The Lucky Charm (The Portland Pioneers) (18 page)

“If that’s all you wanted,” Jack said when Hector stayed quiet, “I’ve got a game to get ready for.”

He was almost out the door when Hector’s voice stopped him. “The reason I told you was because I
know
you have that crazy dream,” he said. “That’s why the guys listen to you. It’s easy to get this far and realize that you’re
living
the dream, that it can’t get much better than this. You have people telling you all the time—regular, ordinary people—that what you have is so extraordinary you don’t need more. But you, you’ve never settled. Don’t start now.”

Jack didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like he wanted to freaking settle either, but when it came down to it, he knew something that his younger, idealistic self hadn’t—decisions like these weren’t his call.

In fact, they had almost nothing to do with him at all, and while that made his need for control go haywire sometimes, he’d had to learn there was no point in arguing. He’d go where he was told, field the balls he could, hit the pitches that came his way the best he could. Where he played or for what team wasn’t a choice he had control over. It was stupidly sentimental—way too sentimental to actually vocalize out loud—to only want to win a World Series for the Pioneers. No doubt Ismael Butler would move them and rename the team something horrible and tasteless, like the Strippers. Or the Elvis Presleys. The first time he’d ever met Ismael Butler, he’d thought that money, even the kind of limitless money that he possessed, couldn’t buy class. So, Jack supposed that it shouldn’t have surprised him that Butler was contemplating moving the team to his own natural habitat.

“Think about it,” Hector said, and Jack only nodded. There was so much he wanted to say that he couldn’t, but at the same time, all the words in the world probably couldn’t express what he was feeling.

He trudged down the dirty hallway and back into the clubhouse where nobody really noticed his entrance, just as they hadn’t really noticed his departure.

“Where’d you go?” Foxy asked the moment he was back at his locker, stripping his shirt off.

Correction: nobody had noticed except Noah. Jack thought that one of these days he was going to correct the completely false assumption that all Foxy possessed was a pretty face, a righteous pair of biceps, and a home-run swing that could make a grown man weep.

“Hector wanted to chat for a minute,” Jack answered, trying to play as it as casual as he could. Noah was not only horribly superstitious—of course, most baseball players were—but worse, he was more than a little high strung. Jack might be able to eventually tell him what Hector had said in the
right
moment, but plain and simple, this one sucked. They had a game in less than two hours, against the reigning World Series champs.

Talk about irony
, Jack thought to himself.
Like salt poured in an open wound
.

“Those strikeouts Sunday afternoon weren’t that bad,” Noah remarked, pulling on his own jersey.

“Yeah,” Jack noncommittally. If only Hector had wanted to talk about his strikeouts, he would have been a hell of a lot happier.

“Three strikeouts and you still won the game. Can’t imagine what, or maybe I should say
who
, made that happen,” Foxy continued, as if he wasn’t right smack in the middle of the clubhouse. Jack tightened his grip on his pants and internally willed his best friend
silent
.

“Quiet,” Jack hissed. “Besides, like I told you, we’re
just
friends
.”

“You say that now,” Noah said, good-natured smile never wavering. “And for the record, I never even said her name.”

“Then, let’s just say,
for the record
, that we don’t need to discuss her at all. Okay?”

Noah just shrugged. “If that’s the way you want to play it,” he said.

Jack gave his best friend a sharp, decisive nod. “That’s exactly what I plan on doing.”

The problem, he realized as he finished dressing in silence, was that he wasn’t entirely sure what he
did
plan on doing. The talk with Hector had cleared his head from all the Izzy haze that had followed him since spring training, reminding him of what he should be paying attention to. But just when he’d reluctantly decided that maybe he was in over his head with her, he remembered the thankful smile she’d given him last night when he’d talked her off the metaphorical cliff, and suddenly, he wasn’t sure what he was even doing with her. He couldn’t seem to shake the idea that somehow he was
better
when he carried her around with him in his head.

A better man. A better teammate. A better baseball player.

And he’d better be damn good, he thought as he jogged out through the tunnel and onto the field, because this was the last season he’d have to win a title for the Pioneers.

The game started uneventfully enough, but then most games felt pretty uneventful after twenty years of playing. Jack chased a ball down, but lamented as he fired a rocket to first that it wasn’t more challenging. Sawyer retired the next two batters, then he jogged back to the dugout.

As the leadoff hitter, he needed to be ready right away, so he grabbed his helmet and bat and swung it around in a curling arc, trying to work out his stiff muscles. The first road trip was always the hardest, and early this morning, Jack had caught a cab for a quick ride down to the ballpark. He’d hit balls for an hour, driving them harder and harder, trying to shake the effect Izzy’d had on him, but it hadn’t worked. Now today, he was more than a little sore.

Usually, he approached an at-bat with a surgeon’s precision. He studied film and listened to every nugget of wisdom Jonesy, the hitting coach, spouted. He was also one of the few players he knew who kept actual physical notes of pitchers he’d faced before. This pitcher was one of a trio of Tigers pitchers who had formed the nucleus of last year’s World Series team. The first pitch was fast, about as fast as he’d expected it to be, since Jonesy had reminded him before the game that Madison liked shocking batters with his heat.

Bring it,
Jack thought, as the baseball hit the pitcher’s mitt with a satisfying, leather against leather crack.

Inside
, he decided just as it was too late to hit it. Maybe he’d get lucky and the umpire would decide it was
too
inside.

No,
he reminded himself,
not lucky.
The last thing he wanted was to be lucky.

“Strike,” the ump bellowed.

Shit
, Jack mentally drawled, but he wasn’t worried. He paused, readjusting his gloves as he always did between pitches. It also gave the pitcher a chance to cool down and come to the proper frame of mind—Jack was in charge of the situation,
not
the pitcher.

Jonesy had also warned that after laying down a dirty strike, the pitcher tended to like another fastball, even closer to the danger zone. That pitch, Jonsey had joked, was going to be his bitch.

Jack swung hard at it, and as he felt the ball connect with the bat, he took off hard, knowing it could possibly be a single, maybe even a double, if the placement was right.

Jonesy was right
, Jack thought with crowing glee as he slid into second. A double. He popped up, dusting off his now-dirty white uniform and readjusted his helmet, shedding his gloves and stuffing them into a back pocket, all while keeping his eyes glued to the battle currently going on at the plate. Foxy took the first hot pitch, too, but then laid off the second.

It was all ego with this guy, Jack determined, watching his jerky, annoyed movements as Foxy refused to bite on more shit that never even touched the zone. The count was now 2-1, and as he usually did, Jack started stretching the distance a little between second and third. Not enough to maybe get noticed by the catcher, but he could see their shortstop eye him with the slightest bit of trepidation.

He wasn’t the Pioneers’ fastest player, but he did have a reputation for stealing. And that, Jack knew perfectly well, was total ego. Frankly, it felt damn good to be able to literally pluck an extra base right out of thin air while making the opposing team look bad.

Gimme one more ball, Foxy
, Jack hissed to himself as he slid his cleat a millimeter further away from second base. And in that moment, the moment when he was usually completely absorbed by the action of the game, a stray thought strayed across his mind: Izzy was watching and she’d be seeing the field the exact same way he’d taught her to see it.

She knew he was thinking about taking third. And determination, sudden and strange, bloomed inside. If luck was going to gift him an Izzy, he wasn’t going to turn it down, not when every at-bat, every pitch, every base mattered more than ever before.

“Strike!” the ump called as Foxy fouled off a decent-looking pitch. He swore Noah sent him a swift apologetic look, as if he knew how eager Jack was to steal third base.

He could see Hall, the third-base coach, giving him the look that said very clearly, “don’t be a fucking moron, Jack.”

But it was happening again, that otherworldly tug at the base of his spine. He’d been unable to avoid the strangely lucky plays before now, but had never actively courted them either. He hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t thought he’d
needed
to. But the team needed this series, to give them confidence and to help them believe they could go toe-to-toe with a championship team and
win
.

So at the resounding crack of Noah’s bat against the ball, he took off like a shot, pushing his legs harder and faster until they burned.

Jack knew things were never going to be the same when he opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the umpire calling him safe.

“I won’t even ask what the hell that was,” Hector joked as Jack took the steps down to the dugout after scoring the run off Foxy’s single. Hector’s reaction would have been a one-eighty if he’d been called out—he’d have nagged and picked and told him what a fucking idiot he’d been for stealing that base. And Jack would’ve deserved every single word.

“Better you don’t know,” Jack muttered as he tossed his helmet down with the rest of the equipment.

He didn’t even know what to tell himself. He’d never been so foolish in his entire career, but the last few weeks had made him wonder what he could really do. Today had been a test, and even though he wanted to reject the truth of what he’d found, he’d passed with flying colors.

He’d been thinking about Izzy. He knew she’d be jumping up and down, a triumphant yell caught in her throat, waiting with bated breath to see if he’d be called out. He knew, because he knew her, that she’d been practically there with him the whole time, each step, each breath, each particle of dirt that his cleats had kicked up.

She could
never
find out, but he couldn’t deny it to himself anymore: Izzy Dalton was his lucky charm.

“Thanks, Bart, Jed.” Izzy tightened the grip on the microphone in her hands, and smiled so hard she thought her face might explode. “Today at…”

And just like that, she spaced yet again.
What’s the name of this stadium?
she thought, panic racing through her veins. She could just see Toby shaking his head in disgust and the sympathetic-bordering-on-annoyed expressions on Bart and Jed’s faces. She’d fucked up
again
.

“Today, at the stadium,” she continued, trying to mask her bungle with brazen confidence.
Remember Jack’s words
, she told herself,
you
can
do this.
“Today, we’re in the middle of a pitching duel that isn’t all that different from games that the Pioneers and the Tigers have played before.”

The segment wasn’t what Toby had initially pitched, but she’d changed it last night with Jack’s help, because she’d finally decided that when you reached the bottom of your barrel, maybe it was time to find a new barrel. It turned out hers was trying her best to combine what she
wanted
with what she
had
.

“In 1998, the year of the Pioneers’ expansion season, they hosted Detroit for a series that brought an almost-sellout crowd to Pioneer Park. Two games went into extra innings, and none of the scores ever went above five runs. Over the next few years, low-scoring games abounded between these two teams, so it’s not any real surprise that today’s score is just 1-0 at the top of the eighth.”

Usually, at the end of her segments, Bart and Jed would just smile at her fondly but impatiently, as if she was a necessary evil they had to tolerate. She’d almost become accustomed to this, she’d told herself during each game, even though it still stung. Toby she could take or leave, but Bart and Jed were old pros in this business and she valued their respect.

But today, instead of just giving her that smile that stabbed her right through the heart, Jed actually spoke up.