Page 61 of Sweet Spot

Isaac met my gaze in the mirror and shrugged. “I gave him what he needed.”

Paredes was an angry, resentful man and everyone I spoke to kept talking about how much he had changed since last season. “And what did he need?”

“To be rewarded for his hard work. To feel important. To be acknowledged. We all have it in ourselves to let the disappointment eat us alive. We shouldn’t, of course, but sometimes it can’t be helped. And if you let it fester…well let’s just say all this could have been avoided if he just talked to me. But that didn’t happen.” Isaac shook his head. “Now we’ve talked and things are better.”

I spun to face him. “Did you give him Gordo’s job?”

“No,” Isaac chuckled lightly under his breath and looked down at his hands. “No. Gordo is where Gordo belongs. I can’t change the fact that life took us all in a new direction. This is the new path. Paredes needed to get that straight in his head. I think, to a certain extent, he still thought he could somehow push things back the way they were. That wasn’t working out so well for him and he got angry.” Isaac shrugged again. “It’s human nature.”

“So I take it you showed him where the new path leads?”

“I did. We all need goals and hope. He lost his when Gordo and I came in. I would have addressed this sooner if I’d known, but I didn’t and here we are. The funny thing is, once we got to talking, the job he really wants isn’t even bench coach or team manager.”

“What is it?”

“He misses being on the field, being part of the game. I told him if Suarez or Long ever quit he’ll be the first person I offer the new job to.”

“He wants to be a base coach?”

Isaac nodded. “Puts him on the field with the guys, makes him part of the plays again. It will be a good fit one day. He has good instincts. But for now he’s staying put and now he knows how much I value him and his skills, how much I appreciate the work he’s putting in with the guys.”

Respect and value. Simple things we all crave. “He still shouldn’t have acted like a petulant child when he didn’t get his way.” I turned back to adjust my earring.

“No one ever said ballplayers are emotionally mature.”

Except the man sitting behind me. I flicked off the bathroom light and went to sit beside him. “How did you get so wise? Seriously. You could do my job.”

He balked. “No! No I could not. I think my specialty begins and ends with ballplayers.” Sometimes Isaac cocked his head to the right and raked his eyes over me. As he did it now his eyes softened. “I recognized the signs,” he finally said. He reached out and tangled his fingers with mine. “We haven’t talked about it. Why I left baseball.”

My heart beat a little faster. Isaac’s career changes and daughter were heavier subjects we avoided so far. “Whenever you’re ready. There’s no rush.”

“I’m not hiding it. I just…don’t talk about it.” He scratched his chin. “I was a good ballplayer. The life was good for me because I didn’t have to think about a whole lot, and the things I did need to think about were very clearly laid out. What was the layout of the stadium we were playing in? Who were the players? What kind of pitches did they throw? I did my research. Always. That’s part of why I was so effective. But outside of what I had to do? Not so much. I…can be a mess, Kate.”

He flipped my hand over and ran his thumb over my palm. “You’ve seen the best parts of me so far. I’m great at starting things. I love the rush, the novelty of it all, the planning even. But six months from now? I might not be so interesting to you.”

“Hey now. Don’t go telling me how to feel.”

He shrugged and didn’t make eye contact as he kept speaking. “I know all these things about myself because they come with my genetics. My dad and Ev both have ADHD just like me. It’s…been a journey. And it’s a journey I’ll be on my whole life. But back when Rosie was born, I hadn’t really started the journey yet. I knew I had ADHD and I knew it made my brain work differently than most people, but I guess we as a society hadn’t gotten to the point where we really understood what that all meant yet. We didn’t anyway. So here I’m having this breakout year, right? And everyone is talking about how I’m going to have years of success in front of me. But things were already changing. You know how hard it is to maintain success in sports.” He finally looked up and met my gaze again. “No matter how talented you are, sports careers are a combination of timing, luck, hard work, and not getting hurt. I went into my first drought and I could see it. My whole future. A bad season turns into getting traded, and then traded again. Maybe things turn around, maybe they don’t. Maybe I make it to arbitration and make bank. Maybe the money in my account is all I’ll ever see from my career. Who would take care of Rosie while I was moving from city to city? Was my mom going to come be my full time nanny? No. My parents were still young. Years away from retirement. They had their own business to worry about. And I didn’t want to hire some stranger to travel with me and raise my daughter.”

“So you walked away?” I squeaked out. It all seemed so glamorous on the outside. A baseball star on the rise. Of course he’d make millions. Life was easy.

Except it wasn’t like that at all. Baseball had lots of rules and deadlines around contract negotiations and arbitration. And the schedule was brutal, especially on an infant.

“When she was born,” he sniffed, “it was like someone rearranged my brain. I have never felt so instinctively protective and possessive of anyone.” His eyes glittered as they darted between mine and it took my breath away. “Although I’ve felt it again rather recently.” He smiled and looked back down at our hands. “I just…I couldn’t leave her. And my mom has this method she uses when Ev or I are conflicted on what to do. She asks us to picture our ideal life ten years from now. What does it look like? And for me, that was Rosie. Taking her to school and knowing all her friends and being with my family. I didn’t see baseball there at all. And when I worked that backward through the years to figure out how I make that future real, there was only one solution: find a new career. Just making that decision calmed the storm in my head. The chaos that was ripping it apart finally subsided. But it didn’t mean it was easy. It meant giving up the future I thought I had ahead of me and taking a different path.”

“You were angry,” I guessed.

He nodded. “Not all the time. And not like Paredes. I did talk it out with Ev and my parents. They let me vent. And, eventually, I got used to being on the new path. Found a job I enjoyed and, like baseball, came with a roadmap for me to follow. I found myself exactly where I wanted to be ten years later. And then the path changed again.”

“But it didn’t make you angry this time.”

He threaded our fingers together and held my hand. “That’s not entirely true. Doing this? It’s terrifying. I’ve left all my systems, all the things I’ve learned to help me be successful, and jumped into the deep end. I’m very worried my mind will not be up to the task, but because I know what my weaknesses are, I’ve been concentrating on them, and with a little bit of that timing and luck, I might just do this thing.”

I already respected Isaac’s leadership and integrity, but now I was head over heels fangirling over everything about him from his struggles to his skills. “You’re a pretty incredible man, Isaac Anson. And very self-aware.”

He grunted. “It comes from years of failing spectacularly. Just be glad you weren’t around for them.”

“Oh, I’ll gladly reap the benefits.” I scooched over until my hips met his and dropped a kiss on his scruffy cheek. “I want to know all of you, Isaac. Even the parts you think are messy.”

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