Eleven Months

The work is small and boring and Ruth guards its boringness like a treasure. For two weeks Mateo is not allowed to throw. Not a single pitch. He had expected to fight her about it and finds, to his surprise, that he doesn't want to — there is something almost restful about being told, plainly, by someone who cannot be flattered, exactly what his body is and is not allowed to do. He does the bands. He does the small humiliating exercises with the weight of a coffee cup. He does them in the treatment room with the bare walls while Ruth works on someone else's knee and narrates his form without looking. "Slower. You're rushing it. The arm doesn't know you used to be fast, you keep telling it." "That doesn't even mean anything." "It means slow down, Salas, I just said it fancy." He learns things about her in pieces, the way you learn about someone who volunteers nothing. She has been in Cedar Falls eleven years. She turned down, twice, a job with a major-league club, and when one of the twenty-two-year-olds asked her why, within Mateo's hearing, she said because the big leagues want you to clear players to play and I'd rather work somewhere that lets me clear players to be alright, and went back to her notes, and the twenty-two-year-old did not understand it and Mateo, against his will, did. It is a Thursday, three weeks in, when she lets him throw. Twenty pitches. Half speed. A net, not a batter, in the empty stadium with the four thousand seats sitting blue and vacant in the evening light. Ruth stands behind him with a tablet, and Petrosky watches from the dugout with his arms folded, and Mateo throws twenty soft, slow, careful pitches into a net and feels, on the eleventh one, his shoulder do the thing it is supposed to do, the smooth thing, the thing it has not done cleanly in over a year — and he stops, with the ball still in his hand, because his eyes have gone hot in a way he was not prepared for. "That one," Ruth says, behind him. She has seen it on the tablet. Of course she has. "Felt different." "Felt like before," Mateo says. His voice is not steady. "Before any of it." He turns around. Ruth is looking at him, and for once she is not assessing a fence post; for once there is something else in her face, something that has come up from underneath the hard ponytail and the bare walls and the lost pens, and it takes Mateo a second to place it because he has not been on the receiving end of it in eleven months. It is being glad for him. Not for the closer, not for the comeback, not for the city's redemption story. Just glad, plainly, that a man she had been working alongside had felt his own body come good. "Don't," she says, because his face is doing something too. "Don't make it a moment. It's eleven pitches at half speed, you have months of this ahead of you, and if you cry in my stadium I'll put it in your file." "It's your stadium now." "It's always been my stadium. You're a guest. A slow one." But she is almost smiling, the way she had almost smiled in Conference Room — no, that was a different person, a different town; the way she had almost smiled, here, in this town, three weeks ago — and Mateo notices the almost, and notices himself noticing, and stands in the middle of four thousand empty seats with a ball in his good hand and understands, with the calm of a man reading an X-ray of his own future, that he is in some trouble. Not the shoulder. The shoulder, for the first time in eleven months, is the least of it. "Twenty pitches," Ruth says, turning back to her tablet, all business, the moment filed and closed. "You've thrown eleven. Stop standing there feeling things. Throw the other nine." Mateo turns back to the net. He sets his feet. And he throws the twelfth pitch slow and clean and careful, the way she taught him, into the quiet — and somewhere behind him, he is fairly sure, Ruth wrote something down, and he found that he very much wanted to know what.