Still Water East
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 1
The heat finds me before the airport doors finish sliding open.
It isn’t the dry, honest heat I grew up with in California, the kind that sits on your shoulders and leaves you alone. This heat has weight and wetness, and it presses against my face like a hand. Behind me, Trevor Hartley says, “Smell that? That’s money,” and Lena says, “That’s jet fuel, Trev,” and the two of them laugh the way people do after eleven years of being married to each other’s timing.
I carry two suitcases and a manila folder of property listings I have printed, annotated, and not yet believed in. Two suitcases is what a man packs when he is either planning a short trip or avoiding a long one. I haven’t decided which.
“Rental car’s at the garage,” Trevor announces, already walking. He’s still built like a pitcher, long in the legs and loose in the shoulders. He moves through the terminal as if somebody might hand him a ball at any moment. Two years out of the game, and he still wears his warmup jacket on flights, just in case.
“It’s ninety degrees,” I tell him.
“It’s October, Calder. That’s practically winter.”
“In Massachusetts, October is practically winter. Here it’s practically the surface of the sun.”
“Spoken like a man who spent eight years in one organization,” he says, not turning around. “Some of us have played in eleven different climates.”
“Eleven teams, Trev. Not eleven climates. You played in Oakland twice.”
“Once, and a half.”
“A half.”
“I was traded in the middle of the series.”
Lena catches my eye and shakes her head slowly, with the patience of a woman who has heard this argument across several time zones. She’s early thirties, a good decade younger than the two of us in spirit if not in birth year, with dark hair pulled back and a canvas bag over one shoulder. The bag holds everything the rest of us forgot to bring: sunscreen, phone chargers, a map of the city on paper because she doesn’t trust the one on her phone. She falls in beside me as Trevor pulls ahead.
“You okay?” she asks quietly.
“I’m great. It’s eighty-nine degrees and I’m in Florida.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
She bumps my shoulder with hers. “You’ll find a better one by Friday.”
I’d like to believe her. Lena tends to be right about things. It’s an irritating quality in a person, and a useful one in a friend.
The drive takes us east and then north through a landscape I can only describe as aggressively green. Palms line the road like they’ve been issued uniforms. Every few blocks, a canal glints between buildings, and every canal has boats in it, tied up behind houses, nosed into slips, hauled up on lifts like trophies. Trevor drives and talks, and Lena sits in the passenger seat with the listings on her lap, and I take the back seat, where I have always been most comfortable, a reliever in the bullpen of someone else’s conversation.
“Fort Lauderdale has three hundred miles of navigable waterways,” Trevor says. “Three hundred. They call it the Venice of America.”
“Who calls it that?” Lena asks.
“People. Brochures.” He takes a turn with one hand. “I read that there are more than forty thousand boats registered in Broward County. Forty thousand. Imagine that. Imagine being a guy who just has a boat, and nobody thinks it’s weird.”
“You are going to be that guy,” Lena says.
“I’m going to be that guy.”
“You’ll need to learn how to drive one first.”
“I’ll hire somebody.”
“You hate hiring somebody.”
“I hate hiring somebody to do things I can do. I’ll gladly hire somebody to do things I can’t.” He glances in the mirror, finds my eyes. “Evan. Back me up here.”
“You’re going to buy a yacht,” I say, “and name it something terrible.”
“I’m going to name it something excellent.”
“What’s the name?”
He hesitates, which means he has one. “The Rotation.”
Lena groans. I laugh, a real one, the first in several days, and it surprises me enough that I look out the window to cover it. The canals keep sliding past, black and silver, with the sun turning the surface to hammered metal.
I have known Trevor for eleven years, which is how long he’s been in my life but, he likes to point out, less than one-third of the teams he’s played for. We met in a clubhouse in Boston when he came over in a trade and took the locker next to mine. He was two weeks into a new city and already telling the story of the last one like it was a legend. We were never close in the way the movies promise. We were close the real way: five hundred bus rides, a thousand card games, a hundred nights in hotel bars where nobody spoke about the things that mattered. When my elbow went, he was one of three people who called. When he went, I was one of two.
“What are you thinking about?” Lena asks, turning to look at me over the seat.
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“Where you look out the window like it owes you money.”
“It doesn’t owe me anything,” I say. “That’s sort of the problem.”
She doesn’t push. She turns back around, and I watch the back of her head, and I feel, not for the first time, that I have been handed a gift I haven’t earned. A sister, more or less. A friend who knows when to stop asking.
The condo is on the sixth floor of a building called Harbor Pointe, which, as far as I can tell, is neither a harbor nor a point. It’s a rectangle of white stucco with a pool the color of mouthwash and a lobby that smells like a lemon being gently threatened. The woman at the front desk hands us three key cards and says, “Welcome home,” in a voice that suggests she says it to everyone, and that most of them believe her.
We’re renting for six weeks, which is the plan. Six weeks to find a winter house for me, and a winter house and a slip for Trevor and Lena, and a reason for all three of us to stop looking over our shoulders at the people we used to be.
The apartment is bright and beige and smells faintly of sunscreen from some previous tenant. There are two bedrooms and a pullout, which I claim before anyone can argue. The kitchen is the size of a dugout. Through the sliding glass doors, a balcony runs the full width of the living room, and beyond the balcony is the Intracoastal Waterway, wide and flat and moving with traffic like a highway made of water.
I drop my suitcases in the little room and go out onto the balcony. The heat has eased a little, or maybe I have stopped noticing it, which my grandfather used to say was the whole secret to climate: you don’t conquer it, you just run out of things to complain about.
A boat passes below. It’s white and low and enormous, carrying six or seven people on its aft deck in matching linen. One of them raises a glass toward the condo, toward all of us, toward nobody. I raise an imaginary glass back.
Behind me, Trevor’s voice rises. “Lena! Come look at this. They have a gym. On the ground floor.”
“I’m unpacking.”
“They have a sauna.”
“It’s eighty-nine degrees, Trev.”
“It’s a dry sauna.”
I smile at the water. Still water, east. Somewhere beneath the smile is the familiar, quiet ache, the one that arrives whenever I’m happy for other people. It isn’t envy. I’d be lying if I called it envy. It’s closer to watching a game from the stands after years of being on the field, and seeing for the first time how much of it you missed while you were busy playing.
For eight years, my life was a calendar. Every day had a shape. A start day, then a day to recover, a day for long toss, a day for bullpen work, a day for film. If I was sore, there was a treatment. If I was tired, there was a number: how many hours of sleep, how many innings, how many pitches. A pitcher’s whole life is arithmetic. You count so you don’t have to feel.
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