“Whoa! I thought it was time for basketball!” Deidre’s staring at Tami when she says this, but Jason doesn’t notice. He’s trying to make eye contact with the bartender.

He glances back to Deidre. “Well, it’s preseason. We are in town for spring training.” He says it slowly, loudly, like he’s talking to a kindergartener or someone very old. Or very drunk. “I’m with the Lions. From Los Angeles?”

“Fabulous!” she all but screeches. “You hear that, Tami? A baseball player!”

“What are you having?” Tami cuts in, which he welcomes by stepping back, letting her slip ahead of him. In the switch his hand brushes along her hip and she very nearly shudders. Jason Goodyear has the reputation of being as clean as a choirboy, quiet as a mouse. But what was that?

“Gin and tonic,” he says. Then he adds, a bit bashfully, “Diet, if they have it.”

Tami gets the bartender’s attention. He knows what the women are up to, but also knows one round will turn into three or four, fat tips each step of the way. For that reason, they comp the women these first rounds as often as not.

“What’ll it be?” he asks.

“Gin and diets, two. And … Dee?”

But she’s turned around and is talking with the young right fielder, who looks nervous at the attention. Tami shrugs and smiles to Jason. He smiles back, and this time, she doesn’t doubt it.

When she tells him she was married to a pitcher in Texas, she can see his shoulders relax, his jaw loosen. She’s one of them. Like flipping a switch, his vocabulary nosedives into baseball jargon. He talks about his batting practice routine, about watching tape obsessively through the winter. He’s not bragging, but there’s a swagger in his assuredness, and it makes the skin on her chest flush. He prattles off his OBP and RBIs, last year’s numbers and goals for the next. The bar clears out—Deidre and the other outfielders are long gone—and Tami, so hungry her stomach feels like a woozy walnut in a sea of gin, suggests they eat. Remarkably, he agrees.

She’s been to the dining room only a few times, always when someone else was buying. Waiters in tuxedos weave between the tables with steaming plates and gleaming knives. Their server seems snippy that Jason won’t remove his hat, but he’s also too polite to tell him to do so. They order steak for two, and when he says two Tami can feel her pulse throb in her neck. What does this man look like at rest? What does he look like happy? What does he look like turned on?

The Caesars come and Tami asks about college—at the bar he mentioned he’d had some. She didn’t realize he’d been at the University of Iowa during the school’s one championship season; they talk about Omaha and the College World Series. She’d been once with Danny—not on the team bus, but following it up Interstate 35 in their VW Rabbit, baby Jeremy hollering in the back for most of the ten-hour drive. They’d been eliminated in the first round of the tournament.