“I wanted to be there.”

The baby is squirming again.

“Would you like to hold him?”

“No. I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to hold him, but what if I drop him? I’m not very experienced.”

“You’re not going to drop him,” she says as she lays him in my arms.

“He smells like a baby,” I say, amazed by the sweet powdery scent of his pink skin.

“Enjoy it.” She laughs. “Sometimes he smells like a goat. I’m warning you. He can turn in a second.”

I squeeze him gently and tell him what a lucky, lucky boy he is.

“You would have made a wonderful father,” she says. Knowing her as well as I do, I detect the slight hint of regret in her voice, the what-if, the if only.

“I hope I would have been a better father than I was a husband.”

“You were a good husband,” she says firmly, leaving no question her opinion is not open to discussion.

“I doubt Curtis would agree with you on that subject.”

“What my father thinks is beside the point.”

And now I know. The obvious can no longer be denied. Curtis hadn’t ended my marriage. Neither had Barry. It was my wife.

“You may not believe it, but you’re back in my father’s good graces.”

“You can’t be serious.”

She lowers her voice several octaves. Her impersonation of the King of Unpainted Furniture is still pitch-perfect.

Goddamn it, not one of these cocksuckers is half the salesman that little cocksucker was.

We’re laughing, tears in our eyes, and Baby Bradley is protesting at having his nap disturbed. I don’t know how long Harold has been standing at the door to my office. He looks a bit forlorn, like he’s just stumbled across a party to which he hadn’t been invited.

“Oh, hey,” I say. It’s awkward being stranded between Alice ’s curiosity and Harold’s self-consciousness. A moment passes, then two. I can’t seem to kick-start the introductions.

This is…the woman who shared my life for twenty years. Sorry I can’t be more specific. “Wife” isn’t accurate. “Ex-wife” sounds harsh, too full of bitterness and regret. “Friend” would be an insult to our history; it can’t describe the bond between us, even now.

This is…a pal, a buddy, the man who’s been falling asleep beside me for the past few months. “Boyfriend” is too juvenile; we’re not in high school and he hasn’t asked me to go steady. He’s definitely not a “partner” or “lover.”

A half million words in the Oxford English Dictionary and I can’t find two that fit.

“ Alice, this is Harold. Harold, this is Alice.”

“Nice to meet you,” she says.

“Nice to meet you,” he mumbles, shyly approaching her and extending his hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No, please, it’s okay,” Alice and I say in unison.

“I’ll call you later,” he says as he backs out the door.

“No, no. We’ll just be a minute.”

“Really, I was just getting ready to leave,” Alice says.

“We’re driving to Durham. We need to be there by seven,” I explain, offering a reason for his palpable anxiousness.

“ Durham?” she asks. Harold doesn’t know the subtext to her question.

“Alice and I used to live in Durham,” I explain.

“I thought you lived in High Point?”

“Before that, when I was at Duke.”

Another fact in my personal history Harold doesn’t know.

“It was nice to meet you,” he repeats, excluded, the odd man out. “I’ll wait downstairs.”

“I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”

“He seems very nice,” she says after he’s gone.

“He is.”

“How did you meet?”

“Believe it or not, he pursued me.” I laugh. “Harold has very low expectations.”

She rocks little Bradley in her arms, saying nothing, knowing her silence will compel me to babble on.

“He’s more persistent than he looks. He kept buying me beers at the local watering hole and I kept blowing him off. Then one night I was eating dinner alone at Cracker Barrel-go ahead and laugh-and he plopped in my booth uninvited. That’s how I learned the man pours ketchup on macaroni and cheese.”

“Love is blind.” She laughs.

“It’s not what you think.”

The reflex is still there, the need to disavow the blatantly apparent.

“How do you know what I’m thinking?” she asks.

“For the same reason you always know what I’m thinking.”

“So you’re suggesting we can read each other’s minds?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Not always,” she says, bringing me back to earth. “I shouldn’t have surprised you, Andy. But I figured if I called ahead you’d make an excuse.”

“See, you can read my mind.”

“I have something of yours I know you’d want and I didn’t want to send it by mail. It’s there. In the bag. Can you get it? I don’t want to wake him.”

I set the bag on my lap.

“Go ahead. It won’t bite you,” she says, encouraging me to fish through the pacifiers and baby spoons in plastic baggies, the disposable diapers, the jars of applesauce and the stuffed sock monkey. I know what it is as soon as I touch the plastic cube. I’d resigned myself to accepting it was gone forever, tossed away with the detritus of my former life. It’s preserved in its pristine state, protected from the elements, snowy white, the ink as fresh as the day it was etched into the cow leather a lifetime ago.

To Andy Nocera, Joe DiMaggio.

“Damn, I don’t believe it. Where did you find it?” I ask.

“It was never lost. It just got forgotten in the…the confusion.”

“There were two of these,” I say wistfully. Forgive me for plagiarizing the great Nabokov this once. There’s no way to describe the effect of a ten-dollar baseball except to admit I’m easily intoxicated by the impossible past.

She blushes and clears her throat, not once, twice-the sure sign she’s embarrassed.

“I have it. I’ll send it to you when I get home.”

“No, no, I want you to keep it,” I say, happier than I should be, thrilled actually, to know she keeps a small reminder of me in the house she shares with her husband and son.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. The least I can do is give you one of my balls.”

She laughs (I knew she would) and the dreaded moment arrives when the violins swell and the lens goes soft focus and we’re meant to fall in each other’s arms and declare eternal love despite the impossible circumstances. But Baby Bradley has an impeccable sense of timing. He knows exactly when to strike up the band.

“Someone’s cranky,” she says, rising from her chair. “I’d give you a hug but I’m a bit encumbered.”

Instead we settle on a chaste kiss on the cheek and a thank-you. I’m sure it’s my imagination but I swear Baby Bradley is giving me the evil eye, warning me to back off.

“I’ll walk you to the car,” I say, hoisting her bag on my shoulder. We make small talk about the weather, comparing last year’s blistering temperatures with the pleasant balminess of this July. A real Mayberry summer we’re having, I observe.

“What is it with men and that show?” She laughs. Obviously Barry and I have something in common.

“Men are only allowed to be sentimental about two things. Their own ten-year-old selves and dead athletes. Them’s the rules,” I say, explaining the Opie factor.

“I can’t believe you’re forty.” She sighs, strapping the baby in his car seat.

“You’re not far behind.”

“Surreal, isn’t it?” she says. “Do you remember when we thought we had all the time in the world?”

“I do.”

“He seems really nice, Andy. I can tell he really loves you.”

I shrug my shoulders, neither admitting nor denying it, and now we do hug, an embrace no different than one I’d share with my mother or sister.

“Don’t fuck this one up,” she says, turning the key in the ignition. “You deserve to be happy.”

My Rolex says it’s 1:45 as her car rolls out of the parking lot and disappears in the traffic. Alice is right: time is slipping away. I find Harold and tell him we need to hit the road if he’s going to see young Mr. Strickland one last time in a Charlotte uniform.