Mrs. Cook let that set in for a long moment. She lowered her brow, concerned. “That’s terrible.”
“I’ll figure it out.” He hated this, hated feeling like a victim. “Anyway, I need to talk to you about the room.”
“Tyler . . .” Mrs. Cook’s expression darkened. “I need rent money.”
“I’m paid up through Friday. But after that . . .” He shrugged his good shoulder. What could he say? “I need to find a job. I could maybe . . . pay half the rent and then the other half after I find something?”
“I’m very sorry, Tyler.” She shook her head and looked out the window for a moment. “Mr. Cook and I count on that money. We use it to pay the mortgage.” She looked back at him. “We usually get four hundred for the room. You know that.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The pain pills weren’t working. “I’m just not sure what to do.”
“Me, either.” Her expression filled with remorse. “I’m awful sorry.”
Tyler waited, expecting some sort of compromise. He hadn’t been late on rent once. But none came. “So that’s it?”
“Stay till the end of the week, of course.” She managed a weak smile. “No need to leave today.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He stood and returned to his room. By then his entire body was shaking, desperate for a way around the pain. Maybe he could take another pill. Certainly that couldn’t hurt. He dropped to his chair and used his knees to brace a water bottle. Then he ripped off the top. He had to use his right hand to brace the lid while he twisted with his left. The effort killed, but one additional pill and a swig of water and he could at least know relief was on the way.
The next two days passed in a haze of medicated pain and restlessness. The pills helped, but even when they were working he couldn’t get good sleep. He could only truly rest when he was sitting up, when his shoulder didn’t feel detached from his body. His mind was another problem. Much as he quickly came to love the pain pills, he was clear-headed only in the morning—when the medication had worn off. That’s when he would drive to Chick-fil-A for a breakfast wrap and a couple regular chicken sandwiches. Lunch and dinner for later in the day. Then he’d head back to his room. A few of the guys had called or texted. Jep had stopped by to check on him. But the team was busy with games.
Finally it was Friday, and as he walked into the house with his bag of food, Mrs. Cook was waiting. “Today’s your last day, then?”
Tyler regretted not spending more time with the woman. Maybe if she’d known him better she would’ve been willing to help. But it was too late for any of that. “Yes, ma’am. Packing up.”
She smiled, nervous. “The new tenant is a baseball player, too. Another pitcher. Just got into town.”
He stared at her. What was he supposed to say to that? His heart fell to his feet and he managed a quick nod before moving past her and up the stairs to his room. His heart pounded in his aching shoulder as he sat down. Was she serious? Did she really think he would want to know that sort of information? The Blue Wahoos were bringing in a new pitcher and he was going to sleep in Tyler’s old room?
So this was God’s idea of a little help?
He ate his breakfast and took the pain pills. Three of them again. The only thing he had to look forward to now. As he washed them down, he stared into the bottle. Already it was half gone. He put the lid back on and set the bottle carefully on his nightstand. Couldn’t let anything happen to the pills.
He stared at the empty boxes still in the middle of his floor. It was time to pack.
Tyler started in the corner of the room where a bookcase held his trophies. Whenever he moved, they were the first things he packed. Especially the big one. The single item that mattered most to him. The two-foot-tall trophy engraved with the words that used to define him.
Little League World Series Most Valuable Player, 2002.
Proof that at one time he had been more than a homeless, washed-up baseball player.
He had been a champion.
6
TYLER RAN HIS FINGERS over the old trophy and the years scattered like so many particles of dust. The Simi Valley Sluggers had felt it when the season began that year. If ever a team had the chance to win it all, it was that one. Surrounded by boxes and with hours left in the place he called home, Tyler closed his eyes and like a favorite movie, the memory played again.
They were a bunch of twelve-year-olds that summer, old enough to be skilled at the game and too young to be distracted by love and life and longing for something more.
There was just baseball and that was enough.
Marcus Dillinger was his best friend that year. Like Tyler, Marcus was the only boy in his family, so the two of them joked that they were twins. Never mind that Marcus was black. When people raised their eyebrows, Marcus would wink at them. “You can see the resemblance, right? We have the same pitching arm.”
That much was true.
Tyler and Marcus ruled the mound from the beginning of the season through the playoffs. They were serious when they pitched and silly in the dugout—not old enough to understand the stakes. They chewed pounds of bubblegum and drank gallons of Gatorade and held contests to see who could spit sunflower seeds the farthest.
Back then all of life smiled down on Tyler and Marcus. First, they had been given the good fortune of growing up in Simi Valley, California—one of the greatest hotbeds for baseball talent in all the country. For Tyler and Marcus, it wasn’t a matter of whether they would play baseball.
It was a matter of when.
Some of the greats of the game had come through Simi Valley. Long before the town’s little boys turned four, most parents dreamed about their sons joining the fabled ranks. That’s how old Tyler and Marcus were when they joined Simi Valley T-ball. Their parents became friends, taking turns driving to practice and bringing snacks for the team—game after game, year after year.
The boys attended different schools, but that didn’t matter. They were brothers on the field and they swore they’d be best friends forever. By the time they were twelve, Tyler and Marcus could play any position. But they were money on the mound. Both of them had been clocked throwing fastballs in the high 70s, and Tyler had pitched one game where the coaches clocked him at 82 miles per hour.
“We’re going pro, man, you and me!” Marcus would sling his arm over Tyler’s shoulders. “We’ll wind up on the same team and no one’ll ever beat us.”
That year it was easy to believe.
When post-season began, all of Simi Valley knew what the boys hadn’t quite figured out: they really were unbeatable.
Tyler’s dad and Marcus’s dad were both coaches for the Sluggers. At home barely an hour passed without some sort of coaching or encouraging or reminding Tyler of how to throw and what to eat and which exercises would keep him best conditioned for the next game.
For the most part, Tyler took his father’s advice. It was too soon to resent his father or accuse him of loving the athlete more than the boy. No, that year there was only baseball and winning and dreaming about tomorrow.
Nine other teams—including one from Canada, two from Mexico, and one from Japan—made up the tournament. As always, Japan was the team to beat.
Tyler took a deep breath and relaxed into the chair. The pain pills were kicking in. He could still see it all, the grassy knolls of Williamsport, the crowds that had trekked there from all over the world. He could still feel the humidity that late August, still hear the cheers from the fans.
It all came down to the final game against Japan. That day in the dugout for the first time since the season started, maybe for the first time ever, Tyler and Marcus understood the stakes.
They had a handshake back then, one they had started in coach-pitch ball, when they were only six. There in the dugout that August day before the game against Japan they did it again, their eyes locked. Opposite hands clasped, two chest thumps, a fist bump, a linking of the arms and the No. 1 symbol. All in perfect rhythm.
Tyler had gr
inned. “Let’s go win this thing.”
Breathe, he had told himself that day. Just breathe. He wound up and threw a strike. And then another and another and another. Even now with his shoulder exploding from its socket and twelve seasons come and gone since, Tyler could feel the ball in his hands, smell the Pennsylvania air.
The umpire called the last strike and the Japanese players crumpled to the ground in defeat.
Marcus was the first one out to the mound. He picked Tyler up and swung him around while Tyler punched his fist in the air. Someone caught the moment on camera and it ran front page in newspapers across the nation: Simi Valley Upsets Japan in Pitching Battle.
The rush lasted for weeks—the team made an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Fox News. Tyler and Marcus were labeled American heroes and pundits wrote their stories as if the future was easy to see. Certainly they would dominate through high school and have unblemished pro careers. The future was theirs to take—winners both of them.
When it was all over, when summer ended and school started up, Marcus came over one Saturday and threw the ball with Tyler in his front yard. “We gotta make a pact, man. A promise.” Marcus grinned at him. “Whoever gets drafted higher, the other one has to be part of the package.”
Tyler liked it. “Play for the same team or not at all.”
“Exactly.” Before Marcus left that day, they did their special handshake, the one that had defined them and united them season after season. “Nothing separates us. Not ever.”
A warm wind blew through the screen of Tyler’s open window and he opened his eyes. No team or teammate could’ve come between them back then. Instead it was something far more insidious, something twelve-year-olds knew nothing of.
Time.
Eighth grade was social and busy and full of plans for high school. Tyler attended Jackson High and Marcus went to Royal—at the other end of town. They talked now and then, but the trophies grew dusty, and by the time they were juniors they hadn’t thrown a ball together since that fabled Little League year.
Tyler clutched his elbow and tried to get comfortable.
He and Marcus were both drafted after high school. Tyler took the offer, Marcus took a scholarship to Oregon State. After graduation he played for the LA Dodgers. He got there the traditional route: through college and a year with the Chattanooga Lookouts, a double-A team in the Dodgers’ farm system. Marcus was their top pitcher now.
Marcus had called after Tyler accepted his spot in the draft their senior year of high school. “You sure?” he sounded surprised. “UCLA’s a great program, man.”
“I can’t wait four years.” Tyler had laughed. “I want the Bigs tomorrow. Soon as I can get there.”
“Save me a spot.”
Tyler chuckled, all of life still easy as the game. “I will. Part of my contract.”
It was the last conversation he and Marcus ever had.
A few years ago when Tyler made news over the public drunkenness arrest, Marcus tweeted him. Been too long, man. Get your game back on! But that was it.
Marcus was making millions now, leading the Dodgers to the playoffs. Every other week he was in the news for throwing a two-hitter or improving his earned run average.
Tyler was pretty sure his childhood friend never thought of him. But if he did, it was with a passing amount of pity. Poor Tyler Ames. Never reached his potential. Messed up along the way. If he caught the current news about Tyler’s blown-out shoulder, Marcus would shake his head and remember being twelve. For a minute or two. Then he’d get back to living the dream.
Tyler hadn’t seen his parents since getting on the bus the summer after his senior year for Billings, Montana, where the Reds Rookie League played. Taking the draft had been a mistake. A year later he understood that. That’s how long it took for Sami Dawson to tire of his mess-ups off the field. Among all the ways he’d paid for making the wrong choice after high school, that one hurt the most.
The loss of the only girl he ever loved.
7
ANGIE AMES SAW THE article in the Monday afternoon paper and wept.
Tyler had blown out his shoulder and been released from the Blue Wahoos. End of story. Now the article lay on the corner of her desk. Proof that her son was still alive. That somewhere in Florida he was suffering without her. The smell of fresh-cut wood filled her office at the front of her husband’s warehouse. Bill had run Ames Fence and Deck since Tyler was a baby, but business had never been slower.
Maybe the recession or the taxes on the small businesses. Maybe people didn’t have extra money for decks and fences. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t Bill’s work ethic or his talent. All his life Bill Ames had been expert at putting up fences.
Especially when it came to their son.
The phone on her desk rang and Angie answered it on the first ring. “Ames Fence and Deck. Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m calling about an account. It’s past due and . . .”
It was the third collector of the day and the answers left Angie exhausted. There had been times like this before, but never this bad. Sometimes she wondered if maybe Bill was weary of the business, distracted by the way he constantly missed Tyler, and always wondering how they’d gone so wrong when it came to their son.
Bill walked in and came to her desk. “I’m finished for the day.” His shoulders stooped more than usual. He didn’t bother to smile. “Let’s get lunch.”
Angie shut down her computer while Bill took the article from her desk and read it. He must’ve had it memorized by now, same way she did. He looked up. “Has he called?”
She stared at him. Was he kidding? Of course Tyler hadn’t called. They hadn’t heard from him in four years. Not since his first arrest. She shook her head. “No. He hasn’t.”
Bill nodded, his eyes back on the paper, distracted. “I can’t imagine how badly he must hurt.”
The way we all hurt, she thought. But she only sighed. “Let’s lock up.”
Lunch was usually at their favorite spot, a café a few blocks from the warehouse on the north end of Simi Valley. Their favorite table was outdoors beneath a Sycamore tree. Somehow the place felt private, despite the traffic. They ordered their usual iced teas and salads and took their seats.
“It was all my fault.” Bill stared over his drink at the distant mountains. “I know that now.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d made the confession. Angie sipped her drink. “Too much baseball.”
“No one should lose his son over a game.” His tone was quietly fiery. “No one.”
For a long time they were quiet, and the years played over again in Angie’s mind. It started with the Little League Championship, of course. That was the dividing line. Life before winning the title.
And life after.
“Things were so good when he was little.” She wasn’t really making conversation. It was more of a fact. Proof that life hadn’t always been this way. “He was the sweetest boy when he was younger.”
“He was an athlete from the time he could walk.” Bill’s eyes glazed over, as if he’d taken up residence some fifteen years ago.
After the championship Bill was absolutely convinced Tyler was going to reach the pros. He used to talk about the spot on the mantle where Tyler’s Cy Young Award would go. The boy wasn’t even in high school yet.
“Did we talk about anything else?” Bill blinked and his eyes met hers. He set his iced tea on the small round table. “Besides baseball? Did we ever talk about God?”
Angie wanted to give him words of comfort. But she had to be honest. “It was a lot of baseball.”
“Mmm.” He nodded, repentant. “I read a verse this morning. ‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?’ ”
“Powerful.” Angie’s words came easily. This wasn’t the first time they’d talked about their regrets. It wouldn’t be the last.
“The verse landed differently today.” Bill narrowed his eyes. “What does it
profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his son? That’s how I heard it.”
Tears stung Angie’s eyes. If only money weren’t so tight they might’ve flown into Pensacola this past year and seen one of Tyler’s games. Surprised him afterward with a hug and a dinner out and a chance at reconciliation. Tyler had long since changed his phone number, so they couldn’t call him. Early on, Angie had tried social media—a tweet congratulating him for a winning game or a comment on Facebook. But Tyler hadn’t been active on social media for years.
Nothing had sparked a response, anyway.
“He must hate us.” Bill looked ten years older than his late forties, a broken man going through the motions. “Right? Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.” Angie ran her fingers down the cold sweat on her glass. “Hate’s a strong word.”
Not that she would’ve blamed him.
She remembered once when Tyler came home from school, his face all lit up. He had asked Sami Dawson to homecoming and she’d said yes. But Bill jumped on him before he had a chance to talk about it. “You’re supposed to be at practice.”
“I talked to Coach. Today was the only time I could ask Sami to—”
“Sami? You’re missing practice for a girl?” Bill wore his work jeans and a denim button-up yellowed with sawdust. Angie could still see him, his scowling face. “Are you serious, Tyler? This is your senior year!”
“I’m not skipping, Dad, it was just—”
“No!” Bill wouldn’t let him finish. “You can’t let anything get in the way, son.” He folded his arms, his expression a mix of disappointment and anger. “We’ve put everything into your baseball. Someone out there is working harder than you. And when it comes to earning scholarships, he’ll be first in line.”