All he needed to concentrate on now was creating as many unforgettable, fun, heartwarming moments as were convenient so his family would give him his space. Like tonight’s doozy. Being Daddy was easy.
Beckett started off the eighth with a four-seamer on the black that Jeter just gaped at. Peter squeezed Vicki’s hand as their usually sedate son, Michael, jumped out of his seat with excitement, delivering high-fives.
Beckett went up 0 and 2 as Jeter swung and missed a breaking ball.
Peter looked down at Beckett with spine-tingling reverence. What a warrior. Baseball immortality was now within his grasp, and not even fifty thousand screaming New Yorkers could take it away.
One more. C’mon, Josh. One more, baby. Please, Peter prayed.
Beckett threw another off-speed pitch down and away, and Jeter swung and got under it. Youk went all out from first, but it bounced off the top of the Yankee dugout into the crowd.
Damn. Just missed, Peter thought. But at least it was just a foul ball.
A beautiful teenaged girl’s face filled the JumboTron in centerfield a moment later. She was holding the ball and hopping up and down like she’d just won the lottery.
There was something familiar about the girl, Peter thought, squinting at the six-story-tall high-def screen. Something in her smile reminded him of his dearly departed mom’s high school yearbook picture. Peter had loved that picture and his mom, despite her inability to keep her legs closed.
Peter watched, riveted, as they replayed the girl’s one-handed grab.
They even froze the frame.
Then his Heineken fell straight down out of his hand, splattering his ankles.
Because the good-looking blond woman embracing the teen girl reminded him even more of someone else.
His dead wife, Jeanine.
Chapter 54
“CAN I BORROW THOSE, SON?” Peter said calmly, despite his galloping heart.
“Sure, Dad,” Scott said, immediately handing over the binoculars that one of the Feds had brought.
Raising the glasses, Peter ignored the thunderous cheer that rose up as Jeter hit a liner into the gap, ruining Beckett’s perfect game. He slowly searched into the crowd behind the Yankee dugout, where the foul ball had landed.
He panned over people in suits. Billy Crystal. A bunch of pudgy Yankee fan goons pointing at a little black girl in a Boston cap. The new and improved Rudy, without the comb-over.
He scanned up and down the rows and sections, one by one, methodically. Looked through the crowded aisles.
He didn’t spot her. Even after five meticulous minutes. There were too many people, too many faces. None of them was Jeanine.
The woman had only looked like her, and he’d jumped to conclusions, he decided as he handed back the binoculars to his son. It made sense.
He’d been thinking more and more about Jeanine over the last year for some inexplicable reason. He’d even dreamed about her a few times.
In one of the dreams, he was eating dinner with her again by the seawall in their backyard like on their first date. In another, he had his hands around her throat, holding her down under the water on an empty beach as she tried to scratch at him.
All in his head.
When he lowered the binoculars, he saw that A-Rod was on first and Beckett was heading for the showers.
“Now that just sucks!” his son Scott yelled.
Tom Reilly, the Fed beside them, began to do a little victory dance as he giggled uncontrollably.
Peter scruffed his tan son’s blond head with a grin.
“Don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world, Scott,” he said. “A man takes disappointment in stride. And what did I tell you about using the S-word?”
“Sorry, Dad,” Scott said sheepishly. “I meant to say stinks.”
“There you go,” Peter said, patting his son gently on his shoulder as he gave Reilly a wink. “Much more appropriate. Always remember, the words we choose reveal our true character.”
Chapter 55
IT WAS A QUARTER TO NINE on Thursday morning when I stepped into a gleaming black glass office tower at 57th Street and Third Avenue. With a temporary security pass hanging off my lapel, I smiled at the dozen or so other young Global 100 lawyers who sat as fresh and crisp as sharpened pencils in the twenty-third-floor conference room for the multifirm pro bono meeting.
I scanned the impressive corporate firm names on the place cards, some of which actually represented countries. It was heartening to see lawyers about to do some pro bono work.
If, in fact, that really was what we were going to do.
I hoped it was.
Unfortunately, I’d done pro bono initiatives before in which there were a lot of long expense-account lunch meetings and high-minded dialogues but not too much legit legal work that affected anything or anyone.
Whatever the case, the only thing I knew was that I was going to work my ass off for my boss, Tom Sidirov.
For the Derek Jeter foul ball Emma had snagged last night and for the front-row privilege of watching the Bombers turn a Beckett perfect game into a ninth-inning come-from-behind walk-off Cano grand slam?
I was prepared to work forty hours a
I was gathering up coffee and info folders when I caught a bright flash of red hair in my peripheral vision.
“No way!” I squealed.
“Yes way, Jose,” my pretty porcelain-skinned friend, Mary Ann Pontano, said as we bear-hugged. “Thank God. I just might be able to get through conference hell after all.”
I laughed as I hugged her again.
She’d been my first New York friend. She was my next-door neighbor in the crappy apartment I’d gotten on 117th Street in Spanish Harlem two weeks after I’d gotten off the Greyhound at the Port Authority.
Being the only single women and non-Spanish-speaking people in residence, we gravitated toward each other. Especially when we had to do laundry in the
“It’s been way, way too long, Mary Ann,” I said.
