The Visitors

Bats distributed: four confirmed, one on watch. Ballgames: three, none on company time. Airfare to Seattle: higher than last week.

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We came into Washington on Thursday, a day ahead of the games, the heat and humidity already up and reminding you the nation's capital was located on a compromise. On the way in we passed the torn-down side of the White House — the east wing gone to a pit, a crane over the hole where they're putting up a ballroom, four hundred million dollars of it behind the chain-link.

We found a room a few blocks south of the ballpark — an old brick efficiency the cranes hadn't gotten to yet. Two beds, a hot plate and a half-fridge, a window unit I cranked before I'd set the bag down.

My Seattle Rainmakers were in town to play the Washington Standing Committee, Friday through Sunday, and though I had not driven across the country to see them, I would have driven a long way. It was the second time this season I'd watched my team be the visitors.

Tate had made a call to a man he knew with the Committee, but the fellow was out of town until Monday, so there was nothing to sell while Seattle was in town. Three games, and nothing to do but watch them. On this trip that is close to a holiday.

Friday night I had a beer I actually wanted and a scorecard I actually kept, and when Dominic Canzone tripled two runs home in the second, I was on my feet before I knew it.

I opined to Tate the Committee bullpen was being mismanaged. He said it wasn't.

In the seventh a man two seats down leaned over. Heavyset, a red ballcap, a kid asleep against his arm. "Are you the bat guys?" he said. "With the wagon?" I said we were. "I thought that was you. I read the things you write." He played in a Wallop league out of his office — third place, he said, which is two spots better than I have ever done in my own. He'd read about Durham. He wanted to know if the bull was really out past the wall. I told him it was, and he nodded like I'd confirmed a rumor he'd been carrying around for years. Then he went back to his scorebook. I didn't tell Tate.

Saturday I made eggs for the two of us on the hot plate. Then I finally sat down to buy the ticket. I'd been carrying it since Durham — a seat to Seattle I could have had for two hundred dollars and didn't click, telling myself I was waiting for a reason and knowing I was waiting because clicking it was the thing I was afraid of.

The fare had gone up. Of course it had — same strait causing the gas problems. Five hundred and eighty dollars now, for the same one-stop seat, and I must have made a noise, because Tate looked up from his book.

"Almost three times what it was in Durham," I said. "Maybe I give it a day. See if it drops."

"I missed Naomi's graduation. Would've liked to do that over," he said, and went back to his book.

I didn't give it a day. I bought the seat at five hundred and eighty dollars.

Then I texted Asher, the same as I had from Houston — saw the Rainmakers, I wrote, here in D.C. this time, still funny seeing them in gray. And then the part I'd never sent before: that I'd booked a flight home, that I'd be there Tuesday. I signed it Dad, the way I always do, and set the phone down, into the same quiet that had swallowed the last four messages.

Nothing came back that night. That was familiar enough that I told myself it was fine, and mostly I believed it.

Sunday was the hot one, the kind of heat that comes up off the Anacostia and settles in the metal of the seats. Tate took his seat before the anthem and stayed in it.

The phone buzzed in my hand and I almost didn't look.

awesome. ceremony's at 5.

Awesome. I read that one word three times before I got to the rest. The time was in there — five o'clock — my kid telling me when to show up for them.

"Five o'clock," I said, jiggling my phone in the air. Tate nodded, eyes on the field. "Good."

I was looking at it instead of the field for most of an inning.

We have the week in front of us. Tomorrow we go see Tate's man with a couple of bats. Tuesday I fly home, and Asher has told me what time to be there.

Two days to Seattle.

— Freely