He loved this city.
**********
She was sitting in the porch glider when he finally got home. He didn’t even want to know what time it was. He sat down and put an arm around her. She was shivering.
“Your cologne smells like champagne,” Mel said.
“Funny thing about–”
He never got to finish the thought as a marvelous redhead thrust her tongue deep in his mouth.
When the game had resumed, the Yankees played like they possessed the secret to victory, and it was located over on the right side of the Red Sox infield. They went out of their way to pull balls at Bryan, but it did not work out for them.
He smoothly snagged the first two grounders and burned them into Mitch’s glove. Then they tried pushing bunts at him, which only resulted in routine outs and a couple of sports segment highlight efforts on Bryan’s part, also outs. Wherever dark hole the yips had crawled out of, they had slinked back in.
By the time it sank in to everyone in the park that Bryan was this evening what he had been his whole career — an elite infielder — it was too late. The Red Sox setup man and the closer had been money for the last month, and they continued to roll.
The visitors went with a whimper as Fenway got louder and louder and the air ripped in a roaring ovation as if a Class 5 tornado was sucking them all into the sky.
The night ended with a group dogpile on the mound and champagne cologne in the clubhouse.
**********
Bryan came up for air and pulled out his cell.
She answered on the first tone.
“Hi, champ.”
“Hi, sis. I just called to say thank you.”
“She’s there, isn’t she?”
“Witch sense?”
“Yep. And sister sense. Bye…. And Bryan? You are welcome.”
He turned to Melody. “Brie says hello.”
Melody ran her fingers through his hair. “I saw the throw. You’re not worried?”
“Nope. Everyone knows I had the yips. I had no idea where that ball was going when it left my hand.”
She frowned. “With an attitude like that, you are going to need permanent legal representation.”
**********
EPILOGUE: THE FOLLOWING SPRING
“When do you get the ring?” The guy stood next to him at the bar, a pint of beer in his hand.
Bryan’s attention was out on the dance floor. He turned and smiled at the man, who had introduced himself a few minutes before. Joe? Jim? Another of Kevin’s detective buddies. Another life-long Dodgers fan.
Bryan had assumed that the crowd would be hostile. The groom’s side was heavy LAPD, and the LAPD was heavy Dodgers. The bride’s side was movie folk, who wore the hats and professed their love of their home team, although in Bryan’s experience not as passionately as the cops.
Hostile? Monnic and his team had gone hot as a highway flare after beating the Yankees. They were boulders, rolling downhill, looking for obstacles to crush. The avalanche flattened the Twins, then squashed the Astros. By the time the Sox faced the Dodgers in the World Series, there was no doubt east of about Pasadena what the outcome was going to be.
Four games to one, and it hadn’t even been that close. Luckily, the cops were fans of baseball and appreciated the way the Sox played the game. They didn’t like the outcome, but they grudgingly admired how it was achieved. Hustle, speed, aggression, dirt on every uniform. Pitching, defense, and an occasional three-run homer. Most of the movie crowd had moved their minds on to the next piece of glitter and donned their Lakers caps.
“There’s a ceremony on opening day. Thursday.” Bryan said. “That’s when we get a look at them, try them on.”
They raised their glasses and watched the crowd. Most were dancing. Off to the side, Melody was deeply involved in a conversation with Kevin and his new bride. Sharon was regarding Mel as some kind of divine oracle. Kevin only had eyes for Sharon, radiant in her beaded white gown.
The guy nodded toward the floor. “Your wife?”
“Not yet.”
“Kevin says that Sharon wants to go to law school all of a sudden.”
“I am really not surprised.”
Bryan’s eye traced the exquisite curve of Melody’s ass in her Fenway green dress.
Yesterday in their hotel room she had been standing nude in front of the sliding glass door, looking out into the Palm Springs sunset. Her hips swelled from her waist in a way that ignited something primeval in him. He realized that he wanted to make her pregnant. The vision of her with a rounded belly and swollen breasts filled him with an odd intoxicating sensation that he had never experienced before.
He felt dizzy. His lungs would not fill properly.
He wanted to be a father.
Then she had turned to him, full frontal, serious, glowing, the tiny fuzzy hairs on her arms and legs incandescent from the backlight of the sun. Her aura.
She smiled. And he was healed.
He remembered Brie’s description of her sister as having something inside that whipped her to be her best, and he tingled. Sandpaper on his skin. He knew. The certainty came to him static-free, translated without flaw by his wizard senses.
She would be driven to be the best. The most faithful and loving wife the world had ever created.
The spirits of generations of poets could but curse their fate not to have known her.
Whoever was organizing this event corralled the unmarried women into a tight group and handed Sharon a bouquet. She turned her back on them and tossed the flowers up so high they threatened the huge chandelier in the middle of the enormous room. As the bunch fell, one hand shot up above the others, one strong hand on a long arm attached to a tall woman.
The crowd ohhed and ahhed and applauded and broke apart. Bryan looked into a gap and saw Melody facing him, cradling the blossoms. Their eyes met and a look of perfect understanding passed between them.
**********
EPILOGUE: FIVE YEARS LATER
He had really done a good job with the sign all those years ago. He had prepped the wood with a layer of primer, then lettered in black on the white, then covered the whole thing with poly. It was hardly showing any sign of weather. The translation, however, he knew was imperfect. If he had it to do again, he would modify the tense. But he would not do it again. It was a product of the moment.
“Can I put the flowers in now, Daddy?”
Bryan handed the yellow roses in their crinkly green paper to his daughter. “Here you go, Breezer. Take the paper off and make sure the stems go into the water.”
The little redhead unwrapped the flowers and put them into the stone vase one by one, carefully, with the lip-biting concentration of a four-year-old.
The early morning sky was filled with puffy perfect but tiny clouds, the kind that would not provide any useful rain to southern Texas at this time of year. They didn’t even provide relief from the sun. It was already in the eighties, and noon wasn’t for a couple of hours yet. He felt sorry for Mel. Seven months pregnant, she was right now ensconced on a sofa in front of the air conditioner at his parents’ house. She and his mother were probably combing the family tree scouting out baby names. Bryan had thought that naming the baby Ashford after her father would be acceptable. It was a cool name, didn’t mean anything vulgar or embarrassing, and it was not common. But Mel decided that since they had named their daughter after her sister that the next name should come from the Monnic side.