Page 2 of Heavy Hitter

Lacey grits her teeth so hard she feels it in her neck. “Sure,” she says. “I’ll text you her contact info in the morning.”

“Who are you with?”

“Just Matilda.”

“Oh, I love Matilda!” her mom exclaims, though they’ve never actually met each other. Lacey finds it’s best to spend time with her mom one-on-one. “Tell her I said hello.”

Back at the table Matilda is taking video of the bustling restaurant, brow furrowed in concentration like Martin Scorsese with an iPhone Pro. “One more drink?” she asks. “There’s a place near Hudson Yards that’s supposed to be fun.”

Lacey hesitates. She’s got a flight out first thing tomorrow morning, the first of six shows over two weekends in Toronto tomorrow night. She should go back to the hotel, do her hour of potions, chug her dutiful liter of water, and go to sleep with the white noise machine humming on the nightstand beside her.

“One more drink,” she agrees, and tucks her phone back into her purse.

Outside the restaurant a small crowd has gathered: a few photographers she recognizes and a trio of girls in TEAM LACEY T-shirts, plus some curious tourists lured by the promise of a celebrity sighting. Lacey glances up over their heads at the tops of the buildings and thinks of Henrietta Lang stepping onstage a few blocks from here, her red hair long and wild and her voice like a flamethrower in the darkness. The night isn’t over yet, Lacey decides, feeling suddenly impetuous. There’s still time for something to happen.

“A spinning wheel,” she announces, raising her voice so Matilda can hear her over the sounds of the screaming, flashbulbs still exploding all around them. “That’s what I’m going to send.”

Chapter Two

Jimmy

THEY GET THEIR ASSES HANDED TO THEM AT YANKEE STADIUM IN a truly spectacular fashion, and by the time they get back to the hotel after the game all Jimmy wants is a burger from room service and never to talk to anyone again for the rest of his natural life, but Tuck catches him in the lobby and reminds him that Rose is in town with some friends tonight. “Come on, man,” Tuck says when Jimmy tries to beg off. “It makes her think I’m cool and popular when I get the whole team to come out.”

“You are unequivocally neither one of those things,” Jimmy promises, tapping his key card as they step into the elevator. Then he looks at Tuck’s hopeful face and sighs. “Text me when you pick a place.”

In the end it’s almost half the team piling into a motorcade of Ubers headed downtown: Tuck and Jonesy and a bunch of the guys from the outfield, plus a couple of the new call-ups whose names Jimmy keeps forgetting, kids so young they still have acne dotted all along their greasy hairlines. He swears they look more like babies every single year. “That’s because you’re a bag of fuckin’ bones, you grizzled bastard,” Tuck says whenever he mentions it. Jimmy guesses he’s got a point.

The bar—club, whatever—is on the top floor of a fancy hotel, high ceilings and an enormous roof deck that looks out over the water, a view of the Hudson River that might make a certain kind of person feel sentimental about New York. Jimmy’s drinking a beer and listening idly as Jonesy and Tito insult each other’s mothers when suddenly Tuck elbows him in the ribs.

“Shit,” Tuck says, motioning toward the corner. “Isn’t that—”

Jimmy follows his gaze to a cordoned-off VIP area—the team is also in a VIP area, allegedly, but all at once Jimmy understands that theirs isn’t the real one, that there’s another area within the VIP area that’s for actual celebrities. There’s a curtain, lush green and thick-looking, but it isn’t quite closed all the way.

“Oh, fuck me,” Ray says, popping up in his seat like a prairie dog. “Is that Lacey Logan?”

It is in fact Lacey Logan, Jimmy sees now, seated on a low couch with her long legs crossed demurely at the ankles. She’s with the other girl she’s with all the time, the actress from the survivalist thing on HBO, the one with the face that’s kind of mean. “Stars,” Jimmy concedes, taking a swig of his beer. “They’re just like us.”

“They are nothing like us,” Tuck corrects, gazing longingly in the post-apocalyptic pirate queen’s direction.

“Isn’t your literal fiancée supposed to be meeting us here any minute?” Jimmy asks him. Tuck scratches his eyebrow with his middle finger instead of answering.

Jimmy smirks, glancing over at the curtain one more time before turning his attention back to the guys, pulling Tito into a different conversation before things with Jonesy get too heated and they all wind up getting their asses kicked out onto Tenth Avenue. Rose arrives with a gaggle of her girlfriends, tufted and patterned and boring as a suite of expensive furniture, and they order another round of drinks. They went to dinner in the Meatpacking District before they got here, but pretty soon Jimmy is hungry again; he wonders if there’s a food menu at this place, though he already knows that if there is it’s going to be full of raw fish and various gourmet foams. He’s about to order buffalo chicken sliders to his hotel room and call a car to take him back uptown when Ray gets unsteadily to his feet. “I’m going to go say hello,” he announces.

Jimmy looks up at him, confused. “To who?” Then, as it dawns on him: “To Lacey Logan? Oh, buddy.” Jimmy shakes his head. “Please don’t.”

“Why not?” Ray asks, looking wounded. Ray is twenty-one, maybe twenty-two at the outside, dressed in jeans and an oversized polo shirt; he was wearing an Orioles cap when they got here, but the bouncer downstairs made him take it off before they got in the elevator, and his hair is a little bit matted. “We’re both Very Important Persons, right?”

“The opacity of that curtain suggests otherwise,” Tuck points out.

Ray ignores him. “She’s from the Midwest,” he goes on, with the authority of a seasoned Wikipedian. “I’m also from the Midwest.” Then, like he’s trying to convince them: “She’s on the rebound, my dudes.”

Jimmy thinks he heard something about that, actually: Lacey Logan breaking up with some skinny nice-guy comedian from SNL his ex-wife Rachel used to like. The guy was on coke, or the guy was cheating? Maybe both. Jimmy is about to ask Ray for the details, if only to try and distract him into sitting back down and drinking a glass of water until his blood alcohol level dips beneath the legal limit, but the kid is already trotting off across the club like Tom Cruise gunning it down the runway in an F-14, all aviators and flight jacket. Jimmy can practically hear the theme music playing in his head.

“Well?” Tuck says expectantly.

Jimmy looks back. “Well what?”

“You’re his captain, Jimmy. As far as that young man is concerned, you are his father. You need to go and save him from himself before he winds up in jail.”

---