Page 56 of Unwritten Rules
“I guess I didn’t think about it that way.”
“Garza—how’d he lose his fingers? Born that way? Accident?”
“He said it was an accident.”
“So, I guess I’d ask him what he wanted to focus on. If it was about the accident and recovery, we’d do that. If it’s about pitching now, we’d do that. If it’s about what he’d want kids going through the same thing to know, we’d do that. And probably a little bit of those things in whatever we end up with. But the point is that you get to control that narrative.”
“If I give you my agent’s email, can you all work out the money?”
“Sure,” she says, and then tells him she’s ready to write it down.
The three days between the All-Star Classic and the start of the second half of the season always feel like the shortest and longest days of Zach’s life—but this year especially so. He prints out their season schedule, circling when the Swordfish are playing against New York: a series in a few weeks, like Eugenio said, and another in New York in late September. He crosses off the days each morning, checking, and then rechecking his phone each time it buzzes to see if Eugenio texts him. And he’s disappointed when he doesn’t, though Zach doesn’t text him either, unsure of what to say.
It’s hot in Miami in July, the kind of hot they only get in Baltimore on the worst days of the year, the pressing, insistent kind of heat that makes Zach sleep all afternoon before going to the beach. He spends time at the ocean, watching the mild Florida surf, the lights that come on as the sun sets.
He eats dinner at his favorite restaurant, the one where the owner has stories about the Dominican winter league and forgives Zach’s emerging Spanish. He thinks about bringing Eugenio there. About if Vladimir, the owner, has any stories about legendary Venezuelan players. About what Eugenio would think of the food.
He ponders texting someone, an old hookup, one who’d probably come over if Zach asked, but he doesn’t. He ponders the under-decorated walls of his apartment, trying to see them through someone else’s eyes, and then spends the day filling them, hanging a few things he got while in Oakland. A framed scorebook page from his first big-league game. Prints from a comics convention: Hawkeye, with a hearing aid curving over one ear; Bobby Drake, commanding ice.
A picture of Julia Child wielding a mallet he got Eugenio for his birthday, after Eugenio mentioned her show was one of the first to have closed captioning. The one that Eugenio left behind when he left.
He finds a box at the back of one of his closets, tape still on it from the move. He works it open with a key. In it are a bunch of graphic novels he forgot about, and he puts them on his increasingly less bare bookshelf, next to a William Hoy biography and his mother’sNew York TimesJewish Cookbook.
The box also has a digital picture frame. Once charged, it takes a minute to blink on. A set of pictures his mother loaded appears: Zach, dressed up for Purim. Eitan in his too-big Bar Mitzvah suit, Aviva next to him in a floral dress and shiny beige tights. A Havdalah dinner at their house, the one where their cousin set his shirt moderately on fire holding a candle, and Zach grabbed a pitcher of water and dumped it over his head.
“I found the picture frame you got me,” he says, when he calls his mom. “I guess I never finished unpacking.”
She flew down to Miami when he first moved in, when all he had was a couple suitcases and his plants, whatever stuff he crammed in a U-Haul. And went with him to get a new bedframe and mattress, called to set up his internet and cable when he didn’t want to deal with talking to someone on the phone.
“It’s good you’re not playing in that farkakteh Oakland stadium anymore,” she said the first time he took her to Swordfish Park. Though she stared at its roof as if in disagreement before saying, “I’m glad it has a roof. You could get sun poisoning in this heat.” As if Baltimore isn’t equally humid at high summer.
They played catch in one of the lush parks that patchwork the city. Zach found his old fielder’s gloves and gave her the smaller of the two, even though it dwarfed her hand. He hadn’t oiled it recently, and it was dry in patches, the lacing a little frayed.
“Next time, I’ll bring mine,” she said. Her old glove from when she played various pickup games, something as methodically tended as the rest of her house. “A good glove is like a good marriage. With the right investment and care, it should last forever.”
“Show me around,” she says, now, and he gives her a tour—the kitchen, where he needs to wipe crumbs off the counters. His living room, the comic books stacked on his coffee table.
“It’s not, like, great literature or anything,” he says, and she tells him about the novel her book club chose, which sounds both convoluted and sad.
“I used to look up the SparkNotes to pretend that I did the reading. But now I just bring a second bottle of wine and listen to Charna Friedman talk about her useless ex-husband.”
He shows her the view from his balcony, downtown Miami, the ocean a distant blue platter, talking about how the streets flood and drain during hurricane season, and reassures her his building has a generator.
“The place looks nice,” she says when he’s done. “Like it belongs to a person.”
“Not a baseball player?”
“Not someone who’s moving out in October. I guess you’re considering not exercising your option. It would be nice if you were closer to home. The O’s could use a good catcher.”
“What couldn’t the O’s use?” he says. There’s an email sitting in his inbox from his agent. A reminder, broken down in small, baseball-player-friendly terms, about the mutual option he has in his contract for after this season. That the team could decline to pick up his salary for the coming season, making him a free agent. That he could decline the team’s offer, elect free agency, and go somewhere else. “But, no, I haven’t thought about the option, really. Besides, I’ll be thirty-two. What’s that in dog years?”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to think about it. If you want to go somewhere that’s not a contending team—well, it could be near us.”
“I don’t mind Miami.” Because at least here his parents won’t set him up with their friends’ daughters. “The food down here is good. There’s beaches.”
“Maryland has beaches.”
“Mom.”
