“We talked about it before I left and we haven’t seen Charlie like this in a long time, not since . . .” He trails off, like he said too much.
“No since what?”
“You know he was married before, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. He hesitates and I let out a frustrated breath. “If you want to say something to me, Javy, just say it, otherwise, leave it alone.”
“Gemma . . . she fucked him up. They were together since high school and then she just reneged. Wanted a different kind of life.”
“Okay, so, what does that have to do with me?”
“I haven’t seen him this happy since, I don’t know, the early days, when we still had our careers ahead of us, when we thought we’d win over and over again and that it would never end, you know?”
“Yeah, I do,” I agree, remembering my freshman year at Cal.
“And then we didn’t and then Gemma left and things got rough there for a minute. He got over it, moved on, but then the game, it started to catch up to us, me first and then him. So to see him like this again, after all this time, and we haven’t even gotten on the field yet. It means something.Youmean something to him.”
“He means something to me too,” I admit, watching him balancing our drinks – two beer bottles and my margarita that I insisted I wasn’t going to drink – as he heads back to the table. “But I have a rule about office relationships and it’s served me well the last decade. What would that make me if I broke it now?”
“It would make you human,” Javy mutters, but that’s all he’s able to get out before Charlie arrives.
“Another round, on me,” Charlie says, about to slide into the space beside Javy, but his friend nudges him back, leaving the booth.
“Gotta hit the head and then call the wife,” Javy calls over hisshoulder, leaving us very much alone, and I have a feeling he won’t be coming back any time soon.
“You alright, Sullivan?” Charlie asks, as I take a very, very long sip from my drink.
“Did you know your best friend is incredibly annoying?”
“Shit, what did he say?”
“Nothing, just . . . he reminded me of something.”
“What?”
“My divorce.”
“You were talking about your divorce with Javy?”
“No, he was talking aboutyourdivorce and it reminded me of mine.”
“I thought you said the guy cheated on you?” Charlie asks, furrowing his brow. “Gemma didn’t . . . at least not that I know of.”
“No, it was more about making promises and then not keeping them.” I stop, but he tilts his head, silently asking me to continue. “Shane and I, we had our lives, he worked in finance, I was with the Dodgers. We were, you know, doing what we set out to do, we were happy, it was what we talked about, what we said we both wanted. Putting off kids until later, if ever, climbing to the top of our careers and then, one day, he just reneged and, before I knew it, he was quitting his job and playing house.”
“So not the same, but definitely not completely different,” he says. “Gemma wanted kids and didn’t want me to travel so much and, to this day, I really wonder if she thought I was going to quit baseball, even though she knew that it was the only thing I ever wanted. Or maybe she realized that I wanted it more than I wanted her.”
“That’s what Shane said. That he couldn’t compete with my job and he didn’t want to.”
“And now here we are, however many years later . . .”
“Three.”
“Ten for me,” he admits, “alone.”
“Alone, together,” I correct him, and then nod to the other table. “Three kids. Maybe four.”
He snorts. “Twenty-six of them once the season gets going, overgrown teenagers with more money than they know what to do with and more energy than I can ever remember having.”
