Page 17

I stare at the mess in front of me.

My mom literally brought every paper she saved of mine starting from preschool and going all the way through high school.

It’s cute, but…what the fuck am I going to do with all this?

She holds up a paper that must be from preschool. There are raw noodles glued to it in the shape of a baseball, and a few have fallen off.

“Look! You were even into the game when you were in third grade!”

“Third grade?” I repeat. “I made that in third grade ? I thought I was three when I did it based on the terrible artwork.”

“Yeah, you weren’t very artistic back then.” She shrugs. “Not everyone’s a Picasso, honey.”

“Clearly. What do you want me to do with all that?”

“I don’t know, but it was just sitting in a bin at the house and I don’t really need it, so I thought maybe you’d want it,” she says. She flips through more papers, and it seems like she kept virtually every single thing I ever did. It’s all a disorganized mess, but at least she wrote the grade and year on the back.

“I guess I’ll go through it and keep what I want for the memory book,” I lie to make her feel better. The second she’s on a plane back to Chicago, it’s going in the dumpster.

“At least keep the noodle baseball. Oh! And this paper on Jane Eyre. Your insight was incredible for a high school junior.” She holds up the paper.

“Correction. Sparknotes had incredible insight on the book, not Cooper Noah.”

She purses her lips and rolls her eyes. “Don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”

“I made it to the big leagues, so I guess I did something right along the way, right?”

She sighs. “You just don’t tell a teacher these things.”

“You teach first grade, Mother. I hardly think your first graders are looking up plot summaries for Dr. Seuss.”

She purses her lips again, clearly annoyed at the direction of this conversation. “You just never know. My job is to keep those kiddos honest.”

“Your job is to teach them how to read, not to worry about whether they’re looking at Sparknotes.”

“Touché.” She sets down the Jane Eyre paper with a clear look of disapproval, and my phone buzzes with a notification that tells me I have a delivery down in the lobby.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell her, and I head down to grab my package. Or my packages , I suppose.

It’s a big load, so the doorman grabs a cart to help me out. I take it all upstairs, and my mom’s brows dip when she spots me and my big load.

“What’s all that?” she asks.

I open the box and pull out packing tape, unprinted newspaper, and two tape guns. I open the other rather large box and pull out an assortment of brand new boxes that aren’t even taped together yet.

“I’m putting you to work, ma’am,” I say. “I need to pack up this place so I’m ready to move to Vegas.” I gloss over the fact that Gabby’s coming next weekend and I don’t want any baseball shit out. I don’t have much since it’s an apartment that came furnished, but I do have a closetful of clothes, a kitchen full of dishes, and a pantry full of beer.

And a few priceless items of memorabilia that dear ole Mom can help me pack while she’s here in town.

Plus, of course, the assortment of schoolwork from my tenure in education.

I tape up a huge box and set it beside her, and then I start heaving the papers she brought me into it. This’ll fit nicely in the dumpster once she’s gone.

She snatches the noodle paper out of the box and hangs it on my fridge as I continue shoveling the stuff she brought right into the box.

“You’re not even going to look?” she whines. “Maybe I should just take it all back home.”

“What are you going to do with it? It sat in your basement for the last fourteen years.”

She presses her lips together and nods. “That’s right. Fourteen years since you graduated high school. Remind me how long your girlfriend has been out of high school?”

I blow out a grunt of frustration. “I thought we were letting that go,” I say.

“We are, we are. But it felt like it merited mentioning again.”

“You’re not okay with it,” I say.

“And I don’t have to be. As long as you are good with it, how I feel doesn’t matter. But I do want you to think about one thing. If you’re getting annoyed at me for bringing it up a second time today, imagine how you’ll feel when it’s all the media talks about once they get wind you’re not only playing again, but you’re dating someone half plus five.”

I press my lips together.

I guess I don’t have a response to that.

It’s something I’ll face when the time comes. Until then…I’m not going to worry about it.

After lunch, we drive to the beach and sit in the sand for a bit, and I think about the things I want to do when Gabby gets here this weekend.

If we even leave my apartment, of course.

I want to take her to all the places I love here in town, and I feel like we’d have a lot of fun together at a place like Sea World. We can ride the roller coasters and admire the fish, walk around hand-in-hand as we laugh and buy cotton candy and ice cream to share.

I want to take her to the beach, and to my favorite pizza place. I want to show her SFK and all I do there. I want to introduce her to Carla and my friends at work.

But I also don’t want to do any of that. I want to spend the entire weekend naked.

“When are you going to officially accept Troy’s offer?” my mom asks, breaking into my thoughts as I stare out at the waves.

I glance over at her. “It’s kind of fun to make him sweat it out. He wants my answer by September first, so…August thirty-first?”

She smacks me in the arm in jest. “Be nice. If your answer is yes, call him now. Nail it down. Get the contract, and make sure he shows you the money.”

“He will. He’s a good friend, and he’s been in this business a long time. He wouldn’t fuck me over that way.”

She raises a brow.

“Sorry. He wouldn’t screw me over that way.”

“Better,” she says, and I chuckle.

“I’ll do it when we get home,” I say.

We spend another hour or so at the beach, and once we arrive back at the apartment, I make good on my word to my mom. I sit at the kitchen table and pull up Troy’s contact information, and my heart starts to race.

I’m really doing this.

He really wants me to play even though he hasn’t seen me pick up a ball in three years.

And I really want to do it. I’m scared I’ll fail, but that’s a fear in anything in life, not just in being a professional athlete. What if I don’t fail? What if I soar? What if it’s even better than the first time I did this?

It’s a new team, and it’ll be a new dynamic—one that he wants me to lead. I love the idea of mentoring young players, of building a team with Troy and creating our own destiny.

I click the call button.

“You got an answer for me, Noah?” he answers.

“I do. Pending contract negotiations, of course, it’s a yes.”

“Fuck yeah !” he yells, and I laugh. “We’re really fucking doing this, man. This is our time .”

We never played on the same team. Troy played shortstop fourteen years for the Rockies, and I played my seven years with the Dodgers. The difference between us is that he retired a few years ago, while I was forced from the game due to an injury, and I decided to turn it into an early retirement.

Despite never having played together, we found a friendly rivalry on the field and we became close friends off it. He started taking more and more interest in charity events, and he invited me to many of them over the years. We lost touch for a bit when I stopped playing, mostly because of me. I isolated myself from my friends because I didn’t want to hear about how they got to play when I didn’t.

But Troy continued to reach out despite my silence. He’s a good friend, and even though we don’t talk as much as we once did, I’m excited to get back on the field with someone I know will support me one hundred percent in the dugout.

And I’m even more excited to make the move to Vegas…to start my life there and see where Sin City takes me.