Page 24 of The Pitcher’s Proposal

We start toward the house and Miles immediately starts talking about food, apparently exhausted from the tremendous hardship of throwing a baseball twenty times.

“There’s stuff in the kitchen,” I tell him as I kick off my shoes. “Don’t destroy anything.”

“I won’t.”

“You said that before the blender incident.”

“That was Joey.”

“You were supervising.”

Miles gives me a grin and heads into the kitchen.

I find Lauren in the living room, sitting in the middle of the couch with her legs tucked beneath her. She doesn’t look away from the television when I come in, so I sit beside her and put my arm along the back of the couch.

“Did we miss anything?”

“Not yet.” She shifts closer, resting her shoulder against my side. “Their pitcher already walked somebody, though.”

“Sounds promising.”

“He threw four balls in a row.”

“That’s generally how walks work.”

Lauren looks up at me with the same unimpressed expression her mother has been giving me for thirteen years.

I grin and kiss her temple. “Sorry. Continue.”

She tells me who is batting and what happened in the first at-bat, giving me far more information than I asked for. I listen anyway. Lauren loves the Titans. She has a favorite player every season, knows most of the roster, and gets genuinely upset when they lose.

When the next batter hits a double into the gap, Lauren grabs my forearm with both hands.

“Yes!”

I laugh as she bounces against me. “Settle down. It’s April.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know you don’t.”

She beams at the television, and I pull her a little closer. She’ll probably stop climbing onto the couch to sit against me eventually. I’m in no hurry to help that happen.

A minute later, Joey runs into the room carrying a plastic dinosaur and climbs straight onto my lap. He launches into a story about how the dinosaur escaped from his bedroom, attacked one of Miles’s trucks, and then drove it into the kitchen.

“Hold on.” I settle him against my chest. “I thought he ate the truck.”

“No, Daddy. He ate the driver.”

“Ah. Important distinction.”

Joey nods solemnly and continues, explaining that the dinosaur drove all the way to the moon, where apparently he encountered an alien and ate him too. Lauren has been listening from beside me, and she finally interrupts. “How did he drive to the moon?”

“He has a flying truck,” Joey says.

“You didn’t say it could fly.”

“I just did.”