The Sweetest Game (The Perfect Game 3)

“What will you be doing exactly?”

“I’ll be a junior agent. They’re going to teach me the ropes when it comes to dealing with guys like you. ” He gave a slight head nod in my general direction.

“Good luck with that,” Cassie said with a snicker.

“But I’ll mostly be researching at first. I’ll be looking at new talent for the guys to check out. It’s going to be a lot of computer work and apparently I’ll be the local contact for any of the players or their families. ”

“For everything, or just certain things?” Cassie asked.

Dean shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I’m sure there will be questions I can’t answer, so maybe just helping facilitate their moves if they get traded, or talk about the trade deadlines and stuff. ”

Warming up to the subject, Cassie asked, “Do the families call a lot?”

“You have no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “Not everyone understands the business side of things, so sometimes they get really frustrated. I have to literally explain every single thing to them that they don’t quite grasp. ”

Cassie’s eyes grew wide as she inhaled audibly. “I bet those are some fun and long calls. ”

Dean nodded. “I was on the phone for over two hours the other day with the wife of one of your ex-teammates. ”

“Who?” I asked.

“One of the outfielders for the D-backs. She was concerned about hi

m not getting a long-term extension after last season and wanted to know how that would affect his playing time and reaching the full pension package. I had to explain the entire business side of things to her and I think she was still confused. She’s obsessed with the pension. ”

Gramps dropped his fork and it clanged against the table. “Sorry,” he said as he picked it up with a funny look on his face. “How many seasons do you have to play before you get the pension?”

“To get full pension benefits, you have to play for ten full seasons. ”

“What happens if you get hurt before then, or if you can’t play all ten?”

Dean sucked in a breath. “Then you only get a partial pension, but it’s way more complicated than that. Your contract terms, the number of years you signed for, it all comes into play. ”

“Oh, enough of this talk. Let’s let the kids have some time together before they leave. ” Gran pushed back from her chair and started collecting her dishes and the plates closest to her.

“Let me help, please?” Cassie asked and Gran swatted at her hand.

“No, dear. You’re a newlywed. Go spend your honeymoon with your friends,” she said with a wry laugh as we filed out into the living room.

The rest of the afternoon flew by as we hung out with Dean and Melissa. Before I knew it, Cassie was reminding me we needed to pack our things and say our good-byes. I hated leaving, but at least I wouldn’t be alone. I’d never be alone again.

Breaking Bones

Three Months Later …

Engrossed in my work, I fiddled with the key that hung from a chain around my neck, my fingers running across the letters that spelled out STRENGTH across the top. Melissa had given it to me after all the drama with the tabloids and mean fans during Jack’s first season. The rule of the necklace, she told me, was that I should keep it until I saw someone else who needed the message on the key more than I did. I hated the thought of ever giving that special gift away, but had to admit it was a really clever idea.

Sitting in my cubicle, I pored over photos I had recently shot during my last assignment. Nora, my boss, wanted to submit one picture for a highly respected photography award. But as I looked at them, I realized that I couldn’t pick the one.

As usual, I’d become emotionally involved on my assignment, and could no longer see the photo for just what it portrayed. I saw the emotions behind it, the meanings that weren’t necessarily captured through my lens.

When I looked at the photograph of the elderly man desperately clutching a child covered in dirt and blood, I saw the hundreds of other people in the background just as desperate and dirty who didn’t make it into my picture. Just out of view sat houses demolished into piles of debris, and their owners, faces filled with disbelief, digging through the rubble in vain. Several square miles of land that had once held schools, businesses, and homes, were now completely leveled into what could only be described as a war zone. It sounded so cliché, but that description was the most accurate. Mother Nature sometimes brought hell to Earth. And I captured it with my camera.

It was one thing to see devastation on the news or in magazines, but was quite another to walk through the scene and witness the destruction firsthand. There were no words to describe what it was like to feel your feet crunching through the broken glass and debris of what used to be someone’s home. Or what you felt as you saw the shock on people’s faces as they realized that everything they’d ever held dear had vanished into thin air, or been crushed into particles of dust. I’d never felt as helpless as I did the day an elderly woman admitted to me that all her family photos and heirlooms had been lost, and I could do nothing but watch as she crumpled to her knees in grief. There was such raw and exposed pain in those first few days after a tragedy, that I often found it hard to shoot. It was virtually indescribable to witness, and almost unbearable to live through.

It probably didn’t help my career that I didn’t enjoy being intrusive. I wasn’t the type of photographer who pushed into people’s faces, piercing their personal space in hopes of getting the money shot. It didn’t bring me joy to photograph the agony of others. After being with them, experiencing it with them, their pain was forever etched in my memory, and I carried it with me wherever I went. I didn’t see the sense, or what good it brought, to expose that pain for all to see.

But then at some point during the recovery, something almost magical seemed to happen. You could literally feel the change in the thick and dusty air. The immediate shock had worn off and people in the community came together in the most incredible of ways. There was a sense of family and strength that was humbling to witness. Every. Single. Time. The focus shifted from each individual’s loss and transformed into the community’s pulling together as a whole to not only survive, but to come back stronger, more resilient, as a more cohesive whole. Experiencing that transformation was in itself worth all the earlier tears and pain.