great dome: the squeal of the wheelchair’s hard rubber tires on the stone floor, the squeak of Julie’s canvas deck shoes. Scattered through the pews, a few people knelt in prayer; others stood in the main aisle, gawking up at the ceiling mosaics that glittered back at them. A small boy let out a “Yap” that resounded and his mother reached down quickly to cover his mouth with her hand.
Julie genuflected beside the last pew and slid into it, sighing. “You are one heavy load,” she whispered, but loud enough that it came back to them as a hiss.
He shut his eyes. Things had turned out better than he thought they would on the darkest day, the Sunday after his injury when he had felt so abandoned in the hospital. In a day, Julie had to go back to Springfield for work. “I’m not important enough that I earn a paycheck for just being alive,” she said. The thought of her leaving brought him up short: he hadn’t thought about how there was life outside their bubble. He would miss her, he realized, had gotten used to being with her every minute; even the times she went to the lobby for a newspaper seemed like long stretches, when he waited in their room for the old and slow elevator to take its time delivering her downstairs and back.
“You’ve been very sweet,” he whispered.
“I’m a sweet girl,” she said in a faraway voice. He realized she was drowsing.
“I made a mistake back in the spring,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gotten afraid.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “You were who you were.”
A heavy door along the side of the church opened, letting in a flood of sunlight momentarily before banging closed with a sharp report. “Shhhh,” someone hissed.
“Do you think we ought to get married?” he said.
“Is that a hypothetical,” she asked: “ ‘Is the state of matrimony a good thing?’ Or is it a proposal?”
“I don’t know …”
She turned to look at him and then took his right hand in hers. “Are you asking me to marry you, mister?”
She really was a pretty girl, he thought again. He saw them doing the vague things husbands and wives did together: pushing a cart through the aisles at a grocery, washing dishes side by side. Her in the stands with the other players’ wives, red-cheeked on a cool fall day late in the season, exhorting him when he batted.
“I guess I am,” he said.
“That’s sweet,” she said. “You’re a great guy and you’ll probably be hugely rich if you ever walk again and play ball, and I like being with you, but let’s just see. Two weeks ago, we weren’t even in each other’s lives at all.”
“I just don’t want to make the same mistake again,” he said.
“Ask me again in six months,” she said. “If we still like each other, then, probably, yes. But for now, let’s go back to the hotel, because if there’s one thing that makes a girl horny, it’s someone asking her to marry him.”
Two days later, she kissed him sweetly, got into a cab for the airport, leaving him balanced on his crutches on the curb, watching her red-and-black taxi until it turned a corner, and he went upstairs and sat in the quiet room for some time, thinking of her pushing through the throng at the airport, thinking of her sitting in a window seat watching the Canadian landscape fall away until the plane was too far up to see land, and then opening a book. Finally, he became aware that he was in what had become a dark room and he turned on the television. And within two weeks he had stopped returning her calls.
Chapter Five
He went home: what choice did he have? Four and a half weeks after Julie left, the team’s traveling secretary phoned him.
“This is embarrassing,” he said, “but we sort of lost track of you.”
“I haven’t gone anywhere,” Edward Everett said.
“Yes, and that’s the problem. We hadn’t meant for you to stay there this long but we hadn’t realized you were still there until the bill came across my desk this morning. We need to get you out of there, sport. Pronto. You’ve been burning up the room service.”
“I thought the per diem—”
“That’s only for when the team is out of town. They got back from that trip weeks ago.”
Could that be possible? Edward Everett wondered. Had he so lost track of time? For a week after Julie left, he was