Heavy Hitter, page 18
* * *
RACHEL LIVES WAY OUT IN A POSTWAR DEVELOPMENT IN TOWSON, blocks and blocks of tidy raised ranches all in a row. The house is small, maybe half the size of the new-build McMansion she and Jimmy lived in when they were first married, with a Radio Flyer trike in the driveway and red geraniums in the window boxes. A trio of pumpkins sit crookedly on the front steps.
Jimmy parks on the street, then heads up the front walk to ring the doorbell, looking uneasily over his shoulder as he goes. It feels abruptly like a donkey move on his part to have come out here in broad daylight, knowing anyone could have followed him. Knowing anyone could have seen. There haven’t been a ton of photographers outside his house the last few days—Lacey’s fans know she’s back in LA, and none of them, it turns out, are particularly interested in Jimmy for Jimmy’s sake—but still. That’s all he fucking needs, a headline breathlessly announcing he’s throwing Lacey Logan over for his ex-wife right before Game 6 of the ALCS.
Assuming his ex-wife even answers her door. Jimmy stands on the stoop for a long moment, hands shoved into his pockets, rocking back on his heels. He’s just about to give up and tell himself he did his best when the lock snicks open.
“Jimmy?” Rachel squints at him through the screen. “Oh my god.”
“Uh.” Jimmy holds his empty hands up. It occurs to him, belatedly, that he should have brought her something, a plant or a box of bakery muffins. A list of all the reasons he knows he’s a piece of shit. “Hi.”
“Hi.” She looks past him—she’s checking for reporters, too, he realizes, and feels the back of his neck get warm. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”
Jimmy shakes his head. “Nothing’s wrong,” he says, feeling awkward and deeply selfish. Fuck, he should have called before he came. He thought—he guesses he thought—
That’s the problem with you, Jimmy, Rachel said to him once, right before their divorce was final. You never think. “I didn’t mean to get the jump on you.”
“Didn’t you?” Rachel’s lips twist. She’s wearing her teaching clothes, jeans and a cotton sweater with little polka dots that he recognizes from way back when they were married. They haven’t seen each other in four years. She’s lost a lot of weight in a way he thinks is a shame, though he knows it’s none of his fucking business. She’s done something different with her hair.
“No, I just—” Jimmy blows a breath out. “Can I come in?”
Rachel hesitates. “Sure,” she says finally, and opens the screen door so he can step inside. He brushes his cheek against hers by way of greeting, quick and polite, and the smell of her perfume makes him time travel.
The house is clean and quiet inside, with one of those big wooden signs that says HOME hanging on the wall in the foyer. Through the door of the den he briefly sees the profile of a toddler sitting on the carpet in front of the TV, something with blue cartoon dogs flickering jauntily across the screen. It turned out it wasn’t that she didn’t want to have kids, Rachel. She just didn’t want to have them with him. Jimmy guesses he doesn’t blame her for that.
“Can I get you anything?” she asks, once he’s followed her into the kitchen. “A beer?”
“No,” he says. “No, I’m not going to stay, I won’t keep you.” He tried to time this so her husband wouldn’t be here; Jimmy doesn’t particularly want the guy to walk in while he’s standing here trying to do whatever he’s trying to do here, and he can tell by the look on Rachel’s face that she doesn’t particularly want that, either.
“Okay.” She stands on the other side of the breakfast bar, flattening her hands against the granite. “So what’s up?”
Jimmy takes a deep breath. He had the whole ride over here to figure out what he was going to say to her. Fuck, he had four full years to figure out what he was going to say to her, but now—“How are you?”
Rachel quirks an eyebrow. “I’m good, thanks,” she says slowly. “I’m really good.”
“Good,” he agrees. “I mean. I figured you were, I just—” He breaks off. “I’m sorry,” he tries. “It’s just I—I mean—” He blows out a breath. “I met someone.”
“Yeah,” Rachel says—and she’s smirking at him openly now, though not unkindly. “I think I might have heard something about that.” She straightens up. “Did you come all the way out here to let me down easy? Because I gotta tell you, buddy, it’s a little late for—”
“No,” he interrupts. “No, of course not.” He laughs. “I guess I just—I met someone, and then I turned around and immediately fucked it up, which won’t be super surprising to you, I’m sure, but the point is, it made me remember that I owed you an apology for fucking our thing up that I had never actually gotten around to delivering, so. I wanted to finally nut up and do that.” He clears his throat. “I’m really sorry about all of it, Rach.”
Rachel is quiet for a long moment, looking at him across the breakfast bar. Sometimes Jimmy used to think she could see the bones underneath his skin. “How’d you fuck it up?” she asks finally, tilting her head to the side with an expression on her face like she’s expecting this to be amusing. “With your, ah. New someone.”
Jimmy laughs again, yanking at his beard a little. “I don’t know,” he says, glancing past her. “By being myself, probably.”
Right away, Rachel shakes her head. “Uh-uh,” she says flatly. “That’s a bullshit answer.”
“It’s—” Jimmy startles. “What?”
“It’s a bullshit answer,” she repeats, “on top of which it begs a kind of blanket absolution I have to tell you I’m not necessarily inclined to provide.”
Oh, this very well may have been a big mistake. “Rach—”
“Don’t Rach me, Jimmy.” Rachel’s voice is perfectly even. “You drop in out of the blue after literal years and tell me you ruined your new thing by being yourself; I tell you no, yourself was never that bad, at which point we hug it out and you go on your merry way feeling confident that whatever actually happened between you and that woman not only couldn’t have been your fault but also couldn’t have possibly been prevented? Is that what you were picturing when you came over here?”
“I—” Jimmy snaps his mouth shut. It kind of was what he was picturing, if he’s being completely honest with himself, but hearing it out loud makes him feel like a psychopath. “I—”
“Well?” Rachel raises an eyebrow.
Jimmy swallows hard. “On second thought,” he tells her sheepishly, “I think I actually will take that beer.”
That makes her smile, just a little. “I only have the douchey kind.”
“The douchey kind is great.”
Rachel pulls a bottle from the fridge and holds it out in his direction, but when he moves to take it from her hand she holds on an extra second. “I chased you our entire marriage, Jimmy,” she says quietly. “I was desperate for you to come to me, do you understand that? To trust me, to tell me things, to show me you loved me as much as you loved baseball. That’s the thing I want you to apologize for. Not for all of it; not for your whole personality. I want you to apologize for never chasing me back.”
Jimmy takes the beer and sets it down on the counter without opening it—absorbing her words in silence, looking at her here in her lovely new life. “I can see that,” he tells her truthfully. “I’m so sorry, Rach.”
Rachel holds his gaze for another moment, then shrugs and clears her throat. “Well,” she says. “For the record: yourself was never that bad.”
“Okay.” Jimmy feels himself smiling at her: her slightly exasperated expression, her hair falling in her face. Rachel was the first woman he ever loved, and standing here he can feel a satisfying ache in his chest, a longing not for the past he might have had but for the future that might still be in front of him, one full of adventure and high drama and the sound of someone singing old rock and roll songs on weekend mornings. He feels abruptly certain of what he wants, here in this kitchen. He feels suddenly sure.
“Mommy!” comes a small voice just then, drifting in from down the hallway. “Can I watch another one?”
“You may not,” Rachel calls back. “I’ll be there in one second.” She looks at Jimmy. “I should probably—”
“Yeah,” he says quickly, “yeah, I’ll leave you to it. Thank you, for this. For talking to me.”
“Of course,” she replies. “You too. And hey, good luck out there tonight.”
Outside the autumn light is toasty, the air still decently warm if you stand directly in the sun. Jimmy detours by the farm instead of going directly back to the city, leaving the Tahoe running in the driveway and wandering around the back of the house. It’s been a couple of weeks since he’s been out here and he was expecting the garden to be mostly buttoned up for the year, but as the dogs trot gamely along behind him down the gravel path he realizes with a jolt of surprise that everything is still busy growing: The bees are still buzzing lazily around the flowers. The tomatoes are still red on the vines. Jimmy’s lived in Maryland for a decade and a half now, but still he manages to forget this every single year: back in Utica the grass on his mother’s front yard will have frosted over, but here the growing season doesn’t finish until damn near Christmas. In a lot of ways, this is actually the best part.
“How about that, huh?” Jimmy says, reaching down to scratch the dogs underneath their soft, graying muzzles. “Turns out it’s not over yet.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Lacey
HE DOESN’T CALL, OBVIOUSLY.
Not that Lacey thought he was going to, but.
She hoped.
She flies back to LA the morning after their horrible fight in his apartment. After all, what else is she going to do, spend the rest of her life alone in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Baltimore wearing her stupid Jimmy Hodges jersey? Not like she’s never been dumped before, she consoles herself. She still has the playlist on her phone from last time, so. That’s convenient. It’s called Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle, which Lacey thought was very clever seven months ago but now just kind of makes her want to barf.
Javi picks her up and they take the service elevator downstairs beside a maintenance guy clutching an industrial vacuum cleaner and not even bothering to pretend he isn’t staring at her. “Tough break last night,” he says sympathetically as they whoosh toward the parking garage. “How’s your boy Hodges doing?”
Lacey musters her most beguiling smile, hoping her face isn’t noticeably puffy, that this stranger isn’t going to think too hard about why apparently she slept here last night and not at Jimmy’s condo in Fells Point. “Oh, he’s fine,” she promises airily. “He’ll be okay.”
She knows he will, too, the way he’s wired. That’s the worst part.
The problem with the tour being over is there’s nothing to do to distract herself. Back in Malibu she wanders the house feeling restless and edgy and out of sorts: picking things up and putting them down again, walking into rooms before abruptly realizing she has no idea what she’s there for. She picks a low-hanging fight with a Republican sports columnist from the Wall Street Journal. She calls her real estate agent and asks him to put together some listings in the Hollywood Hills. She writes a moody piano ballad, the chorus of which is an extended metaphor about Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, then rips it out of her notebook and throws it into the garbage.
“What do you think about me doing some surprise dates while I’m here?” she asks Maddie, the two of them and Claire eating superfood-packed grain salads from Erewhon in Lacey’s backyard as a pair of hummingbirds zip though the jasmine that rings the pool.
“Here?” Maddie asks, sounding surprised. “Like, in LA?”
“Yeah!” Lacey says, briefly buoyed by the idea. She learned her lesson about lying, though she hasn’t told the two of them the whole truth, either, just mentioning as casually as possible after her trip to Baltimore that she and Jimmy had decided to lie low while he focused on the playoffs. “At the Greek or someplace, maybe? Something intimate, just real fans. We could run a contest for tickets.”
Maddie’s gaze flicks for half a second over to Claire. “We could,” she hedges, “but the logistics of that might get complicated on such short notice.”
“Well, sure,” Lacey says, “but not so complicated that we couldn’t make it happen, right? I mean, we’ve certainly done harder things.”
“We certainly have,” Maddie agrees carefully. “I do think, though, that in light of the headlines, there might be some danger of overexposure.”
“Oh,” Lacey says, feeling abruptly foolish. The press coverage has been . . . bad, pages and pages of commentary about how Lacey is directly responsible for the collapse of Jimmy’s career, the Baltimore Orioles, and major league sports in general. It’s not that she didn’t expect that—of course she expected that—but she’s surprised by how true it feels even though it’s objectively not, even though his team just took the League Championship and the prevailing wisdom seems to be that they’ve got a pretty good shot at winning the World Series, too. Of course, Lacey is out of his life now, so. Maybe everyone else knew what they were talking about after all. “Right. Totally.”
“Could be better to let people miss you for a few weeks,” Maddie continues, spearing an artichoke heart on her fork.
“Besides,” Claire jumps in, “you’ve been going a million miles an hour for months now. No shame in taking a break before the European leg.”
“Of course,” Lacey agrees. “I should rest.”
She . . . doesn’t rest. She can barely even sleep, just lying there all night, every night tangled in the sheets, rehashing that last argument with Jimmy over and over in her mind. She doesn’t know why this feels so much worse than it did with Toby, why it feels like some kind of yawning hole has opened up where her heart and lungs used to be. She and Jimmy barely knew each other, she reminds herself. Whatever happened between them was, unequivocally, a rebound fling. He’ll go off and play in the World Series and she’ll go to Europe on tour and they’ll be funny, slightly wistful anecdotes in each other’s memoirs one day, and if, in the meantime, she keeps thinking about his stupid farm and his stupid horses and his stupid good face, the tiny crow’s feet around his eyes when he smiles, well, that’s nobody’s business but Lacey’s own.
She googles Jimmy Hodges + postseason.
She googles Jimmy Hodges + breakup.
She throws her phone across the room.
* * *
DAYS PASS. LACEY WALLOWS. SHE SPENDS LONG NIGHTS IN HER leggings with her laptop warm on her lap and her phone in her hand, reading through Tumblr posts and Twitter threads, clicking over to the Explore tab on Instagram. She taught the algorithm a long time ago to feed her basically only posts about herself, which used to feel satisfying but now just feels a little bit sick, like she’s an ouroboros consuming her own content in an endless, queasy loop. She needs to get a hobby. Hell, she needs to get a life.
There is one post that catches her eye, though, a cheeky selfie of Henrietta Lang in front of a cluster of palm trees: Los Angeles, the caption reads, I am in you! Come see us tonite at the El Rey Theatre. The photo is time-stamped from this morning, which means the show doesn’t start for—Lacey clicks over to Henrietta’s website to confirm—a little over six hours.
Which is, she thinks, a smile spreading over her face alone here in her bedroom, plenty of time to decide what to wear.
Powered up by a sudden burst of energy, Lacey throws off her covers and scampers toward the bathroom for a long-overdue shower—then stops in the middle of the rug and feels her shoulders drop, reflexively beginning the long and laborious process of talking herself out of the idea. She thinks of every talking head on ESPN accusing her of turning the Division Series into a circus. She thinks of Maddie’s warning her she’s already overexposed. Still, Lacey thinks, it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a huge deal, would it? Maybe Jimmy was right, that people are only weird about her because she expects them to be, because she invites it. Maybe it’s possible to fly under the radar after all.
Lacey picks up her phone, starts a new text to Javi. Hi! she begins, her heart thrumming with the disproportionate thrill of doing something brave and spontaneous. Something that’s just for her. I’m going to go see Henrietta Lang at the El Rey tonight and would like to travel light.
Sure, Javi texts back. Though I think a team of three would be more appropriate for a venue of that size.
Lacey bites her lip. She knows this is as close as Javi will likely get to telling her he thinks it’s a bad idea, and normally it would be enough to cow her, but instead she sets her jaw. I think it’ll be fine, she insists, hoping she sounds more confident than she’s necessarily feeling. I’ll sneak in late and leave early.
Claire texts her fifteen minutes later, predictably. Hey there! she begins. Javi told me you’re planning to go to the Henrietta Lang show tonight. So cool! I did just want to share that I reached out to the venue and they can provide a seat in a private area up on the second level but won’t have any extra security available. I know Javi mentioned you wanted to travel light so I did just want to be sure we were okay with that!
Lacey chews her lip for a moment, briefly losing her courage. Probably after everything the smart move would be to just stay in tonight. She could invite Claire over to watch a movie and order ramen; they could get ice cream sandwiches from Van Leeuwen, try some of the million high-end beauty products Lacey’s always getting sent in the mail. She’s almost decided to scuttle the whole endeavor entirely when all at once she shakes her head, remembering how disappointed she was with herself when she chickened out and missed Henrietta’s show back in New York. Maybe she doesn’t have to submit her every decision to focus-group testing. Why shouldn’t she just do what she wants to do?
