Husbands and Other Strangers

by Marie Ferrarella

  Goaded by his smart remarks about the rather infamous way the Angels had of sometimes folding just when they looked as if they would win, Gayle had bet Jack fifty dollars that the Angels would win. It wasn’t the money, but the principle that was at stake. Not to mention a chance at the play-offs.

  Gayle sniffed and gave the small, thin man a scathing look. “Truest words Yogi Berra ever said were, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ So don’t start counting those dollar bills just yet, Reyes.”

  Reyes snorted. “Yeah well, no disrespect to the man but this game is definitely over.” He gestured toward the playing field directly outside the plate-glass window surrounding the press box. “Your guys look like they’re batting flies—insects, not balls,” he added with an even wider grin.

  Annoyed, protective, Gayle was about to say something to put Reyes in his place, reminding him that the team had managed to come back from behind so many times it was practically their hallmark, but she never got the chance. Her attention was drawn to the tall, muscular African-American security guard who was entering from the back of the booth. The man never hesitated but came straight to her.

  Now what? she wondered.

  Towering a good foot over her, the man raised his eyebrows slightly, as if not a hundred percent sure he had the right person. “Ms. Elliott?”

  “Yes?” She was aware that all eyes in the booth had turned in her direction.

  “There’s a guy out here claiming to be your husband,” the guard told her politely. “He says that he wants to see you.”

  A movement on the field had her attention immediately being redirected to the batter who had just come up to the plate. It was strike one. Gayle waved a dismissive hand toward the guard at her left. “Just someone trying to get into the press box. I don’t have a husband.”

  The guard nodded, moving his hat forward on his clean-shaven head. “Thought so. Sorry to bother you.” He began to retreat.

  At her statement Reyes immediately snapped to attention and looked at her with new interest. “You get a divorce?”

  “No, I—” And then it came back to her. Taylor. The wedding photographs. “Oh, wait,” she cried, swinging around. “Wait,” she repeated, raising her voice. The security guard stopped by the rear entrance. “What does this guy say his name is?”

  “Taylor Conway.”

  She nodded. She’d forgotten. Again. “Yes, he’s my husband.”

  Reyes frowned. He glanced at her hand. She was still wearing her wedding ring. “Sure doesn’t leave much of an impression on you, does he?”

  But he does, she thought. That was the weird part. Every time she thought about the way he’d kissed her, she could feel her body tingling, responding like Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of the bell.

  “It’s a long story.” She stiffened slightly as she saw Taylor following the guard into the press box.

  She glanced at the field, but the batter, one of their better players, had just gotten another strike. The count was 0 and 2. Mentally she crossed her fingers as she hurried over to Taylor and the guard.

  “He’s mine,” she confirmed. “Thanks.” His expression never changing, the guard touched the tip of his cap with two fingers and then retreated. Gayle turned to look at Taylor. “What are you doing here?”

  Taylor shrugged carelessly. He was supposed to have been here earlier. But evening rush hour traffic had eaten away at his time. What should have taken him fifteen minutes had turned into more than an hour. He was glad there was still some game left to share with her.

  “I thought I’d catch the game—and you—in person. It’s not against the rules,” he told her, in case she was thinking of sending him away on a technicality. “I’ve been in the press box before.”

  She cocked her head, studying him. “You like baseball?” Everyone she knew liked the game, but something distant and nebulous prompted her to ask, as if she somehow sensed that he didn’t care for sports. If that was true, how could she have married him? She had no answers. Only questions. Lots and lots of questions.

  Since she didn’t remember him and thus couldn’t know that about him, Taylor decided to tip the scales a little in his favor.

  “Sure,” he said glibly, “who doesn’t?”

  “Full count,” the announcer’s voice came over the loud speaker.

  Her head swung back toward the field. “Full count,” she repeated, stunned. She’d only looked away for a minute. “How did that happen?”

  “The pitcher must have thrown him some balls.” Taylor figured that was a safe enough comment to make. To his relief, it earned him a fleeting smile before she looked back on the field.

  So far, so good, he thought. He’d taken back an inch. Now he needed the rest of the mile.

  “Must have,” she agreed. A cheer rose up from the stadium and her head swung back toward the field. “What’d I miss? What’d I miss?” she cried. Reyes said something to answer her echoed question, but his words were drowned out by Gayle’s cheer as her brain processed what had happened. “A home run! Atta boy, Anderson!” The longtime Angel was proudly rounding the bases.

  Blowing out a breath, Gayle turned her attention to the man on her right.

  “Why don’t you grab a seat?” She nodded toward the far corner where a few folding chairs were clumped together.

  “Okay.”

  One chair leaned into another, almost like drunken revelers trying to stay upright. It took a little finagling to separate them. By the time Taylor claimed a chair, brought it over and started to unfold it, another Angel had hit another home run. And Gayle had leaped to her feet, and maybe a few inches off the ground as well, cheering. Color rose to her cheeks.

  The only time she had ever looked more alive than this moment was when they were making love, Taylor caught himself thinking. A pang zipped through his body, making him long for her.

  “Hungry?” she asked, barely turning her face toward him, her eyes glued to the field. “There’s food behind you.” She didn’t even bother gesturing toward it, fairly certain she’d wind up hitting someone. She talked with her hands, and once or twice before, the back of her hand had made contact with someone’s face.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” she urged the next batter after he’d let three pitches pass, earning him the count of one ball and two strikes, none of which he’d tried to connect with.

  “No, I’m fine,” Taylor answered. Food was the last thing on his mind. As he watched, Gayle jumped to her feet, then sank down again when the hit that had looked so perfect had yielded a foul ball.

  “Actually, I’m hungry,” she told him, her eyes never leaving the batter.

  He wasn’t sure if that was just a statement, or a barely veiled hint. Okay, he could play the dutiful husband, even if she didn’t think of him in those terms yet.

  Besides, he recalled, there’d been plenty of times when the tables had been turned and Gayle had served him. Even if she hadn’t cooked the meal herself. He thought of a picnic basket filled to capacity with his favorite dishes. She’d brought the basket out to him when he was working to convert an old carriage house into a second home on an estate-size lot in Tustin. That was during the early days of their marriage.

  He’d fallen behind schedule and was trying to finish the job in order not to be faced with paying a penalty according to his contract. Some days he worked from dawn to way after dark, putting in sixteen, eighteen hours to finish something.

  Gayle had appeared with the basket on her arm, looking far more delectable than anything she could have possibly packed. They’d eaten off a tablecloth on the floor and then made love on it.

  He forced himself to bank down the memory. He couldn’t deal with it right now. Instead he glanced back at the table. There seemed to be an endless variety of things to choose from. “What’ll you have?”

  “Hmm?” Eyes riveted to the batter, she had to replay Taylor’s words in her head before she understood what he was asking. “Oh, a hot dog’ll do fine. Make that two. And no—” />
  “Ketchup,” he finished the sentence for her. “Yes, I know.”

  I know everything about you. What makes you laugh. What makes you cry. How you hate ketchup on anything and only like one kind of pickle.

  That was supposed to make things easier for him, he told himself. Knowing what pitfalls to avoid with her. But it didn’t make things easier, not really. Every time he caught her looking at him, that distant, slightly confused look in her eyes, it felt as if someone had punched him straight in the gut. It was particularly hard to breathe then.

  Taylor focused on what he was doing.

  The buffet table had enough food still on it to feed a small third-world nation. The sportscasters and sportswriters had availed themselves of a lot, but still a great deal was left over. The hot dogs were just that, hot as they made regular passes on an upright rotisserie that kept them ready for consumption. He took two for her, one for himself, housing each in a bun and spreading mustard liberally over each. He used to be a big fan of ketchup, but Gayle had weaned him off the condiment. More by example than anything else. It had just happened.

  Just like falling in love with Gayle had just “happened.”

  Returning to the folding chair, he handed Gayle her paper plate with both hot dogs on it. She took them without looking, her attention glued to the man at the plate. He knew better than to say anything.

  The Angels got three men on base in quick succession before going on to collect two outs. Things in the press booth grew tense. This was an important game. If the Angels lost it, they were out of the running for the play-offs.

  Instead of watching the game, Taylor watched Gayle. The planes and angles of her face were completely rigid as she followed the movements of the batter at the plate. When the announcer declared that the player was up to a full count, Taylor was certain that Gayle had stopped breathing.

  She continued to hold her breath as the batter made contact with the next three balls. All three were fouls.

  Just when it looked as if the batter was going to continue hitting foul balls all night, his bat met the next ball and a resounding “crack” was heard throughout the stadium, amplified a hundred times over by the microphones.

  Gayle was on her feet the second she heard the sound, screaming and cheering as she willed the ball over the fence.

  And then it did just that—flew right over the corner of the back fence, missing the foul line by a hairsbreadth.

  “A grand slam!” she cried. “He got a grand slam.”

  The next second, Gayle was throwing her arms around him. And then her mouth made contact with his. He was aware of tasting just the tiniest bit of mustard before his senses rose to another, more exhilarated level.

  The sheer energy he felt was incredible.

  Taylor needed no further encouragement. Pulling her to him, his paper plate falling to the floor, he wrapped his arms around her as he deepened the kiss she had initiated.

  The adrenaline rush she experienced was overwhelming. By the time Gayle finally broke away, she was literally gasping for air.

  Blinking, she looked at Taylor with new admiration. And something more.

  He was instantly alert, the euphoric buzz sustained from the kiss moved to the back burners.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Did you just remember something?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, unconsciously touching her fingertips to her lips as she looked at him. “Something.”

  But what that “something” was she couldn’t tell. It was gone before assuming a shape or leaving a clue. In its place was only a by-now-familiar frustration. She shook her head.

  “Sorry, I—”

  Her apology was drowned out by another wild cheer from the stands. The next player up had just hit a home run and the crowd was going crazy.

  “Eight to seven. No doubt about it, folks. These Angels love their miracles,” the announcer cried.

  They weren’t the only ones, Taylor thought, watching Gayle. He could still feel the impact of her lips on his. And she’d remembered something. Memories of him, of them, were trying to come back to her.

  It was a start.

  “Eleven to eight, after trailing behind eight to one for eight innings. Looks like our boys in red love doing things the hard way,” Gayle said to the camera, visualizing viewers in their living rooms as she spoke. A camera was far too impersonal a piece of equipment. She did her best with living, breathing audiences. When there as none available, she used her imagination. “But in the end, all that counts is the final score. And the heart that went into playing the game.”

  As the camera swung away, Gayle breathed a happy sigh. Her team had gone on to play another day. There was another World Series pennant in the offing, she could smell it. They just had to get there.

  Her eyes shifted to the man standing in the wings. Taylor.

  Her pulse quickened again, the memory of the fiery kiss in the press box returned to her with full force.

  The man sure knew how to kiss, she thought. One would think she’d remember that kind of thing. That just the act of kissing him would bring it all back to her in spades.

  Maybe if she didn’t try so hard, it would come back to her. She knew that when she’d finally relaxed a little instead of doing her damnedest to make her father proud of her, she’d started winning the meets she’d competed in. Maybe it was the same with memories. Maybe they came back to you if you didn’t try so hard to make them come back.

  Warmth and tension slipped over her at the same time as Taylor joined her.

  “Ready to go home?” he asked.

  They’d already gone out with several members of the team after the game, to share a few beers and make a few grandiose toasts, all of which referred to the swiftly approaching World Series. She’d noticed Taylor had remained quiet, letting her hold court. Was that the way of it, she wondered. Was she the dominant one in this marriage she couldn’t remember?

  After an hour they’d all gone their separate ways. The players to rest up for the next game and she to the studio, to tape a segment for the nightly news. Taylor had quietly hung around the studio, waiting for her to finish. She knew that couldn’t have been fun for him.

  As he approached her now, he seemed tired and wound up at the same time. Same as her, Gayle thought.

  For once she felt no inclination to hold him off with words, or to get into a discussion over his presumption of her state. Despite the odd humming going on in her body, which she stubbornly attributed as a side effect of her overtired state, she didn’t feel like challenging him on any level. If anything, she felt rather agreeable.

  “Yes,” she told him. “I’m ready to go home.”

  Chapter Ten

  Taylor was on his way out the door and to the rest of his day when he glanced at his wristwatch. It was purely out of habit rather than need. He had more than a vague sense of the time. For the most part, he possessed the finely tuned gift of punctuality, of gauging everything properly so that, barring some unforeseen, whimsical act of God, he was never late.

  So it wasn’t the time registered on the dark-blue face of his watch that threw him; it was the date that was displayed just above the number six.

  September 3.

  The day he’d proposed to her.

  Gayle was only a few steps behind him. Breakfast had consisted of half a bagel and a full cup of black coffee. It was all she needed. Unlike him, she was in danger of running late this morning. She was on her way to an early-morning interview with the manager of the Red Sox. The team had arrived in town late last night, and she had managed to wangle an exclusive interview.

  “Something wrong?” she asked as she ran her fingertips first over the lobe of one ear, then the other, checking to see if her earrings were properly fastened.

  Taylor didn’t move. He stood frozen in the doorway as if someone had waved a magic wand over him.

  Gayle suppressed a sigh. She still wasn’t used to this, wasn’t used to Taylor or having to share her space with him
. And she was beginning to think she never would be. Almost two weeks had passed since she’d found herself living in this converted fun house with a man she didn’t remember. And—except for tiny flashes of thoughts she couldn’t seem to catch hold of, couldn’t unravel or examine—nothing was coming back to her about him or the life he claimed they’d had.

  She remembered when she was in high school, her best friend’s parents had gotten a rather unpleasant divorce. After the decree had been issued, Rhonda’s mother cut out her father’s face from every single family photograph she could find. It was like that for her now. Somehow her brain had cut Taylor Conway out of every single memory she possessed.

  Was it motivated by talks of a divorce? she wondered. Was that what had somehow triggered this mental black hole?

  Suddenly aware that he hadn’t answered her, Taylor muttered, “Nothing.”

  “Taylor.”

  Something in her voice made him turn around, a pregnant note that told him she was about to follow up with something he should brace himself for. As if having to deal with a wife who didn’t know you from the paper boy wasn’t bad enough.

  “Yeah?” he asked guardedly as he looked at her.

  “Were we getting a divorce?”

  “What?”

  She took a breath and enunciated every word, as if she was seeking an answer from someone who was mentally impaired. “Were we getting a divorce, talking about a divorce, seeing a lawyer or maybe going to a marriage counselor?”

  “No,” he said emphatically. Then, in case Gayle was going to go over each of the sentence fragments bit by bit, he decided to make it perfectly clear. “No to all of the above.” Taylor paused, looking at her face. Her expression remained the same. Puzzled. That made two of them. “Why?”

  She shrugged slightly, one side of her peasant blouse slipping down off her shoulder. “I thought maybe something dramatic was the reason my mind shut you out of my life.”