The Ninth Inning (The Boys of Baseball #1) - J. Sterling Page 0,8
excited you would be to meet girls after hearing all their horror stories.”
“Your mom’s hot as fuck,” I said before thinking twice, and his face twisted.
“Don’t say that shit.” He bristled.
“I wasn’t finished,” I teased, but he interrupted what I was about to say next and stopped me cold.
“Speaking of moms,” he started, and I felt my entire body tighten, “you never talk about yours.”
“ ’Cause she’s not around. Nothing to say.”
Chance’s expression shifted. “Is she dead?” he asked point-blank, and a guttural laugh escaped from somewhere deep within me.
“No, man. She’s not dead. My parents split up when I was ten. She met some rich guy online and moved across the country to be with him. She told me that a boy needs his father and took off. I used to see her a couple of times a year, but now, I don’t see her at all.”
It had hurt so bad at first, when my mom bailed. I remembered crying myself to sleep at night for weeks, wanting her to come back home. After a while, I’d learned to live without her, but it was to my own detriment. I knew that I was dysfunctional when it came to relationships since I’d never had a healthy one to learn and grow from. I had no idea how to do it right.
When I looked back, it wasn’t that my mom was even all that maternal in the first place, but she was still the only mom I’d ever known. A boy might need their dad, but we needed our moms too.
“And your dad never remarried or anything?”
I shook my head once. “Nah. I think she hurt him real bad when she left, but he never talked to me about it. I mean, I was a ten-year-old kid; of course, he wasn’t going to spill his guts to me. But soon after she was gone, he started burying himself in work. I couldn’t even be pissed because he started making a lot of money, and I never wanted for anything again.”
The second I said those words, I realized how familiar the concept was. I tended to do the same thing when I wanted to avoid overthinking about shit—buried myself in baseball and girls I had no feelings for.
“And the most ironic part was that my mom had apparently wanted more from my dad. Like, she wanted him to be more driven, more ambitious. Basically, she wanted him to have more money. And the second she left, that’s exactly what he did.”
“Karma?” Chance asked.
“Or something like it,” I said with a shrug.
“Did you guys stay in the same house?”
“Yeah. Can you believe that?” I asked, my tone a little incredulous. “Once I was older and realized what had happened between them, I tried to get my dad to sell. I told him we needed to move out of the memories and into someplace new, but he always said no and shut me down. End of discussion,” I said, swiping my hand through the air.
Chance stayed silent, and I had no idea what he was thinking. My mind spun as I started thinking about why my dad would want to stay in a place that caused him pain. We never talked about it.
“Your dad’s an electrician, right? I think I heard you say that once to Mac or someone.”
“Yeah,” I answered before subconsciously bracing myself for what might come next even though I should have known better. Chance wasn’t the kind of guy who would make fun of someone’s occupation.
Even though everyone else always seemed to talk shit or look down on blue-collar workers, I never truly understood why. Those were the jobs that were always needed, that people needed other people to handle for them. Not to mention the fact that my dad had brought in well over six figures every year since he started his own company, and we had a good life.
“How does he feel about baseball as a career? I mean, does he want you to go pro, or does he want you to take over the business?”
Chance and I were talking more about our family dynamics than we ever had before. Maybe it was the fact that Christina had come in and ripped open a part of my heart I’d thought was closed, or maybe it was a full moon or high tide or some shit. Who the hell knew?
“My dad,” I started to say before pausing.
My dad, as loyal and supportive as he was, always told me