Page 35 of Heavy Hitter

“Morning,” she agrees with a smile. “I made coffee. Or I, like, tried to make coffee, anyway. I’m not very good at it.”

Jimmy nods sympathetically. “Your many minions usually do that for you, huh?”

“Screw you,” Lacey says, but she’s smiling. “But yes. In my defense, your machine is a full spaceship.” She hands him a mug over her shoulder, then turns to face him, fingertips curling around the edge of the counter. “Can I ask you something?” she says, her expression full of consternation. “Why does one human person need so many bags of baby carrots?”

Jimmy throws his head back and laughs.

They drink their coffee in the pool, floating on their backs in the deep end, the sparrows chatting up in the trees and a playlist from Lacey’s phone drifting quietly out across the yard.

“I like this song,” Jimmy says, lifting his chin at the speaker. “Is this you?”

“What? No!” Lacey laughs. “You think I’d put myself on a playlist and just casually play it for you, all smooth-like, hoping you’d be into it?”

“I kind of think that, yes.”

Lacey rolls her eyes. “If I’m fishing for compliments, Big Man, you’ll know it,” she promises. “Anyway, no. It’s Henrietta Lang.”

Jimmy nods, listening for another moment: the contralto voice and the vaguely creepy lyrics, what he thinks might be a tenor guitar. “Are you guys pals?”

“Nah,” Lacey says, looking a little bashful. “We don’t really run in the same kinds of circles. I love her, though. I think she’s brilliant. I was maybe going to go see her in New York the night I met you, actually, but I chickened out at the last minute.”

“Why?”

“I told you,” Lacey says, her shrug just visible underneath the water. “I can’t just pop into other people’s shows like that. It would have been a total clusterfuck.”

“Really?” Jimmy has his doubts. He doesn’t want to, like, mansplain her own life to her or whatever, but it does kind of feel to him like maybe not everything needs to be quite as complicated as she’s making it. She’s famous, yeah, but it’s not like people are actually watching her every second. “Are you sure about that?”

“I am sure about that,” Lacey says firmly. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about me anymore. Let’s talk about something else instead. Let’s talk about baseball.”

That makes him laugh. “Just generally?”

“I actually know some stuff about it generally,” she confesses, trailing one hand through the bleachy blue water. “I watched the Ken Burns documentary, back when you and I first started texting.”

Oh, Jimmy is in trouble with this girl. “Did you really?” he asks, surprised and charmed in equal measure. “Isn’t it, like, ten parts?”

“Eleven,” Lacey corrects him. “I like to be informed.”

“I know that about you.” Jimmy smiles. “Well. We made the Wild Card Series,” he reports, a little embarrassed by the pride and excitement he can hear in his own voice as he tells her. “Did you and Ken cover what that is, or—?”

“Let’s pretend we didn’t.”

“It’s the opening round of the playoffs, basically,” Jimmy says, trying not to sound like a pedant as he gives her a quick and dirty primer. “We’re the number six seed—which is, to be clear, the worst you can be and still make it into the series—so Seattle, who’s third, is going to host us. Whoever wins those games goes to the Division Series, and then the League Championship after that.”

“And then the World Series and Disney World?”

“And then the World Series and Disney World.”

“You ever made it that far?”

“Not Disney World,” he confesses. “The other thing, once.”

Lacey nods. “I knew that, too, actually,” she admits, looking at him a little guiltily over the tops of her designer sunglasses. “I googled it.”

He smiles again, though only for a second. It wasn’t exactly a high point of Jimmy’s career. “You did, huh?”

“Six years ago, right? You got close.”

“I—” Jimmy opens his mouth, closes it again. “Yeah,” he says finally. “We got close.” Jimmy’s never played a season like that in his entire life, is the truth: the pieces clicking neatly into place from the very beginning, a crew of guys he loved like kin. Jimmy wasn’t surprised when they made it to the Series—none of them were—and he wasn’t surprised when they won the first three games against Miami, either. It felt inevitable that they were going to win it. It felt predestined that it was theirs to reach out and take.

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