came in fat and flat above the strike zone. A more mature hitter would have let it go or would have had the discipline to wait on it and drive it a long way, but the Urbana hitter was green, a second baseman maybe five foot seven, and his eyes grew large at the pitch sitting there, saying, Hit me. He stood on his toes to reach it, swinging hard, thinking home run, but getting under it weakly, a pop out to second. “You’re doing a good job bringing Sandford along,” Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, commented after Edward Everett uploaded the statistics from the game.
Twice during the home stand, he saw Meg, the first time after a Sunday afternoon game when he drove to meet her in Cedar Falls, where she lived in what had been a carriage house behind a three-story Victorian brick home, much of her life still in boxes she had shoved into the attic crawl space. “After two years, you’d think I’d have fully moved in,” she said when she had him poke his head into the crawl space to look at the stacks of cartons. “I worry the whole ceiling will come in on top of me sometime.” She showed him the house she’d had to sell after her divorce, a tidy ranch that the new owners were letting fall down already, and drove him past where her ex-husband was living, an apartment above an accountant’s office, one of his windows broken out, replaced by a sheet of cardboard. For dinner, she cooked a miserable lasagna, the casserole runny, the noodles stiff as cardboard. “I should warn you, I am not domestic in the least,” she said, and then added, blushing, “Not that I’m expecting you to have to know that about me. No promises, no obligations.”
The second time he saw her was late on a Wednesday, after she called him while he was driving home from the ballpark (not quite a ballpark).
“What are you doing?” she asked. When he told her, she went on, “How’d you like to keep going another fifty miles or so? Halfway between us? There’s a Holiday Inn.”
When he got there, after going home briefly to let Grizzly out, she confessed that she had already been there when she called.
“How did you know I would drive up here?” he asked.
She slipped her hand beneath his belt and said in a low voice, “You’re male, aren’t you?”
Later, while she read the room service menu—she wanted something with beef and grease—she looked at him and said, “I know I’m too old to think this but sometimes all we really need in our lives to be happy is someone who wants to fuck us bad enough that they will drive a hundred miles on the spur of the moment.” She laughed. “The real test will be when you have to drive here all the way from Costa Rica.” She raised the menu again but then lowered it and asked, winking, “So, tell me, Mr. Flour Salesman, what kind of bread goes best with Angus beef and Swiss cheese?”
He flushed, remembering the conversation when he’d admitted the truth about who he was, the first time he called after he got back from St. Louis, worrying the lie would be a deal-breaker. Instead, she’d laughed. “That’s far more interesting,” she said. “Before, all we could have talked about was wheat. Now I can have you describe all the naked athletes you’ve seen in the locker room.”
In the Holiday Inn, she gave him a quick peck, reaching for the phone to order the food. “I love reminding you of that because you’re so darn cute when you get embarrassed.”
The next day when he got home, he looked for the divorce agreement and financial disclosure and filled them out, surprised at how much easier it was than he had expected it to be, and took it to the bank so he could sign it in front of a notary. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She was a stout older woman with three chins and a floral print dress that spread across her ample girth like a slipcover would an overstuffed chair. “I shouldn’t comment,” she said. “I know that—just sign, stamp and off with you. But I see so many sad things—some good, yes, but a lot of sad, and I can’t help myself sometimes.” When she slid the document across the desk toward him, she patted his hand in a maternal way. “Things will get better.