Page 33 of The Progressions

“I guess it’s better to be practical about a breakup,” I said. I didn’t have a lot of experience with those, so it was hard for me to judge. “Was she upset? Were you?”

“She saw it coming. I was very pissed off about that video.” I understood which one he meant. “I’ll miss parts of being together.”

I thought about the two of them kissing and further understood one of the parts he was referencing. It had seemed like a really good part.

“But it’s better this way,” Tyler continued. “I knew that things weren’t going anywhere.”

“And you wanted your relationship to progress? Like, to marriage or something?” I really couldn’t have thought of a worse person to marry—I meant her, not him.

“No, I didn’t want that at all,” he countered, “but I also didn’t want to keep going the way we were. Everything was on repeat. We’d fight, she’d post, we’d make up, she’d post that. We’d pose for pictures, she’d fight with someone else. She was in this huge, ongoing argument with some of the other girlfriends and wives at my former team and they were always getting into it, in person and online. The guys I played with were involved and it was so fucking dumb.”

Of course, I had read about that, too. “You wanted her to come here, though,” I pointed out. “You wanted her to move to Michigan with you.”

He squinted at his tennis shoes again. “Yeah, I guess. I was kind of—” He stopped again, and looked around. There were plenty of people trying to listen but we were seated far enough away that they couldn’t. “I was a little, you know, nervous.”

“You were scared of the change?”

“I wouldn’t say that I was scared,” he corrected me. “No, not scared. Anxious. Upset. I had a good thing going out there, pretty much.”

“But with the Seals, you were fighting for playing time. They had way too much talent in your position because they made such poor decisions when they signed guys.”

“I’ll pass that along to the general manager.”

“Here, since Hidalgo retired, you’re the star,” I reminded him. “So it’s a much better move for your career.”

“You sound like my agent. He pushed hard for me to leave California and get out of that whole atmosphere. It wasn’t only Shay fighting with everyone. No one on the team got along, and the locker room was like poison. All the guys were pissing a ring around their territory.”

“That’s gross.”

“It wasn’t actual piss,” he said, and then smiled a little. “You feeling better?”

“Were you distracting me?”

“Kind of. It’s also kind of nice to talk about it, you know, to explain.”

I didn’t really understand what he was trying to explain, but it might have been because I wasn’t fully paying attention. We were sitting in a place I hated because of all the terrible memories I had of coming behind the ambulance as it had bumped down our road to bring in my dad, and then of sitting and waiting for them to tell me if he was alive.

“Iva will be ok and so will the baby,” I announced.

“Yeah, I think so. You want to hold my hand like she did?” He offered it to me. “I think she broke a few phalanges.”

“Oh no, really?” I did take his hand. “Are you going to be able to play on Saturday?”

He smiled again. “I can manage, coach.” His phalanges curled loosely around mine. “She’ll be ok but your car is not.”

“It will still be drivable.” It had to be. “I’ll get a ride back to the complex so I can pick it up, because I can’t stay here for the whole night. My dad needs me, but so does Iva—”

“Are you Kasia?” a person in scrubs asked me. “Kasia Decker?”

“Yes!” I dropped Tyler’s phalanges and jumped up. “How is she?”

“You can come back,” she told me. “She’d like you to be with her.”

“Ok!” I said, and hurried after the nurse, toward my boss who needed me. I looked over my shoulder and saw Tyler standing there. He raised his hand and nodded, and I went through the big doors.

And a few hours later, Iva had a son, a little, scrunched, red, funny guy who was so small that it scared me to death.

“She’ll be able to go home soon, but they don’t know how long he’ll need to stay,” I explained to my dad when I got home. I didn’t want to worry him, because he knew Iva and he loved babies, all babies. But I was so worried myself that I couldn’t hold it in.

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