Page 88 of Diamond Ring
July
Alex
“Which house is it?” Jake says as he pulls the rental truck onto the street where Alex’s family lives. “Never mind. I can probably guess.”
Courtland didn’t say anything other than “Don’t be late,” when Alex announced he was going to stay with Sofia rather than at the team hotel, even when he added that Jake would too. Because guys sometimes do this: the desire for a home-cooked meal and a familiar pillow outweighing yet another stay in a sterile hotel. And they sometimes take teammates with them—because a truth universally acknowledged is that ballplayers areweirdabout each other in a way clubs mostly ignore.
Jake pulls the truck into Sofia’s driveway at Alex’s say-so, then nods to the house. “It’s very purple.”
Alex’s shoulders stiffen. Because the house is purple—a painting project one summer—and has the faint air of being haunted, with porches and gables and a slightly listing façade. Behind it, his aunts’ sprawling garden, a shed he helped put up when he was fourteen and Sofia deemed him old enough to operate the miter saw. A beehive that’s maintained by a friend of theirs, a set of pieces from Evie’s sculpture phase, a thousand stories he wants to tell with equal parts pride and embarrassment.
“It’s very you,” Jake says. With it, a kiss laid on his cheek.
Sofia comes out on the porch to greet them, hugging Alex. For a second, he inhales her familiar smells, candle smoke and custom-blended tea. They look alike, enough that strangers always defaulted to calling her his mom until he corrected them: the same dark hair as his father had and clocking in at about the same height, though Sofia’s gotten shorter with age. “Evie will be by tomorrow,” she says. “She has to get up for work.” The latter with some criticism to it.
She turns to Jake. Alex has seen her give people all manner of looks—tarot clients, Alex’s scummy band friends, his scummier high school teammates—but never with a sweeping assessment bordering on New England cold. Even Jake rocks back a little before offering a smile and a hand that Sofia shakes.
Inside the house, Alex is overcome by two sensations: the rightness of being home and nerves at Jake seeing this place for the first time. He glances at Jake, looking for indications of amusement. For the polite condescension with which people greet Alex’s family.
“This is kind of how I imagined it,” Jake says finally.
“Messy?” Because it is—or if not messy, at least untidy, andfuck, Alex didn’t really consider what it might be like for Jake being in a house with a record collection arranged by vibe and years-long projects that are picked up and discarded and picked up again.
Jake shakes his head, smiling. “Just nice.”
Alex’s room has changed a lot in the fifteen years since he left for the minors: the gradual process of replacing a teenager’s room with an adult’s, then a more rapid redecoration when he dragged himself back last year to spend the offseason in weather that matched his mood.
The bedframe, custom-built by one of Sofia’s carpenter friends, occupies most of the room. Built-in shelves contain intermixed relics of Alex’s baseball and musical careers—trophies and old gloves and a few guitars he brought back with him from Seattle. A place that’shismore than anywhere else he’s lived, a room that seemed impossibly large when Sofia first showed it to him when he was an eight-year-old and let him pick out what color he wanted the walls. A room that seems smaller now, with Jake wheeling in a suitcase.
Jake looks around at the profusion of stuff, at the big bed with its handmade quilt. “Thank you for inviting me.” Like he might say to an acquaintance, if not for the slight flush to his cheeks.
Alex wants to kiss him, so does, a kiss that gets longer and is only interrupted by the clatter and clash of drums. “Marianne’s practicing,” Alex shouts, though her drumming has a particular angry cadence like she’s trying to resolve a fight.
Downstairs, Marianne is at her drum set. She stops mid-stroke to get up and hug him. He was nine or so when Sofia cautiously introduced them to one another, and he remembered wondering what Sofia was doing with someone so ordinary-looking, until Marianne rolled up her sleeves to reveal her tattoos.
Jake seems to undergo a similar assessment, taking in what Marianne calls her “office-worker drag” before registering the sleeves under her shirt are body art.
She offers a hand in greeting. “You must be Jake.” Said more warmly than Sofia’s welcome, but with a handshake stiff enough that Jake winces and tries to cover it.
“You all eat yet?” Alex asks.
“Food’s in the slow cooker.” She leads them both to the kitchen like Alex hasn’t been fixing his own meals since he was ten.
Dinner is sweet potato and black bean chili, homemade bread, honey collected from their backyard hive, a joint they pass between them out on the porch, Jake wrapped in one of Alex’s sweatshirts despite it being almost seventy degrees out. He burrows into Alex’s side, claiming a chill, not that Alex minds. For a while, the world is Marianne’s drumming and the bobbing yellow lights of fireflies.
“You ever think of moving back here?” Jake says.
A question Sofia has asked him too. “I already did. I gave Eric the condo, so I don’t really have somewhere else.”
Jake’s eyebrows go up. “Gavehim the condo?”
“Figured it was the ‘two years stuck in the closet’ tax.” Maybe it’s the joint or just the experience of being here, but he adds, “That’s not something I want to do again.”
“Do you want to tell guys on the team?”
A question that Alex has been turning over since that hallway encounter with Gordon. Ayessits under his tongue. “I’ve thought about it.”
Jake nods like it doesn’t surprise him. “Never really had to tell other players. Either I wasn’t with the team long enough for it to matter. Or”—he goes a slight pink—“they probably picked it up from context.”
