Perfect Pitch (16 page)

By the third day, she was exhausted. Her eyes were swollen from too much crying. Her hair crackled when she brushed it, as full of static as her heart felt. She left a pre-dawn message at James K. Polk Elementary, saying that she wouldn’t make it to Musicall. If there even
was
a Musicall left to make. That night, she feasted on carbs and ice cream, then poured herself a stiff drink. Alas, the bourbon only made her remember that first night at DJ’s. She thought another few fingers of whiskey might help her to forget. She was wrong.

By the fourth day, she felt like she’d gained a dozen pounds, and she had a hangover to boot. She threw out all the junk food and sat down at her kitchen table, staring at her laptop screen as if it held the secrets of the universe. Alas, no universal secrets lurked there. But her calendar glared back at her, steady and unwavering.

Three times, she steeled herself to reach for her phone, to call the school. It should be easy enough. She just had to keep her tone light, her words simple. She just wanted to confirm they were expecting her that afternoon, for the final Musicall class before summer vacation.

Three times, she hung up the phone without calling.

And then, the suspense was removed. The phone rang, even as she was staring at it, even as she was trying to firm up her resolve. “Miss Winger,” a cool voice said. “I just want to confirm you’ll be picking up your things by the end of the school day.”

“My things?” Sam’s voice trembled. She sounded like she was about to burst into tears—again—which wasn’t far from the truth.

“At the request of the Summer Fair, our janitorial staff placed your belongings into boxes. We were told you’d claim them by the end of today, or we could discard them.”

“Um, I appreciate that,” Sam said, unconvincingly. “How many boxes are there?” She imagined renting a trailer, collecting the assorted instruments and paperwork and classroom projects the kids had created.
 

“Two.”

“Excuse me?”

“There are two boxes of your personal possessions. Those are separate, of course, from the twenty-one boxes that will go to the Summer Fair.”

Twenty-one boxes, holding all the projects the kids had created, all the instruments Sam had begun to collect. They’d end up in storage. Or worse.

The woman on the other end of the line cleared her throat. “The school office closes at four. After that, we’ll place your boxes in the Dumpster.” She hung up before Sam could say anything.

Sam stared down at her sweatpants. She had six hours to shower and put on makeup, to get dressed and look like a civilized human being before she drove across town to pick up her belongings. What did it matter, though? Who cared about her notebooks, her carefully constructed lesson plans? She was never going to teach Musicall again. The files deserved to be trashed.

Even if she
did
get the boxes, nothing would change. Sam had poured the past eleven months of her life into the Summer Fair, putting everything else on hold. She’d graduated from college; there was no retreating into the life of a student. She hadn’t begun to line up a new job yet, because Summer Fair activities had kept her so busy. And she’d always believed she’d have Musicall after her reign ended—somehow. Some way.

In one fell swoop, DJ had wiped out her job, her extracurricular activities, and her love life.

That wasn’t fair. DJ hadn’t ruined her job. Sam had done that herself. She had let the reporters catch her in a compromising position. Even though she’d
known
they would fall on her like starving sharks on chum, she had let herself be overcome with her need for DJ.
 

And
that
wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was she’d let herself believe she loved the man.

It was one thing to enjoy spending time with him. He was attractive—he could catch the attention of every person with two X chromosomes simply by walking into a room. He was the best lover she’d ever had—he understood how to give her pleasure, and he’d made it clear that her satisfaction actually enhanced his own. And he was devoted—he had figured out a dozen ways for her to work around the Summer Fair’s restrictions.

But her relationship with DJ was—
had been
—far more than physical. She had told him things she’d never told anyone else before. She had told him how lonely she’d felt, moving from military base to military base. She had shared her desire to belong, to build a community for herself and others. She had explained how hurtful it was when people viewed her as just a pretty girl, as a mindless beauty queen, without any semblance of a brain in her head. She had told him how much it hurt her when her friends abandoned her, when they chose fun and public entertainment over the staid life the pageant had demanded for the past year.

And
he
had shared with
her.
He had told her how hard it was to live in Iron Dan Thomas’ shadow.
 

She’d thought they were a team, united toward a common goal. She’d been ready to give everything to him, to do whatever it took to keep him in her life forever.

And now she had nothing.

No job. No prospects. And no partner to hold her, to soften the blows, to tell her it would be all right.

Sam closed her computer and retreated to her couch. Pulling her afghan closer about her shoulders, she closed her eyes and tried to think of nothing. She failed, miserably. Hours later, she finally slipped into an uneasy sleep, but her dreams were full of the discordant music of loss. Long after midnight, she realized that her Musicall lesson plans had been thrown out, like the trash they were.

* * *

“What a shithole,” Ormond said, dropping his catcher’s mask onto the bench.
 

“Yeah.” DJ was staring at his phone. He’d grabbed it from the top shelf of his locker as he returned from the cramped showers. Even with the other guys shuffling around in the crowded space behind him, he hurried to check the screen, to see if anyone had called.

No one.

Well, that wasn’t a surprise. He’d spoken to Trey before the game started, told him to finish up his homework, to stop hassling Isabel and get to bed on time. The nanny would only call in an emergency. And it wasn’t like anyone else was going to reach out to him.

Not now, anyway. There’d been a time when he’d had a message waiting for him after every game. Win or lose, he’d had something to look forward to, a breath of fresh air to take him away from the constant parade of crappy visiting-team locker rooms, from the hotel rooms that were the same city after city after city, from the countless miles logged on airplanes where the air was too dry and the food was inedible.
 

But it had been two weeks since he’d blown that to hell. Two weeks since he’d given Sam her walking papers, embossed with gold. Shit.

“Hey!” Ormond shouted.

“What?” DJ asked, feeling stupid as he shoved his phone back into the locker.
 

“I
said
we should work on that curveball when you throw tomorrow. You’ll want it against Washington, with all their lefties.”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“Man,” Ormond said, shaking his head and pulling off his shoes. “You’ve got it bad.”

“Got what bad?”

The veteran catcher leaned back against his locker, ignoring the wobble of the bench in front of him. “Just call the woman.”

“What woman?” DJ thought he sounded totally innocent.

“Maybe you can bullshit all of them,” Ormond said amicably, nodding toward the rest of the locker room, “but you’re not getting that crap past me. You’ve worked your rehab for two weeks. You’re throwing practice pitches tomorrow. Get your mind back in the game.”

“My mind never left the game.”

“You’re a piss-poor liar. I saw the pictures, same as you. Same as anyone with an Internet connection. But get over it, man. Call Samantha Winger and tell her you’re sorry you got her fired from her job.”

DJ felt something crumble inside him. The mere thought that he was so transparent to one of the guys… Still, he had to make a protest. “I didn’t get her fired.”

“I could have
sworn
that was your ugly face, coming in for the kill. And I just assumed you were the one who gave her that hickey.”

DJ threw a towel at the catcher’s head. “Okay, so they caught us. But it was the bullshit rules of that beauty pageant that got her fired.”

Ormond shrugged elaborately. “If that’s what you want to tell yourself.”

“This isn’t about getting her fired, anyway,” DJ muttered, leaning forward to pull his clothes out of the locker.

“The hell it isn’t,” Ormond said amiably.

“This is about her telling me how to raise my own son. It’s about her thinking she knows what it takes to make it in the majors. It’s about her daring to—” DJ realized he was shouting. He lowered his head into his hands.

Ormond tugged off his stinking jersey and tossed it onto the floor. He stood up slowly, clearly favoring his right knee, and he started to strip off his uniform pants.
 

DJ couldn’t be certain, but the guy seemed to taking his time. It was almost like Ormond was daring him to continue the conversation, like the catcher was
asking
for DJ to reduce all the tangled thoughts in his head to a few coherent words.

Like Ormond would ever understand. Like DJ could ever explain.

“Look,” the catcher said when he was finally buck naked and heading for the shower. “You’re the one who can make this right. It isn’t about Trey, and it isn’t about your playing in the majors. It isn’t even about your totally torqued relationship with your father. You said things that hurt her.”

“How do you know that?” DJ answered defensively.

The catcher leveled dark eyes at him, the same penetrating gaze he broadcast from behind the plate when he was calling a game. Zach Ormond
saw
things. That was his job. He knew the truth about the world around him. It made him a great ballplayer and one hell of an annoying friend.

“Figure out what matters to her, DJ.
Make this right.
” The catcher stalked off to the showers.

Make this right
. DJ slumped on the rocking bench. He would make it right, if he had the faintest idea of what “this” was. Samantha Winger was an amazing woman.

No.

She wasn’t just “an amazing woman.” She was
the
woman. The one who had listened to him talk, the one who had heard the words he
didn’t
say. She was fun—
God
was she fun. If he listened to his cock, he’d never spend a second thinking about any other woman again.

But it wasn’t just the sex. It was the rest of it. She
talked
to him. She told him what she was thinking, and she listened to his reply. She heard him admit that he wasn’t perfect, that he had doubts about himself, about his being a father, about his being a son. She was there for all of that and more. She was there for everything.

And he’d blown it all because he couldn’t imagine a life where baseball wasn’t the single most important thing in the world. He couldn’t imagine putting someone else’s needs before his own overpowering desire to match Iron Dan’s career.

Make this right.
 

Yeah, like DJ had the first idea how to do that.
 

But what else had Ormond said?
Figure out what matters to her.
 

Musicall mattered to Sam. Bringing the power of music to all those kids. And that was the one thing he’d taken from her, without a second thought, without even an apology.
 

He slammed his right hand down on the bench, hard enough to make himself wince. Listening to Ormond’s advice or not, DJ was no closer to a solution. But he knew he had to find one, because this hell couldn’t go on.

* * *

Sam crouched in the middle of the back row of the Wake County Auditorium. She’d dressed to fit in with the crowd—jeans, a bright green T-shirt that said Wake County Summer Fair, comfortable sandals. In an effort to avoid being recognized, she’d braided her hair, and she’d skipped all her makeup.

So far, no one had realized she was the former Summer Queen. So far, no one had asked why she was hiding in the back of an over-air-conditioned auditorium instead of standing on stage, wearing an evening gown, holding a bouquet of roses and preparing to hand over her tiara to the next reigning queen.

The contestants had just finished their presentations. All five judges, led by Judith Burroughs, had ostentatiously left their seats, heading back to the sound-proof room where they would assign their final scores, calculate their totals, and designate the next year’s Summer Queen.

Sam knew exactly what the contestants were doing as they waited in the wings. Some chatted nervously with their colleagues. Others paced with tight, tiny steps, mincing in their high heels. A few had their heads bowed as they prayed to be chosen.

The current Summer Queen stood on the other side of the auditorium, just offstage. She was alone, left to think about the wonder that had been her year of power and prestige, her reign. Of course, the current Summer Queen hadn’t had an entire year to reign. She’d had one month since she’d taken over for the disgraced Samantha Winger.

But Sam had to admit, no matter how hard her heart clenched when she thought about it now, she wouldn’t do anything differently.

She had gone to DJ because he was hurting. Because he had to know she loved him. Sure, nothing had worked out the way she’d intended—the cameras had caught them, and they’d fought, and she’d been fired from the one job where she’d truly believed she was making a difference.

But the alternative would have been to stay silent. To never let DJ know that
someone
had his back.

Sam closed her eyes, slouching deeper into her chair. This past month had been a nightmare. She had tried to focus on Musicall, tried to resurrect the program without the pageant’s support. Over and over again, she heard the same message—school officials loved her plans, and they supported her mission. But they simply did not have the funds to offer the program as a summer camp, much less in the next academic year. Without money, everything ground to a halt.