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passage, sounded its horn. The guy in the Beamer gave up and turned off his engine. Sarah unfastened the earpiece and stared at it like she wanted to deposit it in the depths of murky river.
    She drummed out a short, apologetic text to her husband, entering the letters in much the same rhythm as the pounding in her head. She adjusted her rearview mirror and signaled, taking note of the curious onlookers in line behind her.
    Indignant, she narrowed her brows and flared her nostrils at these complete strangers.
What do you think you’re looking at?
    Sarah maneuvered the SUV into a slow, sad U-turn and headed back into the city.

Chapter Three
     
    Y ou think she’s going to miss the game again?” Mitchell asked, and the little boy’s eyes seemed suspiciously glittery in the stadium lighting. Beneath his little glasses, Mitchell looked perilously close to tears.
    “Maybe she’ll get here. She promised us this time, remember?”
    “Yeah,” Mitchell said, dubious. “But it might have been another one of
those days
.” He turned around and scanned the walkway above them. “Maybe she can’t find us.”
    “Oh, she’ll find us. She’s got her phone. She’ll let us know when she gets here.”
    Joe would look back at this months later, at his halfhearted attempt to watch the game while he lost hope in Sarah, as the moment he might have realized their lives were falling apart and he was helpless to do something about it. But he felt no strong hint of that now, only a vague relief that something up in the sky had come along to distract Mitchell from the absence of his mother.
    “Look at that guy! There’s a man way up there, Dad.”
    Joe shaded his eyes and peered into a setting sun so fierce that it made his head hurt. The glare blinded him.
    Chicagoans reveled in the lore of their ancient green score-board, how it had never been hit by a batted ball (although Bill “Swish” Nicholson and Roberto Clemente came close a half-century ago), how it stood where Babe Ruth had once called his ’32 Series bleacher shot and slammed his longest homer ever, how every other team had succumbed to
progress
while the Cubs clung to tradition: their time-honored board with a man hiding inside, climbing from spot to spot on a labyrinth of catwalks and steps, posting numbers by hand.
    “The scoreboard guy. He’s up there, Dad. See him? Right there.”
    “Where?”
    “There. Looking out through the hole in the eighth inning.”
    Joe hated to admit it, but he’d never really given these scoreboard stories much thought; he’d never really seriously considered he would see the guy. He took for granted that the score would go up correctly and instantaneously, the way it went up on the computerized displays at every other stadium he’d ever visited. Flags snapped overhead. Ropes clanged against the pole in the breeze. Joe squinted, trying to see.
    “He’s right there, Dad. See?”
    “No,” Joe said. “I don’t.”
    At that exact moment, uncanny how it all worked, really, one of the flags curled aloft, caught by an updraft off the lake. It streamed across the sunset, briefly casting Joe’s face in shadow. For one instant, Joe caught a view of the board.
    “Mitchell, there’s nothing there.”
    “There is. Right there.”
    “Better let me have a look through your glasses then. Maybe I need them.”
    Mitchell handed them to Joe, and Joe peered at a distance through the lenses.
    “Nope. Nothing.”
    Mitchell’s shoulders sagged with disappointment. And by the way he described the fellow, how he sat high overhead with his forearms crossed and his head inclined toward them, how his small amount of gray hair kept blowing across his scalp, Joe had to be impressed by the boy’s imagination. He was being confronted with so much disappointment right now about his own life that he found himself feeling slightly jealous of Mitchell’s childlike imagination.
Right now I would like to escape reality
, Joe thought.
    “You think he lives