Chapter Twenty
Unfortunately for Suella, Natalie insisted on leaving early the next day. “The coach called a practice,” she said. She wanted them to take the noon train so they would be back in plenty of time for her four o’clock practice. Suella and Natalie sat in the same type of seats as they did on the way there, facing each other. They both passed the time by watching the ocean surf and mountain scenery pass by out the window.
Natalie suddenly said “You’re mad, aren’t you?”
Oh well, Suella thought. At least the girl had heart. It was how she was raised. “No, honey, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”
“Why?”
Suella shifted around as she sat. “I guess I love you so much I want to have you all to myself.”
Natalie looked down at the tabletop, and fidgeted with her fingers. “I’m sorry. I like sports, what can I say! Thank you for going into the water this time, though. Wasn’t it fun?”
“Yes.”
By the end of that summer of 2027, Justin Cintron finished the book. He sent something called galley proofs in files for Nathan to read and check for accuracy. When he tried to open the files and look at them, he kept on closing out the system instead. “Honey, could you come in here?” he called out to Suella. “I need to be rescued by your computer geek expertise.”
She ran into the den to save him. He had been hitting the wrong button.
Suella checked the size of the files and the word count. “Dang! This thing is huge. Did this guy write War and Peace or something?”
Nathan shrugged. “Well you saw how long he was here. I talked my ass off to that man.” It took him over two weeks to read over the galley files, and even then he confessed to “skimming.” At night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, Suella brought the files up onto her own screens and slowly read all of the words. The chapter where Nathan became a father started off with: “My daughter Natalie was born in April, 2014, right in the middle of opening day.” Through Justin’s fine literary talent, he described how he ran out of the bullpen without bothering to change out of his uniform and thundered out of the parking garage and up into the desert hospital where she was born.
It reminded Suella of the old school way that husbands used to participate in the births of their children. They would strictly drive their wives to the hospital and then nervously stand in the waiting room. When the baby was born, they would pass out cigars to all of the other expectant fathers. Nathan made no mention that he jumped out of his uniform at the hospital, scrubbed in, and arrived just in time to watch the afterbirth and hear Natalie’s first cries. He also left out the fact that another woman besides his wife carried and delivered his child. Finally, he made no mention of the high tech way Natalie was conceived, or of the unique status she claimed in the world.
“My daughter is beautiful,” read one line that jumped out of the page at Suella. She felt so touched by what he’d said that she purred “Aw…” in the quiet room.
From everything else she’d read, there were no surprises. He had told her the stories over and over for the past twenty years. Toni was mentioned, but only in that they’d been friends since their childhood in Kansas City and had stayed that way.
They watched each other’s careers germinate and then flourish. “To this day she sometimes joins in with our family celebrations on holidays and birthdays, if she’s not too busy making a movie.”
The whole section where he offers to testify during the steroid scandals took three chapters. No names were mentioned, but the sequence where he is kidnapped by the thugs who crushed his tooth read like something out of a mafia movie. Nathan’s last pitching performance took three chapters, also. Suella giggled when she read over the part where she dangles Natalie down into the bullpen so her father can kiss her. When she had finished all the parts she wanted to read, she closed out the system and out loud she said “It’s gonna be a bestseller.”
Just after Halloween, a representative from the publishing company called Nathan. “They want me to tour,” he said.
“Tour? Like you’re a hip-hop star?” Natalie asked.
“No. Fly around the country. To New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and sign copies of the book. It’s a PR thing.”
“Sounds fine to me,” Suella said. “How are you going to sign the readers? Put an etching on the outside of the casing or something?”
“No, smartass,” Nathan said. “These are going to be real books, with bindings and pages, just like we had in school, back in the dark ages.”
Anxious, Suella asked “You’re not going to be gone over Thanksgiving, are you?”
Nathan patted her on the shoulder to put her mind at ease. “No, hon. It will start the first week of December.”
After Nathan left to begin his nationwide tour, he would call often. “I’ve got a surprise for you Friday. I’m not saying anything about it now, though.” On the cam screen he gave one of his trademark smirks, which made Suella feel as if he’d been in the room with them.
The Friday of that week, Natalie uncharacteristically ran through the front door and shouted “Mom! Dad was on TV! Dad was on TV!”
That morning he’d appeared on The Today Show and had coyly avoided telling Suella about it. “That little stinker,” she said. “Well we can probably access video on it.” She sat at her desktop and opened the screens. With just a couple of clicks and passes, her husband’s face was smugly staring back at someone on a television screen. “Oh my god, look what they did to his hair!” Nathan liked to comb his hair forward, to help hide the receding areas in the front, but the stylist at the television studio combed it back and fluffed it out. He wore his gray suit with the fuchsia threading and rhinestone tie clip. “He looks like a televangelist.”
Natalie squinted. “What is a telvangist?”
“These religious guys who get on TV and try to guilt people into saying donations, saying it’s what Jesus wants them to do.”
“Oh.” Natalie looked closely at her father’s image as he responded to the hostesses questions about his new book. “He looks happy to me.”
“Nat, that’s not very nice.” Happy, in the modern youth culture, was a synonym for “gay.” “You know, your father just happens to have delicate features and a small chin. He’s been fighting rumors like that since he was in high school.”
“Oh, okay.” Natalie said.
Nathan arrived home to a house adorned with welcoming banners and mylar balloons dangling from the ceiling. When they all settled down for that night’s dinner and drank their coffees afterward, he made an announcement. “How would you both like to go to Arizona in March?”
Suella replied “What’s going on? Are you going to try a comeback?”
“No, idiot,” he replied, smiling wryly. “But I am going to be playing again, They’ve invited me to a baseball fantasy camp, as part of the book promotion.”
“What is a fantasy camp?” Suella asked. To her it implied visions of people running around in medieval costumes and trying to talk with archaic accents, using a lot of “thee’s” and “thou’s.”
“Regular people get to play baseball with a bunch of ex-major leaguers like me. People eat it up. The best thing is that I want my two favorite ladies in the world to come with me.”
“When? In March? Natalie will be in school. Can’t we do something during her spring break?”
“It’s a done deal, darling,” Nathan said. “She’s going to be a ball girl.”
“A ball girl?” Suella echoed.
“Wow! That’d be awesome!”
Suella thought of the pimply-faced adolescent boys in baggy versions of the team’s uniforms delivering baseballs to the umpire or handing the hitters their bats. “Don’t boys usually do that?” she asked.
“Mostly. But girls do, too. I showed them a picture. They fell in love with her, said that she’d be grea
t.”
Suella turned to Natalie. “Do you really want to be a ball girl?”
Natalie nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, yes! It’d be so much fun!”
Nathan said “Aw, come on, mom!”
Suella shrugged. “Okay. I guess I’m outvoted.” Over the next two weeks, Nathan received many joyous phone calls from both Justin and the publishing company executives. His book was a huge hit and flying off the bookstore shelves. They were thinking of making a movie from it, with at least one scene scarier than the one from The Marathon Man.
On Christmas morning, Nathan told her to stay in bed while he brought her coffee and fresh pancakes. When she finished, he asked her to go outside and see if the paper came. “Paper? We never get a paper?” she said, while Nathan literally pushed her out the door while she still wore her nightgown. Out on the driveway she found a gleaming, brand new, ocean blue Mazda with a giant bow on the top of it. Nathan casually sauntered outside while Suella gawked at the car.
She hugged him. “It’s beautiful! But you didn’t have to! My old one was fine! Can you afford it?”
Nathan smiled smugly. “Didn’t I show you the deposit I got from the book company? This publishing racket pays some really good coin.”
Natalie had already been awake and patiently unwrapped a monstrous pile of gifts from under the Christmas tree. She received a whole new wardrobe of designer clothes and a brand-new, top-of-the-line Hydroped. “I hope you gave her a helmet, too,” Suella said.
“This is the best Christmas ever!” Natalie exclaimed, hugging both her parents.
Suella was still tapping her everyday or dropping meds into her food or drinks.
The new year 2028 arrived and what seemed like only days later, they were packing their bags for a week-long trip to the Arizona desert. It was the first week of March, the week that Suella would discontinue Natalie’s medications. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about tapping her while they were gone.
They rode six hours into Arizona in Suella’s brand new car. She sat in the back seat while Nathan and Natalie chattered endlessly as they passed desolate stretches of barren mountains and parched grasslands. Suella had envisioned a whole week of having to watch middle-aged men make fools of themselves trying to hit, catch, and run the bases with old major leaguers like her husband
During the week, they would stay at a hotel near the complex, and when Nathan parked there to unload their luggage, she heard a familiar woman’s voice shout out her name. “Suella! Suella!”
She turned in the direction of the shouts and saw an old friend, Kaitlyn Vogel, running toward her, with a fresh updo, swinging bling and a white, sparkling smile. When they reached each other, in front of the opened tailgate of Suella’s car, they swamped each other in a heavy embrace, jumping up and down, giggling like they were teenagers being reunited at summer camp. Soon they let each other slip apart yet they still held hands as Suella looked into Kaitlyn’s beaming eyes. She still looked every inch the runway model, not one pound heavier than the last time Suella had seen her years ago. “How the hell have you been?” Kaitlyn asked. “You look fantastic!”
Suella laughed. “Thank you! It’s so great to see you! Is Jeff in this little shindig, too?”
Kaitlyn smiled wryly at Suella’s “duh” question. “Of course. I’m stuck here for the week too, with these middle-aged crazies.”
Suella looked around. “Where are all your kids?” She mentally calculated their ages and figured that they must be in high school by now.
“Oh, they’re at home.” She leaned in closer to her for a moment, as if she were sharing a confidence. “At the age they are, they’re all too cool for something like this.”
Kaitlyn had opened her mouth, and was going to ask another question, but Natalie’s voice calling out “Hey mom,” interrupted them.
She bounded up from around the other side of the car and reached the two women, panting from her quick run from the other side of the hotel. “Dad found the room,” she said. “Can I start bringing my bags over?”
Kaitlyn, clearly awestruck, took a step toward Natalie. “Oh, my god! Is this your little baby girl?”
“Yes,” Suella said, patting Natalie in the small of her back.
Kaitlyn gently touched a lock of Natalie’s hair and shook her hand tenderly. “I don’t believe my eyes. You are absolutely gorgeous! What’s your name again, darling?”
Suella and Natalie both answered at the same time, as if they’d been coached, in choral unison. “Natalie,” they said.
Kaitlyn looked at them both and laughed. “Not only do you look alike, you think alike, too.”
Suella patted her daughter’s back.
Natalie was going to reach into the car to retrieve her luggage from in there, but Kaitlyn continued to speak, stopping her. “Suella, I just can’t believe this! She’s the mirror image of you! This is uncanny!”
Suella reached out for Natalie’s hand, to gently tug her towards herself, so that they could stand close together and Kaitlyn could look at them.
“This is unreal!” Kaitlyn went on. “I mean, I’ve seen other mothers and daughters who looked alike, but this is eerie!”
Natalie smiled sweetly, showing her dimples and glanced at her mother. “Yeah, we get that a lot,” she said. Soon the old friends had to part to tend to their various businesses. Suella, Nathan, and Natalie checked into the suite where they’d be staying for the week. Two gigantic king beds lay against the wall in the spacious, bright room. Suella thought that two people could lay on opposite sides of the bed and not see each other.
Natalie had the other bed to herself, and when she propped herself against the pillows and called up the hotel system, Nathan walked in from the bathroom. “Don’t be getting too comfortable there, young lady,” he said. “We’ve got dinner downstairs and a big ‘meet and greet’ thing going on.”
Natalie said “Okay. Just let me know when we need to go down there.”
Suella moved over to the side of the bed to stand over her. Natalie looked like a little doll sitting in the middle of the huge bed. “I was thinking you could wear that pretty floral dress we brought along.”
Natalie scrunched her nose, squinting. “You were serious about that?”
“Of course,” Suella said. “Why else would we have packed them?”
“I’m going to be playing baseball all week.”
“Exactly.” Suella nodded. “This might be the only chance we have to wear anything nice.” She crossed the room and found the garment bag containing the dress. After delicately tugging it free of the bag she held it, offering it to Natalie.
“Whatever!” Natalie said, grabbing the dress from Suella’s hand. “I’m probably going to be the only kid down there in a stupid dress.”
Suella glanced over at Nathan, who winced. By the time they finished, Natalie had tied back her hair with a delicate lace bow and looked lovely in the tea length floral dress that sculpted her waist. Suella wore one of her teal and citron business outfits, giving it warmth by adding jewelry and softening her hair. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” Nathan said as he looked them both over.
When they arrived in the dining hall, Suella breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that other women and girls and dresses and men in suits. Kaitlyn Vogel always looked as though she’d just stepped out into the world from a magazine picture It was a giant banquet for all the attendees of the fantasy baseball camp, and the banner above the banquet table read “Welcome players!” At the front of the hall, a tall man with gray hair and a tan stood at a podium on a dais. He wore a clip-on mike and when he spoke, his voice boomed out from the recessed speakers in the corners of the room. “It seems like just about everyone has arrived. The hotel has put out a fantastic spread, and I’m sure you’re all licking your chops to dive in, but I’d like to make some introductions first.”
Nathan leaned ove
r to Suella and spoke into her ear. “That’s Greg Matarocci. He played for the Tigers when I was there. He’s the one who put this whole thing together. I’ve got to get up there.”
Nathan walked up the open floor beside the dais and ten other middle-aged and older men walked up to join him. Suella looked over the diversity of faces and marveled at how they’d added African American former stars, along with Hispanic, to go with Jeff Vogel and Nathan, the only other white players. Greg Matarocci introduced all of them with zing and rhythm in his voice, as if he was calling out the starting lineup at a basketball game. When each of the men were introduced, they would take two steps forward and wave to the dinner crowd, who applauded. Greg had to go through five of them before he reached Nathan.
“And now, we have a real treat for you here at the camp. He pitched in a colossal career that began way back in the last century and spanned four decades. He went straight from a suburban Kansas City town to the big leagues at the tender age of eighteen. For the better part of three decades he baffled hitters with an assortment of nasty breaking stuff and pinpoint control. And he saved his finest hour for last, in the legendary playoff game against the Cubs. For those of you who were living under a rock back then, this guy through out two runners on the same play! Give it up for Methuselah himself Nathan Worthy!”
Nathan smiled widely and raised his hand to the crowd as they applauded with gusto.
Greg went on: “Say there, Worthy, you’ve got a book out now, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Nathan shouted, from his place on the line. “Painting the Black.”
“What was, it? ‘Paint it black?’” Nathan was not miked, and if Suella hadn’t already known the book title, she wouldn’t have understood what he said, either.
Nathan stepped up to the dais to stand closer to Greg and repeat the title.
“Oh yes,” Greg said. “’Painting the black. Nathan did a lot of that in his career.”
Suella learned about “painting the black” not long after she met Nathan. He showed her a publicity picture for ESPN, taken when he was twenty-five years old and still starting games instead of finishing them. They had rigged up a stand near home plate, holding a couple of long, wooden rectangles, representing the right and left strike zones. Young Nathan, wearing his New York uniform, held a small paint can and a paint brush. He was painting one of the frames forming the strike zones. “Painting the black” meant pitching the ball so that it hit the outside edges of the strike zone, where batters would have a tougher time trying to hit it.
When all of the players had been introduced, he waved his arm with a flourish and said “Enough of the formalities! Get up and grab some grub, people!” When Nathan, Suella and Natalie joined the line, a stocky man approached them.
Later, while they sat down to dinner at their table, a matronly woman in her fifties approached them. She greeted Nathan and Suella and turned her attention to their daughter. “And you must be Natalie. Oh, so precious. Listen, first thing tomorrow we need to get you fitted for your ball girl uniform.”
Natalie, who had already started pecking away at her salad, looked up, and out of the corner of her mouth said “Okay.”
After dinner, Kaitlyn and Jeff Vogel came up to Suella and Nathan. Each of the men gave a warm embrace to the other man’s wife. “Congratulations on taking such good care of Jeff,” Nathan said. “Lord knows, it can’t be easy!” Jeff playfully punched at Nathan and for a moment the two men looked like rowdy teenagers.
Kaitlyn took Suella aside. “They don’t believe in wasting any time, do they? For tomorrow they have a full slate of practice scheduled.” She looked around at the men filing out of the dining hall, the ones who would play baseball along with the old time players. “Can you believe the condition of some of these guys?” Together they looked around at the paunchy waistlines, fatty necks and stubby legs. I hope they made them all sign waivers a foot high.”
“Oh, you know they did,” Suella said, laughing. “It’ll be fun to watch.”
“You’ve got that right! See you tomorrow!”