Page 53 of Heavy Hitter

“Of course,” she replies. “You too. And hey, good luck out there tonight.”

Outside the autumn light is toasty, the air still decently warm if you stand directly in the sun. Jimmy detours by the farm instead of going directly back to the city, leaving the Tahoe running in the driveway and wandering around the back of the house. It’s been a couple of weeks since he’s been out here and he was expecting the garden to be mostly buttoned up for the year, but as the dogs trot gamely along behind him down the gravel path he realizes with a jolt of surprise that everything is still busy growing: The bees are still buzzing lazily around the flowers. The tomatoes are still red on the vines. Jimmy’s lived in Maryland for a decade and a half now, but still he manages to forget this every single year: back in Utica the grass on his mother’s front yard will have frosted over, but here the growing season doesn’t finish until damn near Christmas. In a lot of ways, this is actually the best part.

“How about that, huh?” Jimmy says, reaching down to scratch the dogs underneath their soft, graying muzzles. “Turns out it’s not over yet.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Lacey

HE DOESN’T CALL, OBVIOUSLY.

Not that Lacey thought he was going to, but.

She hoped.

She flies back to LA the morning after their horrible fight in his apartment. After all, what else is she going to do, spend the rest of her life alone in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Baltimore wearing her stupid Jimmy Hodges jersey? Not like she’s never been dumped before, she consoles herself. She still has the playlist on her phone from last time, so. That’s convenient. It’s called Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle, which Lacey thought was very clever seven months ago but now just kind of makes her want to barf.

Javi picks her up and they take the service elevator downstairs beside a maintenance guy clutching an industrial vacuum cleaner and not even bothering to pretend he isn’t staring at her. “Tough break last night,” he says sympathetically as they whoosh toward the parking garage. “How’s your boy Hodges doing?”

Lacey musters her most beguiling smile, hoping her face isn’t noticeably puffy, that this stranger isn’t going to think too hard about why apparently she slept here last night and not at Jimmy’s condo in Fells Point. “Oh, he’s fine,” she promises airily. “He’ll be okay.”

She knows he will, too, the way he’s wired. That’s the worst part.

The problem with the tour being over is there’s nothing to do to distract herself. Back in Malibu she wanders the house feeling restless and edgy and out of sorts: picking things up and putting them down again, walking into rooms before abruptly realizing she has no idea what she’s there for. She picks a low-hanging fight with a Republican sports columnist from the Wall Street Journal. She calls her real estate agent and asks him to put together some listings in the Hollywood Hills. She writes a moody piano ballad, the chorus of which is an extended metaphor about Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, then rips it out of her notebook and throws it into the garbage.

“What do you think about me doing some surprise dates while I’m here?” she asks Maddie, the two of them and Claire eating superfood-packed grain salads from Erewhon in Lacey’s backyard as a pair of hummingbirds zip though the jasmine that rings the pool.

“Here?” Maddie asks, sounding surprised. “Like, in LA?”

“Yeah!” Lacey says, briefly buoyed by the idea. She learned her lesson about lying, though she hasn’t told the two of them the whole truth, either, just mentioning as casually as possible after her trip to Baltimore that she and Jimmy had decided to lie low while he focused on the playoffs. “At the Greek or someplace, maybe? Something intimate, just real fans. We could run a contest for tickets.”

Maddie’s gaze flicks for half a second over to Claire. “We could,” she hedges, “but the logistics of that might get complicated on such short notice.”

“Well, sure,” Lacey says, “but not so complicated that we couldn’t make it happen, right? I mean, we’ve certainly done harder things.”

“We certainly have,” Maddie agrees carefully. “I do think, though, that in light of the headlines, there might be some danger of overexposure.”

“Oh,” Lacey says, feeling abruptly foolish. The press coverage has been... bad, pages and pages of commentary about how Lacey is directly responsible for the collapse of Jimmy’s career, the Baltimore Orioles, and major league sports in general. It’s not that she didn’t expect that—of course she expected that—but she’s surprised by how true it feels even though it’s objectively not, even though his team just took the League Championship and the prevailing wisdom seems to be that they’ve got a pretty good shot at winning the World Series, too. Of course, Lacey is out of his life now, so. Maybe everyone else knew what they were talking about after all. “Right. Totally.”

“Could be better to let people miss you for a few weeks,” Maddie continues, spearing an artichoke heart on her fork.

“Besides,” Claire jumps in, “you’ve been going a million miles an hour for months now. No shame in taking a break before the European leg.”

“Of course,” Lacey agrees. “I should rest.”

She... doesn’t rest. She can barely even sleep, just lying there all night, every night tangled in the sheets, rehashing that last argument with Jimmy over and over in her mind. She doesn’t know why this feels so much worse than it did with Toby, why it feels like some kind of yawning hole has opened up where her heart and lungs used to be. She and Jimmy barely knew each other, she reminds herself. Whatever happened between them was, unequivocally, a rebound fling. He’ll go off and play in the World Series and she’ll go to Europe on tour and they’ll be funny, slightly wistful anecdotes in each other’s memoirs one day, and if, in the meantime, she keeps thinking about his stupid farm and his stupid horses and his stupid good face, the tiny crow’s feet around his eyes when he smiles, well, that’s nobody’s business but Lacey’s own.

She googles Jimmy Hodges + postseason.

She googles Jimmy Hodges + breakup.

She throws her phone across the room.

***

DAYS PASS. LACEY WALLOWS. SHE SPENDS LONG NIGHTS IN HER leggings with her laptop warm on her lap and her phone in her hand, reading through Tumblr posts and Twitter threads, clicking over to the Explore tab on Instagram. She taught the algorithm a long time ago to feed her basically only posts about herself, which used to feel satisfying but now just feels a little bit sick, like she’s an ouroboros consuming her own content in an endless, queasy loop. She needs to get a hobby. Hell, she needs to get a life.

There is one post that catches her eye, though, a cheeky selfie of Henrietta Lang in front of a cluster of palm trees: Los Angeles, the caption reads, I am in you! Come see us tonite at the El Rey Theatre. The photo is time-stamped from this morning, which means the show doesn’t start for—Lacey clicks over to Henrietta’s website to confirm—a little over six hours.

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