Siempre Segundo

Cirilo Méndez is born on a tannery floor in Santa Cruz in 1881, two generations after the family's cattle rancho went to a treaty, a land commission and a courthouse, one signature at a time. His grandfather teaches him to pitch in a dirt yard, and teaches him in the same breath that the Méndez come second — that reaching for anything else is how the world collects.

He reaches anyway. A booth on the boardwalk for the summer people's nickels, hides at the tannery through the winters, and sixteen years of being good enough for anybody and wanted by nobody — Santa Clara, the Beach Flats, the Coast League, a man in a derby who passes on him without ever saying why. Rebecca Whitfield marries him against everything she was raised to be, and never once pretends it was easy. He is thirty-six the autumn the country finally learns to say his name.