I’m spiraling and they’re just staring at me, waiting for me to say something.
Fortunately, Vladimir is a saint among men. He’s out of the car and by her side.
“Ms Sullivan, I can take your bag,” he says. “I’m sorry, folks. This is a private car.”
“Right,” his wife, Jessie, says, biting her lip and glancing down at the baby in its carrier. I’m not even sure if it’s a boy or girl. “Sorry, we were waiting for our car to take us, but it’s a half hour late and we thought . . .”
“Take the car,” I hear myself saying, though I can’t quite believe the words as they fall off my tongue.
“What?” Vladimir says.
“What?” Shane says at the same time.
“Oh, we . . . we couldn’t. We’ll just wait,” she says.
“No, no, you have a baby out in the cold and it’s probably going to rain. Vladimir can take you wherever you need to go. I’ll just get an Uber to the field.”
Shane blinks at me, his vision seeming to clear for the first time. “The field?”
“Russell Field.”
“You work for the Eagles now?”
“For about a year,” I say, but shake my head. “You should go . . .”
“Wait, you live in New York?”
Seems like maybe he cut me out of his life just like I did him.
Not that it bothers me. It really doesn’t. It just reaffirms that leaving him, leaving that life behind, was the right decision. No matter how much it hurt.
“For a little over a year now.”
Shane and Jessie look at each other, eyes wide like they don’t quite know what to say to that, and I can’t imagine why it should matter.
Then something in my head pings, like a timer going off.
One of the reasons I’m so good at my job, why I can predict down to the smallest percentage point exactly how a baseball player is going to perform in a season, is because my brain tends to analyze the data it’s given and arrive at the most probable outcome.
And the only reason I can imagine either one of them would care about me living in New York is because they also live here, or maybe . . . are about to.
They really do havea lotof luggage.
Too much for just a vacation.
And who vacations in New York in early November?
No one.
“I didn’t think anything could get you out ofLA,” I manage to say.
“We don’t want Kaydance growing up there.”
“I grew up there,” I protest, though I have no idea why I’m even responding. Who cares why they moved to New York? I just need to get out of here. They can take the car, like I said. I’ll just get an Uber and maybe I won’t go in straight to work. Maybe I’ll just go home for a little while and take a long hot bath and then sleep for a few hours.
Yeah, that’s it. I’ll be refreshed and ready to pitch Stew and can pretend this never happened.
And then spend the rest of however long pretending that they don’t live here.
