“He’s more persistent than he looks. He kept buying me beers at the local watering hole and I kept blowing him off. Then one night I was eating dinner alone at Cracker Barrel-go ahead and laugh-and he plopped in my booth uninvited. That’s how I learned the man pours ketchup on macaroni and cheese.”
“Love is blind.” She laughs.
“It’s not what you think.”
The reflex is still there, the need to disavow the blatantly apparent.
“How do you know what I’m thinking?” she asks.
“For the same reason you always know what I’m thinking.”
“So you’re suggesting we can read each other’s minds?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Not always,” she says, bringing me back to earth. “I shouldn’t have surprised you, Andy. But I figured if I called ahead you’d make an excuse.”
“See, you can read my mind.”
“I have something of yours I know you’d want and I didn’t want to send it by mail. It’s there. In the bag. Can you get it? I don’t want to wake him.”
I set the bag on my lap.
“Go ahead. It won’t bite you,” she says, encouraging me to fish through the pacifiers and baby spoons in plastic baggies, the disposable diapers, the jars of applesauce and the stuffed sock monkey. I know what it is as soon as I touch the plastic cube. I’d resigned myself to accepting it was gone forever, tossed away with the detritus of my former life. It’s preserved in its pristine state, protected from the elements, snowy white, the ink as fresh as the day it was etched into the cow leather a lifetime ago.
To Andy Nocera, Joe DiMaggio.
“Damn, I don’t believe it. Where did you find it?” I ask.
“It was never lost. It just got forgotten in the…the confusion.”
“There were two of these,” I say wistfully. Forgive me for plagiarizing the great Nabokov this once. There’s no way to describe the effect of a ten-dollar baseball except to admit I’m easily intoxicated by the impossible past.
She blushes and clears her throat, not once, twice-the sure sign she’s embarrassed.
“I have it. I’ll send it to you when I get home.”
“No, no, I want you to keep it,” I say, happier than I should be, thrilled actually, to know she keeps a small reminder of me in the house she shares with her husband and son.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. The least I can do is give you one of my balls.”
She laughs (I knew she would) and the dreaded moment arrives when the violins swell and the lens goes soft focus and we’re meant to fall in each other’s arms and declare eternal love despite the impossible circumstances. But Baby Bradley has an impeccable sense of timing. He knows exactly when to strike up the band.
“Someone’s cranky,” she says, rising from her chair. “I’d give you a hug but I’m a bit encumbered.”
Instead we settle on a chaste kiss on the cheek and a thank-you. I’m sure it’s my imagination but I swear Baby Bradley is giving me the evil eye, warning me to back off.
“I’ll walk you to the car,” I say, hoisting her bag on my shoulder. We make small talk about the weather, comparing last year’s blistering temperatures with the pleasant balminess of this July. A real Mayberry summer we’re having, I observe.
“What is it with men and that show?” She laughs. Obviously Barry and I have something in common.
“Men are only allowed to be sentimental about two things. Their own ten-year-old selves and dead athletes. Them’s the rules,” I say, explaining the Opie factor.
“I can’t believe you’re forty.” She sighs, strapping the baby in his car seat.
“You’re not far behind.”
“Surreal, isn’t it?” she says. “Do you remember when we thought we had all the time in the world?”
“I do.”
“He seems really nice, Andy. I can tell he really loves you.”
I shrug my shoulders, neither admitting nor denying it, and now we do hug, an embrace no different than one I’d share with my mother or sister.
“Don’t fuck this one up,” she says, turning the key in the ignition. “You deserve to be happy.”
My Rolex says it’s 1:45 as her car rolls out of the parking lot and disappears in the traffic. Alice is right: time is slipping away. I find Harold and tell him we need to hit the road if he’s going to see young Mr. Strickland one last time in a Charlotte uniform.
He’s quiet in the car, unusual for him. The radio is off and he doesn’t reach for one of his discs to slip in the player. I know exactly how to cheer him up.
“Hey, I’ve got something to show you. You’re going to love this,” I promise, handing him the baseball cube.
“Is this for real?” he asks, his natural giddiness bubbling through the gloom.
“Absolutely.”
“How did you know Joe DiMaggio?”
“My dad played ball with him once.”
He hands the cube back gingerly as if it’s fragile porcelain that would shatter if he sneezed.
“No shit,” he says, amazed.
“No shit.”
He stares at the road beyond the windshield. He shakes his shoulders and cracks his neck, loosening up, preparing for the crushing disappointment of losing the son of a man who played ball with Joe DiMaggio.
“So,” he says, unable to control the tremor in his voice. “Are you guys getting back together?”
I suppress my natural instinct to laugh because now I finally see what Alice recognized at first glance. Harold really loves me.
“No. No. That’s impossible.”
I can leave it at that or I can remind him that the bundle of joy on Alice ’s knee didn’t arrive by FedEx, purchased on eBay. Or I can take the opportunity to make him happy.
“You see, I’m already taken,” I say, squeezing his knee. “So you know where we’re going?”
“ Durham,” he says, reaching down to grab my hand.
“And then?”
“What do you mean?”
“After Durham?”
“Home?”
“You know how to get there?”
“The same way we came.”
“Last star to the left, then straight on to Neverland.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you ever read Peter Pan?”
“I saw the movie. You wanna hear some music?”
“Sure.”
He pops in a Weezer disc, the Blue Album, fast-forwarding to his favorite track. He picks up my hand again, pleading, come on, sing it for me, just the chorus, please, pretty please. What choice do I have but to surrender?
“Woo-ee-oo, I look just like Buddy Holly.”
Yep, things have come full circle.
He plays the track a second time, then a third. He wants to harmonize, but it’s been a long, strange afternoon with hours ahead of us before we roll into Durham. The sun is shining, bugs are splattering on the windshield, and I’m losing a battle with the Sandman as the pine trees and blue skies of North Carolina race by in a blur.
Acknowledgments
The late Mark Harris and the late Jerre Mangione were the first writers to encourage me to follow in their footsteps. Elaine Scarry was exceptionally generous and supportive and deserves all the accolades she has gone on to achieve.
Nick Street, Joe Pittman, and Lawrence Schimel were willing to put me into print.
Judith Stern, since 1994 and counting.
Brian Corbett, Mark McCloud, L.W.B., Sharon Sorokin James, Lori Biondi, and Cheryl Radenz all contributed to making this possible.
Mitchell Waters has been steadfast throughout, and John Scognamiglio ought to be on a Publisher’s Row Mount Rushmore with Perkins and Robbins and Maxwell.
The family in this work of fiction are pikers compared to my parents and sister when it comes to unconditional love.
And, finally, to Nick Ifft, for better or worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health and, thirty years later, till death do us part.
