Page 4 of Caught Offside

“I’ll be there,” Asher said. “Do I need to rent a tux?”

“A suit is fine. A clean one.”

“You wound me.”

“I’ve seen your closet.”

Asher laughed because he had a point. Half the time, Asher had more suits draped over his bedroom chair than on hangers. “Fine. For you, I might even go out and buy some gaudy tie that makes you regret picking on me. Keep it up, and I’ll tell Abbi.”

His family dynamics were confusing to outsiders. He’d been raised knowing that his cool aunt was actually his bio mom. He frequently joked that he was going to tattle so she’d take him back, even though he was now an adult and couldn’t imagine having grown up with anyone other than Dad and Pops.

“How’s training going?” Dad asked, and Asher heard the real questions underneathAre you taking it seriously? Are you doing the work? Are you going to be ready when it matters?

“Good. Working on my swing mechanics with Torres. Spending time in the cage.”

“How’s your knee?”

“Still right there between my femur and tibia.” He didn’t want to talk about the knee he’d been rehabbing all winter.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer I’ve got. It’s fine, Dad. Tweaked it in September, did the PT. It’s fine.”

He went quiet again. Asher could picture him in the kitchen in Milwaukee, looking out the window at the lake, gray and frozen along the shore, the same view Asher had grown up watching change with the seasons. His dad would be dressed already, even on a day off, because Sean Tucker did not own sweatpants and viewed them as a moral failing. Pops, on the other hand, lived in them as often as possible.

“I’ll send you the details,” Sean said. “Foundation website, dress code, the event schedule. And, Asher?”

“I know. Don’t be late.”

“I was going to say I’m glad you’re coming.”

The words sat between them for a beat. His dad meant them. Sometimes it was exhausting standing inside the pride of a man who’d played seventeen seasons, made three All-Star teams, and come out during his career when it could have ended everything. His dad had handled all of it with the same control he brought to everything—deliberate, measured, unflinching—and the world had rearranged itself around him.

Asher loved his father. He also knew, in the honest place underneath his charm, that he’d never be him. He didn’t have the discipline, the precision, or the ability to hold everything together so tightly it looked effortless. He’d known that since he was old enough to notice that his instincts in every situation ran opposite to his dad’s. Louder where his dad was quiet, faster where his dad was careful, gone before his dad had finished thinking it through.

“Me too,” Asher said. “I’ll text you when I figure out the drive.”

They hung up. Asher stood in the empty warehouse, phone in one hand, rubber ball in the other, and let the stillness resettle around him.

Asher pocketed his phone and stood. His knees popped, the left one louder than the right, a souvenir from September that PT had fixed in theory but that cold weather kept arguing about. He stretched, rolled his shoulders, and walked to the batting cage.

The pitching machine was old enough to have a personality. It pulled left on every third pitch and made a grinding noise the equipment manager swore was normal. Asher loaded it, grabbed a bat from the rack, and stepped in. The first pitch came in low and inside, and he fouled it off the netting overhead. The second sat belt-high. He drove it back up the middle with a crack that rang through his hands. The third pulled left, the way it always did, so he let it go.

He hit for twenty minutes. Not chasing mechanics, not working on anything specific, just swinging because that was the thing he could control when everything else felt like waiting. Waiting for the season to start. Waiting for the call-up that hadn’t come yet and might not come this year either. Waiting to be someone other than Sean Tucker’s kid, with all the tools and none of the results.

His breath came in clouds. The bat felt heavier in the cold, and every ball that came off the barrel sent a vibration through his wrists that he’d feel tomorrow. He didn’t care. The cage didn’t ask anything of him.

He hit until his shoulders burned and the machine ran out of balls, then stood with the bat against his hip and his breath fogging in front of him. He racked it and locked up after turning out the lights.

Back home, he showered, changed, microwaved the Thai food, and ate it on the couch with a game replay on TV that he watched without watching. His phone sat on the armrest, screen dark.

He could call someone. There were friends on the team, guys from spring training, people from college who still texted him memes and invited him to things. Being good with people had never been the problem. He could walk into any room and have the whole table laughing inside of ten minutes, the performance so practiced nobody ever noticed it was one. But after the night ended and everyone had said, “Asher, you’re the best. We should do this more often,” he’d be in his car alone, wondering when fun had started feeling like work.

He set his plate in the sink and stood at the kitchen window. The parking lot below was half-empty, lit by the orange wash of a streetlight that buzzed loud enough to hear through the glass. Beyond it ran the strip of road that led to the highway, and beyond that, the flat dark of a Wisconsin winter.

Asher turned off the kitchen light and dropped onto the couch. He pulled a blanket over his legs, picked up his phone, and scrolled through nothing until his eyes got heavy.

The TV murmured. The heater clicked on and off. Spring training was five weeks away. The gala was two. The season was three months out, the one that would decide whether “potential” turned into a call-up or just became the word they retired him with. He thought about the drive to Chicago, the navy suit hanging in his closet, the room full of strangers he’d charm and forget. He thought about his dad on a stage, telling the truth. He’d be there. He pulled the blanket higher and let the schedule run on a loop until the loop wore out and he slept.