woman balancing the infant on her lap, holding on to its hands as it stood on her legs, bouncing up and down in an excited fashion. As he crossed the first base line, she seemed to wave. He felt a lurch in his chest and raised his hand to wave back but she seemed not to notice and was, instead, looking beyond him. When he turned around, he saw the Peoria shortstop waving back at her: his wife, his child.
Another time, in Duluth, as he sat on the bus, leaving town after a Sunday afternoon game, they stopped at a traffic signal beside a Dairy Queen. Through the plate-glass window, he was certain he saw her in one of the booths, spooning ice cream into the mouth of a child in a high chair. As the bus idled there, the woman turned to the window and squinted out into the day as the light changed and the bus pulled away. When they arrived at their next town, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he called directory assistance for Duluth, asked for listings under her last name but there were none.
He developed a ritual: whenever they arrived in a new town, he would take the white pages from his room, carry it to a phone booth and call everyone sharing Julie’s last name, thinking: I may not find her, but certainly a cousin, an aunt, an uncle. He tried to remember if she had siblings. Her name was not common and, as it was in Duluth, often there were no listings, but occasionally there were. Once, in Racine, he thought he’d found her. It was during a bad stretch for him, a handful of hits in he-didn’t-want-to-think-how-many at-bats. Two days before, his manager—Mike Norman, then—had called him into his office for what he thought was going to be yet another death sentence in yet another organization but it wasn’t; he was in a professional coma, on life support: Norman was sitting him down for a few games—he’d been pressing, was too conscious of everything when he was at the plate; had his hands always been an inch from the knob of the bat or was it three-quarters? No matter where he put his feet, his stance felt off balance. It all distracted him, slowing his swing a few-hundredths of a second; even on curves that didn’t break and which he should have driven hard, he was popping meekly to the second baseman.
He had begun to think that his looking for a woman and a baby he’d never find would mean the end to his career; he vowed to give it up. She knew where he was; she kept sending him the photographs. If she wanted to see him again, she could. But, in the room, the phone book was already sitting on the desk and he flipped it open and found a listing there: “Aylesworth,” initial “J,” and thought, all right, once more, and called it. A woman answered. There was considerable noise where she was, music and voices, as if a party was going on, and the thought struck him that he could not remember when, exactly, his son had been born, and so, maybe in some grand coincidence, he had called on his birthday, when Julie and her family were celebrating.
“I’m looking for Julie Aylesworth,” he said.
“This is her,” she said, and his stomach tightened.
“This is Ed—” he began, and she interrupted him.
“Ed? We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Ed!” several voices in the background exclaimed. “Finally!”
“Are you coming?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know where you are,” he said, his heart racing. He saw himself calling a cab, giving the driver Julie’s address, being dropped at the curb, the door opening, a swarm of people, his son standing there in a paper birthday hat.
“Oh, God,” the woman said. “Are you drunk?” Then she said to someone where she was, “He’s so drunk, he doesn’t remember his way.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not drunk. I—” But where the woman was, a doorbell chimed and the woman said, “Ed! How can you be here and on the phone?”
“I think there’s a mistake,” Edward Everett said. “I guess I was looking for another Julie.”
“Who’s Julie?” the woman said. “This is Judy. Ju-dee.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, but she had hung up.
At one point, he realized that the boy would no longer be a boy but a young man. This was when he was in Montana, a bad year, a year out of baseball after the Angels organization fired him the