Roberto Núñez had come to America to play baseball but had ended up an avid baseball card collector instead. It had started with a talisman, the card of 35-year-old rookie Jim Morris that he kept in his wallet, as a reminder that there was no such thing as too late. Over the years, he added players to his deck, and by the time he signed a $12,000 contract to play at Triple-A for the Zephyrs, he’d collected thousands of cards, all organized into laminated three-ring binders that he would flip through each night before bed, gazing at their faces, then memorizing the stats written on the card backs.
Now 41 and his career at an end, Núñez had settled into a two-bedroom apartment above his own baseball card shop, and he would shuttle between the two floors during the day as customer traffic dictated. The store didn’t make much money: New Orleans had never had a Major League team, so interest in card collecting amongst the city’s inhabitants was low, but Núñez didn’t care; he was jus happy to be working for himself.
He had come to New Orleans in early 2007, his 8th ball club in 10 years. After two seasons, the Zephyrs failed to offer him a new contract but he decided to stay in the city anyway, turning down an outstanding offer to play for the Storm Chasers of Omaha. He was old and it was over, he reasoned. He was ready to just settle into something more comfortable, so he quit baseball and bought the storefront in Central City.
He liked to tell people that he was a self-made man, that back home in Santo Domingo nobody could believe what he had done with himself, but in truth, he came from a well-to-do family: his father was the CEO of Falcondo, a successful ferronickel mining company. Núñez’s move to the States represented downward mobility, not upward, and the two-story redbrick building that he was now settling into was purchased from money he had been gifted on his 40th birthday, when he told his parents that he was quitting the game.
In the afternoons, after school, Marjorie would come by the shop, and when nobody was in the store the two would go upstairs to his apartment and make out for hours on his red leather sofa. He would always leave the storefront door unlocked and the register unattended, so hurried did he feel to get her into his arms, but she would always remind him halfway up the stairs, and then they would go back down and lock the door together, giggling.
He loved Marjorie – she was cheerful and graceful and so much smarter than him – but she was only 17, and so he made rules for how physical they could get.
“My parents would never forgive me if they found out,” he said, deathly serious, and she laughed because she thought it was funny that an old man like him would still fear the wrath of his parents, but she accepted his rules, which were that until her 18th birthday he wasn’t allowed to “enter her in any way”.
She never thought of him as a true adult (she had first met him at a baseball game, watching him slide around in the dirt) but she liked the restrictions, and thought it made their encounters more seductive. He liked them because they allowed him to sleep at night.
In the early evenings, the two would settle in at the shop for hours, the flat screen television on, watching the Rangers when the Rangers were playing, and watching whatever other team was on when the Rangers were not. She didn’t love baseball but she liked it enough, and since they always muted the TV it meant they could talk at length without making eye contact and say the things they otherwise might not be brave enough to say.
On the Tuesday night after Easter, it was unseasonably hot and since Núñez hadn’t yet installed his air-conditioner, he left the window on his fire escape open to help cool his room. A burglar climbed in, shoved a 9 millimeter pistol in his face, and tied his hands to a chair behind his back with an orange vinyl extension cord.
“Where’s your wallet?” the burglar whispered.
“On the dresser, by the clock,” Núñez whispered back, and then was shot twice in the back of the head.
The burglar took the $63 from Núñez’s wallet, and then went downstairs into the card shop. He couldn’t get into the electronic safe – with the Mickey Mantle rookie card and the Cal Ripken autograph – but he took the keys to Núñez’s Mercedes, a 1998 C230 with 135,000 miles on it, and sold the vehicle for $600 to a junkyard before daybreak.
Núñez’s mother and father and three siblings flew in for his funeral, and his mother cried over the coffin and threw red roses. Knowing they would be there, Marjorie avoided the service.
They stayed at a bed and breakfast in the French Quarter. Even though one should not have an appetite during times of mourning, they could not get enough of the spicy peel-and-eat shrimp, and ate very well while in town.
His building was turned over to his family, who sold it for a profit: that part of Central City was coming up in a big way. Developers tore it down and turned it into a luxury condominium. His baseball cards went to his eldest brother Juan, who not knowing what to do with them shoved them into a white plastic mail tote, which he then left in his bedroom closet where his cat mistook it for a litter box.
Adam Janos resides in New York City, where he works as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. His creative prose has been published in Word Riot, Narratively, and Múlt és Jövő. You can find him on Twitter at @adamtjanos.
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