The Might Have Been - By Joe Schuster Page 0,132

at least have a messed-up daughter who I can visit and a granddaughter who doesn’t deserve her silly name. But you had this boy that you never—and I felt so sorry for you.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s my own New Age blady-blah but something told me I should come here.” She laid a hand gently on his arm. “Is it okay to go upstairs?”

“Yes,” he said.

In the morning when he woke, she was gone. She left a note on a hotel postcard. “Forgive my presumption.” And then a phone number with an area code the same as his. Just before he checked out, when he was pulling back the covers to make certain he wasn’t leaving anything behind—despite the fact that he had no luggage, it was a force of habit after hundreds of nights in hotels—he found a pink sock she evidently hadn’t been able to find whenever she’d left, an anklet with the fabric worn thin at the heel. He folded it neatly and put it into the pocket of his jeans.

The flight, as he felt fate owed him, was uneventful. There was no rain and nearly no turbulence. When the plane began its descent, they passed over a river he thought must be the Flann, the one that ran along the edge of Perabo City. Fields around it were in flood still; the tops of trees poked out from the water, as did the roofs of houses and barns. The water seemed placid, unthreatening to anything at all. It ebbed and flowed gently against the sides of buildings and their reflections rippled against the actual structures. Under the full sun, the water gleamed and he thought that it was actually beautiful. What would that be in Spanish? he wondered. “Agua” was “water” and “hermoso” was “beautiful” but how would he say it in a sentence? El agua es hermoso. That isn’t right, he thought, but close enough. “Agua es hermoso,” he said aloud. “Agua es hermoso.”

Chapter Thirty-one

He decided his team would win the pennant. In the great scheme of life, in the universe of a hundred billion galaxies, who won and who lost a single-A championship in the middle of America mattered perhaps not at all. But it was one small thing he could try to give Johansen, something to move the organization higher in the Baseball America rankings; something to give his players. When the season was over, as many as half of them would get the same sort of thin envelope the Cardinals had sent him a dozen years before any of them was born: We hereby grant … unconditional release—victims of the organization “rebalancing its portfolio,” as Johansen had put it to him in his mother’s million-dollar great room, the organization investing in talent in another country rather than the talent it already had. It wouldn’t matter a whit if, at the end of it all, it was Perabo City players rushing out of a dugout on a ball field the last Sunday in August, fists raised in triumph, but it would be one moment that his players could have for when they were sixty and had been out of ball themselves for decades, working behind the counter at an auto parts store or at a desk in the lobby of a bank, and be able to say, Oh, man, I remember this one year, the twenty-year-old young men they’d been reawakening for a moment inside their sixty-year-old selves.

As they moved past the All-Star break and into August, whatever new arrangement the stars had shifted themselves into seemed enough to change all their fortunes. In the series after he came back from St. Louis, they lost the first of three games against Oshkosh but then took the other two, the last game eleven–ten on a walk-off, bases-loaded double by Martinez with two outs in the ninth. Quincy moved in and Perabo City took two of three, and then all three against Urbana, a tidy seven–two record for the home stand. It was a streak that nearly no one noticed. The attendance was almost nonexistent; for the two Sunday afternoon contests in the home stand, the crowd might have reached 150, but no other crowd came close to that. Although Sandford did not match the brilliance of his first game in their god-awful park, he pitched eight innings in his next appearance and in the one after earned a complete game, although he was spent when he heaved the final pitch, a breaking ball that

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