Mohawk

had wanted her to get away
before
she’d made a mess of things. Afterward made little sense to him, and he didn’t believe that people could simply walk away from serious errors in judgment. But she was a grown woman, not the little girl in whom he had dared to invest his dreams. Anne decided to move to New York and make herself forget to care about what her father thought—and, if she succeeded in doing that, maybe even forget Dan Wood. It was worth as many tries as it took.
    She was still young and pretty, and in New York there were plenty of men. Unfortunately, most were majoring in insecurity, just starting up the corporate ladder. To her surprise, many reminded her of Dallas, despite cleaner fingernails and a decent wardrobe. She didn’t meet anybody that reminded her of Dan. Or her father, for that matter. What recommended Price was that he was the first quiet man she met in the city, that and the fact that he wanted to take her out to breakfast. They had three six-thirty A.M. dates before he explained he was a professional ballplayer. Night games ruled out dinner, the theater, the movies and espresso in the Village. Anne didn’t mind. She had never got the hang of letting men she didn’t like spend money on her.
    Before being traded to the expansion Mets, Price was the property of eight other major league teams, though he’d spent the majority of his career in the minors. She met him when things were going well. Theregular Met third baseman had been sidelined with an injury, and Price was installed for what he imagined would be the rest of the season. For every home game, Price left tickets for Anne and Randall at the will-call window. The boy was cautious, but given the avalanche of baseballs and autographs found it difficult to object to the new man in his mother’s life. He would’ve preferred the Yankee third baseman, but Price was some kind of ballplayer and the Mets were some kind of team and Randall was some kind of impressed. And Price wasn’t nearly as hapless as most of his teammates. He was enjoying his best season, hitting a solid 240 and getting his body in front of the screamers that invariably whistled down the third-base line off Met pitching. He knew how to play within himself and seldom tried to do anything his chunky body wasn’t capable of. Not a bad body, Anne thought, though it usually sported at least one technicolor bruise, now in the center of his chest, now the left shoulder, now the top of the thigh. Price claimed they didn’t hurt, but the center of the bruised area was always leprous white at the point of impact, radiating outward in concentric circles—dark purple, blue, green, yellow.
    By the middle of August the Mets had been out of contention for months and Price, in the middle of what was for him a hitting streak, was unaccountably benched. To Price the move defied all logic. No one on the team was playing better ball, and his replacement, a young kid from the Dominican Republic yanked all the way up from double-A ball, seemed always on the verge of fainting. He made the sign of the cross before every pitch, clearly praying the ball would be hit to someone else. It was age, of course. Price was thirty-four, and a middle-aged journeyman infielder had no part in theteam’s future. If the Mets were going to continue losing, it was better to lose with nineteen-year-olds. Price worked all of this out on the bench in September, and once the season was over, he concluded sensibly that there was no point in worrying all winter. He was seeing a girl he liked and who liked being shown around the city and introduced to the people he knew. He liked the boy, too. Price would stay in shape during the off-season and with luck get himself traded to a contending team in need of a solid veteran.
    They had a nice winter. A native Californian, Price had never liked New York, but for sightseeing it was a good city. Anne and Randall were enthusiastic and grateful. He thought little about baseball and didn’t fulfill his resolution to keep in shape. The bruises gradually disappeared, along with a dozen or so aches, and he easily convinced himself that he was mending, not loafing. When it came time to go to Florida for spring training, he knew he’d have to work hard. But he’d always had to work hard.
    He called Anne in March with the bad news. “This doesn’t mean much,” he said of his release. “It’s probably good. I’ll be better off with another team.” He’d stay in