by then. He picked up the familiar ambient sounds of a game, the slight background thrum of a small crowd, a vendor near the broadcast booth calling out “Labatt,” but the call was in French, and so he scanned further until he found an English language play-by-play. It was the seventh inning of the second game and he could tell by the announcer’s voice that the Cardinals were winning. He was indifferent as he called the balls and strikes, as if the Expos were so far down they could never come back. Indeed it was so: as the home half of the inning ended, the score was eight–one, and the Cardinals were going for the sweep, having won the first, two–nothing.
He turned it off, depressed by their success. He would not be missed, not at all. On the flight to Chicago, the team would be loud and brash, as they were after a good series. They still would be behind the division-leading Phillies but in the hunt. They would be thinking, Win two of three in Chicago, and two of three from here until the first weekend of October, and they would have a chance. It would stand before them, a done deal. They would do it without him and he wouldn’t even be a tickle in their brains, just the man who had never been there.
Until that moment, he hadn’t wanted to call anyone, certainly hadn’t wanted to call his mother; she would want to come to Montreal to see him, and he hadn’t wanted to see her look when she saw his leg in the plaster, or hear her Oh, honey making him feel five again: Come kiss my boo-boo, Mommy. But he didn’t know whom else to call, so he reached over to pick up the phone, snagging its cord with his right hand and pulling it to him clumsily, first the receiver and then dragging the base behind it. He dialed the number and as it rang, he thought of his mother. It would be near dinnertime; she would be in the kitchen, peeling potatoes: roast beef, mashed potatoes and corn every Sunday he could remember. But, no, the picture was false, he realized: his mother wouldn’t cook such an elaborate dinner for one. He hung up after the third ring.
From outside his room he could hear that visiting hours had begun. Across the hall, an excited voice exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness, Johnny,” and that was followed by other animated voices giving greetings.
If he hadn’t broken up with Julie, he thought, she might be someone who would exclaim in delight when she saw him, someone who could comfort him for his injury and not have it be a boy-thing but a man-thing, a man tended to by his woman. Telling himself she wouldn’t want to hear from him and would have no sympathy for him, he nonetheless dialed her number.
Chapter Four
He had met her the previous summer, after her freshman year at Springfield College, a tall redhead from an even smaller town in Illinois than he came from in Ohio.
She had gone to a ball game with her roommate, Audrey, and Audrey had flirted with him from the bleachers as he warmed up between innings. But Edward Everett had been more struck by Julie, who seemed embarrassed by Audrey’s aggressiveness, keeping her head down, her hands folded in the lap of the brown jumper she wore over a yellow blouse. It reminded Edward Everett of the uniforms the girls at his grade school wore and when Audrey asked to meet him after the game, he agreed. “Hell,” he said, “why don’t you both come along?” The three of them went to a pizza restaurant not far from the park, but up close, Audrey became more shy the longer they sat there and Julie said little, while around them the restaurant buzzed with conversations and the jukebox blared Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. Finally, when a lone slice of pepperoni pizza lay on the serving plate in the middle of the table, Julie said quietly something that Edward Everett couldn’t hear, except for the end of her sentence, “convention of Carmelites.”
“What?” he asked.
She blushed. “I said, ‘I feel like I am at a convention of Carmelites.’ ” Edward Everett laughed, partly out of relief that someone had broken the silence.
Audrey said, “I don’t get it.”
“It’s,” Julie said, “an order of nuns who take a vow—”