“When I spoke to him last week…” my father continues, “… I told him to stay away from your studio. I told him because I’ve seen this story before, and I know how it ends.” He turns the wine glass again. “I think I may have been telling myself a version of that story.”
“What do you mean?”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and in the quiet, I watch my father’s face do something I’ve rarely seen it do—work through something publicly, let the process be visible instead of presenting the finished conclusion.
“Reece Steele walked into my studio.” He stops. Corrects himself. “Yourstudio. Walked in on a dare from his teammates, got shut down, and came back. Not for the tattoo. For you.” He looks at the table. “I know this because I know him. I’ve been coaching him for two seasons. I know how he is with things he doesn’t care about, and I know how he is with things he does.” He pauses. “He came back to your studio the way he comes back to a batter he’s decided to study. Not casually. With intention.”
I breathe carefully through my nose.
“He’s my star pitcher,” my father says. “I’ve spent the last several weeks thinking about him in those terms. The contract, the ERA, the five-year window, the things that could compromise the investment.” He meets my eyes. “I haven’t been thinking about the fact that he’s also a twenty-seven-year-old man who lost his father at sixteen and has been turning himself into someone that loss would be proud of ever since. Who has been going through the motions of a career he loves without any of the things outside it being real.” He stops again.
The kitchen is completely quiet.
“He’s a good man,” my father says, and the simplicity of the four words after everything else makes my eyes sting. “Not just a good pitcher. A good man. And I’ve been treating those two things as if they’re in competition when maybe they’re not.”
“Dad…”
“I’m not telling you what to do.” He raises one hand. “I would never. You’re the most capable person I know. You make your own choices, and you always have.” He lets the hand drop. “I’m telling you, I may have been wrong to frame this the way I did. And I’m telling you because you’re my daughter, and I don’t like seeing you not fine.”
I press my fingers to my lips for a moment.
“You’re not supposed to do this,” I say.
“What?”
“Be reasonable about it.”
“I’m a very reasonable person.”
“You are not a very reasonable person. You’re a very controlled person, and those are different things, as someone recently pointed out to me.” I breathe through the tightness in my chest. “If you’re reasonable about this, I’m going to cry at your kitchen table, and neither of us wants that.”
“I have tissues.”
“Dad.”
He stands up and puts his arms around me from behind, the same way he did when I was small enough for it to be natural, and I grip his forearm, hold on, and let myself feel for approximately thirty seconds the full accumulated weight of the last several days.
He lets me. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t offer solutions or manage the moment into something more comfortable.
When I straighten up, he sits back down and pretends to be very interested in his pasta, which is his way of giving me the privacy while I recover without an audience.
I wipe my face with my napkin before taking a long sip of wine.
“He’s spiraling,” I say.
“A little.”
“Because of me.”
“Because of the situation.” My father points his fork at me. “Not the same thing.”
“It feels like the same thing.”
“It usually does.” He takes a bite, chews, and considers. “The question is, what do you want to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You do,” he says, with the calm certainty of someone who has been watching me make decisions my entire life. “You just need to catch up to it.”
