He didn’t walk Isla down the aisle, but they were cordial, shared conversation, laughter, a hug, and a dance. Abby didn’t know if she thought less of her sister or envied it.
“May I join you?” Audie nodded to a chair at the otherwise empty table.
“I guess.”
He’d aged since their last run-in. White had set in at the temples of his jet-black hair and new folds creased his cheeks. “The game strikes again,” he said, while he puffed on a cigar.
Abby furrowed her brow. “What?”
“Your sister says you and your teammate got her and Luca together, yes? The girl with the pretty eyes?” Audie asked.
Abby swallowed a knot in her throat at the mention of Kate.
“You don’t play softball, you don’t go to Insley, you don’t meet the girl who goes to law school, who Isla and Luca end up helping. The game. See?”
Abby swirled her scotch. “Sure.”
“You look beautiful.” Audie’s eyes, so much like her own, glinted gentler than she remembered.
“Yeah, well, Isla chose the dress.”
“I hear you are playing.”
“You heard right.” Abby grabbed the cigar from his mouth, took a long drag, and exhaled into his face.
“Good.” Audie grabbed another cigar from the inner pocket of his tuxedo jacket. “You are doing well?”
“What do you care?”
Audie winced. “I suppose I should apologize for our last meeting. I shouldn’t have put hands on you. Or said the things I did.” He contemplated his cigar. “I suppose you know how to push my buttons better than anyone. But it helped me to make some changes.”
“Yeah, like what?” Abby narrowed her eyes. She’d heard the same song and dance before. “Isla told me you moved back here to work for the Padres, but that’s for you. Everything you ever do is for you.”
“I’ve stopped drinking. I should’ve done that a long time ago. To be there for you and your sister.”
“Well, we’ll see how long that lasts.”
Abby blew a delicate ring of smoke to hide that the revelation surprised her, and that it gave her a rare smidge of hope.
It was too late to talk to her mother, too late to sort through her complicated childhood, but, just maybe, Audie wasn’t entirely bad.
Just as she wasn’t. Because whether she admitted it or not, they were more alike than different.
“I saw where you grew up when I was training in Puerto Rico.”
Audie chortled bitterly. “I do everything in my power to get away. A generation later, you choose to go back.”
“Have you?” she asked. “Gone back home?”
“No. Have you?”
“Where’s home?”
Audie frowned. “Well, I won’t keep you.”
“I’m sorry too.” Abby closed her eyes and sighed. “For my part in our fight.”
Audie’s mustache quirked with a half smile. “Do you want to dance?”
“Seriously?”
They watched the wedding guests twist and sway to music.
“Do you have someone special?”
Abby shook her head. “No.”
“But someone you wish was here.”
She bit her lip and allowed him a full glimpse of her face.
“I let her go,” Abby whispered.
Audie canted his head, and it reminded her of Isla. That tender curiosity. “Why?”
“Because I didn’t know how to hold on to her.” Abby threw back the rest of her drink. “I wonder where I get that from.”
Audie shrugged, a teasing sparkle in his gaze. “Beats me, mija.”
“This was great.” She strapped her heels back on and patted his shoulder. “Let’s do it again in three years.”
Abby moved to Japan next. The league offered an actual paycheck, something she didn’t need her trust fund to supplement. Its fan base grew every year, sponsorships, even television deals. It was the closest she ever felt to a true professional career.
Tokyo was also like nothing she’d experienced.
The neon signs stacked atop each other, the honking traffic, motorcycles gunning by, smoke and smog, all reflected in the stretch of skyscrapers that spanned as far as she could see.
And people everywhere, at every hour, a constant tide that she failed to swim in.
Abby always considered herself rudderless, but never had she been this impossibly lost.
She struggled to communicate with her teammates, with anyone really, mostly just nodding along in the locker room until they took the field. Fortunately, that was the same in every language. Fielding, hitting, listening to the ball. She was fluent in it across the globe.
The bottle remained a dependable ally in the foreign landscape.
That year, Kate graduated from law school, and while Abby resisted reaching out or asking their friends about her, she broke her rule and looked her up.
She beamed at the accomplishments listed during commencement: top of her class, California Law Review, a clerkship with the Supreme Court of California.
Abby lost herself for days after, drinking with teammates, and when they tired, anyone who might partake or invite her to join their nomikai.
She developed a taste for sake, never declined a second party or third, stumbling through karaoke and izakayas, falling asleep on the sidewalk alongside the businessmen snoring in their neckties.
In that same depressed, hungover stupor, she agreed to what launched one of the strangest chapters of her career.
A battle of the sexes–themed game show enlisted her and a few of her teammates to participate in an episode, pitting them against men from Japan’s professional baseball league.
Abby barely understood the rules when a producer explained them backstage.
They played on a regulation-sized field inside a large studio.
Multicolor lights bore down on the artificial diamond.
High-pitched video game music never ceased.
The host screamed the premise in Japanese to a roaring crowd.
Abby, who chugged several drinks backstage, likened it to an acid trip.
In fact, she seriously contemplated whether someone slipped her something during a party the night before.
Despite the strangeness of the softball nightmare, she did the one thing she knew how. She plucked up a bat and stared down the pitcher as the announcer echoed from the speakers:
“San, ni, ichi, starto!”
The baseball flew in, smaller and zippier than the yellow softball she typically played with, but she picked up its trajectory, took advantage of its speed and size, and cracked a home run.
She did it six more times while the cameras rolled, stunning the male pitcher, sending the audience and host into a frenzy.
Horns rang, confetti rained, and strobe lights pulsed.
The audience screamed and jumped. The announcers deemed her “Hanmāgaru!”
No longer frightened, Abby raised her bat to the crowd, and they chanted it at her: “Hanmāgaru!”
When the home run derby ended, she asked the host, “Did I win?” and she swore all of Tokyo laughed along with her.
Sponsorships followed. She starred in a commercial for Shiso-Plum potato chips.
It took her two dozen takes to say the slogan correctly in Japanese and another dozen to not gag when she took a bite.
Mick, Jill, and T.K. replayed the commercial during their phone calls, stitched in hysterics.
Mick somehow bought half of the marketing materials with Abby’s smile plastered across them and Abby sent them all the Shiso-Plum potato chips they could want.
More endorsements and advertisements poured in.
She made a return appearance on the game show and her bobblehead sold out at the stadium shop.
More people recognized her. She already stuck out with her height and tan skin, but now they knew her from television and billboards. Kids asked for autographs and photos and wore her jersey. In the streets, people pointed and yelled, “Hanmāgaru!” as she ducked into bars.
Whatever version of glory this was, Abby hated it.
She was at the top of the league, playing for a living, but miserable.
She was surrounded, in one of the most bustling cities in the world, but lonely.
She’d successfully chased the game without a care for the consequences.
But all she wanted, after all this time, was the same.
She wondered, in between drinking and batting practice, if it was too late.
If she might turn back the clock and choose Kate.
That’s what flashed through her mind in the middle of her last game, dehydrated from the night before, despising the chants of her name and her stupid face on posters.
She couldn’t hear the ball. She couldn’t feel it anymore.
As she rounded the bases after crushing a triple, her ACL snapped.
The game didn’t whisper it, but shouted it while she lay in the dirt, the stands spinning above—her time was up.
When Mick rang with news of her engagement twenty-four hours later, she knew she couldn’t outrun it much longer.