Page 47 of The Fall Classic

Just a little.

CHAPTER TEN

Logan

The bus to Fort Lauderdale leaves at five AM, which means I need to be at the stadium by four forty-five, which means I set my alarm last night for four fifteen.

And that can only mean one thing:

I’ve been lying in the dark since three fifty counting down the minutes, because that’s what a guy with anxiety does.

I blink at the alarm clock, the red letters bright against the dark room. It’s four oh two now. I yawn and rub my eyes, which are sandy with sleep.

The apartment is quiet except for the ceiling fan and air conditioning. Slowly I give up and get out of bed, leaving the light off because turning it on will be a signal that the day is starting, and if the day starts, that means today’s the day I leave Georgie for a week.

I’m not ready to turn the light on.

I make myself a protein shake and put the spoon I used for my peanut butter powder in the sink while I shake my blender bottle, the ice and coiled metal ball clacking loudly with every shake.

I stare at that spoon in the sink. Man, it drove me crazy how Lucas would leave the dishes in the sink instead of loading them.

It’s funny how you can miss something like dirty dishes.

No, you know what? I don’t miss the dirty dishes. I miss the guy who dirtied the dishes.

There’s a difference. No one actually misses dirty dishes.

As I keep shaking, I walk past box after box, looking at paperbacks and hard copies, special editions and used copies. I walk over to a box full of favorites, which I’ve left right on Lucas’s bed for no other reason than to spite his memory.

His dishes drove me crazy. My books drove him crazy.

It’s a brother thing.

This box has the complete Chronicles of Narnia and a couple of nonfiction books that are more pop psychology than deep psychology but I don’t care.

And it has my favorite nonfiction of all: Tuesdays with Morrie.

I pop the top off my blender bottle and take a drink while I hold the book in my hand. When I finish my shake, I’m still holding the book.

I put it on top of my wallet and then grab my things to leave. I double-check that I’ve remembered my toothbrush, charger, and underwear, and then, because I’m me, I check that my wallet has my ID in it … as well as the Meant to Bean patch Georgie was wearing at Spring Training.

I take it out of my wallet and run my fingers over it.

The brown patch is maybe half the size of my palm, with the stitching slightly raised around the Meant to Bean name and coffee cup logo. The safety pin is still attached to the backing, bent slightly from when it ripped out of her shoe. I turn it over and over in my hand, thinking about how it was a symbol for months, and now …

Now I have the real thing.

I hold it between two fingers while I grab Tuesdays with Morrie and open the book to the page I’ve read more times than I can count. In fact, the book opens to the page automatically, the spine having been trained by my constant rereading.

I love this book, but it’s a gut punch.

When the author found out his beloved mentor was dying, he visited him every Tuesday until he passed, wanting to glean all the wisdom he could from his old friend.

There’s a part about detachment that hit me hard when I read it several years ago. It’s not simply because the mentor was dying of ALS—the same disease that was slowly claiming my mother—but because I felt like the author could see through me.

The detachment he talked about wasn’t the cold, unfeeling kind where you shut down all emotion. It was the kind where you feel something all the way to your bones, let it seep into the fabric of who you are—and then you open your hand and release it.

You feel it and feel it and then somehow just let it go.