Page 20 of Heavy Hitter

He’s still joking around, but Lacey doesn’t laugh. “Wow,” she deadpans instead, “what a groundbreaking take on my extremely successful career as a multiplatinum performer. You should consider a second act as a music critic for CosmoGirl.”

Jimmy considers that for a moment, surprised by the sudden heat in her voice. “You know what?” he says. “Fair enough.”

“You know who else wrote a lot about his own life without anyone giving him shit about it?” she continues as if he hasn’t spoken. “Ernest Hemingway.”

“Point taken,” Jimmy agrees easily. “His pop songs are truly spectacular.”

“Shut up,” Lacey tells him, but he can hear that she’s smiling again, that she’s forgiven him. “Anyway, you’re just salty ’cause I haven’t written one about you yet.”

“Is that something I should anticipate for the future?”

“Maybe,” she says, in a voice that he happens to know means she’s about to wriggle out of her pajamas on the other end of the phone. “If you’re lucky.”

“Oh,” Jimmy promises, “I think we both know I’m lucky.”

***

HE SEEMS TO BE, ACTUALLY—ON THE FIELD, AT LEAST. JIMMY wouldn’t say their season has turned around, exactly, but it’s objectively looking a hell of a lot better than it was a couple of weeks ago. “It isn’t luck, fuckheads,” he reminds the guys over and over, standing up on the bench for his pregame captain sermons while Hugo scratches his balls through his uniform and Jonesy shoves more nicotine gum into his cheek. “It’s hard work and dedication and grit, and we’ve got it. We always have.”

Whatever it is, all at once the Birds are hitting more baseballs than they have all year long, a string of tidy wins lined up one after another like freshwater pearls on a church lady’s necklace. “That’s seven in a row,” Tuck points out when they beat the Pirates 8–5 a few days later, the two of them ambling back down the tunnel toward the locker room. The air smells like grass and sweat and popcorn. The hum of the crowd is still audible from the stands.

“Is it really?” Jimmy asks. That surprises him, not because he hasn’t noticed they’ve been winning but because he hasn’t let himself think of it as a streak until right this moment. Streaks, after all, are made to be broken. “Huh. Okay,” he says, answering his own question. “I guess it is.”

Tuck snorts. “What are you—don’t act like you’re so fucking cool, you piece of shit,” he says, shoving Jimmy not-that-gently in the shoulder. “Do you remember the last time we won seven in a row?”

“Nope,” Jimmy lies. He does, actually; it was six years ago, the first and only time they ever made it to the Series. “I do not.”

“Well then,” Tuck says, glancing at Jimmy sidelong. “Whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it.”

Jimmy ignores him, peeling off at the door to the locker room to go hit the showers. He hasn’t told anyone, obviously. What would he even say? I’m having a middle school phone call situation with the most famous woman on the planet, and it turns out she’s got the dirtiest mouth I’ve ever heard? It sounds insane. Jimmy has no idea what she’s after with him: If it’s an ego thing for her, the need to be perpetually admired. If maybe she’s just killing time. He could ask, he guesses—he would ask, if it was any other woman he liked as much as he finds himself liking her—but again: she’s Lacey Logan. And he is, for all his famous girlfriends, a leather sack full of grass stains and spit. It seems wiser, in Jimmy’s estimation, not to draw any more attention to that than is absolutely necessary. It seems smarter to play it cool.

Also—and not that he’s ever going to say this out loud in a million years—he can’t be 100 percent certain that whatever he’s got going on with Lacey isn’t part of why he’s playing so well all of a sudden. Jimmy doesn’t like to think of himself as superstitious, but he’s been in this game long enough to know that at the end of the day, most of it is mental. And a person doesn’t spend almost a decade and a half in the major leagues without getting a little funny about his good luck charms.

It’s fine, Jimmy tells himself when they win their eighth game in a row the following evening. Whatever. He’s not complaining.

Ike takes the train down from New York to see him, and they go to lunch at the Capital Grille. Ike has been Jimmy’s agent since Jimmy first got called up, a deeply unflashy Bronx native with a Peter Falk haircut and a face like a jack-o’-lantern two weeks after Halloween. “You still thinking you’re done after this season?” Ike asks, as they’re eating their steaks.

“Yep,” Jimmy says immediately, then thinks of what Tuck said the other night in Pittsburgh. Eight games in a row isn’t anything to get a hard-on about, but it isn’t nothing, either. It felt easier to be sure he was done back when they sucked. “I don’t know. I mean. Yeah, probably. Yes.”

Ike raises his bushy eyebrows. “So you don’t want to announce yet, I take it.”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy says again. “No. Not yet, I guess.”

“Well, since you seem to feel so strongly about it,” Ike says mildly, shaking a truly eye-popping amount of salt onto his mashed potatoes. “Look, Jimmy, can I ask you something? And first of all, you know I’m saying this as a person who would be delighted for you to stay out there on that field until the day you keel over in the middle of extra innings and we have to shoot you in your head like a used-up racehorse—”

“Thanks for that.”

“—but. Is it possible your, ah, reluctance to call it has anything to do with how it all went in Miami?”

Right away, Jimmy shakes his head. “What?” he says, reaching up reflexively to rub at his throbbing shoulder. “No. No, of course not. That was six years ago, Ike. I’m not losing sleep over that shit anymore.”

“You sure?” Ike presses. “Because I could understand not wanting to be definitively done without getting another shot at it. Nobody’s going to fault you for that.”

“Maybe not,” Jimmy says, trying not to think of the night sky in Florida in October. Trying not to remember the sear of muscle torn from bone. “But that’s not what this is.”

Ike looks at him for a long time. “Okay,” he agrees, shrugging at Jimmy across the table. “Eat your steak.”

***

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