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belongings and had taken her keys out of her purse.
    â€œI’ll take you home,” he suggested.
    â€œNo,” she said. “I just met you. That would never do.” Even so, she was pleased that he’d offered.
    Early the next morning he phoned her and asked if she wanted to go to the Cotton Bowl parade with him.
    â€œThis is crazy,” she said, sitting straight up in bed and holding the receiver with both hands.
    â€œIt isn’t crazy. The parade starts up Commerce Street in an hour. You could be there.”
    â€œIt’ll be hard to find a place to stand coming that late.”
    â€œI bet you’ll be surprised,” he told her. “We’ll find a place.”
    â€œI guess we could,” she said, still clutching the receiver, with a fluttering in her stomach that made her feel like she was in high school again.
    An hour later she gasped as they climbed the steps to the grandstand and Buddy pulled out a metal chair for her beside the mayor of Dallas.
    â€œWhy are we up here?” she whispered to him after she’d been introduced to half the public officials in Dallas.
    He crossed his arms and stretched out his feet. “We’re here because this is where I always sit.”
    It wasn’t until the J. J. Pearce High School Marching Band tromped by playing Spirit in the Sky, halfway through the parade, that he offhandedly mentioned he played soccer.
    â€œThat’s what you do for a living?”
    â€œYeah,” he said, chuckling. “At least it was last time I looked. But maybe I’d better check again. I might be an insurance salesman now.”
    That’s when it all started piecing together in her mind and making sense, the name, the vaguely familiar, handsome face, the seats of honor they occupied. “You play for the Burn,” she said in a whisper. “You’re Buddy Draper.”
    He didn’t look at her. He just took her hand. “I thought I told you that last night.”
    After the day of the parade, they did a lot of things together. They rode bumper cars and wandered around a flea market. They attended a film festival together. She invited him to visit her church one Sunday and he did so readily, promising he’d invite her to join him for services at the non-denominational worship center he attended. After that, Andy’s priorities had shifted. She loved her patients and urged them forward. But, now, with Buddy in her life, her patients weren’t the compelling force that drove her soul any longer. Buddy took over a new, special corner of her heart. The two of them spent quiet time alone together every weekend. He gave her tickets to every Dallas home game. She sat with the other players’ girlfriends or wives and cheered him on.
    She wasn’t certain she loved him until one afternoon when the Burn played in San Jose. The Earthquake defeated them in California. She drove to Dallas/Fort Worth International to meet the plane and, when she went to the charter gate, there was a crowd of people waiting to greet the team when they came in.
    Just before the plane landed, a security guard came up behind her and took her by the arm. “You Andy Kendall? We’re bringing the plane into a hangar away from the terminal. Those players are exhausted and Harv Siskell doesn’t want them to have to face this crowd right now. We’ve got all the wives boarding a shuttle. Liza Townsend saw you standing here and thought I should let you know.”
    â€œThank you,” she said quietly, following him. The shuttle bounced across the tarmac and they disembarked inside the cavernous hangar, huddling in a group as the jet pulled inside, too.
    Liza Townsend’s husband, Marshall, was a striker on the team like Buddy. She held their little boy in her arms while he squirmed. He was ready for bed, dressed in a fuzzy blue blanket sleeper. And, as the steps went up and the players started to climb down, Marshall