“But I must be remembering wrong,” she says. “My father doesn’t love football, right? I mean… we never even watch games.”
“That’s what I was thinking. But he may have loved it then. When he thought he would make a fan out of you.”
“When I was a toddler?”
I shrug. “Maybe he thought he could mold you into a Longhorn?”
Bailey turns back toward the field. Nothing left, apparently, to add to her memory. “I do think that’s what it was. It wasn’t about football, in general. He loved this team.” She pauses. “Or whatever team it was, in their orange uniforms…”
“Just walk me through what you know, as if this were the place,” I say. “Did you come after the wedding? Was it night?”
“No, it was during the afternoon. And I was in my dress. The flower girl dress. I know that. Maybe we had come from the wedding. The ceremony part.”
She pauses.
“Unless I’m imagining all of this. Which feels equally possible.”
I feel her getting frustrated. More than likely, Bailey remembered what she could back in Sausalito, and that’s where we should’ve stayed. In our floating home, empty without Owen. The two of us existing in the terrible space he left there.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “Any stadium I might feel this way.”
“But it does look familiar?”
“Yeah, it kinda does.”
Then something occurs to me. It comes fast and I can see the rest, depending on what her answer is.
“So you walked here?”
She gives me a strange look. “Yes, with you.”
“No, I mean, didn’t you say you walked here from the wedding? That day with your fat
her? Assuming it was here…”
She shakes her head, as if that was a crazy question, but then her eyes get wider. “Yeah, I think we did. If I was in the dress, we probably came right from the church.”
I don’t know if this conversation is creating the memory, or not, but she suddenly becomes more definitive.
“We definitely did,” she says. “I mean we only came to the game for a little while, after the ceremony. We walked over. I’m pretty sure of it…”
“So it has to be near here.”
“What does?” she says.
I look down at the map and see the options marked for us: a Catholic Church not too far from here; two Episcopal chapters, and a synagogue even closer than that. They are all within walking distance. They are all potentially the place Owen took Bailey before he took her here.
“You don’t remember by chance what kind of ceremony it was? Like denominationally?”
“You’re joking, right?”
I’m not. “Of course I am,” I say.
Who Needs a Tour Guide?
I circle the churches on the map and we head out of the stadium through a different exit. We head down the steps and past a statue honoring the Longhorn Band, UT’s Etter-Harbin Alumni Center just behind it.
“Wait,” Bailey says. “Slow down a sec…”