Page 13 of Heavy Hitter

“Did you hit a home run?”

“Did I—no,” he says, laughing, a little taken aback. “That’s not really something that happens every time.”

Lacey hmms. “I think if I was a baseball player I would try to hit a home run at every game.”

“That’s... solid strategy,” Jimmy agrees. “I’ll be sure to mention it to the rest of the team.”

“Thank you.”

He rubs at his beard for a moment, feeling the curve of his own smile under his palm. “What about you?” he asks—shoving a pillow behind his back, trying to get comfortable. “How was your night?”

“It was good,” she reports. “Well, mostly good. My dancing was a little stupid on the bridge during ‘Fameland’—that’s one of my songs that I do, I don’t know if you—?”

Jimmy laughs out loud. “It’s one of your songs that you do, huh?” “Fameland” was the number one record in the US for, like, thirty-three consecutive weeks last year. “You know, I think I’ve heard of it.”

“Okay, well!” Lacey laughs, too, huffing a little. He can picture the exasperated face she’s making on the other end of the phone. “I’m just, like, contextualizing. I don’t know what you listen to.”

“Sea shanties, mostly. The occasional German opera.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.”

“Not at all.”

“Love that for you,” Lacey says. “Anyway, there’s this one turn that I can only ever nail, like, eighty percent of time, and tonight wasn’t one of them, so I’ll just, you know. Be here perseverating on that nonstop until next Thursday night.”

Jimmy knows better than to tell her that probably nobody noticed. “Yeah,” he says instead. “I know how that goes.”

“I get too in my head sometimes.”

“I hear that.” He reaches for another pillow, trying not to groan with the effort. He took some high-test Motrin earlier, but it isn’t doing much. “So you’re off for a few days now, right? What’ll you do?”

“I’m flying back to LA first thing tomorrow,” she says, rustling around a little. He wonders if she’s getting ready for bed, what she sleeps in. What she’d look like in his T-shirt and nothing else. “I’ll see some friends, take care of some admin stuff. Water my plants.”

“You water your own plants?”

“I do, as a matter of fact,” she informs him a little haughtily. “When I’m home.”

“Me too.”

“You have a lot of plants?”

“I have a farm, actually.”

“Wait.” That stops her. “Do you really?”

“Small one,” Jimmy admits. “Fourteen acres, up in Baltimore County.”

“What do you farm?”

“I don’t know,” he says, faintly embarrassed all of a sudden. The guys love to tell him how corny he is, how he’s Old MacDonald. On his birthday they got him overalls and a straw hat. “Regular farm shit. Vegetables, mostly. I’ve got a little orchard.”

“Animals?”

“Horses,” he says. “Some chickens. Coupla dogs.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, well.” Jimmy shrugs into the pillows. “I needed a project after my divorce. And I’m not really that into cars, so.”

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