Page 62 of Breakout Year
Over text, Mark reminded him about Shabbat dinner.
Take the money, Akiva begged.
Bring some wine, came the response.
He quit trying to write, got in his car, drove to his parents’ house. Their old house. It used to be white with green trim. Now it was a color that was neither yellow nor tan, an unobtrusive paint job that made Akiva want to egg the place. The developers probably put in greige vinyl flooring like every other flipper. They probably thought of a kitchen with two sinks as an oddity and not a necessity that came from separating your milk dishes from your meat ones. My parents lost all that because of me.
He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles pulled white. If he held onto that, he wouldn’t do something foolish like dial Eitan’s number. I could be getting paid to?—
Eitan said his parents couldn’t put a price on certainty, but uncertainty, as Akiva knew, came with its own costs. Was there a price he’d put on the glowing feeling in his chest he got whenever Eitan called—a part of himself Akiva would have to sell to make rent?
When in doubt, throw someone from a train. He tried not to feel like that had already happened to him: being tossed from a train emotionally and making hard impact. In books, you could cut away from a character getting up, brushing gravel off themselves, testing for a twisted ankle or a bruised knee. You could edit out the grind of everyday living.
Not here. Here came slow and unexciting, and it was funny how the right decision was so often the one that made you feel the worst.
So he turned on his engine and slowly navigated home to confront a blank page he didn’t know how to fill.
23
Eitan
@shootthemoon (7:30PM): at least Rivkin showed up. The rest of the team is fucking hungover. Didn’t even hit my parlay.
@shootthemoon (8:41PM): fuck fuck there goes the fucking season
* * *
“I want to go to the community center,” Eitan said the following Tuesday, when he’d spent a listless weekend not messaging Akiva. He’d texted Connor, a set of increasingly urgent messages culminating with, Bro, did you change your number?? Only to be met with silence.
He’d groused at Williams in the clubhouse, circling the hot tub until Williams had told him to stop pacing and climb in already, then responded yeah dude, that sucks to Eitan’s complaints as if Williams could tell he was trying to pick a fight and wouldn’t let him. Vientos had given him advice. (Don’t text your ex.) Salenko had given a noogie. None of it helped.
Eitan was bored to the point that he didn’t even want to be around himself right now. When he got like this, the best cure was to get out of his own apartment and thus out of his own head.
Isabel looked up from where she was seated behind her office desk, jotting something in one of her many notebooks. “So go to the community center.”
“Where do you get all those notebooks anyway?” Eitan asked.
“I’ve been told I have an office supply problem,” she said, as if she fundamentally disagreed with that being characterized as a problem. “Why?”
“I have a friend who—” Eitan cut himself off. Because Akiva seemed like the notebook type: Eitan had once jokingly asked if he had a loyalty card at the stationery store, and Akiva said that of course he did. He didn’t know if Akiva still qualified as a friend, or if that was over too now that Akiva had fulfilled his contract to the letter. The past seven years must have made Akiva wary of fine print. “Never mind.”
Isabel’s forehead didn’t un-scrunch. Eitan wondered if PR people got hazard pay. If his legacy in New York would be an entry on his baseball-reference page and Isabel’s bar tabs or therapy bills. Maybe she wanted more fruit delivered. Fruit seemed doable.
“So is it a problem if I go to the community center without a whole camera crew?” he asked.
“You know, you could just volunteer.” She typed something on her computer, then swung the monitor around to show her browser: the community center’s website and about eighty bajillion tabs that all appeared to be various players’ Instagrams.
“Wow, you really do have to keep track of us.”
“Thank you for not posting things accusing our corporate sponsors of trying to turn people gay through rainbow-themed candle collections.”
“But it’d be fine if I said that about another company who wasn’t a sponsor, right?” It was more combative than Eitan should be, but he was feeling especially combative, and Isabel’s office was a safer place to do that than the clubhouse or in front of a reporter’s microphone.
Isabel scrubbed a hand down her face. “Yeah, it would be fine. That’s how this stuff works, and you know it.”
Eitan did know it. At least unlike Cleveland, Isabel wasn’t denying that the club’s first, second, and third priority was money. “Sorry,” he said. “The past couple days have been hard.”
“I got that sense. Did something happen?”
