I knew she wasn’t talking about the game. She’d come because the World Series was fun, not because she cared.
“Uh-oh what? Do you know something I don’t?” I asked.
Steve Youder ran out to the field and tossed Dash another ball and something black I couldn’t see. Dash caught them both and juggled. He’d tried to teach me how to keep those balls in the air, but I just dropped all of them and we laughed.
“All I know is I was supposed to make sure you stuck around for the seventh-inning stretch.” She put her arm around me and squeezed as if keeping me in place, and I looked up.
My face was huge. On the stadium monitor, my hands flew to my mouth to cover my blushing cheeks but not my eyes because Dash was looking at me.
He came toward the section I sat in, and words scrolled over my face in billion-point type.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
He got to the rail, and Francine pushed me forward while holding me up.
“He’s crazy,” I said, clutching her forearm.
“Hell, yeah.”
The field was five steps down, and she made sure I got there.
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
Then, flashing under my big, blushing moon-pie face: Say yes.
He waited for me at the railing, and when I got there, he caught the two balls and a little black box. He was sweating and dirty, holding out the open box with scrapes on the heel of his hand from sliding into second in the fifth.
The ring was stunning. Three diamonds across, as clear and perfect as his eyes.
“Marry me, sweetapple.”
I was too stunned to utter a word.
Francine elbowed me.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said.
“You’d better answer. I have to get on deck.”
I paused, not because I didn’t know what to say but because I wanted to run this moment over my tongue and teeth, have my senses give it form. But though baseball fans were terribly patient with balls and fouls, in matters of marriage, they apparently had no time for delay.
The chants of “Say yes! Say yes! Say yes!” started in the centerfield bleachers and rolled to the first base line until I couldn’t put it off another second.
“Yes, Dash. Yes. Without a doubt, yes.”
He plucked the ring out and tossed the box over his shoulder. The crowd went wild in a deafening roar, and after he’d slipped it on my finger, he kissed me over the railing. We held each other, one of us on the field, one off, locked at the lip and heart as Los Angeles cheered us on.
THE END