by Linda Holmes
“I guess I’d say the same thing.”
Dean had spent a lot of nights in Andy’s living room when they were kids in exactly this way, biding his time. He waited for elementary school and then high school to be over so he could move on to what was next. But that was when he had known what was next. Now his only plans were dinner and bringing his duffel in from the truck. The part of the future that was in focus had shortened; the part that was just a wall of fog went on forever. He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t.
The sixteenth second was a killer.
CALCASSET WAS IN THE PART of Maine well-suited to the name MidCoast because it resolutely doesn’t mean anything, and a description that resolutely doesn’t mean anything is a powerful indicator of communally owned modesty. Even the weather changed politely: every year, as fall began to take over from summer, there would be crisp mornings that would warn that one day soon, it would truly be cold.
As soon as Evvie woke up and put her feet on the cool wood floor, she knew this was one of the days when fall would poke its head out. She made tea, ate a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and maple syrup, and threw her favorite gray cardigan over her Calcasset High School Band T-shirt—still hanging in after fifteen years—and jeans. The sweater left a trail of fuzzy puffs everywhere, but she’d had it since college. When she wore it and drank something hot, she liked to imagine it gave her autumnal superpowers and a certain cozy appeal.
She could work. She should work. There was a little voice getting louder and louder, saying, Do something, do something. She had emails to answer, including one from Nona Powell Brown, a professor at Howard, with the subject line, “Your attentive ear.”
Evvie sometimes called herself a professional eavesdropper, but she was a transcriber. She worked mostly with interview tapes from researchers and journalists, though she also had what she called “cha-ching clients” who wanted documentation of board meetings or presentations. She knew it sounded boring to people who figured she could be cheaply replaced by decent software. Tim had once cracked that she should get business cards that said, “For when technology barely won’t do.” And she did have automation breathing—or buzzing, or whatever—down her neck, not that everyone she worked with didn’t, too.
But she’d always thought it was sort of fabulous. It meant slipping on headphones and listening for hours to people’s stories, imitating their accents, being surprised by their voices cracking or tumbling into laughs. Often, she’d develop elaborate ideas of what they looked like or what they wore, and she’d image-search them at midnight, sitting in bed with her face lit up by her laptop screen to see if she was right. She was good; she could type almost as fast as she could listen, and a reporter for The Boston Globe called her “the only woman who can reliably translate mumble into English.” He was the one who’d connected her with Nona, her favorite client, a labor economist who wrote what she called “occupational biographies.” The last one had been about logging, and Evvie had transcribed almost two hundred hours of tape for it. She could tell you what a whistle punk was. She knew logging had the highest per capita death rate of any U.S. occupation. This did not come in handy at parties—or, it would not, if she went to parties.
Nona’s email said that she was planning a book on Maine lobstermen, and she wouldn’t be starting the work for at least a year, but she wondered if Evvie was interested in helping with the research. Not just transcription, but the interviewing, too, and helping Nona navigate. This would be a promotion of sorts. “I always try to team up with a local,” she’d written, “and I naturally thought of you right away. I don’t know what your schedule is like these days, and it’s still a long way off, but let me know when you have time to talk.”
Right now, though, Evvie’s attentive ear was mostly on hiatus—and she hadn’t yet answered Nona. She did little jobs here and there so she wouldn’t be broke, but the very thought of going out into the towns up and down the coast, having her work interrupted by condolences that would make her circle back into her marriage was too much to even think about. Most things were too much to think about.
So instead of returning emails to clients, she devoured books that moved with her from table to table, chair to chair, as she read and stopped and read more, sticking a scrap of paper between the pages to mark her place. On this occasion, she was a third of the way through a fat Southern novel she’d been wanting to read ever since she heard the author on Fresh Air, talking about how he grew up living above a beauty parlor with his family and their illegal pet monkey.
She was stretched out on the sofa, trying to ignore the Do something, do something voice, when she heard a knock that had to be Andy and the potential tenant. She hopped up and started for the front door, but along the way, she stopped. Her eyes settled on the fireplace mantel, which held two marbled scented candles and a driftwood sculpture she didn’t like from somewhere salty where she and Tim had once had a lobster roll. She yanked open the drawer of the writing desk in the corner and pulled out her silver-framed wedding portrait. She’d loved the gazebo; she’d hated her dress. But propped up between the candles, the photo would perhaps testify on her behalf that she was properly grieving and was not a monster, monster. She walked to the door.
When she opened it, Andy wasn’t there. There was only a man, strikingly tall, with green eyes and dark hair flecked with gray. He had a sunburn on his left arm, likely from hanging it out a car window. “Oh,” she said. “Hi there.” Andy hadn’t mentioned that the guy was particularly good-looking, but he probably didn’t even know. Andy was such a decent guy, and he was such a dummy about this stuff.
“Evvie,” he said.
“I bet you’re Dean,” she said, extending her hand.
He clasped it and said, “Good to meet you. I hope you don’t mind. I was afraid if I brought Andy, you’d feel like you should say yes to shut him up, so I left him at home.”
She looked at his eyes, his wrists, his high cheekbones, all the years of sun on his skin, and the way he didn’t look as young as she’d thought he would. “Sure, come on in, it’s fine.” Remembering to let go of his hand, she stepped to the side, and he squeezed past her into the house. As she closed the door, she encountered his shoulder and got a whiff of detergent and maybe bacon, which she figured Andy had been putting in front of him all morning, next to the same frozen waffles the girls favored on the weekends. “When did you get to town?” she asked.
He looked around the living room a little. “I got here yesterday afternoon. I caught up with Andy and his kids. We haven’t seen each other in a few years.”
“That sounds like fun. Did the girls ask you about where you live? They’re very into geography right now. Maps and globes, the shape of the coast.”
“They did. I had to promise to take them on the subway someday. I think they’re going to be disappointed that it doesn’t feel as much like a roller coaster as it looks like on a map.”
“Did Lilly ask you to play Doc McStuffins?”
“Yeah. She was very thorough. I’m supposed to go back in six months for a follow-up.”
Evvie nodded. “Abundance of caution, sure.”
“I’ve been in worse hands.” He smiled, about a third of the way. It was a pretty good third of a smile.
“So you drove up from Manhattan? How long does that take?”
“Eight hours, give or take.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. The good news is that there’s a lot of radio to listen to.”
“What do you like? Sports talk and stuff?”
“Oh, no. Jerks who don’t play sports fighting about sports is not my idea of a good time,” he said. “I’m more of a public radio guy.”
“Hey, me, too,” she said. “Or podcasts.”
“My brother’s trying to get me into those. I’m always afrai
d it’s going to be, like, three guys on Skype getting high and talking about jam bands. What kind do you listen to?”
“One about music, one about design, a couple about politics when I can stand it. A bunch that are just, you know, ‘Today on our show, a man who learned everything and nothing at all.’ That stuff. And one where a guy summarizes horror novels. I’m not sure how I got listening to that one; I’m not a horror person.”
“It’s not bad to know a little something about the things you don’t care about,” he said.
She laughed. “That’s how I am about Sports Illustrated, no offense.”
“Oh, none taken.”
“So,” she said, “anyway. This is the house. The apartment is in back. It doesn’t have a separate entrance, so you’d come in this way, or there’s a side door into the kitchen from the yard. But it’s a straight shot”—she walked him through the house—“back to the kitchen, and then it’s this door, right through here.” She kept the apartment door closed, and she hadn’t had the heat on in there, so it was a little chilly when she opened it up. “It stays nice and warm normally, promise.”
He stepped in behind her and closed the door, and then they were standing in the middle of all that beige carpeting with the cloudy gray light coming in the big windows. She reached up and pulled the chain on the overhead light, but after he’d walked around a bit, he reached up and shut it off again. He went to the bathroom door and swung it open, then shut it again and came back to her. He seemed to be stretching out a sore shoulder as he opened and closed the refrigerator in the kitchenette. He walked back and stood with his hands on his hips. “I feel like I should ask you questions.”
“Do you have questions?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well,” she said, “let me think of answers. You can have whoever over that you want, of course, it won’t bother me. I’m usually working upstairs, or in the living room where you came in. You’ve got the kitchenette in here, but if you need anything in the big kitchen, there’s plenty of room.”
“I’m only good at grilled cheese,” he said. “And Pringles. I’m also good with Pringles.”
“Just cans of Pringles, or, like, you cook with Pringles?”
“Just Pringles. I buy them, I open the package, and then I stuff them straight into my face.”
“Ah. Got it. That’s how I make Oreos,” she said. He grinned, and she told him about the washer and dryer, the gas grill outside, and the spot beside the house where he could park.
He looked around the empty space. “It looks great, just right. I know you weren’t sure about renting it out. Not knowing me and everything.”
“I thought about it more after I talked to Andy. It makes a lot of sense. It can be open-ended, you don’t have to get into a big”—she waved her hand—“a big thing that’s not convenient for your situation. It’s more space than I need.”
He nodded slowly. “House rules? Other stuff?”
“No smoking. Do you have pets?”
“I don’t have pets, and I also don’t smoke. True story, by the way: a friend of mine had a Great Dane who used to try to eat his Marlboro Lights. Wound up in the dog hospital once.”
“Well, at least they were lights.”
“Yeah, he pulled through. You’re not a dog person?”
“No, I am. Always meant to get one. I guess I didn’t get around to it.”
“Ah, that happens,” Dean said. “Andy said you were asking $800?”
“To be honest, Andy was asking $800,” she said. “He does all my negotiating.”
“Seems reasonable.” Dean smiled and looked out the window, where the biggest tree in the yard shook. “Getting windy out there.”
It got quiet. She heard a car go by outside, and more wind. A swarm of leaves blew across the yard. “It seems like a cup-of-tea day,” she said, finally. “I assume you like Gatorade or something. Do you drink tea?”
“I do drink tea, when it’s cold,” he said. “Hot Gatorade is not good.”
Back in the kitchen, they sat across from each other at her wooden table. She wished she’d thrown out the wilting bunch of parsley she was storing in a jar of water. “So you grew up with Andy in Denver.” He nodded. “What was after that?”
“I went to Cornell to play baseball. Graduated from there, then I got drafted, played in the minors in a couple different places, and then I went to the Marlins in 2008.”
“Mi…ami Marlins?” she ventured.
“Exactly. But back then, the Florida Marlins, before they got the new stadium. So I lived down in Miami for a couple years, then I got traded to the Yankees, and I went to New York. And now I’m unemployed. You?”
“Nowhere near that interesting. I grew up right here, in Calcasset. My husband, Tim, and I went to USC, and then he went to medical school out there. Then Tim did his residency in Portland. I lived up here, so we were semi-long-distance. Then he moved to Calcasset, and we got married and got this house. That was four years ago.”
When he immediately looked at the floor, it seemed likely that Andy had told him how the story ended, at least as much as Andy knew himself. His version did not include her in her car with her birth certificate and a wad of cash.
Dean looked back at her. “I’m sorry about all that, by the way,” he said.
“Yeah, thank you.” She nodded. Her mind was digging through options, seeking for anything else to ask. “How long were you thinking of staying?”
“I don’t know. Six months? A year at the most. I’ll have to get back to New York, that’s where my real life is. But right now, I’m kind of clearing my head.” He smiled. “That’s about as far as I’ve gotten for now.”
She nodded. “I can relate.”
The amount of time people who have just met are supposed to look directly at each other, particularly without talking, is a unit that’s both very short and very precise. When you exceed it, you get suspicious, or you get threatened, or you get this flicker of accidental intimacy, like you’ve peeked at the person naked through a shower door. They both smiled, and it ended. “Right,” she said. “So, I think you should take it. The apartment. You should take it.” She could see that he was carefully considering whether to say something. “What?” she asked.
“I’m wondering if I should promise you no funny stuff or something.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you need me to promise you no funny stuff?”
Now he seemed a little more serious. “I do think we should have a deal.” She looked at him expectantly. “You don’t ask me about baseball,” he said, “and I don’t ask you about your husband.”
She blinked. “I didn’t ask you about baseball.”
“I know. I didn’t ask you about your husband.”
“But you want to have an official arrangement.”
He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know how much you know about it, Evvie, but I have had a shitty year. A shitty couple of years. And I have talked about it a lot. And I think maybe you’re in the same position. If you’re okay with this, you’d be doing me a favor, and you’d be doing me an even bigger favor if it can just be normal. I’ll say hi, and you can say hi, and we won’t do, you know, the whole thing with the mysterious sad lady and the exiled…fuckup.”
She squinted at him a little. “So, like, as an example, I won’t mention that ‘exile’ and ‘fuckup’ both strike me as a little unfair.”
“Right. And I won’t ask you why ‘mysterious sad lady’ doesn’t.”
Her hand stretched out across the table. Instead of taking it in his handshake hand, his business hand, he took it in the hand on the same side. “Do we have a deal?” he asked.
She nodded, noticing the freckles on the back of his wrist.
Oh, stop it.
A FEW DAYS LATER, EVVIE WAS stuffing the second notice on her electric bill into her
kitchen drawer when she heard a bang from the apartment. She went and knocked, and Dean opened the door wide. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Evvie said. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “sorry about the noise. Knocked a box off the counter. It’s never the box with the sheets in it, you know? It’s always whatever will make it sound the most like you tried to murder a robot by throwing it down a couple of flights of stairs.”
Evvie laughed. “Are you settling in okay? I wasn’t sure I’d told you how to open the windows.”
“Oh, no, you did, they’re open, I’ve got a breeze going. You want to come in? I’m unpacking. I got lucky at your thrift store. I got furniture, I got dishes, I got my grilled cheese pan.”
Evvie peeked inside. “You didn’t get a bed.”
“It’s on the way. Diane told me a used mattress might give me bedbugs.”
“Smart lady. I’d be happy to put you in the guest room until it gets here.”
“Nah,” he said. “I’ve slept in airplane seats with guys who were spitting tobacco the whole time, I can make it a couple more days bunking with Andy. I’m pretty sure Lilly wants me back tonight anyway to look at some sketches of a superhero she invented. Her dad told her I like Batman.”
She stepped into the apartment, which was so different with anything in it. Even boxes made it breathe differently, and he had set up a pair of big, comfortable-looking club chairs sort of facing each other. “Batman, huh? You’re one of those guys.”
“Yeah. I sneaked around at Comic-Con in San Diego in costume a few years ago. Full thing, big cowl over my face. Missed a couple of days of practice and got fined, but it was worth it.”
“Because?”
He stopped unpacking. “I’d never been. I’d always wanted to go. I saw a guy in a picture who was decked out like Boba Fett—you know, from Star Wars?”
“I know who Boba Fett is.”
“Anyway, I figured Comic-Con was the one place I could wear a mask and still blend in. Probably the most normal I got to be that year, walking around in a superhero costume.”