These attempts are, in turn, focused on baseball, which Chick's father wants him to play professionally.
She's also, however, mysterious and cagey about how it's possible that she's even there.Ĭhick's narration of a series of visits between Posey and some of her friends/clients (she runs a door-to-door beautician service) intertwines with his recollections of his past, which focus on his increasingly desperate attempts to engage his father in an affectionate, open relationship. At first everything seems incredibly normal: Posey is as chatty as she always was, busy with friends as she always was, warmly dictatorial about his behavior as she always was. He arrives at his childhood home, discovers that his mother is there, and sits down to the breakfast she prepares, still disbelieving but grateful for "one more day" with his mother (Posey). He survives the fall and awakens to see his long dead mother standing over him.Ĭhick walks into town, disbelieving what's happening but at the same time desperately hopeful that what he saw was somehow real. He walks into town, climbs the same water tower he climbed as a child, and jumps off in another attempt to kill himself. As he nears the town he rolls his car in an attempt to avoid collision with a transport truck, but survives. He prepares to kill himself, and then sets off on one last journey to the small California town where he grew up. As Chick describes it, the photograph represents the latest in a long string of personal failings and disappointments, and was also the final straw, leading him to decide to end his life. The story, the narrator writes, is to be told in Chick's own voice and from Chick's own perspective and is, in spite of some apparent impossibilities, to be believed by the reader.Ĭhick's narrative begins with a description of his attempted suicide, triggered by the arrival in the mail of a photograph of his daughter's wedding - a wedding to which he wasn't invited. A near-death experience in which he encounters the spirit of his dead mother is the catalyst of a journey into his troubled past, the narrative of that journey exploring the theme of relationships between parents and children, as well as loyalty and human fallibility.įor one more day begins with an introduction, in which an anonymous narrator describes the story about to be told as that of Chick Benetto, an elderly man encountered seemingly by chance at a small town baseball field. This novel, at times poetic and at times sentimental, tells the story of a day in the death of Chick Benetto, ex-pro baseball player, ex-husband, and ex-father.
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