Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Dr. Nora Bell
Most sessions, I can tell how they’ll go before the patients even sit down. I read it in the shoulders, the way they hold the door, whether they make eye contact coming in. It’s pattern recognition after fifteen years of watching people decide how much they’re willing to give.
Today, it’s Foster who has his walls up. He’s already got that look—jaw set, distant eyes.
And that’s fine, because today, I don’t plan to focus on him directly.
I wanted them both to understand their lives during the time they were apart.
Now I’ll focus on Decker. He’s the kind of patient who gives you everything you ask for and nothing you don’t.
He’s cooperative, but genuinely guarded.
I wait until they’ve settled on the couch—opposite ends, as always, though they don’t look like they want to crawl over the arm of the couch anymore. They’re more relaxed in each other’s presence.
I rest my hands over my knee, legs crossed.
“We’ve touched on Foster’s path to where he is today,” I begin. “The move south. The development years. How baseball became the thing your father handed him, and he ran with.” I shift my attention to Decker. “Now, I’d like to hear yours.”
Decker’s chin raises slightly, and he glances at Foster, as if he’s worried to share. “Mine?”
“How you got here. To the majors.” I pause. “If you were left behind, being raised by your mom, how did you become talented enough to make it to the bigs?”
“Bigs?” Foster and Decker say in unison, glancing at one another as they laugh like teenage boys in their first sex ed class.
I’ll take their laughter at my expense if it means they bond over something.
Decker takes his time. I’ve learned to give him space. He’s stalling because he’s deciding where to start.
“After Dad and Foster left, it was just me and Mom for a while. She had to take on a second job, which left me with a lot of time by myself.” He says it without any bitterness. Like it’s just the geography of his life.
“Didn’t Dad pay her support? He’d always make a big deal about it at the end of the month.” Foster frowns.
Decker’s already shaking his head. “No—with the split, Dad said he’d be responsible for you, and she’d be responsible for me. So, the house payment…”
Foster’s face falls, and his jaw tenses.
“I figured you knew that.” Decker’s forehead is creased.
“No.” Foster’s chest rises and falls with a deep breath, and he glances out the window.
“I was playing ball in a rec league, but my confidence was kind of shot.” He turns to Foster. “Not because you were so good—well, that’s only partly true. But it was because Dad left me behind like I wasn’t worth his time.”
Foster turns away from the window and looks at Decker, nodding.
“And then?” I try to keep us on track.
Decker shifts on the couch. “Mom said she had this friend. They’d known each other in high school.
She’d lost touch with him, but he was back in town.
She invited him to a game, and he came with his daughter.
” The energy in the room shifts when he says, “his daughter.” Foster’s shoulders stiffen, and Decker appears nervous.
“I was eleven or twelve. After another horrible game where I struck out and sat on the bench more than I played a position, he told me he coached baseball and had played when he was younger. Asked me if I wanted his help. Mom’s smile was so big, I said yes, even though I was ready to stop playing. ”
Foster’s head whips in Decker’s direction. “You were gonna quit?”
“It seemed like a waste of time. I was clearly behind everyone, and after you left, all the jokes and…”
“Jokes?” I ask, hesitant to go down this path, but willing to try.
“That all the talent went to Foster in the womb. I was left with the garbage genes.”
Foster shakes his head, but Decker won’t see it since he’s looking in the opposite direction.
“That must have been hard,” I say.
Decker shrugs. “It was what it was. But Mark changed all that.”
“So he coached you?”
“Yeah, he’d meet me at the field while his daughter ran track.
He’d help me while she practiced, then usually he’d take us to dinner.
He’s the reason I got seen. It helped that he was a coach for a small local college.
He had some connections and got me on a travel team a year later.
It just kind of took off from there and things started connecting. Helped when I hit puberty.”
“That jump is crazy, right?” Foster says. “Still one of my best seasons ever.”
Decker chuckles. “Mine too.”
I smile, watching them interact and share.
“Since I never heard from Dad much, Mark was the male role model in my life.”
“You’re still close with him?”
Decker almost smiles. “He’s the Colts’ manager.”
“Mark Ripley?” My eyebrows raise.
Decker nods and glances at his brother.
I turn to Foster. “How does that make you feel, hearing Decker’s path?”
Foster is quiet for a beat, and his jaw shifts. “Jealous.”
His honesty throws me for a second.
“Of your brother’s relationship with Mark Ripley?”
“Of the whole thing.” His gaze never strays to Decker.
“You had the same outcome.”
Foster’s shoulder lifts. “Yeah, sure, but he had someone looking out for him.” He pauses.
“Dad didn’t give a shit about me, other than how well I played baseball.
I was his trophy. Something to show off.
” He says it without any self-pity, which somehow makes it sadder.
“Ripley chose Decker. Chose to be there for him.”
The room quiets. There’s not even the sound of birds chirping outside, as though they too can feel the strained silence inside this room.
I turn back to Decker. A guilty expression crosses his face.
“Decker, do you want to respond to that?”
He runs his hands down his thighs, flexing them on his knees.
“I spent a long time being jealous of you.” He turns toward Foster.
“Not of your athletic ability. Of the fact that he showed up. That he packed a bag and took you somewhere because he believed in you.” He stops.
“Ripley is the reason I got here. But he’s not my dad.
He’s a man who was kind to a helpless kid.
” He pauses again. “I’m not diminishing what he did for me, but Dad deemed you worthy and me not. ”
“He was there to cash in on the fame he hoped I’d get,” Foster says quietly.
“He showed up.” Decker’s voice is firm, and I think this might be the first time they’ve truly grappled with this together. “That’s more than I had.”
Foster opens his mouth. Closes it. His thumb runs along the seam on the arm of the couch.
“I didn’t know it felt like that,” Foster finally says. “I thought you had the better deal. Mom, and then someone like Ripley—”
“You thought I was fine?”
A sharp nod from Foster. “I thought you were fine.”
Decker sighs. “I thought the same about you. Until later in life.”
I’ve been doing this long enough to know when things are coming together. I inwardly clap my hands. Progress.
“When you made it to the bigs and Foster’s struggles became more public?” They both smirk at my use of the word bigs, and I can’t help but smile.
“Yeah,” Decker mumbles.
I stay quiet. This is the part where a therapist who jumps in does more damage than good. I want them to sit with the connection they just made, the raw honesty they gave one another, and really think about what the other one endured.
It’s Foster who breaks the silence, and his voice has lost some of its careful evenness. “He’s a good man. Ripley. I didn’t know all that. So, you and Penelope knew each other back then?”
Decker tears his eyes away from Foster. The pause before he answers is small, but I catch it. I file it away for another session.
“Yeah, Penelope and Ripley became… family.”
Foster’s expression says this is all a revelation. That he had no idea the role Ripley and his daughter played in Decker’s life.
The day will come when we’ll have to dive into that, but not today.
Today we’ve covered enough.
Some sessions have breakthroughs. Today was one. Two men, same wound—and for the first time, they looked at each other and recognized it. That’s a success, and we’ll take it.