The Comeback of Roy Walker. Stephanie Doyle

maybe he’d missed it. The grass on the field—although this field was mostly brown after a hard winter. The shape of the diamond. The sight of a masked man crouching sixty feet away waiting to catch whatever Roy threw at him.

      “Keep it simple to start,” Duff called out. “Fastball.”

      Roy nodded and he could see Scout had a radar gun pointed at him ready to record his velocity.

      His throat tightened and his hand flexed around the ball. “Don’t time me yet. Let me get a few in first.”

      Scout nodded and put the gun down.

      Then Roy went through his motions—forward lean, left arm dangle, pull up, plant foot and fire.

      He heard the snap of the ball hitting Javier’s glove. It sounded pretty fast. Javier tossed back the ball and Roy did it again. After his third warm-up he nodded in Scout’s direction. She held up the gun and he fired.

      “Eighty-six!”

      Roy held his glove up, asking for the ball. Eighty-six wasn’t fast. His fastest had been ninety-two, ninety-three miles an hour. But eighty-six after not throwing for a few years was...workable.

      “Try a curve,” Duff suggested.

      Roy changed the position of the ball in his hand and threw. It curved. It wasn’t his killer curve, but, again, it was something to work with. He threw over and over. All of his old pitches, even the changeup, just to test that speed. Every fastball got a little faster, every curve a little curvier.

      They worked him for an hour and when it was over, his body was covered in sweat and his arm hurt like hell. But he knew. He knew what they knew.

      “You can still pitch, Roy Walker,” Scout said, patting him on his right shoulder. Duff kept his hands in his jeans pockets and nodded his agreement.

      “The New England Rebels are looking for pitching,” Duff said. “Might be willing to offer you a minor-league deal to see if you can get your conditioning and timing up to speed. I’m thinking in a starting role, too, to build your stamina. It’s a lot of ifs, but if we can get you back into form, if you don’t blow out your arm while doing it, it might be perfect timing for the Rebels, heck, any team, looking to add to their rotation after the all-star break in July.”

      Roy nodded. “You really think the Rebels will give me a chance?”

      “I don’t,” Scout told him bluntly. “No one will take a chance on what might be. You can still pitch, but you are nowhere near major-league ready. Plus you’re old. Sorry to be so blunt but—”

      “No, I appreciate it. I...need it.”

      Duff sighed. “They’ll take a chance. They’ll take a chance if I tell them to. Call Charlie, tell him to call Russell. He’s the Rebels’ new general manager. I’ll let Russell know what’s coming and what I saw. In the meantime, Roy Walker, you’ll fill a hell of a lot of seats in this stadium and that’s something that will make our owner very happy. I sure do like to make JoJo happy.”

      “You might want to start by not calling her JoJo,” Scout said. “She hates it.”

      Duff scowled. “No, she loves it coming from me.”

      Roy tuned them out and focused only on what might be. The minors. Roy Walker, future Hall of Famer, was back in the minors.

      Still, it was a start.

      They walked off the field and Roy gave his thanks to Javier. Something he might not have cared about before. But the guy had come on his own time to help Roy and the least he deserved was a thank-you.

      “You good pitch.”

      Roy smiled. “Thanks. Gracias. See you around, maybe.”

      With that, Javier smiled and headed through the dugout to the door that would lead to the locker rooms. Roy put his mitt in his bag.

      “You know, I’ve seen a lot of guys try this comeback,” Duff said as they followed Javier to the locker room, where there was an elevator that would take them up to the second level.

      Both Roy and Scout purposefully walked slowly to accommodate Duff’s slow gait.

      “The problem is the technique won’t be there for a while, which means you could hurt yourself before you can get your arm into shape.”

      “Duff’s right,” Scout said. “Seen it a million times. You’ll be almost there and then you’ll tear something because you’re not getting the right treatment. Treatment is the key.”

      “Okay. I’ll try to find someone. You have any recommendations? A sports therapist you use for the team?”

      Roy should have guessed by the look Duff and Scout shared but really, truly, he didn’t see it coming.

      “I do know someone,” Scout said. “Maybe she can be persuaded to come home for a visit.”

      Duff chuckled before he started coughing. “Yep. Got the best in the business on my team. And I hear she works cheap.”

      Roy looked at Duff, then at Scout. They couldn’t be serious. “She’ll never do it. She hates me.”

      Scout and Duff both smiled back. “Yep,” they said together.

       CHAPTER THREE

      “YOU NEED TO come home.”

      Lane pressed her cell to her ear with her shoulder and opened the door to her apartment, two grocery bags hanging from her arms. “Hold on.”

      Once inside, she shut the door, made her way to the kitchen, put the bags—recyclable, of course—on the counter along with her phone and hit the speaker button.

      “Okay, Scout, I’m here. What do you mean come home? I was just there.”

      “Months ago at Christmas. Things are different now.”

      Lane took a deep breath as she unpacked her frozen entrées and tried not to let Scout’s anxiety get her freaked out as well.

      “Has he been to a doctor?” Lane asked, knowing what Scout was worried about. This was about Duff. With Scout it was always about Duff. Or baseball.

      “He won’t go. He says he’s fine, just old and tired—”

      “Scout, he is seventy-five. I mean, he’s allowed to be tired.”

      “It’s not like that. It’s not naps in the afternoon. It’s not dozing after dinner. Something is wrong and you are the only one in this family who has any kind of medical knowledge. If you tell him to go to a doctor, he’ll listen to you. With me he brushes it off as nagging.”

       Home.

      The word blasted through Lane like a bullet into the gut. Suddenly the idea made so much sense to her when nothing seemed to make sense six days ago.

      Six days? Had it been that long since the doctor told her Stephen had died? The eerie sense of lost time had Lane wondering what had happened during the past week. Most of that time had been spent on a couch staring at four walls. Until she got hungry enough to go to a grocery store to get something besides potato chips and peanut butter sandwiches to eat.

      Now with Scout’s worry about Duff, it suddenly felt like there was an answer. A place to go. A person to be. Not a physical therapist, but a daughter.

      Because Lane was no longer a physical therapist.

      Scout wasn’t prone to exaggeration and she certainly wasn’t the type to ask for help. Lane hadn’t missed the fatigue Duff seemed to suffer from at Christmas. If he was getting worse, then he needed to see a doctor.

      “Should we call Samantha?”

      “The traitor sister? No.”

      Lane groaned. Sometimes