Page 45 of Caught Offside

The Fireflies won it in the ninth.

In the visitors’ clubhouse, the assistant trainer crouched in front of him, put his thumbs on either side of Asher’s right knee, and pressed. Asher looked at the ceiling and let him.

“Swelling’s up from Tuesday,” the trainer said.

“It’s a catcher’s knee. It’s supposed to look like that. It’s character.”

“I can get you an MRI when we’re back home.”

“You can get me an ice bag and an Advil, and we’ll call it square.” He said it easy, grin already up.

It worked on most people. They saw the grin and stopped digging. The trainer held his eyes a second longer, then let it go and went for the ice.

He didn’t joke about the knee. Everything else was fair game: his dads, his swing, his love life, the four years of being a prospect instead of a player. But the knee sat too close to the one thing he couldn’t laugh off: who he’d be if his body gave out before his name ever got called. He left that question where it was. He showered, let the trainer tape the ice on, and carried his bag out to the bus.

Briggs dropped into the seat beside him with a gas-station sandwich and the settled air of a man with opinions.

“You’re quiet,” Briggs said around a mouthful. “You’ve been quiet since Tuesday. Quiet Asher is unsettling. It’s like when the dog stops barking, so you go check the yard.”

“I’m conserving energy. It’s a veteran thing. You’ll get there around year eight.”

“You’re doing the bit, but your heart’s not in it.” Briggs chewed. “Is this about the hockey guy?”

Asher kept his eyes on the dark fields unspooling past the window. Briggs knew there was a hockey guy. Most of the clubhouse didn’t. Asher didn’t bring that into the room. But Briggs caught things other people walked past, and Asher’s quiet was one of them. He’d listen if Asher wanted to talk. He was a good guy under all the bluntness. But Briggs’s idea of help was a hand on the shoulder, a beer, a there’s-other-fish pep talk. What was happening with Patrick didn’t fold into a clubhouse-sized box, and Asher didn’t have it in him tonight to go into everything that was, or more like wasn’t, going on.

Nobody had warned him about this kind of lonely. He had friends, real ones, guys who’d run through a wall for him. The baseball guys understood the grind and the depth chart and the waiting. His friends back home understood what it cost to clock a room before you reached for somebody’s hand. Almost nobody held both at once. He’d spent his whole life handing out different pieces of himself to different people and never setting the whole of it on one table because the whole of it weighed more than any single friendship was built to carry.

Patrick was the first one who’d gotten all of him at once. For a few months, Asher hadn’t had to hand somebody one piece and hold the rest back. And now, Patrick had gone quiet on him.

“Nah,” he said. “Just tired. Long trip.”

Briggs nodded and let it go. He held out half the sandwich. Asher took it. They rode the rest of the way without talking, which was its own kind of friendship, and Asher was grateful for it and a little ashamed of the gratitude.

The hotel was the same as every other in a minor-league city in the country: the polyester bedspread, the AC unit grinding under the window, the parking-lot light coming through the curtains in a stripe across the second bed.

Four years he’d done this: the bus rides, the box-spring beds, the road cities that blurred together until he couldn’t have named the one he was in. He used to find a kind of peace in the sameness of it, one minor-league city dissolving into the next. Now it just felt like being nowhere, repeatedly, while his real life happened without him.

He sat on the edge of the mattress with his phone and didn’t dial right away.

He knew how this went by now. Patrick answered texts. He picked up calls, most of the time. He said the right words, or words that were close enough to right that you couldn’t hold the gap up to the light and call it a gap. The withdrawal had no edges. There was no fight, no scene, no night you could circle on a calendar. There was only Patrick giving back a little less every day, so slowly that Asher kept losing his grip on whether it was even real.

He called anyway. Because the alternative was not calling, and Asher wasn’t ready to be a guy who didn’t call.

Patrick picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hey.”

It came out flat, and that one word told Asher everything. A week ago in Appleton, that same voice had been warm and easy, close to his ear, laughing at something dumb he’d said. Now it was the one Patrick used on people he didn’t know.

“Hey,” Asher said.

“How’d the game go?” he asked like he was reading it off a card.

“We won. I threw a guy out at third I had no business getting.”

“Good.”

The old Patrick would have wanted the rest of it, every pitch of it, just to hear Asher tell it. Tonight, he took the score and let it go.