Chapter 5 - 6

“Your favorite place?”

she asked.

“Most of D.C.’s favorite place,”

he said. “Half of Congress comes in and out of here, and half the local mob. That’s a judge over there, sitting on a milk crate pulled up to that corner booth with Senator Sutherland... That’s Xavier Byrne taking his daily lunch; he used to run half the numbers racket in town for the Warring gang... Booth number three, that’s the junior senator from Massachusetts...”

Harland saw the blank look on Bea’s face and grinned. “Okay. Billy Martin founded this place, and he played shortstop for the Boston Braves back in the day.”

“Now we’re talking.”

Bea slugged half her martini when the waiter set it down. “You know there’s been a woman scout before? I had no idea! Edith Houghton, for the Phillies. She only left the post last year, scouted young players all over the Philadelphia area—”

Harland sat back, toying with the stem of his glass, other arm along the back of his booth. “Is that what life looks like for you, then?”

“If I get my foot in the door.”

Taking trains wherever there was a whiff of talent, evaluating factory-team pitchers in Baltimore and high school shortstops in Gaithersburg. Sitting through games, talking to eager kids and their wary families. Show me what you’ve got, kid. Making the case at staff meetings for the ones she believed in. Getting to see the next generation of talent head off toward a career in the majors, all bright eyes and big dreams of hitting five-hundred-foot homers like Mickey Mantle. Making Briarwood House her base... Because Bea had realized she had no desire, after all, to leave it. Not the house, which had become a home, or Grace’s Thursday night suppers, or the Briarwood Belles, who had somehow become family. She smiled, lifting her glass. “I hope.”

“Then I hope, too.”

They clinked glasses, just as the waiter swooped back to take their order. “What’s the commotion?”

Harland asked, nodding at the wave of craning heads rubbernecking toward Booth #3.

“We appear to be witnessing a marriage proposal.”

The waiter lowered his voice. “The junior senator from Massachusetts is, I believe, proposing matrimony to MissJacqueline Bouvier.”

“No kidding.”

Bea craned her neck, too, unashamedly, for a look at the petite brunette in the pale yellow sheath dress and pearls, and the man in the carelessly rumpled suit holding her hands across the table. “Cute,”

Bea appreciated, getting a gander at the big white grin and tanned face. “What’s his name again?”

A cheer went up, rippling across the tavern as the young senator straightened, looking exultant. “I take it MissBouvier said yes.”

The waiter smiled and whipped off across the room to be the first to offer the engaged couple champagne on the house.

It seemed like a day for toasts. “To the happy couple,”

Bea suggested. She swallowed the rest of her martini, lowering the glass to see Harland gazing at her, his lean foxlike face looking oddly, nakedly bemused.

“Let’s make it two proposals for Martin’s Tavern on June twenty-fourth, 1953,”

he said. “Marry me.”

Bea laughed. “What?”

“I’m serious.”

“No, you aren’t. What are you thinking?”

“I have no idea. Marry me.”

“Are you drunk?”

Taking his glass out of his hand and setting it down. “I am completely wrong for you.”

“I’m not arguing. You are completely wrong for me. You are in fact probably the worst candidate for an FBI agent’s wife I can think of. Marry me.”

“But I don’t want to be an FBI agent’s wife.”

Bea gave him another grin, but a gentler one. “I want to be the first woman scout for the Washington Senators. I’d rather it was the Red Sox, but—”

“You can do both. Who says you can’t do both?”

“I don’t want to do both. Even if I’m very flattered by the offer, G-man, considering you think everything I do and wear and say is goddamn appalling.”

Bea leaned across the table and gave him a lingering kiss.

“You do appall me,”

he murmured against her lips. “But I’m not withdrawing my offer.”

“I’m not taking your offer.”

His eyes narrowed. “You have no idea how patient I can be, Beatrice Maria Verretti.”

“You’ll have to be, Harland Custis Adams. Because I’ve got miles to go and lots to do, and I’m aching to get started.”

Bea rose from the booth, slinging Claire’s borrowed black straw hat across one arm and fishing in her pocketbook for the good luck token she’d brought to stake out Mr.Griffith’s office this morning: her faded Fort Wayne Daisies baseball cap. “You got an hour? Let’s head to Prospect Park and play some catch.”