Page 60 of Breakout Year
He wouldn’t get to stand in this kitchen again, admiring the line of Akiva’s back as he sliced apples. Akiva’s cuffs fell down his wrists until he pushed them back up, and Eitan lost himself in the hair on his forearms, in the competence of Akiva’s hands. For the second time this year—after crash landing in New York having been unceremoniously thrown out of Cleveland, contract un-extended—Eitan found himself missing something that was never really his to begin with.
“C’mon,” Akiva said, when he was done slicing, “we can eat outside.”
Akiva’s yard was a patio that was fraying at the edges with weeds, presiding over a lawn that was growing more stones than grass. Akiva unfolded two lawn chairs. One he sat on a patch of concrete marked with two long rust spots.
“You come here often?” Maybe Eitan shouldn’t tease him, given the conversation they were about to have.
Akiva’s smile tugged the corner of his mouth before he disciplined it away. “Every morning. I drink coffee out here before I daven.”
Eitan surveyed the yard again—the bare patches of soil and wilting grass, the rust of the chain-link fence separating Akiva’s yard from his neighbors—and tried to find something in this place that would inspire beginning his day in prayer. Let me take you away from this. Even as Akiva settled into what was clearly his favorite chair, as he balanced a plate bearing apple slices on the bony tops of his knees.
“Huh,” Eitan said belatedly.
“Yeah, I know, it doesn’t look like much.” Akiva dragged an apple slice through a pool of honey, then said the blessing just barely loud enough to be audible, fast enough that Eitan could only make out a blur of words.
“I forget what prayer we’re supposed to use for this one,” Eitan said, even if he knew perfectly well that it was the blessing for things grown on trees.
Akiva shot him a look—a knowing Akiva look that Eitan filed away for later—then recited the blessing again, louder and slower, as if he was blessing not just a plate of apples but also his neighbor’s high oak tree and all the other trees beside.
Obligingly, Eitan dipped an apple slice into honey then chewed it as Akiva did the same. The slices were already beginning to brown. Eitan would not find a metaphor in that, mostly because he wasn’t sure if that qualified as a metaphor, and he was going to save his important questions for things like asking what Akiva had meant by stop and this.
“I’ve lived here for about six years,” Akiva said. “After I quit baseball, I left home pretty soon after. I enrolled in college, but I couldn’t afford the dorms, and I didn’t want to take out a bunch of loans just to pay rent. I figured I owed enough as it was. Things got bad for a while. I was working a shitty retail job and barely making ends meet. The only place I could afford was this short-term rental place and I thought that was gonna be the worst part—but the worst part was not being able to afford even that.”
He shrugged and dipped another apple slice through honey, and Eitan would not rush him through this story—he knew how it ended, with Akiva sitting next to him, safe and relatively sound, even as some part of Eitan twisted up waiting to hear what happened next.
“I was gonna have to sleep in my car.” Akiva gave another shrug, this one markedly more defensive. “Mark and Rachel found out and let me crash in their guest room for a while, then floated me money for a deposit on this place and a few months’ rent. Even now, Mark won’t let me pay him back.”
Eitan got the not-unfamiliar urge to hug a complete stranger. He wondered if Mark was a Cosmos fan and if he had any use for season tickets or a personalized ballpark tour. “They sound like nice people.”
“They are.” Akiva’s voice tightened. “I tried to show my gratitude to them. I ran errands. I cleaned their house, even when they insisted I didn’t have to. I felt like I was trying to dig my way out of some place unrecoverable but if I could just get something right… I was determined to repay them. So I did cam work for a while.”
He said it like he expected Eitan to shout at him or possibly to get up and leave the patio suddenly enough to knock over his chair. “By cam work, you mean…” Eitan began.
Akiva lifted an eyebrow at him. “Stuff on camera. For money.”
“Right. Right, yeah, I know.” Eitan felt like he couldn’t move his limbs.
“I didn’t show my face much. There might be screenshots out there, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Eitan blinked, willing sensation back into his body. “I don’t care if people find out.” No, that wasn’t correct. “I mean, it’s not about me. Are you—” Okay felt enormously incomplete for what he was trying to say.
“I want you to remember,” Akiva said, “that I was twenty-two and broke and stupid.”
“I don’t think you could ever be stupid. I didn’t know you had to pay different amounts for different types of apples and got in trouble at the grocery store.”
“You’re not stupid, you’re…” Akiva searched for a word. “Sincere.”
“That’s a writer word for not smart.”
Akiva shook his head. “New Yorkers like to disguise ignorance with aggressiveness half the time. You’re brave enough to tell people when you don’t know something.”
“Well, I don’t know a lot.” Including how I’m supposed to feel right now or what I should say. Eitan held that in. Maybe Akiva needed someone who would listen. He could do that, if nothing else.
“Anyway,” Akiva said, “Mark found out about the cam work. He got pretty pissed off—he thought I needed more money and was too stubborn to ask for it. We had a big fight. I slept a night in my car just to show that if I needed to, I could. When he came to find me the next morning, I…” He looked down and turned a shade of red that Eitan had never seen him become. “…I, uh, tried to kiss him.”
Eitan’s brain sometimes went too rapidly for its own good. Now it moved slow, as if recalibrating every interaction he and Akiva had over the past month. Akiva was sitting there, ashamed that he’d tried to kiss someone out of a misplaced sense of obligation. Someone who’d given him money. “Oh.”
Akiva’s shoulders, already stiff, went even more rigid. “Mark turned me down, of course. He’s bi—he wouldn’t mind me telling you—but that doesn’t mean…” Akiva shook his head. “I was scared and lonely, and he was just so kind about it. Rachel knows and she was kind about it too. I think that was almost worse: how understanding they both were.”
