Screwball

by Linda Morris

  Clearly she despised him, and he couldn’t blame her.

  Paul came off better, like a sane man trying desperately to manage an asylum full of lunatics. That was the way he felt most of the time, but seeing it in black-and-white on the web for everyone in the world to read made him squirm. The incident with the pipe wrench received several paragraphs, and he winced as he read the largely accurate account of his meltdown.

  He had Alex to thank for those details getting to Willow. His coffee grew cold on the table next to his tablet, unnoticed. He’d fire Alex’s ass and take pleasure in doing it, if he had the power rather than White Sox management.

  His phone rang again. His father. “Yeah.”

  “You read it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pretty awful, huh?”

  “There’s nothing in it that isn’t true.” That made it even harder to swallow.

  “What do you mean? She made me out to be some sort of cheap-ass who doesn’t care about anything except squeezing a dollar.”

  Paul rubbed the bridge of his nose. Had anyone ever been so self-deluded as his dad? “Dad, you are a cheap-ass. I’d say it was an accurate portrayal.”

  “Hmph. Well, she sure made you out to be crazy, that’s for sure. Tracy called and said the Plainview Thrashers are trending on Twitter, whatever the hell that means.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything good.” He pulled up the app on his iPad and searched for the Plainview Thrashers. Dozens of tweets appeared, with more popping up every second. He scanned the first few, and his pulse sped. A dull throb started at the back of his head.

  “Dad, I’ve gotta go. I need to figure out what we’re up against and call you back.” He clicked off and scrolled down his Twitter feed. As he read, his grip on his phone tightened with every insult.

  A reporter for SportsCenter called his explosion “a team president gone Hulksmash.” Somebody from Deadspin wondered if he’d been using steroids. “Only ’roid rage could explain this out-of-character freak-out.”

  Oh, please. He didn’t care what stupid people said about him. They’d have their laugh over his outburst for a few hours and then something else would come along to capture the media’s notoriously short attention span. Besides, he didn’t have anger management issues or ’roid rage, or anything of that other crap. It didn’t matter what some uninformed jerk thought. He knew the truth.

  But the things about his father …

  A cheap-ass. A skinflint. Daddy Dearest. “Looks like the rumors about overbearing Walter Dudley chasing his daughter Sarah out of the Thrashers front office are true,” one Indianapolis sportswriter tweeted. “The only surprise is that Paul Dudley has stuck it out this long.”

  Yeah, that dude didn’t know the half of it. This was a god-awful PR mess, and it was especially serious because everything they said was true. The Thrashers were already in the middle of a dicey situation because of the accident. Lawsuits might be pending, and the insurance company had made noise about their concerns. As they put it, if Walter Dudley had kept an old bus in service past its time, what other future disasters might be lurking around the corner due to the senior Dudley’s penny-pinching?

  This public meltdown would not reassure their insurers. They’d already intimated their rates might go up after the crash. Hell, after they found out about the train wreck behind the scenes in the Thrashers organization, the Thrashers would be lucky if they weren’t dropped entirely.

  Bad as they were, the practical concerns weren’t the worst part. This was personal. This was family. This was his legacy. This team was created by his grandfather and handed down to his father. He’d been going to games since he was a kid. So much had been sacrificed for it. His father had barely been around, even after their mom died, so busy had he been running the team.

  A heart attack had taken his mom. The Thrashers had taken his dad.

  And Paul had made sacrifices too. His place had always been in his hometown, protecting his legacy for the son he’d have someday. Now that son wasn’t some a theoretical someday possibility. He was here, sleeping in the other room.

  Had Willow thought about that before she’d done this hatchet job on his father? On her child’s grandfather?

  His family’s dirty laundry was being aired in the most public, humiliating way he could imagine, and the woman who’d done it lay sleeping in his bed.

  His fists clenched and unclenched. What to do? The first step would be to call the White Sox. They were the parent club. They’d have concerns about this. A grim chuckle escaped. That was putting it mildly. He took a deep breath and reached for his phone. After them, he’d touch base with the insurance company. He’d be on damage control all day.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Willow’s voice from the doorway shocked his senses. She wore a nursing nightgown that gaped at the breast to make for easier access to Jack. Even now, Paul couldn’t deny the sight stirred him. In the early-morning light, with no makeup on and her red hair curling wildly around her shoulders, she looked every bit a natural, uncalculated beauty.

  Looks could be deceiving. Hers were natural maybe, but obviously not uncalculated. He carefully lowered the phone to the table, resisting the urge to smash it down hard. That would only break his phone, and he’d already had one pointless, self-destructive meltdown lately.

  “Your piece ran this morning.”

  To her credit, Willow winced. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  She crossed to the coffeepot, her bare feet scuffling on the vinyl. She’d painted her toes while he was gone, some blue color with glitter. The little detail broke his heart, for some crazy reason.

  She poured a cup of coffee and then turned to face him, leaning against the counter and crossing her arms. “I’m not sorry for telling the truth. I’m sorry if it hurt you.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not much of an apology. You’re not sorry for what you did, you’re only sorry for how I feel about it. What bullshit.” He rose.

  Her eyes widened. “I—but.” She stuttered to a halt. “Every word I wrote in the piece is true. What did you expect me to do? Lie?”

  “I expected loyalty.” He hadn’t been able to put his finger on it, but the minute he spoke the words, he knew it was true. “I’ve given everything to this team. Everything! I’ve stood by my father when I knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on. I’ve done the best I could in a shitty situation, always, because I knew it was part of my legacy. Someday the team will be mine to run as I see fit, but for now, it’s not. Someday, it will be Jack’s team to run. I think he’ll appreciate it if I haven’t run it into the ground by then.”

  “I think he’ll appreciate having a father more.” Willow slammed her coffee cup on the counter, not noticing that coffee sloshed over the rim. “You admit your dad was never there for you growing up and your mom had to be both mother and father. You admit you had to help raise your sister after your mom died because your dad was absent. Yet you’re going down the same path with your own family!”

  “How dare you!” He stood so fast his chair fell backward and his hands fisted. In a second, he was up in her face.

  Her eyes went wide, but he didn’t back down.

  “I took a week off in the middle of the season! My dad would never have done something like that.”

  “Yeah, and at the first sign of trouble, you let your dad give you a guilt trip over it.”

  “Guilt trip? You think this is all about a guilt trip? You don’t have any idea the deep shit this team is in. We could lose our insurance, and the White Sox could fire me.”

  “Fire you?” She looked stricken.

  “They can’t do much about ownership. This team is independently owned, but they control management. They could fire me. They don’t do it lightly, but in this kind of a situation, who knows? Ironic, huh? The one guy responsible for this whole mess, my dad, could well end up being the only one immune from any repercussions. Did you think about that when you were dragging
me and my family through the mud?” He wasn’t even being fair anymore. Everything she had written was true, but dammit. It hurt so bad to see it all out there, and all because of a woman he’d finally started to trust.

  She swallowed but lifted her chin. She wouldn’t go down without a fight. It was one of the things he loved about her, even though it made his life damned inconvenient right now.

  “If you ask me, and I know you didn’t, you’d be better off. Your father is ruining your life, Paul. He’s ruining your career, and he’s ruining us.” Tears welled in her eyes, and a part of him wanted to brush them away, to take her in his arms and promise her everything would be okay.

  Yet, he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t reach past that cold lump of anger sitting in his stomach, the one that her betrayal had put there.

  “He’s ruining our chance at being a family,” she said.

  He couldn’t stand here and watch her cry anymore. If he did, he’d take her into his arms and forgive her, and he wouldn’t be able to stand himself if he did. “Ruined our family? Don’t put that on my dad. I’d say you did a pretty good job of that all by yourself.”

  It was time to go to work. Despite everything, he knew it was the one place he’d always be needed.

  *

  Damn that bastard. How dare he accuse her of ruining their family? She wiped a tear away as she lowered Jack into the sink for a bath. Jack cooed and splashed, but she wasn’t in the mood to play. She cleaned him with quick motions, her mind racing ahead all the while. She’d done the job she’d been hired to do, the one he knew she’d come here to do. She’d kept to her word and left out personal details about Walter Dudley and Sarah. Dammit, the power struggle between Paul and his dad was news. She couldn’t leave it out. What kind of a reporter would that make her?

  A piss-poor one. But the decision she’d made instead might mean she was an equally rotten girlfriend and mother. In her way, she’d had an idea that maybe she could help Paul, thinking exposing the situation with ownership might be a way of ripping off the Band-Aid once and for all. If everyone knew what was going on, people would stop blaming him for the Thrashers situation.

  Liar. No matter what, I knew Paul wouldn’t want this to go public. He’s too private for that. I went ahead and wrote up the worst things about his father, the man he’s been protecting for years, and put them on the Internet for everybody to read.

  Lifting Jack out of the water, she drained the sink and dried him on a fluffy towel, then diapered and dressed him. Just as she finished, her phone rang.

  It was Nate, her editor. She’d been dreading the call, but she put Jack on the floor with a few toys and answered the phone anyway.

  “Congratulations, hon. Your story has already gotten us more hits than any we’ve had in the last six months.”

  “That’s great.” That was what she’d been hired to do: write hard-hitting sports journalism stories that could generate clicks and revenue for Screwball. Mission accomplished. She should be proud, but instead she felt god-awful.

  “I bet the Dudleys aren’t happy.”

  “I think that’s safe to say, yeah.”

  “You’ve talked to them?”

  “Yeah, I have. To Paul Dudley.”

  “He’s got nothing to complain about, compared to his dad.”

  “I don’t think he sees it that way.”

  “Oh, come on. He might have taken a bath in the headline, but you were pretty fair to him in the article.”

  “Headline? What’s the headline?” She’d turned the article in a week ago, but she hadn’t seen the edited version, or written the headline. She turned on Paul’s iPad, which still had the website pulled up. She winced. “Nate. How could you? Paul isn’t ‘out-of-control.’”

  “He sure sounds like it. Who goes crazy with a pipe wrench when they’re calm and well-balanced?”

  “He had a lot of personal stuff going on.”

  “Yeah? Who doesn’t? Take me, for instance. My girlfriend thinks she might be a lesbian.”

  “I could have done without hearing that, Nate.”

  “Me too. Anyway, my point is, everybody’s got personal stuff going on. Not everybody takes it out on inanimate objects.”

  She ignored him, scanning down the article. “Nate, this isn’t the exact article I turned in.”

  “I edited it, of course.”

  “You rewrote the intro to play up the stuff about Paul and his dad. I didn’t write this.”

  “You buried the lead, Willow. The most interesting thing about your article was the power struggle. I made some edits to put that front and center.”

  “Edits? Those aren’t edits. You cut my intro and replaced it with yours and added that totally gratuitous headline. Great,” she muttered. “Now he thinks I wrote this stuff.”

  “Who thinks that?” Nate missed very little.

  “Never mind. Look, I’ve got to go, okay?” She ignored Nate’s sputtering and ended the call. He’d get over it. After the trouble he’d caused, it was the least he could do.

  Chapter 13

  “Have a seat, son.”

  Paul took the chair across from his father’s desk, eyeing him warily. Walter Dudley wore an expansive grin that didn’t bode well for this conversation. Paul leaned back and braced himself. He’d known he’d have to have it out with his father in person as soon as he got back from dealing with the accident. Better to get it over with now and get on with the business of putting the team back together. His phone had been lighting up like a Christmas tree with calls from reporters, players and White Sox officials, and even one from Alex. Yeah, that last one would be at the bottom of his list of priorities.

  “This disaster has gotten me thinking,” his dad said. “I think it’s time we made some changes around here. We need to admit our way of handling things hasn’t been working. I’m not a believer in denying reality.”

  Paul barely repressed an eye-roll at that one. Denying reality in favor of his prejudices was his father’s specialty. He wouldn’t interrupt, though, because otherwise, his father’s words gave him a glimmer of hope. Could his dad be finally coming to grips with the idea that his time was over and he needed to move aside?

  “Here’s what I propose.” His father leaned forward, spreading his hands out on the desk. “I think I need to take a more hands-on role.”

  “What?” Paul froze, not even blinking. Surely he’d misunderstood that.

  “You’re young, Paul. I thought you were ready to take on the team on a day-to-day basis because you’ve always been so responsible, but I was wrong. You don’t have the seasoning that an older, more experienced man would have. You’re too easily distracted by bells and whistles.” He punctuated his words with a wave of his hand. “A fancy stadium, a pretty girl, they turn your head and make you forget what’s important. Someday, the team will be yours again, but for now, until you’re ready to lead, I’m taking back over as team president. Your official title will be vice president of operations.” He clasped his hands together, looking like he expected to be thanked for working everything out.

  Paul just stared, unbelieving. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  The broad smile slipped, but only for a second. “I’m quite serious. You’ll be a good manager someday, son, but not yet. You need to learn from more experienced leaders for a little while longer.”

  “Dad, I—” Paul stopped. Words failed him, blotted out by a thundercloud of anger that started somewhere in his brain and spread until it filled every cell of his body. His fists clenched. It was lucky for his father he didn’t have a pipe wrench handy. Vice president? What the hell? “Thanks for not demoting me down to grounds crew.” How calm he sounded. An impartial observer would hardly know how he was dying to lunge across the desk and throttle the old man until he saw reason.

  His father blinked. “Well, that would be a total waste of your talents.”

  “Good to know you think I have some.”

  “Oh, don’t take it so hard. Of course
you’re disappointed. I know you want to run the team now, but it’ll be yours someday. You have to be patient.”

  “Dad, you seem to think I’m five years old. You used to use the same tone when you told me I’d have to be a good boy or Santa wouldn’t bring me any presents.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do—”

  “Here’s what it has to do with this conversation, Dad. I know you’re a get-to-the-point guy, so I’ll get right to it. I’m a grown man, not a little boy, and I can’t take this anymore. I’ve put up with you for years because I love this town and this team. I knew if I left, you’d run the team into the ground.”

  “I beg your pardon!” Walter Dudley sat upright, his face flushing deep red.

  “Everyone knows it’s true, Dad. The reason this team is still struggling so badly is because you mismanage it and you tie my hands constantly to keep me from doing better. I’ve thought all along I could be a moderating force, keep you from your most destructive impulses, but I now see I was wrong. I love you, and I always will. You’re my father. You’re the only parent I have left.” His throat clogged, and he had to pause for a moment to continue calmly. “But I can’t save you from yourself. All I can do is get dragged down with you. And I won’t let that happen. I quit.” The words sounded odd in his mouth. He’d never quit on anything, but it was time. As surely as he knew his name, he knew it was time for him to move on.

  His dad’s eyes narrowed. “This is because of that girl, isn’t it? You’ve always been a good son up until now. She’s talked you into rebelling against me.”

  “She’s not the president of the Walter Dudley fan club, that’s true, but she’s got nothing to do with why I’m quitting. This is between you and me.”

  “I don’t believe it! You’re putting her ahead of your family, your legacy, and look what she’s done to you. Did you even read that article, the awful things she wrote?”

  He ignored that last bit. “I’m not putting her ahead of you at all, Dad. I would have done anything to prevent that piece from coming out if I’d known how badly it would embarrass you.”