[tenthreeleader]

“So,” Rob began. “Tell me about you.”

“Love the game, don’t love everyone in it,” she said. “I’m forty, I’m an attorney and, no, I do not consider this a consultation.”

She smiled. “I love good wine, a ballgame on a warm summer evening, text messages when you least expect them, and giving people nicknames they don’t know they have.”

The wine seemed to be reaching Jody’s cheeks. Either that or she was blushing.

“That can’t be good,” Rob replied. “I probably have a ton of those nicknames.”

“You have a few,” she teased. “I hear things in the stands.”

“Well, Counselor, if you’re trying to impress me, that’s not really the best way to do it,” Rob replied, now channeling his inner Frank Furillo.

“Nobody’s perfect,” she said. “I even have nicknames, not all of them positive.”

“I’m surprised you’d make an admission like that,” he replied, swirling the remnants of his beer around the bottom of his glass. Their waitress noticed and soon he had a replacement.

“I’m a lawyer,” she said. “You know what people think about lawyers.”

“At least you aren’t a politician,” he joked, with enough of a shine in his eye to make her realize he was kidding.

“Oh, I’ve been called all kinds of things,” she said. “I’m a family attorney so I get called a home-wrecker, a kid-stealer, man-hater, you name it.”

“And I thought being called a dumb SOB was bad,” Rob replied. “Does it bother you?”

She laughed, this time sarcastically. “Of course it hurts me,” she answered. “I may be a lawyer, but I’m human too.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Oh, I know,” she answered. “But you try to do the right thing for people within the law and you get called a witch. Or worse.”

He changed the subject. “You said you didn’t love everyone in the game,” he said. “What does that mean, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Well, you never asked me if I was married. I was, to a ballplayer,” she replied. “Ten years ago. Do you remember a pitcher named Ozzy Hamm?”

Rob shook his head.

“Neither does anyone else, and that was the problem,” she said, a genuine smile returning to her face. “He wanted everyone to call him Ace, and then he went to the Eastern League and got the crap kicked out of him before getting released. He played here for a year and I just fell for him.”

“Any kids?”

“Thank God, no,” she answered. “After he got released he couldn’t handle not being around things any more. He drank. He drank a lot. His parents named him after Ozzy Osbourne so he thought he had to live fast.”

“He drank, and so you’re here drinking with me.”

“Well, there’s a difference when you drink with a grown-up,” she said. “We lasted two years.”

“So why…” he began, before stopping. “Never mind.”

“You want to know why I stayed around the ballpark,” she said, guessing correctly. She took another sip of wine. “I’ll tell you. I wasn’t going to let some jerk named Ozzy take away one of the things I love most in my life, which is baseball. I’m a Tennessee girl, I love my city and I support its team. Does that answer your question?”

Rob sat back and took a pull from his glass. “It does,” he answered.

“So, what about you? What brought you back?”

“Same thing, I guess,” he said. “After Liza ran off a few years back, it was either get back into baseball or rot.”

“So baseball is all you know?”

“I hate people who say that, but yes,” he answered. “I was a roving instructor for a few years and since I never got to see my kids, that was a way to keep me from going insane. But it’s hard when you’re sitting in a hotel room in Elizabethton on a Thursday evening with nothing to do before the weekend series, wondering how your life went to crap.”

“So you hated the life and then became a manager,” she said.

“Touche,” Rob replied. “I guess I deserved that. But let’s just say I like the life a lot better when I’m around people who make it worthwhile.”

“Don’t talk about my brother that way,” she teased.

“I don’t,” Rob answered. “But, I think you know that.”