by Lacy Hart
“What do you want me to do, Kris?” Wes raised his voice. “Time is passing by, and all I can do is sit around and watch it happen. We’re at the end of February, and I haven’t been able to do what I want. I just want to feel better so I can get back up there and hit and maybe…” Wes let his voice trail off.
“And maybe what? Do you want to try to play again?”
“Maybe I do,” Wes said quietly.
Kristin sat quietly for a moment. In the back of her mind, she thought that this was where everything would lead.
“Why didn’t you say something about this to me weeks ago? Did you think I wouldn’t support you? Wes, you have to know that I would be there for you no matter what you decided to do. You need to be honest and open with me. I thought we were a team here, the three of us.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t say anything about it, Kris,” Wes confessed. “I think part of me knew I wanted to at least try to go back, to see what I could do. I feel like, I don’t know that I left things unfinished and that I still have that passion for playing. I guess I was a little embarrassed about it, too.”
“You don’t have to feel embarrassed about something you have passion for.” Kristin gripped Wes’ hand tighter. “Wes, I don’t want you to just give up on anything you aren’t ready for. Don’t do that. I would hate to think you didn’t try and then… then you might resent me like I was the reason you stopped playing.”
“I never said that, and I never felt that way.” Wes sat up, moved closer to Kristin, and looked her in the eyes.
“I know you never said it, Wes, but the way you walked away from the game last year to come back home, I guess part of me always worried that you might have quit and never got the chance to finish last year the way you wanted to.”
“Kris, I did finish last year the way I wanted to… right here with you and Izzy. When I walked away from Cincinnati last year, it was the right thing for me to do. I needed to do that for me. Maybe this is just a passing feeling, and once I try it, I won’t want to do it, but I know that I have to find that out. The more time I have to sit here and think about it, the more I know that’s true. I’m sorry I have been so hard on you and Izzy. It’s been beyond frustrating to me, and there were many times I wanted to share that with you, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. For that, I’m sorry too.”
Kristin sniffled back some tears coming and leaned in and kissed Wes, softly at first and then with more feeling.
“I love you, Wes,” Kristin told him. “Don’t shut me out or feel like you have to hide things from me. Good or bad, you need to talk to me, okay?”
“I promise,” Wes said, making the crossing motion over his heart, which caused Kristin to giggle. “And you have to promise to not hide things from me, like telling me when I am an asshole, or anything else.”
Kristin paused for a moment and then broke into a smile.
“Oh, don’t worry. If I don’t, I am sure Izzy will be glad to.”
Wes grabbed Kristin and rolled her onto the mattress, causing her to squeal with laughter.
6
Wes awoke to sunshine that streamed through the gap in the curtains, a gap just large enough to let the morning rays dance across his face. He squinted and turned to his alarm clock and saw it was already passed nine, causing him to sit up quickly. Wes let the morning slip away again, and Kristin and Izzy were long gone to work and school, meaning he missed them once again. With the way his mood swung lately, there were good mornings and bad ones. Sometimes he just stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling as he wondered if his ankle might ever heal fully or if his baseball life had just passed him by.
This morning Wes got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, his only thought about that it was late and he should get his day started. Not until after he brushed his teeth and stepped on his way back towards the bedroom, did he experience the realization that he walked without any pain. Wes stopped and stared down at his feet. At first, he wiggled his toes, and gingerly moved his right foot up and down off the ground. Everything felt good for the first time in weeks. A grin swept across Wes’ face as he put more weight on his ankle and shifted his feet back and forth. He could move without even the slightest twinge of discomfort.
Wes didn’t think twice about what his next move would be. He stripped out of his pajamas quickly and put on a t-shirt and sweatpants. He sat down to put on his socks and sneakers and looked closely at the right ankle that gave him so much trouble over the last several weeks. The bruise that marked his ankle was faded and almost gone, finally. Wes finished getting dressed, grabbed a sweatshirt from the closet, and headed towards the back door.
Wes was a bit leery about making his way back to the batting cages. He peered outside and saw the bright sun, but there were still some hints of melting ice that dotted the yard all the way up to the building in the back. He grabbed the wooden cane in the corner that his father had brought up for him a few weeks ago while he healed and decided to bring it along, just to keep things safe in case he should run into trouble.
The first step onto the back lawn saw his sneaker sink a bit into the softening grass. The temperature had risen quite a bit lately, a warm spell in March for Western Pennsylvania, which started to make Wes even antsier to swing again. Wes took small steps and tried to stay safe, and even walked the long way around up to the back to avoid more significant swaths of ice that lingered on the lawn. When he made it up to the building successfully, he looked back down towards the house. Wes smiled and felt accomplished before he unlocked the door and stepped inside.
Wes didn’t waste any time today. He turned everything on quickly, grabbed a bat and a helmet, and got in the cage right away. He set the pitching machine to just do fastballs for now, and eagerly awaited the first one coming in at him. His fingers tightened around the bat, and when the first pitch came in, Wes took a soft swing at it, afraid to test his ankle too much right away. He sent a slow chopper off to the left, and it dribbled aside, but Wes nodded in approval of it. The critical part of the process was nothing hurt.
Wes spent the next forty-five minutes swinging, mixing up the pitches, and making good contact most of the time. He finished the session with a flourish as he smacked a line drive so it rattled off the back netting. Wes gave the bat a toss in a way he never did when he played and smiled triumphantly. He walked out of the batting cage, grabbed a towel, and wiped the sweat from his head and arms. Wes sat back on the chair in front of the computer that charted his sessions and saw he had contacted over 80% of the pitches, and the connection was mostly solid. He couldn’t have asked for anything better.
Wes left the back building and followed the same easier route down to the house that he took going up. He heard the snow and ice rapidly melt on the trees nearby, and he got to the patio and yelled, “Yes!” loudly enough that it echoed. Once inside, Wes went to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, first pressing it against his forehead to help him cool down a bit, before he twisted off the cap and took a long draw on the bottle. Wes wanted to share his excitement with someone, and he picked up his cell phone to call Kristin at the library. He tried her line, but it went right to voicemail.
“Hey Kris,” he said happily. “Sorry I missed you leaving this morning. Give me a call when you get the chance. It’s nothing terrible, I promise.”
Wes ended the call and thought about who he could contact next when he realized he didn’t have any other friends nearby to call and tell about his victory. It bothered him a little, to be distanced from the people he considered his friends, but the truth was that they were all ballplayers who were either at spring training in Arizona or Florida or guys who had retired and lived further away.
Wes returned to the bedroom, stripped out of his sweaty clothes, and went to get in the shower. As he washed and allowed the water to take the dried sweat away, he realized who his next call needed to be to, but he was unsure how it would go. He hadn’t spoken to his agent, Randy, in months, since Wes passed on that commentator jo
b one of the networks wanted him to take. Randy wasn’t happy with the decision, and even though they exchanged Christmas cards, the two hadn’t talked since the disagreement.
Wes spent the whole time in the shower trying to go over in his head what he would say to Randy, how to smooth things over, and how to approach the idea of maybe getting a tryout with someone. He sat on his bed, wrapped in a towel, and stared at his cell phone the whole time with Randy’s number pulled up.
*******
Kristin had been locked into a meeting all morning with the library’s board, going over business updates, the budget, and other details. She spent the last week or so readying for the meeting so that she had access to the information the board might ask for, and Kristin even prepared for some of the questions she knew they were bound to ask. The programs she introduced over the last year brought more people to the library than ever before, including many that lived beyond Chandler but liked all the library now had to offer. The speakers, classes, and more she arranged produced more visitors to the library and the town in general, and she worked hard to generate positive word of mouth, feedback, and business not just for the library but the other places in town.
As Kristin sat through the meeting, she found her mind wandered, as it had been wont to do lately. Even though she and Wes talked a lot about what he dealt with right now, and she tried to be as supportive as possible, part of her still worried about how it would all play out. Kristin always saw herself as a strong, independent, and assertive woman, but she some insecurities lingered when it came to her relationship with Wes. Kristin loved him dearly, and she knew he felt the same way about her, but she also knew that his pro career worked as a powerful draw for him. Competing with the feelings he had about baseball she thought was something long gone, but with the recent revelations about Wes’ desire to play again, she didn’t know what to think.
Kristin stared out the window and watched the water droplets from the melting icicles on the eaves patter down onto the windowsill. The ice and snow thawed more each day, and the weather warmed, with hints of the spring to come more prevalent all the time. She knew the warm weather made the itch Wes felt even stronger, and part of her was almost grateful for the ankle injury that held him up from practicing more. Maybe the spring would come, Wes’ ankle still wouldn’t be fully healed, and he might give up on the thoughts of playing again and move on. Kristin realized these were selfish thoughts, but the idea crept into her mind more and more lately.
“What do you think, Kristin?” Pauline Scott, one of the board members, asked her.
“Hmmm? I’m sorry, I got lost for a minute. Think about what?”
“I know it’s easy to start getting spring fever with the weather lately, but we really need you to focus,” Pauline chastised.
Even after all the hard work she put in, Kristin still got a hard time from many of the board members, an older contingent reluctant to a lot of the changes she had implemented and always wanted to do.
Kristin took a deep breath and mentally counted to five to calm her nerves. She then gave a genteel smile to Pauline.
“You’re right, Pauline. My apologies. Can you ask your question again, please?”
“I was wondering if that expense for upgrading the Wi-Fi in the library is essential. We already offer Internet access. Do we need it to be that much better for people coming in? It seems like a lot of money.”
“It’s an investment,” Kristin explained. “Young people are less likely to come to us to do work, research, or look for books and information if they know we have lousy Internet access. They are the patrons we are trying to bring in more so they can see all we have to offer and use our services. Besides, we only have a few computers, and patrons are always waiting to use them. If people could bring their own laptops and use them, it would be better for all of us. I got three price quotes for the work, and the one Jim Gentry quoted us was the best of them.”
“I think we need to look into this more,” Pauline retorted, straightening her glasses on her pointy nose.
Kristin looked at the other members of the board, all of whom were forty or fifty years older than her. It became more challenging to convince them of modernizing the rest of the library assets as she wanted after getting so much out of them last year. Kristin had used Wes to her advantage last year, with the board members enamored of her relationship with him and that she routinely brought him to parties and fundraisers. This year she determined to take on tasks on her own, to show the members that she was the driving force behind the ideas that helped to make the library better. If she just had one ally on the board that she could count on and who looked at her as more than Wes Martin’s girlfriend, Kristin knew she could make some headway.
“Okay, let’s table that idea for now,” Marion Harris, the director of the library and the one who hired Kristin a year ago, stated, wanting to move the meeting forward.
“We shouldn’t wait too long,” Kristin stated to Marion and the others on the board. “Spring is coming, kids will be writing research and term papers, and we are going to need it before the school year ends. It might take a week or so to get the work done, and I don’t know if Jim will be available to start right away if we hold off on things.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Pauline added, cutting Kristin off.
“Now, on to the Spring fundraiser dinner. We can do the same as last year and have the dinner at Angelo’s,” Marion stated. “I already talked to Angelo about it, and he’s willing to give us the whole restaurant for the night. We can work on the menu and figure out how much to charge per person. Kristin, I hope Wes will be joining us again this year?”
Kristin held back her sigh. “I’ll have to ask him to make sure he is free,” she said politely.
“Oh, I’m sure he will be,” Fred Clark, another board member and owner of the local barbershop, chimed in. “He’s retired. What else will he have to do?” he chuckled. The rest of the board members laughed and nodded in agreement.
“I know he’s retired, Fred,” Kristin said as she gripped the arm of her chair. “But he does have things of his own to do, too. I don’t know if he’s made other commitments, is working on the farm, helping with Jenny, or what. I will ask him.”
“Well, having him there helped us sell out the dinner last year,” Fred added. “I don’t know if we can do that without him, and he worked to secure a lot of donations. Maybe you can, you know, convince him, to go,” Fred said with a wink.
“Excuse me?” Kristin roared. “That’s utterly inappropriate of you to suggest, Fred.”
Kristin stood up and began to gather her things. The board members looked on, flabbergasted.
“I’m sure Fred was just making a joke,” Marion said, as she glared at Fred. “As in bad taste as it was, he surely didn’t mean it, did you, Fred?”
Fred, now with all eyes on him, should have known better to feel the pressure and to try to backtrack on his statements. Instead, he opted to double down.
“All I’m saying is that a pretty girl like Kristin could use her… you know… assets, to make him see that it’s a good idea to go.”
Marion rolled her eyes and groaned. Kristin slammed her paperwork into her bag. She knew if she stayed in that room a minute longer, she was going to leap across the table and leave the town minus a barber and a barbershop.
“It’s time for me to get back to work,” Kristin huffed. She grabbed her things and stormed out of the meeting room they used in the town hall. Kristin’s heels clacked loudly on each step she hit, and she whisked herself out of the building and into the sunlit street, grateful for the light breeze that blew because it might help cool her down.
Kristin muttered to herself the entire two-block walk to the library, and more than one person turned to look at her as she marched along talking to no one. When she reached the library, she flung open the doors so that they clapped loudly when they shut, causing people in the library to turn their heads. The noise grabbed the attention of Karen
right away, who was positioned at the front desk.
Karen watched as Kristin chugged by her and into her office and slammed the door behind her, so it rattled the glass pane. Karen glanced around the library as people stared before she broke out in a smile.
“Next show is in thirty minutes, folks,” she said. “Stick around and see what happens next!”
Karen slipped into Kristin’s office and closed the door quietly. Kristin sat at her desk, viciously typing on her keyboard.
“Geez, Kris, what’s wrong? You came in here like Jerome Bettis running through the line.”
Kristin looked up from her keyboard, her face red, and her eyes peering like Clint Eastwood.
“What?” Kristin answered, sounding angry and confused at the same time.
“Pittsburgh football reference,” Karen said. “Never mind. It took enough to get you to understand baseball. What happened?”
“The monthly board meeting happened is what, and Fred Clark is a Dark Ages moron. He basically told me to go home and have sex with Wes to convince him to come to this year’s fundraising dinner so the library would make more money. Nice to know that the board thinks it’s okay to just pimp me out like that.”
