“You pitched the game of your life last Thursday,” my father says, and his eyes move to Reece with the particular dissecting focus that has undone better men than most. “You threw a complete game shutout in a playoff situation. Your command was flawless.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve been watching you since you came up through the minors. I’ve watched you pitch angry, pitch distracted, pitch hungover once…” he raises an eyebrow, “… don’t think I didn’t know, and pitch with a shoulder that should have been on ice.” He pauses. “Last Thursday was different.”
Reece doesn’t answer immediately. Then, “Yeah, it was.”
“Because of my daughter.”
“Because of a lot of things.” Reece sets down his glass. “Because I’ve spent three years pitching for everyone else’s expectations, and somewhere this season I remembered why I loved it. Because I stopped running from the things that matter and started throwing toward them.” He looks at me briefly, then back to my father. “Ava is a part of that. She’s a big part of it, but she’s not the whole story, and I won’t reduce her to a reason my numbers went up.”
My father is quiet.
Outside, a car passes. The city does what the city does, enormous and indifferent, while the three of us stand in my small kitchen with the sauce simmering on the stove.
“You should have told me,” Dad says finally, and he’s looking at me now.
“I know.”
“The hiding…”
“I know, Dad.”
“It’s not what I taught you.”
“No.” I meet his eyes. “It’s what I taught myself. Because I was scared of exactly this conversation.” I set down my glass. “I’m not scared of it anymore.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at Reece. Then he does the thing I have seen him do at the end of difficult meetings, the slight exhale, the almost imperceptible shift in the set of his shoulders, the decision made.
He picks up the wine glass Reece poured for him from the counter.
“If you hurt her…” he says to Reece, conversationally, as though discussing batting averages, “… I will make the remainder of your contract the most educational experience of your professional life.”
“Understood,” Reece says.
“And you…” Dad turns to me, “… stop making things harder than they need to be. You always did.”
“Genetics,” I tell him.
Something shifts in his face. It’s not a smile, not fully. It’s the reluctant softening of a man who has already arrived at an answer and is adjusting the rest of himself to match it.
He raises his glass.
“The pasta had better be worth it,” he says.
“It always is,” I tell him.
We eat.
A week later, the Wildcats are home.
I find a seat in section 214, the same box where I sat the first time, the night I told myself I was there for the fresh air and definitely not for a particular pitcher. The stadium hums at a frequency I’ve spent a year pretending to be immune to and have long since given up resisting.
The thing about watching Reece pitch when you know him, when you know the way he breathes before a difficult batter, the way his shoulders drop when he’s found his rhythm, and the specific stillness that comes over him right before the ball leaves his hand, it becomes impossible to see it as anything other than what it is.
Art.
Not in the way people say something is art as a compliment. In the way I mean it when I say the work of a person who has given themselves over to something completely, who has surrendered the parts of themselves that needed surrendering while keeping the parts worth keeping, and has created something out of that whole process that did not exist before them and will not exist without them.
