by Linda Holmes
She smiled. “Maybe that’s why Bruce Wayne did it.”
He laughed. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, it looks like Esther’s Attic treated you right,” she said. “I haven’t bought anything over there in forever, but she’s amazing. Diane, not Esther. Esther’s been dead since I was in high school. But Diane can tell you who gave her everything she has in that store. I was about to buy a sweater from her once when she told me that my dentist brought it over with a pile of his mother’s stuff from when they moved her into a home. I couldn’t do it. I figured it was bad enough I was drawn to an old-lady sweater without literally buying an old lady’s sweater.”
“She says nice things about you.” He looked up from his unpacking. “She promised you would be a very nice landlady. She put her hand over her heart when she said your name and everything.”
Evvie sighed. “Uch. I bet. A lot of people will tell you how nice I am, which mostly means they feel very, very sorry for me and they’re very worried about where they’re going to find a new doctor.”
“She said you were a trouper.”
“Yes, that sounds like something she would say.”
“I met her dog.”
“Ah, Ziggy.”
“Yeah. She said he’s a…fluffernutter or something? Scared the hell out of me. I thought he was stuffed, and then he started walking toward me. I think I almost screamed.”
“He’s a miniature goldendoodle. At Christmas, he wears antlers. On St. Patrick’s Day, he wears a hat with a buckle on it.”
“Can’t wait.”
“Town treat you well otherwise?”
“Yeah. I like it. It’s nice and quiet. It’s, uh…”
“Quaint? Fishy?”
“White. It’s very, very white.”
“Oh,” Evvie said. “You noticed that, huh? You know, Maine is the whitest state in the country. Oldest, too. Freezing cold in the winter, full of tourists in the summer. On the plus side: lobster.”
“What do people do for fun?”
“Sometimes the kids from the high school throw bricks through the windows of our deserted shoe factory.” She paused. “Is that not what you meant by ‘fun’?”
He smiled and set a blender on the counter. “It seems like nobody gives a shit about baseball, which is helpful.”
Evvie laughed as she dropped into one of the chairs and inspected the upholstery on the arm. “That is not true. They don’t care about major league baseball. But they care intensely about baseball, I promise.”
He frowned. “Really?”
“You are in the home territory of the Calcasset Claws,” she said. He looked at her, puzzled, and she held up her fingers in a sideways V. He just stared. “You didn’t see ‘Go Claws’? Esther’s has one in the window, I think.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right, that’s what that was. Hey, you want a water?”
She nodded, and he tossed her a small plastic water bottle. “We had an Atlanta Braves farm team back in the ’80s, and then we lost it, and a few years later we got the Claws, who play in the same park. They’re part of the Northern Atlantic League. Unaffiliated minors.”
He hopped up to sit on the kitchen counter. “Is this okay?” he asked, gesturing generally to his perch. She waved dismissively. “So,” he said, “Claws are big.”
“They’re huge. Couple summers ago, there was a scandal, though.” She raised then lowered her eyebrows.
“You don’t say.”
“Intrigue at the cereal-box races.” She swiveled in the chair so she was sitting in it sideways with her legs slung over one of its wide, soft arms. “At every home game, between the third and fourth innings, three kids from town get into these foam cereal-box costumes. There’s a Cheerios box, a Wheaties box, and a Chex box. And they run around the bases, and whoever comes in first gets an autographed ball and a gift certificate to the DQ.”
“Wow, the DQ!” he said. “Giving away the good stuff.”
“Exactly. As you can imagine, it’s very serious. And everybody in the stands jumps up and knocks over their beers, you know, ‘CHEEEERIOOOOS!’ or ‘WHEEEEEEATIEEEES!’ So. Anyway. There’s this kid Mike Parco, who at the time is eight years old and is a serious, total asshole. I know you’re not supposed to say that about children, but I swear, it takes most men at least two divorces to be as mean as this twerp. His mom, Talley, ran the lobster-roll stand at the ballpark, and everybody knew that, at the time, she was sleeping with Doug Lexington, who was in charge of fan relations, like, ha ha.”
Dean grinned at her. “Oh, Talley.”
“So, probably because of favoritism, Mike got to race in the Cheerios costume for about ten games in a row. But, because fan relations can get you into the outfit but not around the bases, he never won. And Talley started to complain that it was the costume. She believed that the cereal-box races were rigged. So she writes a letter to the Calcasset Neighbor, and she’s demanding that somebody do something about this injustice and restore public confidence.”
“Boy, that’s a lady going a long way for a free Dilly Bar.”
Evvie laughed. “Right? So she raises this huge stink, and finally, the word goes out—Mike Parco is going to wear the Wheaties box at the game against Concord. By the time the night arrives, this story has everything—sex, sports, official corruption—so everybody is there. Everybody. You could have walked into any house in the entire town and cleaned it out. Taken absolutely everything they owned. And they’re not there for the game; they’re there for the cereal-box race. Not for love of the community, not for the spirit of the town—they’re there because they care who wins the cereal-box race. It is the least uplifting thing that has ever brought a town together. It is the opposite of the end of a Hallmark Channel movie.”
He nodded. “I’m not going to lie; this would not happen in New York.”
“Yes. Here’s to MidCoast Maine, home of a surprising number of people whose Fridays are available.” She smiled, raising her water bottle. “So Mike’s in the Wheaties. Dutch Halloran’s kid—we call him Double Dutch because his real name is Addison and it does not fit him—is wearing the Chex. And in the supposedly cursed Cheerios box is Bree Blythe Netherington, who is the shortest girl in the third grade. In fact, Bree is so short that we’re all pretty sure she can’t see out of the eyeholes.”
Dean smacked his hand to his forehead. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. So they’re all standing there, and finally Denny Paraday—who plays shortstop and is emceeing the thing—says, ‘GO!’ and they go. And they’re sort of run-waddling toward first, and Bree is so short that the costume comes down to her ankles, but for reasons that defy the laws of physics, she’s motoring. And she’s the first one to get to first base, but the actual bases have been removed so the kids won’t trip. And she can’t see, so she keeps going, and she’s clearly going to run straight into the Righteous Heating and Plumbing sign on the right-field fence. Somebody yells, ‘Turn, Cheerios!’ And she pivots, and with some kind of internal GPS or magnets in her head or whatever, she heads straight for second. She’s like a bloodhound. And when she gets there, they have to do it again—‘Turn, Cheerios!’ She turns.
“After they get her around the turn at third, it looks like she’s going to win. Mike is ahead of Double Dutch, but he’s about a step behind Bree. And then somebody thinks they see him trying to trip her. And you hear these voices going, ‘Wheaties is cheating! Wheaties is cheating!’ Bree is still on her feet. She’s still going to beat him. But then—absolutely everybody sees it this time—out from Mike’s Wheaties box comes this foot, he sticks it right out in front of her, and she trips and falls flat on what is, under about half a foot of foam, her face. So Mike crosses the plate while Bree is lying on the ground with her hands and feet sticking out, waggling. She’s like a foam turtle. In the shape of a Cheerios box.”
“I assume some
body helped her up. I mean, she’s not still there.”
Evvie cackled. “No, no. She’s not. They got her up, and her mom put the video on YouTube and called it, ‘The Video the Claws Lobster-Roll Stand Doesn’t Want You to See.’ Eventually they revoked Mike’s gift certificate, and Bree got free DQ for a year. Fan Relations Doug dumped Talley out of shame, and she had to quit the lobster-roll stand, so now she’s a manager at the CVS in Camden. Mike was banned from the cereal-box races for life, in part because he was told to give a public apology, got up to the microphone at a game, and made fart noises with his elbow.” Evvie took a deep swallow from her water bottle. “That is all true. My hand to God.”
“It’s not surprising they don’t give a damn about me.”
She grinned. “Believe me, they know all about you. It’s a different gossip economy. They’re worrying about the Claws and the sorry state of the soccer field at the high school, and the fate of the Maine lobster, and whether the tourists are going to come. I’m sure that’s why Andy thought it would be a good place to take a break. They’re just…”
“Not petty?”
“Oh, no,” she said as she peeled back the corner of the label on the bottle. “They are very petty. But they’re petty about insiders more than outsiders. They only violate your privacy if they’ve known you since you were a child.”
“They’ve known you since you were a child.” He looked over at her.
“They have,” she said slowly. She hadn’t been listening to the refrigerator, but it clicked off, and suddenly she was very much listening to it not running. “Anyway. What are you going to do while you’re here? I assume you’re not looking to get into the lobster business.”
“Your local signs certainly make it seem like an option, especially since apparently I’m not going to get in at the shoe factory like I was hoping.”
“Oh, the lobster thing is real. It’s what my dad did. He bought his own boat when I was little, and he had it until a couple years ago, when he retired.”
“Is he still with your mom?”
“No. She’s been in Florida since I was eight. She’s remarried to a real estate guy, and she makes jewelry and sells it to tourists. Last I checked, she was doing something with sea glass and old dimes. Don’t ask me what aesthetic that is.”
“Maybe she’s inspired by those guys at the beach with metal detectors. I saw a lot of that in Miami.”
“I’ll bet. Anyway, tell me your plans.”
“Read Vonnegut,” he said. “Write poetry. I play the ukulele a little. I make driftwood sculptures.”
She suddenly realized her brows were knitted together and she popped them apart. “Oh. Oh.”
“That’s a joke.”
Evvie rolled her eyes. “Mm-hmm, hilarious.”
He laughed. “I’m not sure. Not baseball. Just…Maine, I guess. Probably hang out with Andy. I’m sort of on vacation from everything.”
“Honestly, I would have thought New York would be a good place for that, for blending into the background.”
“For most people,” he said, then briefly tilted his head to indicate how much there was that they weren’t talking about.
She stood up. “Right, fair enough. Okay, I should go and do work for a little bit.”
“Oh, right. Andy said you work with journalists.”
“I do,” she said. “I’m transcribing an interview one of my clients did with an extremely famous musician whose name rhymes with…Baylor Biffed. And Baylor has got some tales to tell.”
“Baylor’s got nothing on you,” he said as he went back to unpacking a couple of boxes. “You tell a good story.”
She smiled. “If that’s true, it’s all the years of hearing other people do it.”
“I appreciate all this,” he said as she paused at the door.
“Appreciate what?”
“Just, you know, place to stay. Cereal-box story.”
“Ah. Well. You’re very welcome. If you ever want to see the Claws play, let me know; they’ll be starting up again in the spring if you’re still here.” She paused. “Is that weird? To take you to the game?”
“Because I’m a head case?”
She put her hand up. “Never mind. I’m asking about baseball.” She paused, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll see you around.”
IT WAS A PRETTY DAY for a tree-planting ceremony, Evvie had to admit.
Assertively crisp, she’d call it, though that only made her want a glass of wine more than she already did. Andy met her in the parking lot, and they made their way across the lawn to the stone bench. There was Dr. Schramm. There was Tim’s friend Nate, and there was Tim’s favorite nurse, with whom Evvie knew he had flirted incessantly. There were a few other people she didn’t recognize, maybe from Camden or Portland, wearing fall jackets and sad expressions. And there was a hole with the wrapped ball of a tree in it. All that was left now was to put back the dirt they’d disturbed, like they’d done a year ago on a similar day, in similar company, when they’d buried him.
Evvie found Tim’s mom and dad among the subdued faces. Lila was wrapped in a navy blue car coat, with her mostly gray hair twisted into a bun. Pete had his arm around her, and the two of them were looking at what seemed to be the same spot on the ground in front of them. Evvie went over to them, forcing every step like she was sinking into the grass, even though she knew she couldn’t be. When she came near, Lila stood up and embraced her. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said, hanging on tight. She smelled like roses, as always, even now. Lila had spritzed Evvie with this scent on the night of the senior prom, and on the day of her wedding.
“It’s good to see you. I’m so glad we’re doing this,” Evvie said. Lila deserved for this to be true, and in the moment when Evvie felt Lila rub her back, it was.
“I still can’t believe it.”
“I know. I know.” Evvie pressed her hand to the back of Lila’s head.
Paul Schramm stepped up to them and said quietly, mostly to Pete, “We’re going to get started.”
Evvie and Lila stepped back from each other and Lila sat down beside her husband, who reached up and, with an even smile, squeezed Evvie’s hand.
Dr. Schramm began to speak to the little circle about how they were all gathered for this purpose, in this place, to remember one of the kindest doctors and one of the best men any of them had ever known. Andy had an arm around her, and she leaned against him a little. She was sure there were people standing around this lumpy little dirt ball, staring at a tree that wasn’t even a tree yet, who had drawn the wrong conclusions. About their breakfasts together, and about the fact that his girls would jump into her arms with such familiarity. She was sure there was talk about this, some of it excited and some of it about whether she was moving on too soon, like there was talk about everything else. Why wouldn’t there be? This had to be much hotter gossip than cereal-box racing.
She wondered sometimes if they’d ever thought she was good enough for the doctor. For them, she had gone directly from lobsterman’s daughter to doctor’s wife, and because they didn’t know anything, they figured it was a promotion. This was how she knew without a doubt that reputation, in many forms, was bullshit.
Tim had been effortlessly charming to nearly everyone who hadn’t married him. He was especially good with patients and people he outranked, because they most obligingly did what he told them to, and if they didn’t, he had reason to maintain that they should have. Evvie herself had thought of him as a very good boyfriend through high school and college.
Later, when he had brought her to Christmas parties and she wouldn’t dance, she knew that all it did was make them love him more. They’d all say, “Oh, Eveleth, don’t be silly.” She’d say no, she wasn’t feeling well, and then they’d look at Tim with sympathy, like What a good man you are to love this. They wouldn’t have believed that the reasons she rarely
felt like dancing with him had to do with the way he was at home. She knew the way he sort of glowed for most people. She probably knew it better than anybody, because she’d traded away more than anybody in return for it.
* * *
—
Evvie had been almost sixteen on the day in March of her sophomore year when Tim found her alone, dripping wet, and out of options. She was back from a band trip to Augusta, and she had a fleece jacket on and her clarinet case under one arm. The bus had come back at 4:20 and her dad had been scheduled to pick her up at 4:30. But it was 5:30 now, and it was raining. If her father was still working, she didn’t want to bother him, even if she could find a phone. She watched for anyone she knew, even though most of her friends were in band, too, and they’d already been picked up by parents or they’d driven off in twos and threes, laughing and waving. Evvie was just starting to wonder how, exactly, to get herself home when a blue Lexus pulled up to the curb in front of her. The license plate said DR8KE, which didn’t quite scan.
She and Tim Drake had been in the same class since third grade, but she didn’t know him very well. Still, the class was small, so she knew enough. She knew his dad was a lawyer, his mom owned a real fur, his sister was three years older than he was, and their dog was named Kenny—supposedly for Kennebunkport, where his mom grew up. Evvie and Tim had two classes together, and he’d held a door for her not long ago, throwing her a sideways smile. Other than that, they were effectively strangers.
He rolled down the window of his car. “Hey, Evvie. Did you call a taxi?”
She frowned. “What? A taxi? No.”
He looked away, smiled, and looked back. “Do you need a ride? I’m asking if you need a ride.”
She laughed. “Oh my God, I’m sorry, yes. That makes sense, sorry.” It was raining a little harder. “And, I mean, yes, a ride. A ride would be great.”
“Okay, it’s open.”