Page 89 of Stone Vows

He laughs. “How could I forget? I’m a bit surprised you didn’t name your daughterSal.”

I sneer at him. “I’m notthatobsessed with it.”

“Oh, but you are. Sal’s Chinese food and Hawks baseball.”

Caden pats me on the back. “That’s my sis.”

“You should have seen her, Caden,” Kyle says. “She wouldn’t even let anyone speak if you were at bat. Or behind the plate. Or even on a highlight reel—especiallythen.”

“I wasn’t that bad,” I say, reaching in the bag to get the boxes out and spread them around the table.

Kyle raises his eyebrows in objection. “Eliz—sorry—Lexi, youwere. At first it was endearing, a woman so into baseball. But then as time went on, I became aware that it wasn’t baseball in general, it was one particular baseball player. And I’m not ashamed to say I was jealous as hell.”

Caden snorts beer through his nose. “Dude, that’s just wrong. Jealous of me and my sister?”

Kyle throws a pair of chopsticks across the table at him. “I didn’t know she was your sister back then.”

He leans over me to grab his favorite egg roll, and when he catches Ellie watching him, he does the sign for ‘mother’ and puts his hand on my arm.

He has no idea what his doing that just meant to me.

I watch him take a bite of the egg roll and then wrinkle his nose at it.

“What?” I ask. “Is it not good?”

“It’s fine,” he says, putting it down on his plate. “It’s just, I’ve had a lot of them over the past several months. They may have worn out their welcome with my taste buds. I might have to move on to spring rolls or something.”

“You’ve eaten at Sal’s a lot, huh?”

“Uh, I guess once or twice,” he says, looking embarrassed.

He went there. He went there forme. It was the only place outside the hospital that he associated with me. I can’t help my triumphant smile.

“What?” he asks, annoyed with himself for revealing what he did.

“Nothing,” I reply. Then I turn to Caden. “So, are you going to keep number eight, or go back to twenty-seven?”

“I think I’ll stick with eight,” he says around his food. “It’s brought me a lot of luck. I had seven home runs last season. And nowyou’reback. Lucky number eight.”

“Why did you change it?” Kyle asks him. “I thought it was kind of unusual for a player to change a number.”

“It is,” Caden says. “I grew up being number twenty-seven. It was the first number they ever assigned me when I started playing T-ball at age five.”

“Every year, he just kept getting better,” I say. “He impressed his coaches. The other players. He thought it was the number. It got to the point where if he couldn’t get number twenty-seven, he wouldn’t play for a team. I remember a few travel ball teams he turned down when he was twelve just because they already had a kid with the same number.”

“Really?” Kyle asks Caden in amusement.

“It’s a superstitious sport, man. People do crazy things in baseball.”

“But you changed it halfway through your first year with the Nighthawks. What happened?”

Caden nods at me. “Lexi went missing. It was a tribute to her.”

“How was it a tribute to Lexi?”

“Alexa Octavia Kessler,” Caden says. He looks over at me and we share a nostalgic smile. “My big sister always thought I should be number eight, not number twenty-seven. She said eight was the better number and that I should listen to my big sister and if I didn’t, bad things would happen. I guess my superstition about that overrode my superstition about baseball.”

“No shit?” Kyle says. “You’d think that story would have been all over ESPN. I never heard about it.”

---