Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 60219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
He was probably surprised when I took him up on it, but he didn’t show it. He was right. I needed to get away from the reporters and the lawyers and the attention in general. I had craved that spotlight for so long, relishing in being the star pitcher. Now I was a cautionary tale. A case study. I had a law named after me.
I didn’t plan on being there long. Just long enough to figure some things out. In the meantime, I would stay with Ryan at his place, work at Murdock High as a coach, and take some time to drink beer on a back porch and mourn the career I’d thought would last until I decided to retire.
Ryan was waiting for me outside of his house, the same house his mother had been in when I was a kid and we played in her front yard. I opened the car door, and he greeted me, giving me a big hug and slapping me on the back the way he always did. It had been more than a year since we had seen each other in person.
“You son of a bitch, how are you?” Ryan said as he broke the hug. “Come on in, I’ve got beer and pizza.”
“Oh man, you don’t know how good that sounds. Angelo’s?”
“Where else?” he laughed. “This is Murdock, man. We don’t have a hundred pizza shops. We’ve got two. And you drew Angelo’s.”
I followed him inside. His house was pretty much like I remembered when his mom lived there, though the furniture had been updated. Some of the knick-knacks his mother was known for were gone, replaced by pictures of his wife and kids. It was a step up, for sure.
“Where’s Allison?” I asked.
“Ah, she took the kid out for the afternoon,” he said, handing me a beer. “She thought you might want a couple of hours of catching up without worrying about Leo showing you all of his toys.”
“I wouldn’t have minded that,” I said, taking a sip and sitting down. It was a local-ish brew, out of Austin, and something I didn’t usually get while on the road. It reminded me of nights in Murdock when the whole world had been in front of me.
Nights I’d spent thinking about the girl with the red hair.
“So how are you, brother?” Ryan asked. “Seeing someone?”
“Like a girl or a psychiatrist?” I asked.
“Either,” he said, taking a big swig and sitting across from me. “Both help in different ways.”
He would know. Ryan lost his dream too, though his dream was a life in the military. An injury removed him from service the same way it had removed me, though he was a freaking hero. I was just some former ballplayer.
“No and no,” I said. “I never really had time for girls, and I felt like an idiot talking about being sad I couldn’t throw a ball anymore.”
“Come on, man,” Ryan said. “It’s been six months. You have to have dealt with it a little.”
I shrugged.
“It’s dealt with,” I said. “I tore my rotator cuff. The surgery was botched. The end.”
“The end?” he said. “You know you have a whole life ahead of you, right? You’re thirty-two. Life’s just getting started.”
“I dunno,” I said.
I was uncomfortable, but I knew he was probably right. He generally was. Ryan was always the one who knew how to get to the heart of things. He didn’t deal in bullshit. He went right to the subject and attacked.
Fact was, he was right. I hadn’t really dealt with it. The rotator cuff surgery was scary enough, and when I went under the knife, I was sure I was gone for the year. It devastated me. A whole year, right at my contract year, right before what would be my last chance to have a big contract and sign with a team destined for October baseball.
Then I woke up with hushed whispers from nurses and sheepish doctors explaining how there were complications. At first, they refused to admit fault. My lawyers got the truth out of them eventually.
The money I settled for was a far cry from what I was projected to make in free agency, but that wasn’t the point. I was done as a player. Not just ‘done for now’ or ‘done until there is a surgery that can fix the surgery.’ Done. For good. I would never take the mound against a major league hitter with the pennant race in the balance. I would never again make a home run champion whiff on a slider down and away or a rising two-seamer upstairs. It was over. I was done.
I had no choice but to come home. The money I’d saved was good, but I spent a lot of what I had made on trainers and making my body a machine. I sold the mansion three weeks after the surgery, sold most of everything else right after, put it all in a savings account, took the one car I couldn’t part with, and drove south. To Murdock. To Ryan and Murdock High. Home.