The Cactus League

by Emily Nemens

  Sara has never been to a baseball game, but she can guess what he wants to hear. “That sounds nice.”

  “It is. Don’t worry, it’s not like I need someone to wipe my ass,” he continues. “I mean, not anymore, thank God. To be honest, that’s probably the straw that fucked the camel, regarding Marlene and me.” Sara tries to imagine this woman, but can’t. “The leg’s doing better, as you know. But it’d be nice to have an able body around the house.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Allison,” Sara says, her mind racing. She wants to ask for the details again, they sound so impossible, so good. A nice place to stay, no expenses … “I’ve been with Dr. Jewell a long time and—”

  “What’s he paying you?”

  “What?”

  “How much? I’ll double it. On top of room and board.”

  Truth be told, Dr. Jewell has underpaid her from the start, but she’s been afraid to complain. In all the ups and downs, the bad boyfriends and good times, the weeks she’d call in “sick” for spur-of-the-moment trips to Mexico or Burning Man, and for all the hangovers that really did keep her in bed, Dr. Jewell forgave her. He’d dock her pay and cancel vacation hours, talk down to her plenty—and he never once has given her a raise—but he forgave her screwups.

  She rounds up to save face. “Thirty-two thousand.”

  Herb Allison lets out a sharp ha. “Cheap bastard. I like it. I’ll start you at sixty-five. Upward potential, if you know what I mean.” Sara does not know what he means, but dollar signs are dancing in her vision.

  “What about my place?” Sara asks, looking around the cramped and dingy kitchen. “I can’t just leave.”

  “Sure you can. Quit the lease. I’ll cover any fees for early termination, have my guys get you a storage unit.” She’s heard Herb use this tone on the phone, but to be on the other end of it: even with its gruffness, somehow he sounds like she’s the one doing him a favor. “Movers to haul your stuff, too.”

  “Why me?”

  “You? I like you, kid.”

  “But you hardly know me!”

  “You seem like you can roll with the punches. And I’ve got a guy.” He means a service that does background checks on all potential clients, to make sure he doesn’t make any unwise investments. “No domestic assaults or child porn on my roster, no way. Try to stay away from the drunk drivers, too. At least the habitual ones.” It was easy enough to run her name. “Sara Ashley Jones, daughter of Cathy and blank. Born February 27, 1981—big birthday coming up, my dear—raised in Flagstaff. First in your family to go to college—congrats for that—though your grades were nothing to write home about. Started out with Jewell eight years ago, which we knew, stable employment since. Your credit score is shit, but—”

  “Some of it was for school,” she interrupts.

  She hears a rustle of papers. “Whopper loans, I see that. But I’m looking at thirty-five K of uninsured cosmetic medical treatments for one Cathy Jones.”

  Her face burns, remembering that.

  “What was it, her tits?”

  “She just said she needed a medical procedure.”

  Herb coughs. “What you need to do is become a better judge of character.”

  He couldn’t possibly realize how deep that digs. “Are you all done with that Davis guy?”

  “What?” Coffee sloshes around in her stomach. How could he know about Davis?

  “That thug you were seeing. I’ve got controlled substances in the house—pain meds and the like—and I can’t have any addicts around. Convicts, neither. I’m not saying no gentlemen callers. But not him.”

  “Right,” Sara says, though she is more confused than ever. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend isn’t exactly a Cub Scout, but in three years of dating he’d never said anything about jail time.

  “It’s a lovely house, as cookie cutters go,” Herb says. “Just a few years old, right on the Troon North course. Did I mention there’s a hot tub?”

  Herb prattles on about the patio and the view. When he reaches the chef-quality kitchen, a new message pops up on Sara’s computer. Davis, again. Still. Subject line: “I’m Sorry.”

  Sara’s heart starts to gallop. Last week, three nights straight, he loitered outside her apartment. Stayed the whole night, rushed her in the morning, looking like a zombie and sputtering out apologies that sounded too rehearsed to be true. Was she supposed to forgive him for what happened on New Year’s Eve, easy as that? She can’t forget how scared she was. And how mad. Then he vanished again—another bender? Now these e-mails, more every day. She sort of expects him to be standing in the parking lot.

  Sara interrupts Herb’s description of the dishwasher. “When can I move in?”

  “Atta girl! Room’s ready now.”

  Sara deletes Davis’s message without reading it. Sorry, her ass. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  * * *

  “I wanted to go back to L.A. for the PT, but Marlene thought Arizona would do me good,” Herb explains as he tours Sara through the house. He doesn’t mention, so neither does Sara, the single-floor layout, the wide doorways and low counters, the grab bars in the bathrooms. “Desert air or some nonsense. Besides, my chair is too wide for Neutra’s doorways. The man’s a genius, but hardly ADA compliant.”

  They’d had the Realtor furnish the place, he continues. “It’s no Case Study, but it’ll have to do.” Sara thinks it looks beautiful, like one of those posh Southwestern resorts she and Davis would sneak into for the pools. Suede couches and cowboy-blanket throws, formal-looking cacti in beautifully glazed pots.

  There are no trinkets, no refrigerator magnets, no photos—almost no photos. Sara finds two on the side buffet in the dining room. One is of the dog standing outside a regal-looking redbrick building. The other is of a brown-haired girl, smiling up from the seat of a stadium.

  She watches the photos all of dinner. She’d charred their chicken, and, after many apologies, called in Thai and opened a bottle of merlot. At the meal’s close, far enough into the bottle to muster the courage, Sara asks about them.

  “That’s the Baseball Hall of Fame,” Herb explains, pointing his fork toward the dog. “Cooperstown.” Sara’d really wanted to know about the girl, but she nods like she’s interested. “I wanted Kirby to pay his respects to his namesake.”

  “Namesake?”

  “Kirby Puckett?” He blinks, unbelieving. “Do you live under a rock?”

  Sara shrugs, her shoulders getting loose with alcohol. “I don’t follow baseball.”

  “He died of a stroke, not two miles from here. Forty-five years old.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine, I discovered him”—Herb pokes his chest for emphasis—“in the Chicago projects. High school All-American but poor as dirt, he wouldn’t mind me saying. Living in a three-room apartment with his parents and nine siblings. Nine! I got him a college scholarship, and then, four years later, third pick in the draft. He was my first big contract—and the easiest ever. Stayed with Minnesota his entire fucking career.” He makes a face. “‘Just keep me in Minneapolis, Herb, just keep me in M-N’—who ever thought they’d hear that sentence?”

  Sara smiles. “Not me.” She’s never been north of Las Vegas, and can’t imagine life up there, all covered in snow, the millions of lakes and dairy cows.

  “He didn’t make me much, but of course I couldn’t quit the Puck.” He looks into his wineglass, lost in reminiscence. “You’ve really never heard of him?”

  “I guess he sounds familiar.”

  “All-Star ten years in a row. Career batting average of three eighteen. Made the Hall of Fame his first year of eligibility. You know, every agent wants to get a guy into Cooperstown. But most guys have to wait a lot longer. Fuck, I wasn’t even fifty.” He shakes his head at the memory. “You know, he was the second-youngest ballplayer to pass away having already been enshrined in the Hall of Fame.”

  “Who was the youngest?” Sara says, her curiosity piqued.

  “Lou G
ehrig.” Herb drains his wine, nods at her to pour him more. “You’ve heard of him, right?”

  * * *

  The first weeks are strange, like one of those arranged marriages: two people who hardly know each other suddenly sharing everything. She makes him breakfast, lunch, and dinner, figuring out the kinds of foods he likes and trying her best at them. She figures out where Marlene stowed the paper towels and potholders, gets acquainted with the linen cabinets and the locations of the power outlets. The place still smells like fresh paint in some corners, and it’s about a hundred times bigger and a thousand times nicer than her cruddy studio. She’s not heard a peep from her landlord—Herb took care of that, gave her keys to the storage unit where he’d had moving guys stash her beat-up furniture—though the pleading e-mails from Davis keep coming in, every day.

  And they go places together: Herb visits Diamond three times a week, the barber every Thursday, a psychologist on Tuesdays. She types the addresses of his appointments into the Escalade’s GPS, then has to negotiate as the car’s British-woman directions send her one way and Herb points her in another. Herb’s gotten a new PTA at Dr. Jewell’s, a pretty brunette whom Sara doesn’t recognize. Dr. Jewell shot her a mean stare the first time she dropped off Herb, so now Sara waits in the car, AC blasting. Once, she went to a café at the far end of the strip mall, but after a few minutes with her latte she thought she saw Davis, so she gulped down her coffee and drove the Escalade in loops around Scottsdale’s golf courses, feeling guilty about the gas.

  Marlene calls daily; she and Herb seem still to be friends. Sara is always the one to answer: at first their conversations are tight and antagonistic, like Marlene is trying to poke holes in Sara’s story. As if plateauing as a PTA, the crap apartment, and her going-nowhere life were some ludicrous fiction, a façade for something more nefarious. Don’t you think I’d give myself a better story if I were making it up? Sara wants to ask; she holds her tongue. But the conversation always slides to Herb: His speech okay? Sara says he’s a mumbler unless he’s yelling, but she’s learned to lean in. His fingers? Not falling off, she’ll say, though she’s noticed he’s no good at buttons. More than once he’s appeared in the kitchen “ready to go” with just the button over his sternum secure.

  Aside from buttoning buttons she doesn’t dress him—but Sara does do his laundry, picking up piles of sweat-sour undershirts and crumpled khakis, faint wheelchair tracks ribbed across the fabric. One afternoon, throwing a load of whites into the high-efficiency washer, she has a revelation: Davis, her mother—everyone has been taking advantage of her. She did all of Davis’s laundry, and she even had to scrounge the quarters. Her mother, too: convincing Sara to come back to Flagstaff for “holiday,” just so she could spend her week of vacation time scrubbing the house, buying food, and running her mother’s long-postponed errands. They’d spent $600 of Sara’s money in one afternoon at Walmart. Thank you so much, Sar-bear. I don’t know what I’d do without you. How long would Cathy keep playing the poor single-mom card? It had always worked on Sara, but as she sets the washer running she considers that maybe her dad, whoever he was, had a good reason for quitting Cathy Jones.

  Back in the kitchen she starts on dinner, attempting to debone a whole raw chicken with a paring knife. Her cooking is still poor, but she is making improvements; Herb surreptitiously leaves cookbooks for her to find, the easiest recipes marked with pink Post-its. Herb had scolded: Be a better judge of character. Is he taking advantage of her, too? It doesn’t feel that way, but it’s strange, this cohabitation, her playing chauffeur and maid and confidante to this lonely man. She gives up on the slippery knife and starts ripping at the carcass with her hands.

  Her phone chirps, and with a dry pinkie she deletes Davis’s most recent message without reading past the first apologetic line.

  * * *

  While Kirby Puckett may have been Herb’s first client, now more of them are with the Los Angeles Lions than any other franchise, and he feels a certain affinity for the team. He wants to support his athletes—Goodyear, Cardozo, Moyers, and Goslin, a handful of relief pitchers Sara cannot keep straight—if not the front office (whom he considers stingy bastards), and the new stadium looks like a good place to watch a game, so that spring he plans to attend several Lions games a week.

  Opening day, Sara parks in a handicap spot just next to the players’ entrance. She and Herb eventually find the accessible gate and the elevator to the suites. Theirs is next door to the organist’s, and through the wall she can hear someone hitting woodblocks.

  As they settle in, Herb points out favorite clients, prattling off the details of their contracts and his plans for their next negotiation. Sara smiles; it’s like he’s speaking Greek. Then he’s reabsorbed into his technology, tapping at his phone, typing things into a laptop mounted on the arm of his chair. But somehow he seems never to miss a play, hooting and hollering with each feat of athleticism.

  Sara has heard of three strikes, but knows little else of the rules. Even in her confusion, she enjoys the players’ movements, how they bend and dip to collect batted balls, the spinning motion of the pitcher, the prance of the base runners. Like ballet, she thinks. She’d wanted to be a ballerina, but her mom vetoed that, like she did most things. How we gonna afford that, Sar-bear? So Sara learned what she could, gleaning toe positions from the girls whose mothers would pay for classes, recording The Nutcracker off the public television station at Christmastime. In a roundabout way, ballet’s what pushed Sara into PT—she learned after one quarter of ASU dance classes she was no Martha Graham, but she wanted to do something with bodies, to help them achieve their potential.

  Sara doesn’t mention all the connections she’s making between baseball and ballet. She doesn’t say that the outfielders run with huge strides like grands jetés. That the infielders are all coiled energy, ready to leap into action with another saut de basque. And that pitching is just one barrel turn after another. Then there’s the catcher: he pulls players in and pushes others back like he’s choreographing the whole troupe.

  But she does note aloud that the base runner just did a pirouette on his way into second.

  “You do ballet?” Herb’s ears perk up. “My Julie did that for years.”

  “Is that your daughter?” Sara says. “The little girl in the photo?”

  Herb nods. “The same. She’s twenty now.”

  “Where is she?” she asks.

  “In college. Pitzer, last I heard, though academics aren’t exactly her priority. You know about that.”

  Sara makes a face like she doesn’t.

  “Anyway, her mother—my first ex, Linda, will give her absolutely anything she wants.”

  “How long were you together?”

  “Linda and I?” He pauses to think. “Three-year contract, then she asked for a trade.”

  * * *

  Early mornings, at twilight, when the temperature is bearable, she tries to encourage Herb to walk—well, roll—outside with her, around the golf course or over at the nature preserve. But Herb always waves her off, glued to some screen. Too busy, he says. And he’s working all the time, pecking at his phone or typing on his laptop, barking into a headset. At home he has a complicated setup of monitors and speakerphones; several TVs stream different games and sports talk shows.

  He might be too busy to exercise, but he never misses a meal and makes a point of having a nice dinner. Herb likes a certain kind of restaurant—the kind Sara could never afford—and they dine out several times a week. Up and down Scottsdale Boulevard, everyone knows Herb, or knows of him: the maître d’ who is ready to clear a path through the dining room to accommodate his chair, the bartender who pours him a Belvedere vodka martini upon first sight, the waiter who hurries to their table to talk about the specials. Sara is aware of people watching them as they settle into their secluded booth. Part of that is wonder at Herb’s elaborate chair, but is it also wonder at her? How pretty she looks, her little black dress, her shimmering eyes and
red lips. Is she the new girlfriend? No one will say it, but she knows they’re thinking of sex, her naked body and Herb’s. How in the world that might happen, this feeble old man and her dancer’s frame.

  People can think what they want. She’s helping him. She’s young now, next to Herb, rather than the old one in the room, as she was at those parties with Davis. It made her crazy how no one cared that Davis was twenty-eight going on fifty-four, with his crow’s feet and premature gray, but she was the old maid. Dr. Jewell, too—if it were up to him, she’d have frozen time at twenty-four. She’s still mad at her mother for the surgery, but in the last year she’s started to understand why she did it, why she felt she had to. If Sara feels this way, so worn out at twenty-nine, what will forty-five be like? Or Herb’s fifty-two? She watches as he slurps at his martini, hunched and looking even older than that. His eyes squint with pleasure.

  * * *

  On Sara’s thirtieth birthday, Herb has a huge bouquet of flowers delivered. At the stadium, between innings, there’s a birthday announcement on the scoreboard, the organist next door playing “Happy Birthday.”

  When they get home Herb hands her a hundred-dollar bill and tells her to buy steaks—he’ll show her how to grill them. Sara cruises down Hayden faster than she should, pushing the car up to fifty on the long stretches between lights. As soon as she passes a golf course on her left, another country club begins on her right. A sign for another old folks’ home, “supported living” they call it, is on the left, the barracks-style housing only slightly softened by its red-tiled roof and faux-adobe walls. If Herb were in the car right now, he’d shudder and make the international sign for choking, his tongue flapping out the side of his mouth. He does it every time they pass an old folks’ home. Oh, stop it, Sara always tells him. You’re not even sixty. He shakes his head. You know what to do, he says, if it comes to that.