Happy Saturday! I wrote this for Friday’s #2MinutesGo. Loads of great writing going on over at JD Mader’s place. Maybe one week you’ll join us. Or just read.

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His hands are ruined, but that came with the job. Catching blazing pitchers, winging balls to second, getting knocked around by foul tips and bats on the rebound and runners plowing into him trying to reach holy mother home plate. These hands will never win any beauty contests, but each blown knuckle and callus and broken nail tells a story. He can point to one and talk about the day he threw out a Hall of Fame base-stealing legend—twice. He can point out another, always with a smile, because those rough-and-tumble days of bus rides and crap motels have become romantic over time, and talk about the beating he took from catching his first knuckleballer.

If he could still talk.

The nurses comment on his hands each time they come to check his vitals; one in particular, a young girl, visibly pregnant, pets his good hand like it’s an abused dog, sometimes cooing a few words in Spanish. They are beautiful words, and her hands are soft and soothing, and he says the words over and over to himself, embedding them in what’s left of his memory. She’s the type of girl he might have cottoned to in the bar after the game, the quiet and motherly girls, like his Gina, God rest her soul.

Today the older one comes, with her world-wise eyes and the limp she won’t talk about. “Morning, Pete.” Flo is the only nurse who calls him by his first name, which he prefers, because that mister business makes him feel every inch of his years. She’s the only nurse who picks up his hand and laughs and says “that’s one damn ugly paw,” and he likes that too. He can take that, from a woman like her, and if he could talk, he’d give it right back to her, and the smile in those weary eyes tells her she knows that. She checks his reflexes, his various bags of fluids, his numbers. With a grim attempt at a smile—only one side is working—he remembers the days when his stats were the numbers that mattered. Batting average, home runs, percentage of runners he’d thrown out. Now it’s blood pressure, oxygen level, heartbeats. Each heartbeat chattering across a digital screen. He’d rather be back there, jamming another finger trying to scoop a low, mean pitch out of the dirt, than in this damn bed, watching the measure of what’s left of his life.

It’s late when she returns; he can see that with his one good eye, the way the light is dimmer through his half-open shades. Maybe Flo sees the way he’s looking because she says, “Yeah. Lucinda called in sick, something with the baby.”

He feels surprise and worry do something to the side of his face that works, and god knows what’s happening to the other side. “Nah, she’s fine.” Flo checks his IV. “And aren’t you the lucky duck to get me pokin’ at you twice in one day.”

He wants to tell her that he doesn’t mind at all. Flo reminds him of another girl he knew when. She came right up to him at the bar after a game, nothing shy about her at all, and both of them knew what they wanted. He liked her honesty. It made things easier for him. He’d gotten good at reading signals and calling pitches, but it was frankly a relief to leave that on the field at the end of the day.

“Yeah,” Flo mutters, giving him a wink, “I know you love me. But we don’t want to make the other nurses jealous.”

He laughs at that, or at least tries to, and it comes out like a bit of a wheeze. Still, it gives him hope. When they first brought him here after the stroke, damn near nothing worked. The doctors told him he had an excellent chance of recovering most of what he’d lost.

Flo makes a few notations on his chart. “Not bad, Pete. They’ll be getting you into rehab pretty soon.” Her face softens. “You want, I’ll come visit. I know you got some good stories in you, especially about what happened to these ugly paws. And I want to hear every one.”

She wraps one strong, no-nonsense hand around his. The one on his bad side. Where he hasn’t been able to feel a thing. But her hand is warm, the pressure firm but not so much it hurts.

His heart monitor beeps and beeps and beeps.