“Thanks, but we’ll be here a week, tops.”

Stu shakes his head, smiles. “It could be like back when you first got called up, and you and Audrey hadn’t found a place in L.A. yet. Remember that?”

Michael watches his friend. Clearly Stu doesn’t remember the part right after the three-week slumber party, when the Taylors finally did find a little place in Hollywood and signed a year lease, only to get sent back to Salt Lake five months later. That was a blow, with the baby and a second on the way. Stu’s gaze slides over to the game, his face showing blithe, unknowing comfort.

What would Joe DiMaggio do? He wouldn’t take the charity of no one, especially not a friend. “Thanks, Stu, but no one is going to keep me out of my own home.”

Why Joe? Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio is part of Michael’s origin story. In May 1941 one Nelson Taylor, a newlywed New York professional, had an unfortunate run-in with a taxicab, breaking his leg in three places. There was little good news that wartime summer, save for the Streak and Nelson’s young wife’s attentive nursing. (In recounting his recuperation, Nelson said he rallied some strength every time DiMaggio got a hit—and his raised eyebrows said the rest.) By the end of the season Nelson’s leg had healed enough for him to enlist and be assigned to a classified desk in Brooklyn, and in February 1942, the Taylors’ first and only child was born.

Michael was a quick fan of baseball, the Yankees, and Joltin’ Joe. Even after the Taylors moved to Milwaukee for Nelson’s work, young Michael continued to root for the Yankee Clipper. Michael started playing at four (wearing number 5, of course), varsity at fourteen—he was the best player at his high school, hands down. He followed Joe obsessively, calculating his batting average from the box scores in the daily paper. And though DiMaggio’s career had ended more than a decade before Michael’s professional play began, DiMaggio remained a lodestar. The only reason Michael switched from center to left was that a Double-A coach made it abundantly clear he’d be playing the corner or nowhere at all. And even this necessity felt like some sort of betrayal.

Joe’s reputation for a quick temper, his habit of holding a grudge, even his postcareer controversies (marrying Marilyn, divorcing Marilyn, rumors that he was to marry Marilyn again) had not besmirched Michael’s view of the Italian American sports star. Who cared if sportswriters called him gristly, if he held a grudge: he had principles, and Michael respected him for it. If anything, in those tragic years Joe’d taken on mythic proportions. Joe as guiding light, Joe as amulet. So when Audrey discovered the mistyped Jesus bracelet in a remainders bin, the extra yellow D embroidered into the blue cloth—WWJDD—of course she bought it, and of course Michael knotted it around his wrist.