Page 59 of Totally Opposed

Gramps calls Precious over and lifts her to his lap while everyone laughs, and Ryan dishes another helping onto Gramps’s plate.

“Alan thinks she hates him, but…” Ryan starts to explain.

“No buts. You’ve seen the gashes on my leg, the way that thing hisses at me the second I’m in the room,” I interject.

“And the way she just rubbed up against you to say hi,” Ryan adds, a smirk on his lips. “That was so scary.”

“It was. I had no idea what was under the table.”

“Because in a house with no other pets, it could have been anything?” Kelly adds.

“You would have freaked out, too,” I say, righting the chair and sitting back down, my heart still beating a million miles a minute.

“Would not,” she argues, but we both know she’s lying. When it comes to Gramps and his demon cat, we’re both always a little on edge. But tonight has been good. Great even, and as I look over at Ryan and Gramps deep in another conversation about the he grew up on, I can’t help but wonder, how did anyone ever let this guy go?

Chapter twenty-one

Ryan

“Tonight went better thanI thought it would,” Alan says as he hands me another plate to dry. We’re standing in his sister’s kitchen washing up while she sits on the couch chatting with their Gramps.

“How did you think it would go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Gramps would say something bad about baseball and piss off one of the guys.”

“Your Gramps loves baseball, though.”

“Yeah, but not our kind of baseball. You heard him. He called it a circus.”

He’s not wrong. But what I’m struggling to see is why that is a problem.

“It is, though. You see that, don’t you?”

“No. We’re baseball players, not clowns.”

The harshness in his tone is nothing I’ve heard from him before, and I’m starting to think it isn’t just Don who has a problem with the kind of baseball we play. Does Alan think of us, of himself as less than an MLB player?

I put the plate down and rest my hand on his forearm. “We are baseball players,” I say, trying to keep my voice low so that I don’t draw attention from Kelly and Gramps. “But we are clowns, too, and singers and dancers.”

“But why can’t he just see me as a baseball player?”

“Because you are so much more than that.”

He sighs and drops the plate he’s half washed into the soapy water in the sink and turns to face me.

“I just wish he’d come watch me. Come see how good I am.”

“Then ask him.”

“I did, and he said no. I asked him a hundred different ways and every time he’d make a comment about it not being baseball and why would he leave his house to go to some show when he could watch the real baseball on television.”

I glance over at Kelly and Gramps. How did he say no when Alan told him how much he wanted him to come watch him? How could anyone say no to those gorgeous, pleading eyes?

“And you told him you wanted him to watch you?”

He lowered his head a little to the side. “I asked him if he wanted to come to a game,” he says, leaning in close to whisper so they don’t hear. “I asked him to come. I might not have saidI want you to come watch me play,but I asked him and eventually, I just got sick of asking.”

“Hey, Gramps,” I call, and Alan immediately turns back to washing the plate he dropped earlier.

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