She stared at him for a good second. “You’re Roy Walker.”
“Yep.”
“My sister hates you.”
Not that he needed further confirmation of who the woman was, but her statement gave her away. Scout was Lanie’s younger sister. They also had an older sister, Samantha, who was known as one of the most cutthroat agents in the game, but everyone knew she and Duff weren’t close.
Scout was the opposite of Samantha. Where Duff was, Scout was.
“Yep,” Roy said again.
“You’re here to see Duff?”
The Baker girls called their father Duff. It was something Lane had told him about once while working on his shoulder with her voodoo physical therapy. Their mother had claimed that, because he was gone for so much of the year, they couldn’t legitimately call him a father. So they were to call him Duff.
Not hard to see why that marriage hadn’t worked out.
Which was part of why Lane had been so devastated when hers had ended.
Do not go there. Back to baseball, okay. But not back to Lane Baker.
“I have an appointment,” he said.
Scout tilted her head and eyed him as if he was a suspect in a criminal case. “He didn’t tell me. He tells me everything.”
“I asked him to keep this private.”
She assessed him and he had a hard time trying not to think about Lane. Lane was prettier than Scout. Softer around the edges where Scout was all sharp lines. Cheeks and chin. Still, it was easy to see they were sisters. They both had the same honey-wheat-colored hair with green eyes. A similar shrewdness in those eyes.
And honesty, with no thought of pretense.
“You’re here to see your first major-league manager. The man who led you to your first epic World Series win. You’re carrying an equipment bag that smells a little moldy and you look like you’re going to vomit if you breathe in that smell too deeply, which makes me think you’re nervous.”
“Hey, Sherlock, give it a rest. I need to talk to Duff.”
“Damn, I’m good. Roy Walker is here for a tryout.”
“It’s not really a tryout,” he mumbled. “More like an assessment. And I would appreciate it, if you didn’t tell anyone—”
Scout held her hand up. “Please. My father wants it private, it stays private. But you have to let me tell Lane. She’s going to die.”
Please, please don’t tell Lane. Don’t let her know what a complete and total failure I turned out to be. In...everything.
“I doubt she would care,” he said trying for nonchalance. “Like you said, she hates me.”
“Yes, that’s what she always said. All the time. ‘Roy Walker, Roy Walker, how I hate Roy Walker.’ Funny she never mentioned anyone she liked as much as she talked about hating you.”
Roy really didn’t know what to do with that.
“Let me go wake him up. He pretends he’s watching scouting footage after lunch but he actually just puts a headset on and takes a nap.”
Roy waited while Scout went into the inner office to wake her father. After a few minutes she came back wearing a grim expression but giving a solid nod. “He’s ready for you.”
“Thanks. Hey, you mean it, right? You won’t tell anyone I’m here.”
“I mean it.”
Roy nodded. He didn’t question her word.
“I won’t even tell Lane. That is, if don’t want me to. Do you want me to?”
He struggled to get the words out because he knew they would reveal too much about how he felt about Lane. But the consequences of Lane knowing how hard he had fallen were worse in his mind.
“I would prefer it if you didn’t.”
After all, what if he failed at this, too?
“Sure.”
He summoned a smile and walked past her. Duff was slow getting to his feet and Roy’s first thought was wow, Duff had aged. Thinner, his face drawn, his hair a bit wild around his head, probably from his afternoon nap.
“Duff, you’re looking good.”
The old man coughed up a laugh. “Ha. Liar. I look like shit. Which is appropriate because I feel like shit. That’s what happens when you get to seventy-five. You only hope you feel as shitty as me when you get to my age.”
Slowly Duff walked around the desk and Roy jumped to meet him halfway and shook his hand.
“Gotta tell you, you don’t look so great yourself, Walker. You look...defeated, and that sure as hell is a look I never thought I would see on you.”
Defeated.
“That about sums it up,” Roy said, not hiding anything from Duff. “I sank all my money into a video gaming company that went under. I was too stubborn to file for bankruptcy so I paid everyone off and now I’m broke. Really broke. I don’t have a college degree and the only thing I can put on my résumé is a failed start-up company. So I’m here hoping I have enough bullets in this arm to earn me enough money to try again.”
Duff nodded like it was a story he heard every day. “Why me?”
“I’ve got to find out if I can still throw. Before Charlie can put it out there that I’m looking for a team. I needed someone I can trust. Both to tell me the truth and to not announce it to ESPN that I’m trying to make a comeback.”
“How long has it been? Since you launched the rocket?”
“Five years. Since the no-no in San Diego.”
Duff let out a small grunt. “What kind of shape are you in otherwise?”
“I still run. Twenty miles a week. Still work out with weights. Physically, I feel good. In fact, my arm feels great.”
“Well, let’s go change that.”
* * *
ROY, DUFF AND SCOUT made their way to the field.
“You’ll start with throwing on grass before you take the mound,” Scout said, walking into the dugout and coming back with a ball, a catcher’s glove and a mask.
“Okay, wait,” Roy said, wondering if she actually expected him to throw to her. “It may have been five years, but my velocity still has to be pretty high.”
“Relax, slugger, this isn’t some scene from Bull Durham. I called Javier, who lives close by. He’ll come and catch for you. Also he’s a recent immigrant from El Salvador so he will have no idea who the heck you are and, even if he did, none of the sports reporters in town speak Spanish.”
At that moment, a young man with a round face emerged from the dugout. Scout spoke to him in Spanish and he took the catcher’s mitt and dropped to his haunches near home plate.
Roy stood in front of the mound on flat grass and gripped the ball in his hand. Like an old muscle memory waking up, he remembered the shape of the ball, the weight of it and how to hold it just so. There had been a time when the baseball had felt like a natural extension of his left arm. Like it had been grafted to his fingers with the thread of the seams.
He would hurl it as hard as he could, but those threads would retract and the ball would always come back.
When he threw it for the last time he told himself he would never pick up a baseball again. He used to tell himself that if he ever got married and had a kid