featured act for the weekend at the fair took the stage up the hill from the game: a Motown group that’d had a few top-40 hits in the 1960s. Their songs—some familiar, most not—floated down the hill, the volume increasing and decreasing with the direction and speed of the wind. On the Perabo City bench, with the lead they had, the team was loose. When the band played its most famous hit—one Edward Everett remembered from his junior prom, a slow number during which the disc jockey had lowered the lights and Edward Everett and his date held tightly to each other, turning in the slowest of circles while above them the fluorescent stars tacked to the gymnasium ceiling twinkled—Vila stood up on the bench.
“My grandma used to play this to get me to go to sleep when I was at her house while my mom was at work,” he said. He started swaying on the bench, singing the lyrics, trying to mimic the movements Edward Everett remembered the group going through when they performed on American Bandstand. Four or five other players got up, watching his moves, trying to imitate him, shouting out the lyrics when they knew them, getting them wrong when they didn’t. When the song finished, just as Vila had to leave the bench to warm up in the on-deck circle, the few fans in the ballpark applauded.
On his way home, Edward Everett was restless. It has come down to the last game of the year, he thought; of course it has. The final game for the pennant and for Sandford’s shot at twenty wins. In all his years, he had seen few other pitchers he would rather have starting a game that mattered as this one did. He realized he had fooled himself when he’d said that winning the pennant would mean little to him and for a brief moment pictured his team pouring onto the field after the last out, hefting him to their shoulders, although he realized at the same time that it was something that would happen in the movies, a movie about a main character who was someone like him. In life, he knew, his players thought of themselves as the main characters. They were all driving home with their own visions of the team picking them up and carrying them off the field.
He called Meg and she answered the phone after the first ring.
“I was hoping you’d call,” she said.
He told her about the game and the one tomorrow for all the marbles.
“Not bad for a little old flour salesman,” she said.
Although he knew it was crazy, he suggested they meet at the Holiday Inn. He wouldn’t get there until almost midnight and would have to leave the next morning by five to get back home to prepare for the game, and yet he didn’t want to be alone.
“What makes you think I can just pick up like that, at this hour?” she asked, and then, as disappointment was settling on him, said quickly, “Just kidding. I didn’t think I’d get to see you until after the season, when you’d exploit me to help you pack to move.”
This time, even stopping at home to care for Grizzly, he was at the hotel first and had to wait for her, worrying that she had changed her mind. He sat on the edge of the bed, half watching the MLB Network, video of the best plays of the day, men doing extraordinary things on the field: a first baseman for St. Louis leaping onto a rolled-up tarp to backhand a pop foul; a Tampa Bay shortstop diving into left field to snag a deep ground ball and then throwing to second while still on his back. If Webber hadn’t gotten hurt, that might have been him in a few years. Not long before Webber’s accident, Edward Everett remembered, he was convinced that it would be Webber who survived the season and that he would be out—but the story is not over until the story is over; he was still in the game and Webber was back home in Ohio, going through physical therapy to build up the muscles in his damaged shoulder, but only so he could live a normal life in the World. It would not be enough for him to ever play again.
When Meg got there, she tapped nervously on the door, quietly, as if she were afraid someone in the hall might hear. When he opened the door, she