Unstrung by Laura Spinella

Author:Laura Spinella [Spinella, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503937352
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Published: 2017-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

Once I find my way to the lobby of the Embassy Suites, it occurs to me this is not a well-thought-out fit of rage. They never are. What are the odds of Sam traveling with a baseball bat and owning a Porsche? I bite down on a thumbnail. Not likely—he was a pitcher; he flew into Boston. Plopping onto a stain-resistant sofa, I people watch for a while. It could be that Sam won’t come back here until evening, if at all. I don’t have his phone number. I have no idea where he lives, if he returned to Bulls Gap, Tennessee, or remained on the West Coast after his baseball playing days—I was too flummoxed to ask. Strangers come and go. After all this time, I wonder if Sam is anything more than that. I do the thing that I’ve resisted since the invention of the internet—I Google him.

For the next half hour, I take a Cooperstown-like tour, skimming baseball history and noting stats. I have no idea if the stats are good or bad. Good, I suppose. There’s a lot of fuss about his pitching prowess. The sums of money that he was paid make my eyes bug. Attempting to attach this kind of money to Sam is like picturing him as the wallflower at a party. Impossible. When we were together, he never took me home to Tennessee. I know it was because he was too ashamed of where he came from—especially after his chilly trip north to the Wellesley house. But his reasons for keeping me away went deeper, centering on a childhood that made mine appear pedestrian.

Sam grew up without a mother, but he didn’t know if she was dead or had abandoned them. According to Sam, his father spun various tales depending on his state of sobriety. Sitting in the hotel lobby, I recall one in particular: “Sometimes my old man tried to scare us, saying there was a body buried out back. Saying it was our mother—sadistic son of a bitch that he was. It kept Tate and me away from the shed, the piece of yard behind it. When I was thirteen or so I got up the nerve and went out to see for myself.” At first I thought Sam was telling a humorous story, one that had a punch-line ending. It did. It just came by way of his father’s fists. Hudson Nash caught Sam where he wasn’t supposed to be, staring into a finely farmed patch of marijuana.

Every so often, mostly when Sam was drunk, his guard would slip and he’d share more of his tumultuous past—growing up in a trailer not fit for raccoons and a father wholly unfit for parenthood. I vividly recall Tate, the older brother who dropped in on Sam’s life in Winston-Salem. I remember remarking to Sam about his brother not being housebroken. “Aw, Tate’s nothin’, Livy . . . If you think he’s rough around the edges, you should meet my old man .

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