They all looked. They all shrieked.

“The snaggle-toothed one with the big ol’ bush for a head?”

“He cute.”

“For a dog.”

“No, he—”

“Look at that big spilly belly on him,” ’Ginia said. “Go all the way to his knees. And that butt look like a hundred pounds of warm taffy.”

“I like a little roundness in a man.”

“Well, that be your true love, then, ’cause he all round all the time. Round as a harvest moon. Ain’t nothing hard in that man. Ain’t nothing going to get hard neither.”

They shrieked some more and clapped their thighs and CC said, “What about you, Miss Lila Waters? You see your Mr. Right?”

Lila shook her head, but the girls were having none of it.

Yet no matter how much shrieking and jawing they did to get it out of her, she kept her lips sealed and her eyes from wandering because she’d seen him, she’d seen him just fine, could see him now out of the corner of her eye as he moved across the grass like the breeze itself and snatched a ball from the air with a flick of his glove so effortless it was almost cruel. A slim man. Looked like he had cat in his blood the way he moved, as if where other men had joints, he had springs. And they were oiled to a shine. Even when he threw the ball, you didn’t notice his arm, the piece of him that had done it, so much as you saw every square inch of him moving as a whole.

Music, Lila decided. The man’s body was nothing less than music.

She’d heard the other men call his name—Luther. When he came running in to take his turn at bat, a small boy ran alongside him in the grass and tripped as they reached the dirt. The child landed on his chin and opened his mouth to wail, but Luther scooped him up without breaking stride and said, “Hear now, boy, ain’t no crying on Saturday.”

The child’s mouth hung open and Luther smiled wide at him. The child let loose a yelp and then laughed like he might never stop.

Luther swung the boy in the air and then looked straight at Lila, taking her breath on a ride down to her knees with how fast his eyes locked on hers. “Yours, ma’am?”

Lila tuned her eyes in to his and didn’t blink. “I don’t have no children.”

“Yet,” CC said and laughed loud.

That stopped whatever was about to come out of his mouth. He placed the child’s feet on the ground. He dropped his eyes from hers and gave a smile to the air, his jaw slanted to the right. Then he turned back and looked right at her again, cool as you please.

“Well, that’s some pretty news,” he said. “Yes, sir. That’s pretty as this here day itself, ma’am.”

And he tipped his hat to her and walked over to pick up the bat.