Gemma laughed.
“It’s true. I have a couple essays sitting on my desk to prove it.”
She held her hands up. “I trust you.”
“Here’s your water.”
“Thanks.” Gemma took hold of the glass and nibbled on the remainder of her donut. Tim sat down next to her. “So there’s one question I’ve been wondering about since I walked into your place.”
“And what’s that?”
“Why do you have so many sloth things?”
“It’s not some weird obsession, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He grinned. “There’s actually two reasons: baseball and Costa Rica.” Rolling up his trouser leg, he exposed the tattoo of a sloth wearing a green baseball uniform holding onto a baseball bat. “This guy here is the logo for an exhibition baseball team called the Scottsdale Sloths. I played three seasons with them right out of college.”
The muscles in her forehead wrinkled. “Exhibition baseball?”
“Uh-huh. The Sloths are a baseball team that doesn’t focus on baseball. They focus on performance.”
“I’m confused. How does a baseball team perform? Do you sing and dance between innings?”
“Yup, but it wasn’t just between innings. We did it throughout the entire game. Think of it as if baseball were to be turned into a musical comedy show.” Locating the remote, Tim clicked on his smart telly and opened the SearchTube app. “It’ll make more sense if I show you.” Typing in the words “sloth ball,” he loaded a video onto the screen with baseball players in the same neon-green uniform as his tattoo.
Over the next five minutes, Gemma watched in fascination as the Scottsdale Sloths performed a Rockettes-style kick line, sang classic nineties pop songs, and assembled a cheerleading pyramid while playing a game of baseball.
She sat taller. “How have I never seen this before?”
“When I played for the team, it was still up-and-coming.” Tim laughed again. “We played mostly in the Scottsdale area, but now, thanks to social media, the Sloths are growing in popularity. They went on their first national tour last year.”
“Wow! And you played three years?”
“Uh-huh, I did. They were some of the best years of my life too. The Sloths gave me the second chance I never thought I’d have.”
“Because of your injuries?”
He nodded. “After I tore my rotator cuff, I was told by the doctors that my shoulder was one of the most messed up ones they’d ever seen. I didn’t have much cartilage left, and if I wanted to limit the number of problems I was going to have in the future, I had to give up playing baseball.
“At the time, it was one of the toughest decisions I ever had to make. I was nineteen and thought that the future was so far away. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t some surgery out there that could just fix me. It wasn’t until my dad took me to the UCLA Medical Center to see one of the top orthopedic surgeons in the country that the reality of the situation sank in.”
Gemma winced and placed a hand on his knee. “That must’ve been incredibly hard to overcome.”
She remembered being nineteen too, and how it felt to be so hopeful about making it big on the international stage. She’d dreamed of becoming the British National Champion and going to the World Championships and Olympic Games.
Unfortunately, her jumps were too inconsistent, and she’d never had enough difficulty in her routines to compete with the younger girls who kept rising in the ranks. By the time she was twenty-two, she learned her future lay in performing, not winning medals.
“I was in a dark place for the first couple of months, but eventually, I just accepted it,” Tim said.
“What helped you overcome it?”
“Comic books and my dad taking me on a long road trip. We had alotof time and space to talk and reflect on life. I also learned how to meditate. It helped me to be able to clear out my mind when things got too heavy.”
She adjusted the heat level on the pad. “Do you think you could teach me how to do that? I’m rubbish at trying to keep my mind empty.”
“Of course. We can do it now if you want.”
Gemma shook her head. “No, I need to hear the rest of your story first. I know it has a happy ending. Where do sloths fit into this?”
“Oh, the Sloths thing happened my senior year of college. I was heating up a cup of soup in the student union microwave when I saw a bright green flyer pinned to the corkboard, looking to recruit performers for a theatrical baseball team. The next thing I knew, I was filling out my contact info, answering a couple questions over the phone, and by the time I graduated, I had a job as a designated hitter playing for the Sloths.”
