When he wakes up, he doesn’t know where he is.
The room is shapes in the darkness, nonsensical abstractions. He blinks. They don’t resolve. It’s night. He’s in a city. Light seeps around the edges of the curtains. The sound of a passing car. A smell like the heat’s on. Is it summer? He thought it was summer.
He stirs, enough to wake whoever’s beside him. They fumble for the switch on the nearby lamp, flooding the room in enough light to chase back the shadows.
“Sorry,” Reid pants.
Charlie’s next to him. “Are you okay?” He soothes a hand across Reid’s back.
“Must have been a bad dream.” Reid shakes his head, trying to dislodge lingering panic.
“What was it about?”
“Not sure.” But he doesn’t know what else he can add without scaring Charlie.
Charlie gets up, then returns with a glass of water. It’s mercifully tepid. He looks older in the half-light, worry creasing his face. He doesn’t say anything for a few minutes.
Reid sips the water. Breathes. Steadies his hands. “Sorry for waking you up.” Because the clock says it’s four in the morning.
“It’s fine.” Said softly. A hand on his back, touch featherlight.
“I’m gonna go shower.” Which will be noticeable late at night, but Reid’s coated in a slime of sweat. The bathroom is only ten feet away. He’s practically winded when he gets there, flipping the wall switch, blinking at the particular too-bright shock of bathroom lights in the hours before dawn.
Charlie follows him, wincing when his feet make contact with the chilly bathroom floor. “Hey, c’mere.”
He opens his arms, an offer, and Reid goes, a hug that’s more like an extended lean. They stand like that. Time goes hazy. Reid counts things: The measured rhythm of his inhales, the edifying beat of Charlie’s heart. The careful stroke of Charlie’s fingers at the base of his neck.
Eventually, Reid pulls back. “Okay, I’m good.” Not the entire truth, but no use in ruining Charlie’s night more then he already has.
Charlie looks like he doesn’t believe him either. “You sure?”
“I’ll be fine.” And goes to scald himself in the shower.
After, Reid lies back in bed, putting distance between them. He trails his hand down, the edge of his pinkie against Charlie’s. “It wasn’t a nightmare. I woke up and I didn’t know who you were, or where I was.”
“Has that happened before?”
Asked gently, even if it hurts to answer. “Waking up and not knowing where I am? It has.”
Too much to admit, even if Charlie doesn’t do more than move their hands closer.
“The first day of the road trip in Texas, when we fell asleep. You woke me up, and it surprised me.” Though surprise is the wrong word for startling awake, disoriented, with a roiling fear that he got drunk and just didn’t remember it. He takes another stuttering breath and gets the careful wrap of Charlie’s fingers across his.
“I have antianxiety meds if you want them. I don’t know if they’ll show up on a PED test, but the team can probably get you a prescription.”
Reid’s seen the meds in the bathroom stationed in familiar orange bottles. Seen and forced himself to forget about them, because the team offered, a few times, to get him sleeping pills—never the team doc, but a few of the coaching staff. Enough times until he wanted to snap, impatiently, that it wasn’t a good idea to offer pills to the guy with a substance use disorder. He imagines taking one now, buoyed by a world that’s softer at the edges, a place whose gentle haziness he might not be able to escape.
“I’ll be fine.” It’s not a lie, because he will be. And he inhales and exhales and counts the cycle of his breathing. Eventually, he falls asleep.
Reid wakes up to a damp pillow, to unplaceable aches he sweats out on his morning run. Fog shrouds the trees like ghosts. At least his shoulder gives a familiar bark of complaint. It echoes in his leg, tightness banding the muscle. He stretches it, foam-rolls it, sprays it with physio freeze spray. Non-pharmaceutical solutions to a pharmaceutical problem. When Charlie asks if he’s feeling better, he shrugs, and Charlie frowns but doesn’t argue.
Things aren’t much better at the ballpark.
Reid’s leg hurts. At least that gives him something to focus on. He parks himself in the chair in front of his stall, flipping through scouting reports for their upcoming series.
Glasser’s nearby, doing the same thing.
“Hey,” Reid says, too loud, because Glasser’s hand goes to his ear, “you ever gonna call for my curveball?”
He expects, and receives, a shrug. Fantastic.
If Glasser’s distant, Gordon is the opposite. He posts up near where Reid’s sitting, stacking and restacking a deck of cards. Shuffle, whoosh, tap. Shuffle, whoosh, tap. The noise shouldn’t bother Reid. Shouldn’t. It’s just cards. It’s a clubhouse. Baseball is a card game interrupted by occasional hitting. Shuffle, whoosh, tap.
A test—one he’s failing, because his spine goes stiff. He smiles. His face hurts. He turns his chair toward Gordon’s and motions to the cards. “Did you want to play?”
Gordon shakes his head. “All set here.”
And Reid tries not to limp as he walks out.
When he gets outside, the sky is orange. Ballplayers are all part-time meteorologists. A cluster of them mills in the dugout, pointing upward.
“Should we be playing in this?” Reid asks. “Fuck, should we be breathing this?”
But they play in that strange and troubling haze. Whatever hostilities McCormick normally aims his way are lost to the puff of his inhaler. Reid pitches the eighth. His leg is tight, his mind similar, a tension Glasser’s pitch-calling—fastball, fastball, another fucking fastball—doesn’t ease.
Reid shakes him off, once. Glasser throws the same sign, index finger tapping to indicate location. Reid shakes his head again. Another sign, same as the first. Another head shake. Glasser calls time, jogging out to the mound, mask tipped up.
“Let me go curveball,” Reid says.
Glasser frowns. His eyes drift to the scoreboard where the Elephants are up by one. “You think that’s a good idea?”
“Not really feeling the trust here.”
A deepening frown, then a fine.
“Aw, Zach, you’re the best.”
Glasser reinstalls himself behind home plate. He taps his mitt to one side, a request for a ball in the dirt as if to say, If you’re gonna do this, at least miss. Better a walk than a home run.
Reid comes set, rotating the ball in his glove, fingers riding its seams. And maybe it’s the thickness of the air, his lingering bleariness from a bad night’s sleep, his annoyance at Gordon that he should have left off the field. Maybe it’s foul temper or the evil fucking eye. But whatever it is, the ball comes out of his hand wrong.
He doesn’t watch, mostly because he doesn’t need to. It’s the sweetest sound in baseball, that wood-meets-leather noise—except if you’re a pitcher. A moon shot of a home run, right into the hazy Martian sky. He slumps, down to the mound, glove on his face as he swears. Someone’s up in the bullpen already—McCormick, because of fucking course. Like that, Reid’s hooked from the game.
He doesn’t wait for anyone to say anything, shaking off Charlie’s concern the way he did Glasser’s sign. He floats through his postgame rituals, not feeling the sting of his ice pack on his shoulder or the beat of the hot water on his back. From the neck down, he’s numb. From the neck up, his mind is like the sky outside: a smoky mess.
Charlie’s by his stall when he gets done in the shower, like all this can be fixed with a buck up. “What’re you thinking for dinner?” he asks.
Anything would probably taste like foam rubber right now. Reid wants, with sudden clarity, to be transported to his grandma’s kitchen table. To worry only about the custody of a fork, a knife, a dinged-up spoon. Not all of this, bearing down like an atmosphere. “You know what? I could really go for some roast chicken.”
“Okay.” Charlie taps something on his phone. “Anything else?”
“You suddenly learn how to cook?” Because Charlie can, with some instruction, heat water. A skill set that comes from ample team meals and an infinite take-out budget.
“I can order.”
“Don’t think a roast chicken’s gonna fix that home run.”
Charlie gives a can’t hurt shrug.
“I probably gotta apologize to Glasser.” Which would be easier if Reid’s insides weren’t made of wet cement.
“Stuff happens.” Not to you. Because Charlie’s gentle tolerance, his assurances that the next day will be better lie at odds with the world outside. “Zach’s usually pretty forgiving.”
“I think he might like you a little better than he does me.” A mistake to say it, like Charlie’s going to try to intercede in that too. “Don’t talk to him. I can take care of it.”
“Did he say something?”
“Not like that, just normal stuff. You know when two guys got a lot in common and don’t like each other for it?”
“You and Glasser have a lot in common?”
And Reid almost says, The Jewish thing. True but not the whole of it. Because there’s what he suspects but doesn’t outright know, the way people with secrets can sense one another. Instead he scrubs a hand over his eye. “I’m beat. When can we go home?”
He endures his press interrogation, making words with his mouth genuinely disconnected from his brain. Bad location, didn’t execute how I wanted, hey, you win some, you lose some, and that’s baseball. Except today when you lose some seems to be all he can do.
Home would be better—but home has Christine in the living room. Worse, Stephanie’s there too, sitting beside her, feet kicked up on the couch.
Reid wants a lot of things. For this day to be over. A drink, vaguely, diffusely, without the seriousness of intention. To discard his clothes on Charlie’s bedroom floor and crawl into bed. Definitely not spending his evening making small talk with the team’s PR person and Charlie’s wife.
Charlie’s next to him, standing behind him as Reid pauses in the doorway. “It’ll be fine,” Charlie says, though it’s not entirely clear who he’s saying that to.
“They dropped off the food earlier,” Christine says.
Sure enough, a set of catering trays sits in the kitchen. Reid’s bank account—now, mercifully, firmly positive—has never had several hundred million dollars to turn into a Marin mansion, an SUV with a nicer interior than some jets. Or apparently roast chicken, delivered at whatever time he wants it, along with several other pans of food.
Charlie, in his postdivorce furniture buying, invested heavily in a couch, an entertainment system, a bed. But his dining table is barely big enough for two people, let alone four. Dishes and silverware sit on it like they’re just gonna have a dinner party.
There’s no reason Reid can give, other than he doesn’t want to. So he sits, smiles, tries not to feel like they’re playing a game where everyone can see a card stuck to his forehead, one advertising that he and Charlie are sleeping together. One that advertises exactly how he’s feeling right now.
Charlie settles in next to him. His shoulder taps against Reid’s.
Reid pulls away, elbow on the table. “IKEA didn’t have anything smaller?” His face is hot. “It’s kinda warm in here.”
“Really?” Stephanie says. “I’m freezing.” She tucks herself into Christine’s side to avoid the vent, and Christine pats her hair.
Reid takes a gulp of ice water. It doesn’t cool his throat. Because he spends time near Charlie at the ballpark, where guys slide along each other constantly, companionably, or in the living room, insulated by habit and space and Charlie’s arm draped on the back of the couch. This shouldn’t be any different.
“We could switch,” Reid offers.
Stephanie scoots her chair even closer to Christine’s. “I’m good here.” The caterer has included printed-out descriptions of what they’re going to eat, and they study it together, Stephanie fiddling with her cross pendant.
She says something to Christine, whose shoulders shake as she laughs a little too loud. And Charlie got flustered the first few times that Reid joked that he has a type. Which is one thing to acknowledge but another to see.
Reid catches Charlie watching them, expression unreadable. It’s possible that he and Christine are getting back together. An irrational fear, a catastrophizing one that sticks in Reid’s brain like pine tar. That his and Charlie’s relationship will end up as an interlude, as one of those things couples refer to, obliquely, when they say, marriage, well, it takes work. The kind of work Letitia quit from. No. The kind he stopped participating in.
Stephanie’s phone buzzes. “I gotta go deal with team stuff.” She ducks into the living room, Christine trailing behind, leaving him and Charlie to look at their plates of food.
Reid drops his smile, scrubbing his hand over his face.
“I didn’t mean for this to turn into a thing,” Charlie says.
Something that’s not his fault, but that doesn’t mean it’s not his problem. Reid digs out his phone, setting a timer. Thirty minutes. He can probably survive this for thirty minutes before claiming he’s beat from the game, then going the hell to sleep.
The food is at least good: chicken, roasted potatoes, Broccolini, a set of rolls with little cups of...margarine. “Is this from a kosher place?” he asks.
“The rules seemed complicated,” Charlie says, shrugging.
The bag of sand sitting on Reid’s chest lightens by a couple of grains. “Thank you.” The food doesn’t taste like his grandmother’s—the potatoes are roasted in olive oil, not schmaltz—but it has that familiar heaviness that somehow makes it easy to keep eating.
Christine and Stephanie return, sitting. Christine plucks one of the squat little tubs of margarine from a stack of them, examining it. “Didn’t know people still ate this stuff.”
Charlie looks like he’s about to say something.
“It’s fine,” Reid says, before he can. “The food’s kosher. I’m Jewish.”
He braces himself for questions. Which he doesn’t mind, exactly, but are often accompanied by curiosity—why bother, isn’t it too complicated—or an endless list of inquiries about what is and isn’t kosher, like he knows about locusts (kosher) or lumpfish (not) without looking it up.
He’s gotten shock, denial. Occasionally a You don’t look... Like there was one way to look. Christine’s eyebrows pinch slightly, as if she should have been able to pick up on the fact he’s Jewish just by sharing living space with him.
“Oh,” she says, “did you convert?” A polite question that kind of isn’t one.
Reid takes a sip of water. He waits, in case Charlie wants to intercede, to change the subject or provide some diversion learned over years of marriage. Charlie doesn’t say anything. Not one of his listening silences but like he’s not going to. Terrific.
“Technically, yeah,” Reid says. “My dad’s mom is Jewish. It’s mostly passed down through your mom”—a phrase he always felt like better applied to male-pattern baldness—“so I got converted when I was a baby.”
Another faintly pinched look. And Reid would blame his shoulder, would retreat to his room with a plate and a movie, if not for Stephanie, who might say something to the team.
“I don’t know much about the conversion process,” Christine says.
So google it. An unfair response. The Judaism-alcoholism double whammy of (im)polite interest. “As a baby, you get dunked in a ritual bath. As an adult, you gotta get turned down by a rabbi a bunch of times, then there’s classes.”
Which probably invites more questions. He probably should’ve just said he has a milk allergy.
“They turn you down?” This from Charlie.
It’s one of the traditions Reid likes, though it’s hard to put why into words. That it’s something you have to choose, to work at, to chase after even when you’re told no. “You gotta really be sure. It’s fine if you try it for a while and it’s not right for you. No harm, no foul.”
Charlie’s face falls a little. Reid resists the urge to drop his own forehead to the polished wood of the table.
They eat. Or Reid eats, and Stephanie and Christine talk, and Charlie doesn’t say much.
“So,” Christine says, after a while, “the sky turned orange for a while today. That’s weird.” She spreads margarine carefully on a roll. “Guess you should tell your parents to skip coming out here this fall.”
This aimed at Charlie, who pauses, fork hovering midbite. “Haven’t really discussed it with them.”
“Charlie’s folks come out every year right after the season’s over,” Christine says. “They say it’s to avoid hurricanes, but I think they secretly like California.” She gives a tight smile like there’s more to it, some lingering disagreement from their marriage clinging like fog.
Reid doesn’t know where he’ll be then. Back in Jersey or overseas auditioning for teams’ midwinter signings. Even if a selfish, screaming part of him thought here. It hurts, that he’ll have to pack his stuff up and leave. That any trace of him will be shaken out from Charlie’s house, possibly from his life, the way the cleaning service evicts dust from the rugs.
He’s spent his tenure in Oakland monitoring for peaks, careful he doesn’t get too high on everything, that he forgot what low really felt like. Stop being melodramatic. Like feelings are a jersey he can just shuck off. He needs...space.
He gets up, sudden enough to jar the table. The glasses and silverware rattle. “I’m gonna go take Avis out.”
“I took her a couple hours ago,” Christine says.
“It’s fine. I could use the walk.”
Avis trots over to meet him at the door. She licks a stripe on one of his hands. “Hey, old girl,” he says, “you ready to go out?” She wags her tail eagerly.
It’s easier with her there. She demands a familiar route, inspecting mailboxes and trash cans and other fascinating attractions. Reid’s heart rate slows with her waddling steps.
Then a tug of her leash: a request, to see the sights—and smells—of the nearby commercial strip. A place she avoided when they first got her, which they encouraged her to take on with slow incentivizing in the form of treats.
He can’t discourage her now, so he goes. Past a street lined with restaurants. People spill out onto the sidewalks, the familiar loud chatter of drinking he misses almost more than alcohol itself. Conversation swells and ebbs around him. Nothing is stopping him from going to get a drink—from bellying up and asking for some horrible Northern California microbrew. From requesting an accompanying shot of whiskey, maybe a few for the people around him, from making those instantaneous friendships watered by alcohol that don’t last beyond the evening.
He could decide to go in. Nothing is stopping him: only years of sobriety. He could sit down. Pull out his wallet. Hand the bartender his card and tell them to run a tab. He’s been sober long enough that it wouldn’t take much to get him drunk. A decision he could make now or in thirty minutes. One he’s been making over and over for the past two and a half years. One that he’ll have to make every day for the rest of his life.
He keeps walking.
He quickens their pace, like slowing will mean succumbing to a certain gravity, then climbs up a steep San Francisco incline until they’re on a more residential street.
He counts the streetlights, the rings illuminating the pavement, the faces of other pedestrians coming in and out of view. He could call his grandma. It’s not that late in New Jersey. The last few times he called, she didn’t answer with that gasp, the one that said she was certain he reset the clock on his sobriety. He could call her or Letitia, who might answer, or who might tell him to fuck off. At least that’s reassuring in its constancy.
Calmer, he sends his therapist a joking u up? text. She says she is, then picks up on the second ring.
He tells her about it: dinner, the tension with Christine, Charlie’s answering silence. “There’s more to it with Charlie.” Because he told her before about moving in, but not about everything else, hoarding it like a secret even if he shouldn’t have. “We’re, um, together.”
There’s a pause, longer than her normal pauses, something attributable to the time of night or maybe just surprise.
“You think I’m making bad decisions,” he says.
“It’s interesting that you’re assuming that other people are judging you with less”—she feels around for a word—“leeway than you would give them.”
“Well, shit, Doc, when you put it like that.”
“I’m more concerned about how you feel.”
“I told you: I got up. I left. I got Avis—that’s our dog—and we’re out now.”
“None of those are feelings, Reid.”
“I don’t know. It’s not even about dinner. It’s like, why am I living with Charlie? Why am I taking his money? I don’t know if I have good answers to that.”
“If you broke things off with him, would he kick you out?”
“What? No, of course not. I mean, it might get awkward, but he wouldn’t do that. I might start paying rent, though. I might anyway.”
“It’s interesting that you’re focused on money—”
“When you don’t have any of it, you tend to focus on it.”
“It’s interesting that you’re focused on money, when it sounds like the issue is something else.”
“If people find out about this, I know what it looks like. Like I’m taking advantage of him or he’s paying me for... I just don’t want it to reflect badly on him.”
“That’s a lot to handle. And you dealt with it, and you haven’t acknowledged that either.”
“You mean I stormed out?”
“I mean you were in circumstances in which you felt isolated and alone, ones that you know are connected with drinking for you, and you chose other coping mechanisms.”
“Oh.”
“Did you consider drinking?”
“I thought about it. I think about it, probably more than I should.”
“It might help to consider your current reasons for not drinking.”
“I want to play.” The same thing he’s said any number of times to her in the past. She waits. Traffic passes around him; Avis’s toenails click against the concrete. She gives grunting little huffs, the kind she makes on their morning runs together, when she toggles between him and Charlie when they’re on the couch, before lying down where she can see them both.
He called Charlie’s house home just now, even if he’ll have to leave at the end of the season. A place that, when he felt adrift, he could come safe ashore.
“I want to be here.” His voice is a scratch in his throat. “Every day. I want to show up and be here. Even if I get bounced around or if I’m not playing anymore. I want to be present. And I can’t do that if I’m drinking.”
He lets out a long, slow breath. It’s strange standing there, holding a leash and a handful of disposable bags, like he wants to yell or cry or crow like he does after a momentous strikeout.
“I just—” he continues. “I just don’t want to want to drink. I don’t want to think about it. To have that be where my brain goes all the time. To have that be everyone’s first thought about me. ‘Oh, Giordano, man, I heard he used to party with the best of ’em.’”
“It’s okay to acknowledge that. But that shouldn’t be where it ends. So you can pair thinking about still wanting to drink with the choice not to. As an example: ‘I still think about drinking, but I don’t want to drink now because...etc.’”
“Why do I feel like there’s gonna be a homework assignment?”
She laughs at that. “Sorry, but it’s pretty much all going to be homework.”
“I’m looking forward to it, Doc.” He gets a beep, an incoming call from Charlie. He could let it go to voice mail. Avoid. Say he didn’t see it. He answers.
“Um,” Charlie says, “where are you?”
“I’m on the other line with my therapist. Sorry for leaving like that. I’m at—” He gives a set of cross-streets.
“Let me bring you a coat. It’s cold.”
“Charlie, it’s like fifty degrees out.” But he can’t keep the smile from his voice. “I’ll be home in a minute.”
“That was Charlie,” he says, when he switches the call back.
“There’s a lot here.” She yawns around it, sounding more exhausted than bored.
“Yeah, I’m a deep vein of fucked-up-ness.” He recalibrates before she can say anything. “I’m working on things. It’s okay to work on things.”
“Something to consider, for next time. I want you to write about yourself in the third person. Who you are. What you’ve been through.”
“An article?”
“Sure. An article, a tweet. I’m not asking for a Pulitzer. Just think about how someone else sees you.”
“I take it you don’t read a lot of sports media, Doc.”
“I do, actually. It’s not an order. Just consider it.”
“Okay, I will.”
When he gets home a few minutes later, Charlie’s hovering near the door. Avis, unclipped from her harness, trots into the living room. Christine isn’t around, though there’s a telltale light from under her door. The house might be home, but Reid’s loud and the walls are thin. “I, uh, wanted to talk. Maybe not here.” The only places open now will probably smell like booze or be full of people nudging Charlie’s arm for his autograph. “There’s a beach near the Presidio I run past sometimes.”
Charlie looks over at the clock. “You want to go to Baker Beach?”
“We don’t have to.”
But Charlie’s already digging through the hall closet for a coat. He holds it out. It’s one of his, too big for Reid, but he puts it on anyway.
This time of night, it’s a short drive. Charlie’s quiet in the truck, maybe waiting for Reid to say something, maybe gathering what he wants to say. Reid finds a parking lot nearby. They have to walk a little while to get there, shoulders bumping on the narrow sidewalk. The beach isn’t deserted, though the only conversation is the sound of water, the distant hum of the city around them.
Charlie’s coat is warm against the blow of the wind, its pockets capacious when Reid ducks to gather a handful of rocks, little stones smoothed by the tumble of the water, their sharp edges ground away.
This late, in the dark, no one else can hear them. Still Reid breathes in, steadying himself before saying, “I’m sorry.” Charlie looks like he’s about to say something—possibly tell Reid it’s all right—when he adds, “I shouldn’t have done that. I bet Christine thinks I’m a head case.”
“It’s important to you that she likes you.” It’s not quite a question.
“She probably sees me as a mooch. You know, living in your house, letting you pay for everything.”
“Chris has her own stuff she’s dealing with,” Charlie says, a little defensively. “But I should have said something to her. About the conversion stuff. And to you about my parents coming out here. I did that a lot when she and I were married—not saying something when I should have. Like people tell you to just let stuff go—that you’re supposed to let stuff go—but I used that as an excuse.”
An apology, words carefully selected the way he might a gift.
“I should have just told her,” Reid says. “I was already kind of pissed off—mad at myself and telling myself I wasn’t. Sometimes it feels like I’m making the same mistakes over and over.”
“I know what you mean. At least it doesn’t leave much space to make new ones.”
Said in that accepting way of his. Reid reaches for his hand. “What if I want to make new ones?”
Charlie laughs at that. “I had this whole plan for making it up to you.”
“Don’t let me talk you out of that.”
“Starting with... I want to tell Chris. About us. About me. But only if you’re good with it.”
Which might make things, if not better, at least different. “Are you sure?”
Charlie strokes his thumb against his knuckles. “I think you think I’m gonna change my mind. But I signed a contract extension to play in the Coliseum. I know when my mind’s made up.”
“Is that what I am in this analogy—a banged-up old stadium?”
“You know, you’ve got some miles on you. It ain’t exactly a bad thing.”
Reid’s chest tightens. He focuses on the lights in the distance, their fellow beachgoers, a good ways off, the delighted yapping of dogs kicking at sand. The time that he and Charlie have been holding hands, and how he always wishes it was for one more second when he eventually has to let go. “Can I kiss you?”
Charlie cups his face like he did that first time, in Reid’s hotel room. His beard rasps at the edge of Reid’s mouth. His hands slide into the shelter of his jacket. A long kiss, a declarative one, the dotted city lights sparkling around them like bubbles. A kiss that yields another, where they pull back only to reunite, Charlie gripping him like he might not let go.
Eventually the wind picks up. Sounds from the beach intrude. “We should go home,” Charlie says.
“There’s something I wanted to do. But we have to get closer to the water.”
It’s slow going down to the shallow lap of waves. Reid reaches to pull off his shoes, to peel off his socks. He’s probably covered in sand, though he welcomes its faint abrasion now. Charlie offers an arm like Reid’s at risk of falling over, and it’d be unnecessary—they spend a good amount of time on balance training—if not for the clasp of Charlie’s hand on his.
He doesn’t ask why Reid decided to stand in toe-deep surf, a silence that gives Reid time to take out a handful of rocks, trying not to feel like a kid explaining the superstitions behind birthday candles. Hoping Charlie won’t laugh or, worse, indulge him.
“There’s this thing we do on Rosh Hashanah—new year’s. We take stones and kind of...throw the previous year away. Metaphorically. The first year I got sober, I went with my grandma. She gave me a bunch of rocks and told me not to show off throwing, even if by then my shoulder felt like hamburger.”
A warm New Jersey afternoon, standing by the bank of a stream. His grandma scooping up pebbles and handing them to him. How he thought it was silly, until he did it. “Once I started throwing, I thought I was never gonna stop. I just wanted so bad to be different than how I was. Wanted someone, anyone, to come take away all this stuff I’d been carrying, and realizing I had to do it.”
Charlie doesn’t say anything for a long minute, then slowly holds out his palm. “Can I do it too or is that not allowed?”
“The ocean won’t know what hit it.” He drops a few rocks into Charlie’s hand, Charlie curling his fingers up, brushing Reid’s.
“Are you supposed to say what you’re throwing away out loud or...?”
“Not usually. But you can if you want.”
“Maybe you go first.” As if he needs Reid’s help to throw rocks at water. Something about it—his expression in the darkness, his gentle seriousness—makes Reid breathe a little easier.
The first stone: that blowup in Kansas City. And he tosses it away. Other stones go easier: Things he’s done or hasn’t done. Promises not kept, including to himself. A stone for Letitia he tucks into his jacket pocket. That one he can’t let go of yet. Finally one for tonight, throwing it as far as he can, listening for its faint splash as the ocean takes it.
Charlie cups a stone briefly in his hand, then throws it, not a big-league throw like a rejection, but a soft toss, stone easing into the water not far from shore.
“It might wash back up,” Reid says.
For a second, Charlie looks panicked, like Reid’s going to tell him to wade into the Pacific Ocean at night to find a pebble no bigger than a thumbnail.
“Charlie, it’s fine. It’s just a rock.”
“If it’s important to you, I want to get it right.”
“You did, baby. Exactly right.” He takes Charlie’s hand. His throat is scratchy. From salt water and wind. From the sand whipping around him like it’s polishing him into someone new. “Now c’mon. Let’s go home.”
When they get back, the living room is dark, no light from under Christine’s closed door. Reid starts going toward the guest room, but Charlie stops him. “We can set an alarm.”
“You’d miss me in the other room?”
“You know I would,” Charlie says. “Come to bed.”