GPS Read Free Page A

and, Jeff hoped, do something that’s easy to scout, like hit a first-pitch home run. Not likely.
    The GPS had come into Jeff’s life at a time when he’d started to scrutinize everything attached to Riley, and for that reason it didn’t shock him that it ended up being the last gift exchanged between the two before the split. It was so fitting, Jeff had found he rather liked the GPS now, or at least the idea of it, and had come to be almost giddy about using the thing, even if only to spite her in some ridiculous, Jeff sort of way.
    For about 10 minutes last Christmas, he believed that thing he’d unwrapped, which had arrived with a tipsy Riley at about 3 that morning, was a symbol of some new, happier life for both of them. Not long after, he’d found the sarcasm he just knew was programmed somewhere into that magical direction-finding thing. Riley, putting her LSU education to work, had decided this piece of gadgetry was some sort of solution to Jeff’s hatred for plane travel and his constant, unrelenting stress.
    He’d been scouting baseball talent in some manner and for various teams for 15 years — after his own playing career fizzled in a blink his sophomore year at UConn — and he had hated airports and the people inside them for almost just as long. The GPS, he imagined Riley thinking gleefully to herself, would rejuvenate his career, a big reset button he could plug into his cigarette lighter. Always the perfect little solution to Jeff’s nonstop problems.
    The GPS symbolized the new leaf she was turning over for him. It was so simple to her. Those two-hour flights from Houston to Phoenix? Why not turn them into 16-hour drives instead? It was comical then, and as Ascondo waved pathetically at a high-arcing slider for strike three, it seemed more so now. He almost shrieked in delightful impersonation of the fictional airport lady he’d dreamed up.
    Jeff shuffled up the stadium steps and through the sparsely-populated concourse toward the exit gate — it was only the bottom of the fourth inning, but it was clear Ascondo was pure shit and couldn’t hit a breaking ball if he ran one over with his car — and he wore a smile that was becoming more and more common for him, the kind worn by death row inmates who have long since realized every minute leading up to the last one will be a lot easier than the last one.
    So find some way to enjoy them.

 
    - 2 -
     
     
     
    “ In four, hundred, feet, turn right … In three, hundred, feet, turn right … Arriving at destination, on left.”
    Jeff was still smiling two days later as he drove through the crowded streets of the French Quarter, where he almost never went anymore unless his brother or one of his few remaining friends made it to town on a weekend he was actually in town.
    He loved the city, had called it home for six years now and did so in a defining love-it-or-leave-it time for New Orleans. Far from a native, Jeff always felt when Katrina came blowing through in 2005 that, in some way, he became almost as important a resident as the ones he always listened to — either playing improv jazz or just drunkenly gabbing — in the Frenchmen Street bars he loved.
    The storm forced every survivor that still had a front door to walk into to either find some way to stick it out or to cut and run forever. Jeff was one of those lucky ones whose life hadn’t been ripped in half by the storm, and he vowed to stick it out even if it meant three different addresses in the same part of town in less than three years, and it did.
    Sticking it out also meant, as it turned out, scouting for the Houston Astros those first three seasons, then catching on with the fledgling Washington Nationals, with whom he spent two difficult years as a minor league advisor and regional scout right after the hurricane. Last season, he’d pulled off the trick a third time by catching on with the New York Mets, and all of it was made possible by his stubborn allegiance to the city of