“What you need is a brand new girlfriend.”
 
I glanced over. My agent wasn’t smiling. Not the faintest hint of a guffaw in his tone.
 
“Like a hole in the head.”
 
I hadn’t felt the need for a new girlfriend since my last girlfriend was discovered in flagrante amidst the Creeping Charlie near the reflecting pond of my Beverly Hills mansion with one of the paparazzi who always follow me around. Just my double-bad luck, said discovery was made by another paparazzi, leading to predictably breathless publicity.
 
That had been three months ago, and it still hadn’t quieted down. 
 
“That’s not a ‘no,’ Vincent. That’s a ‘hell, no.’” I shook a finger in his direction, which he naturally ignored. My agent was still my agent only because he ignored the last four times I fired him. “No girlfriends.” I wagged the finger sternly under his nose again for emphasis.
 
Vincent failed to look up from the newspaper he’d been reading.
 
“See? Right here.” Vincent stabbed a picture with a stubby forefinger. “This here’s the little gal you oughtta be dating.”
 
I snatched the pages from his grasp, momentarily considering whether I ought to shove them down Vincent’s chubby Italian throat or simply crumple them into a ball and hurl the wad toward the nearest waste basket.
 
As it turned out, I did neither. My eyes caught the image Vincent had been pointing out. And despite my very best effort to stay present in the moment – the overwrought, furiously heated, impeccably angry moment – my puffed-out chest deflated like an emptied balloon.
 
Whoosh went the air from my lungs.
 
“Told you so!” crowed Vincent, breaking into an impromptu victory jig, his face wreathed in smiles. “She’s perfect for you!”
 
She was, indeed, perfect. For me and probably every other red-blooded American male over the age of twelve. Honey-blonde hair. Blue eyes the color of cornflowers, with a twinkle made twinklier by the dimple in her right cheek.
 
Inhaling sharply in a valiant effort to quell my rising heart rate, I cast the newspaper aside.
 
“Nah. What would a girl like that want with a loser like me?”
 
Vincent’s face turned suddenly sober. Grabbing me by both forearms, he leaned close and stared me in the eye. The intended effect was slightly marred by the anchovies he’d eaten for lunch. I pulled back slightly.
 
“Lissen, compadre.” The air whistled between his two front teeth. The odor of anchovies grew stronger. “There’s nothing wrong with your pitching arm that a little motivation won’t fix. That dame you were seeing—” (the one who’d been caught in the Creeping Charlie, I presumed) “—she was trouble from Day One. Any dork could’ve seen that one coming.”
 
I bit my lip. He was right. Any dork except me, of course.
 
“You need a nice girl. A sweet girl. A girl with a head on her shoulders.” Retrieving the newspaper from the table where I’d tossed it, he stabbed the picture again with his stubby finger. “Like this one.”
 
“Vincent, a girl like that’s gonna be taken, one hundred out of a hundred times.” I backed up a step, grateful for the somewhat fresher air. “Besides. Did you read the caption? She just won a Rhodes Scholarship. She’s headed for Outer Bamboozi to study fly-speck patterns and their relation to interplanetary celestial orbits. What’s a girl like that gonna want with a washed-up has-been like me?”
 
Vincent pulled himself up to his maximum elevator-shoe-enhanced height of five-foot two and a quarter. A statistic I only knew because he’d bragged about it once in the locker room. Along with another statistic I preferred to forget.
 
“I think you oughtta call her. Ask her out. Nothing ventured –” He waved a hand agitatedly in the air. A tiny piece of paper was fluttering between his fingers, I realized. With a phone number scrawled on it.
 
A flurry of retorts sprang to my lips. But a sizzling ember from my earlier angry outburst still burned in my belly. So instead of giving high-decibel expression to what I was thinking, I grabbed my phone instead.
 
I. Would. Show. Him!!
 
Triumph in his eyes, Vincent bent closer, holding the phone number where I could read it. I did my best not to flinch.
 
To my amazement, a sweet Southern voice answered on the second ring.
 
I gulped.
 
“Miss Seachrist? My name’s Aaron Allred. . .  Yes, that’s right, that Aaron Allred. . . Yes ma’am. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance too. . . . You adore baseball? That’s. . . “
 
Vincent’s smile had expanded so wide I was afraid his chest was going to burst like an over-inflated frog.
 
“. . . well, that’s amazing. Happy. Yes, I’m happy to hear it! Tonight? A party?? Well, yes, I guess I could. . .”
 
Vincent was alternating between knowing winks and high-fives. I turned my back so I could concentrate.
 
“Pick you up at eight? Why, I’d be. . .” I found myself swallowing hard. “. . . happy to.”
 
My voice sounded strange, like it was reaching my ears through an eighty-foot tunnel. Was that even my voice? I wasn’t quite sure.
 
Tonight. A date. With Miss Eleven-on-a-scale-from-one-to-ten.
 
“I don’t know, Vincent,” I groaned as I hung up the phone. “This is all pretty sudden. What if she –”
 
“It’s gonna be fine,” he told me, interrupting his little jig to pat me on the shoulder. “Trust me. Did I ever tell you I inherited a touch of the second sight from my Italian grandma? I knew that girl was the one for you soon as I seen her picture.” He pronounced it ‘pick-chur,’ but that was Vincent.
 
“Really? Second sight, huh?” I wasn’t exactly a believer. But it had certainly been an incredible phone call.
 
It wasn’t until three years later, when Miss Elena Seachrist had become Mrs. Elena Allred and our first pair of twins was born, that I finally got around to asking Vincent about his miraculous Italian gramma and his gift of second-sight. By then he’d not only been right about Elena but had also correctly predicted our successful expedition to Outer Bamboozi; my winning pitching streak; and the happy arrival of the twins.
 
“So, tell me how you do it, Vince,” I prompted, handing him an ice-cold beer as Elena dandled one twin on her lap and I jiggled the other on my knee. “What’s it like to be able to predict things? Is it like a voice that whispers in your ear, or just a feeling that comes over you? Did your grandmother teach you, or is it just some wild gene you inherited?”
 
Vincent’s eyes twinkled and he leaned closer, as if sharing a confidence. I found myself secretly pleased there’d been no fish on the menu this evening.
 
“Aaron, my boy. That stuff about my grandmother? And second sight? I made all that up.”
 
I spluttered. “But – but — Elena? My sudden winning streak? Our expedition to Outer Bamboozi?”
 
Vincent shrugged. “All you needed was a little confidence.”
 
“But, you assured me it would all happen!” I protested.
 
“Ah, yes. The magic –?”  He caught my eye and winked. “That was all you.”

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