Out of My League Read Free

bridges that only love could cross. Love and a crap job working at a local Circuit City, that is. I couldn’t drive my grandma’s car forever, not with the way it swilled fuel. The dating economy demanded I make some investments if I wanted to keep up the relationship. I took the little minor league savings I had accrued, bought a used Corolla, and committed myself to working at Circuit City for the holiday season. It wasn’t the most common thing to see a pro athlete do, but it was the only way I could keep the car gassed up, and dates paid for.
    Ironically, of all the things that Bonnie liked about me, baseball wasn’t one of them. It was a bonus, she said, like icing on a six-foot-two, dark-haired, blue-eyed, likes-long-walks-on-the-beach cake. We shared the same faith, which was big because she was worried about getting matched with an Internet-spawned psychopathic killing machine. I told her that, historically speaking, there have been several psychos who believed in Jesus, but she told me if I gave her any trouble she’d kick me in the crotch and run—she told me it was what Jesus would do.
    Though not the key pillar of our relationship at first, whenever the question came up of how things would get paid for, or why I never invited Bonnie over to my residence, or why I worked at Circuit City, the line always traced back to the same point: baseball. As things got more serious, the role baseball played in my life became more apparent to her, and to me. Everything I did, I did with the game in mind. It was my first love and it was a commitment I had to honor, hoping that Bonnie would understand. She did, or at least she did her best to look the part. She supported me and encouraged me, but people have a much easier time understanding stuff when you’re right next to them explaining it. In two months’ time I’d be gone, out chasing the dream of playing in the big leagues while Bonnie would still be here waiting on me. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was so wonderful, I’d say it was unfortunate that Bonnie and I liked each other so much because no matter how good things were right now, there was no way she was going to avoid pain by being my girlfriend, or I by being her boyfriend.
    Dating a baseball player is much more complicated than dating your average Joe, and dating me was more complicated still. I had baggage in the shape of a crazy old woman and a family with a past history of violence and alcohol abuse. Bonnie hadn’t met any of them yet, but that was what today was supposed to be about: lunch with Grandma and coffee with my parents. I had resisted the idea of her meeting my family for as long as I could, but I knew, even from the short time we were with each other, that Bonnie and I would be heading toward bigger decisions. We didn’t have a lot of time together, so she deserved to know what was ahead of her before committing to a year of holding her breath on her dreams while I chased mine.
     
    The first major obstacle in front of any kind of relationship Bonnie and I might have was currently passed out in her recliner, head lolling sideways, dentures roaming freely about her gaping mouth while she sucked air. This was Bonnie’s first official encounter with the eldest woman in my family, the same woman I called landlord, and it started to the soothing sound of a ninety-year-old with sleep apnea gasping for air, only to find it, then fart.
    The television next to my grandma was tuned to Judge Judy with the volume cranked into the upper ranges. Still, Grandma snored away. There are only two types of show my grandma watches: programs that document stupid young people, and news about stupid young people being shot. To emphasize this point, in Grandma’s hands lay a newspaper open to the obituary section. She enjoys seeing whom she’s outlasted, crossing their name off a death list she keeps next to the framed family portrait, wherein some of her “less desirables” have been cut from the scene.