Who brings their children out? the baseball wives wonder, whisper among themselves when the girl excuses herself to go feed the fussy child. The baseball wives miss their children, but they know better than to bring them here. The baby’s mewling is a distraction, unnecessary, and they think of the girl in the dingy stadium restroom, swaying with her child at her breast. How hard it would be to attend to their husbands’ needs—never mind going out with the other wives—if they had children on their hips. Doesn’t she know about nannies? Mothers-in-law?

Vásquez, the team’s young prospect, has thrown four innings with two hits, two walks, and seven strikeouts. Another batter swings through three. The young woman, back from wherever she went, claps the baby’s hands within her own, and the baby squeals. “Mira, tu padre,” she says into the child’s ear.

Really, Melissa thinks. She has borne three children, had them each weaned by nine months and in a nanny’s arms at nine months and a day. The oldest is away at college, the younger two, a boy and a girl, each have a driver to get them to and from their many activities. Baseball for the boy, of course; Japanese lessons, too, in case he’s not good enough to make it in the majors (it was the boy’s idea to be so pragmatic). Soccer and violin for the girl, a quiet child who doesn’t seem to like Melissa very much. We’re too old for nannies, they’d complained when they started middle school, and she’d agreed, at least to such an extent that she hired male nannies who didn’t mind wearing a driver’s coat and hat. The boy is now old enough to drive himself but says he prefers their current arrangement.

The wives are gathered on the patio of the place they eat lunch on Wednesdays in spring, a nouveau Italian joint in Old Town, when one of the wives, Eliza Summers—wife of Nick, middle relief—encourages them to “do something.” They do plenty, they say, swirling their white wines. Their calendars are full, they add, thumbing through their annotated phones as proof. Charity luncheons. Museum fundraisers. The PTA (even if they miss a few meetings). They join their husbands at charity events, go to others in their husbands’ steads, have philanthropic causes of their own. Not in Arizona, mind. This is a break, a whole state free of benefit committees and donation envelopes.

But Eliza, a former staffer for Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (she met her husband at a golf fund-raiser), has brochures, has mailing lists, has buttons with the tiny, laminated face of Candice “Candy” Hill, a candidate for Phoenix mayor. Eliza fans literature over the white tablecloth, plunks down a button by each woman’s spoon. I WANT CANDY! the buttons proclaim. The wives frown, the wives scrunch their noses.