by Linda Holmes
Still, there had already been one reporter at Evvie’s door. He felt bad enough about drawing one to her house; he didn’t want to draw them to the school or to football practice, and who knew whether the football team would even want to hear from somebody who not only didn’t play football but was pretty much set on fire and sent out of town because he couldn’t outpitch the guys on a high school staff?
“We’d keep it quiet,” Coach Finch told him, mind-reading as a man might learn to do after spending twenty years reading the complex behavioral signals of the seventeen-year-old male New Englander. “Not a show. Just talk to some kids. And if it works out, who knows? You help run drills, you do a little assistant coaching maybe, instead of sitting inside playing video games like I bet you’re doing.”
Dean chuckled. “I haven’t played football since high school, and I wasn’t that good.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea, Coach. Kids are online, all that, people talk.”
Finch shrugged again, waved that hand again. “Eh. My boys are solid. I tell ’em it’s not for Twitter, they’ll keep it quiet much as they can.” This was Dean’s favorite part—it came out nawt fuh Twittah.
“I hate to tell you, Coach, but I think they all gave up Twitter. That’s for old guys like you and me. I think now you have to tell them it’s not for…something else. Instagram, maybe.”
“Oh, for the love of Gawd,” Coach muttered. “I get a hold of whatever they’re doing with their phones and they’re on to something else. It’s like grabbin’ at eels.” He continued: “Anyway, they’re good boys. Worst thing that happens, everybody finds out you’re working with a bunch of kids. Right now, they’re sayin’ you’ve gone dog-bone loony, so you’ve got nothing to lose, right?”
Dean had played for an awful lot of coaches. And Coach Finch of the Calcasset High School Hawks was the first one who’d ever come to him for a favor and called it a favor. Hard to say no.
IN THE THIRD WEEK OF October, Dean opened the apartment door and called to the living room, where Evvie was reading a dancer’s diary from the 1920s, to tell her that it was ten minutes to Halls of Power, a dopey political soap they made a point of watching at the time when it aired, but mutually vowed to deny they knew anything about if they were ever asked.
When the door wasn’t closed, they could hear well between his apartment and her kitchen, and sometimes they’d leave it open so they could chat while she made dinner or he opened a bunch of his forwarded mail. Now and then, if she made something she was particularly proud of, he’d come in and eat with her, or she’d flop into one of his club chairs with a beer and he’d tell her on-the-road athlete stories, which they’d agreed didn’t count as talking about baseball. He told her about a guy he’d hid from an angry ex-girlfriend, two guys he’d smuggled into a hotel when they missed curfew, and a time he’d had to sneak into his hotel room naked, trying to block the view of himself with a towel and an electric guitar.
“I still can’t believe you got this ridiculous, enormous TV,” she said, settling in for Halls of Power, “that I really love.” He’d mounted it on the wall opposite the club chairs, so she flopped into her seat and threw her feet over the arm. “Remind me where we were,” she said.
“The lobbyist you hate was paying off Special Agent Flathead of the FBI.”
“Ah, right.” She rubbed her arms through her sweater. “And the president was…”
“Giving the VP the old pocket veto.”
Evvie turned toward him. “If we watch this show long enough, I’m going to find out how many governmental sex euphemisms you have.”
“I don’t even know myself. Try me again.”
“Okay. What was the president doing?”
“Giving the VP the old advise and consent.”
“Stop.”
“Well, stop laughing.”
Evvie stretched in her seat. “It seems cold in here, are you cold?”
“Little bit.” He went to pour her a drink.
She got up and went to her kitchen, where she fetched a foil-wrapped brick she’d sometimes used to flatten roasted chickens. She propped open the apartment door. “Better air circulation,” she said. She sat back down. “So, how was today?”
“Actually, I was going to tell you something. I don’t know if you heard, but the Drakes are setting up a scholarship at the school.”
Evvie nodded. “I had heard they might do that. I’m not surprised.”
Dean shook his head. “Guy casts a shadow, huh? I mean, if I can ask.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, went off to California and came back. Worked in town, lived in town…it was a big deal.”
“Just that he came back and lived here?”
“Yeah.” She took the glass of whiskey from him and shook her head when he held out an open can of Pringles. “A couple of years ago, somebody told us that Tim—who was class of 1999—was one of only two valedictorians from our high school who graduated after 1994 who still lived here.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s demographics and economics and stuff.”
“Go ahead. Tee it up, nerd. I went to college.”
She laughed. “Well, basically a lot of eighteen-year-olds with good options don’t stay in a place like this. And when they leave, they don’t usually come back. So the town gets older, tax base gets smaller, things get harder. Long story short? Too much leaving and dying; not enough arriving and being born.”
“Oldest and whitest state in the country.” He nodded.
“Exactly.” She took another drink. “So with Tim, I think a lot of people knew that if he were their kid, they might have encouraged him to get out. But he didn’t, and they loved him for it.”
“I guess I can understand that.”
“Besides, he was cute, he was friendly as long as you didn’t live with him, and he married his high school sweetheart. He just had that thing. That thing that makes certain guys kind of glide across everything.” She skimmed her flat hand through the air. “To some of the people who had watched him grow up, I think he was…a unicorn.”
“He didn’t want bigger things?”
“No, he did.”
“Then why come back?”
Evvie shrugged. “Because anywhere else, he’d just be a nice-looking horse.” She smiled and pointed to the TV. “Show’s starting.”
* * *
—
When she went to bed that night, she moved the brick and shut the door, but when Dean came into the kitchen to share a pot of coffee with her the next morning, she waved her hand. “Put the brick back,” she said. After that, they closed it only at night.
EVVIE HAD SAT OUT THANKSGIVING the previous fall. She’d sent her father off to eat turkey with Andy and his kids and Kell, and she’d spent most of the day in bed with a book, putting on the nightstand a bottle of wine, which she opened at noon and finished at ten thirty at night.
This year, Andy had started working on her a month ahead of time, telling her he wanted her and her dad to come with him and the girls to Kell’s in Thomaston. Kell had invited Dean’s parents as well, and they were so eager to see him and so enticed by the pictures he’d sent that they’d decided to make the trip. Evvie promised to go, then planned to cancel, then got a supermarket flyer in the mail for frozen turkeys and cried in the bathroom, then called Andy and promised him she would bring the pumpkin bread.
There was a half-inch of snow on the ground when she woke up on Thursday and went downstairs with her thick robe wrapped around her to put the coffee on. She could hear that Dean was up, so she went over and stood at the closed door. “Morning,” she said to it.
“Morning.” He sounded barely awake. It made her smile.
As she scooped coffee into the filter basket, the door opened. “You want coffee?” she asked
.
“I do,” he said, coming into the kitchen and settling in one of her chairs. “I was at Kell’s way too late last night. My parents’ plane was delayed, so I didn’t get them over there until midnight.”
“They’re settled in?”
“Yeah. They have about ten years of small talk to catch up on. Five boys between them, I’m sure they’re keeping busy.”
“It was nice of them to come all this way.”
“I think my mom wanted to see for herself that I wasn’t doing quite as badly as she kept reading that I was. How about you? Are you excited? Turkey? Family? Football?”
She gave a little “hmm” that wasn’t quite a real laugh. “I don’t know about excited, but it’ll be good to see everybody. I didn’t do last holiday season.”
“Understandable,” he said, rubbing his shoulder.
She poured in the water, pressed the button, and listened to the coffeemaker go ffft-ffft-ffft while she put away the clean dishes. The plates she’d gotten when she got married, which she still used every day, were white with a neat row of little yellow flowers around the edges. They’d always felt to her like dollhouse furnishings. “I can always tell I’m in a bad mood when I get annoyed about these dishes,” she said.
“Oh, boy. Why?”
“They’re not my style. There’s something about registering for wedding presents that makes people think they’re going to turn into other people. Like I was going to turn into a little-yellow-flowers person when I got married.”
She put away the glasses, the flatware, the glass mixing bowl. They’d spent so much time sitting in her kitchen in the last two months that even with her back turned, she knew what Dean was doing. He was watching her work and listening to everything with a periodic narrowing of his eyes or tilt of his head. When she first met him, she’d thought he listened like a therapist, but now she thought he listened like a journalist. Everything she said, he treated like it ended in a semicolon. “I did not turn into a little-yellow-flowers person,” she added. “I wound up with all this stuff I didn’t pick, because there’s this wedding-industrial complex, and you have to buy ugly dishes and not-soft towels and people get angry if you don’t come up with pressure cookers and blenders and shrimp forks that you promise them you really, really want, and then you’re stuck with them. I’m stuck with these flower dishes for the rest of my life.”
“Why are you stuck with them?”
Evvie closed the dishwasher and turned back to him. “Oh…you know. I have them and everything. I mean, they’re fine.”
“But you’re not stuck with them.”
“Right, but I have them now.”
“They’re dishes.”
“Right.”
“So you could get other dishes.”
“I have these, though.”
“But you’re the only person who lives here.”
“You live here.”
He tossed his head back toward the apartment door. “I live there. You live here.” He tapped his index finger on the table. “You”—tap—“live”—tap—“here.” Tap. “They’re your fuckin’ dishes. You’re the person who eats off the dishes.”
“I know that.”
“So if you don’t like them, get new ones. Diane could give you a whole box of them for a buck fifty. She’d probably throw in a set of salad tongs.”
“Why are you mad about dishes?” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Why are you?”
“I’m not!”
This silence was different. Ffft-ffft-ffft from the coffeemaker. “There’s a lot of things you don’t get to decide,” he finally said. “I think you can decide about this and you’re talking like you can’t.”
She thought about the too-delicate wineglasses, the undersized table, the too-big house, the big shower she ended up with in place of the tub she wanted, and whether she’d ever chosen to live here at all. “I’ll get different dishes. I promise.”
The coffeemaker beeped, and she filled two mugs and brought them to the table. “My father will be happy to spend some time with you. He likes baseball, but I’ve made him promise not to mention it, and if you’re curious about lobsters, he can tell you everything you want to know.”
“How long was he in that business?”
“Well, he retired two years ago, and he started training when he was ten and doing it full-time when he was seventeen, I think? So…it’s almost fifty years.”
“But no lobster boat for you.”
“It wasn’t encouraged for girls so much when I was little. Plus, I think I knew from watching my dad that it was brutal. I never saw him before school, and then he’d get home right around when I had dinner ready.”
“Good lord. I don’t think I could heat up soup when I was that age.”
She smiled. “Well, he was the one working hard. His back was—it is—a nightmare from hauling up the traps. He’s had surgery on it a few different times, that’s part of why he finally retired. He always wanted to make sure I felt like I could do whatever I wanted. ‘There’s more to life than eight hundred traps,’ he used to tell me.”
“Eight hundred traps?”
“That’s how many one guy can have.”
“That’s a lot of lobster.”
“It is. I think I…figured there were easier ways to live.” She put her hands flat on the table. “Which I guess turned out to mean marrying a doctor.”
“Did you want to do something else?” he asked.
She sighed. “I think every plan I ever had involved everything happening later. You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It’s like a pool where you can’t touch the bottom. I knew there would be something else, but it was always after. After, after. It was like I was waiting for something to start, and I was actually in the middle of it the whole time. Does that make sense?”
“It does.”
She picked at a thread on the sleeve of her robe. “You never wanted to do anything else besides baseball?”
He made a sound like pffft. “No. Never.”
“Did your parents mind?”
He thought about it. “I don’t think anybody wants their kid to have exactly one plan that could end in the time it takes for him to take a baseball to the eye socket. But they eventually gave up and went for it. Pushed me really hard to go to this All-Star Camp, and that’s where I decided I wanted to go to Cornell…and you know the rest.”
She remembered the smack of the pinecone against the fence when she was spying on him in the dark, and she wondered if he did this everywhere all the time, with oranges in supermarket alleys and snow globes behind souvenir shops and sea urchins from the tide pools into the sides of bleached-out boathouses, hurling everything over and over until it finally fell apart. She wanted to know if he thought he’d go back to pitching. She wanted to ask all the questions she’d promised she wouldn’t—was he crazy, was he messed up, did something happen, what happened?
“I’m just saying,” she told him, “that my dad is going to talk to you a lot about lobsters.”
“I’m ready. My dad might ask about your homeowner’s policy.”
“Can’t wait.”
* * *
—
The door of Kell’s house opened, and Lilly, Andy’s five-year-old, looked up at them. “Hello and welcome to Thanksgiving!” she said. She was the more adventurous dresser of the girls, hostessing today in brown-and-white checked pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt featuring a frog made of sequins.
“Hello, lightning bug,” Evvie said.
“Hey there, Lilly Buck,” Dean added, giving her hair a muss with his right hand.
“Dean, dooooooon’t-uuuuh,” Lilly wailed with a grin, then she took off running into the house.
“Oh, boy, she is nuts about you, that one,” Evvie said.
A warm wave of turkey fumes drew them into the living room, where Frank Ashton was making short work of a dish of peanuts while voices chattered in the kitchen. Lilly had disappeared back into the finished basement, where her sister surely awaited with whatever inflatable fort or elaborate robot kit their grandmother had secured for them. Evvie called out a greeting. “Don’t get up, Pop,” she said as she bent to hug him and press her cheek to his. “How are you?”
He patted her encircling arm. “Oh, I’m doin’ fine, sweetheart.” She still loved the sound of her father’s voice. She gave him an extra squeeze before she let go.
“Dad, this is my friend Dean,” Evvie said.
Dean shook her father’s hand. “Good to meet you.”
“You, too. And I promised Eveleth I’m not going to say anything about baseball.” Evvie froze.
“Right on,” Dean said with a nod. “Excuse me a minute, I’m going to go kiss my mom.” He took the pumpkin bread from Evvie and turned toward the kitchen. “You guys, I’m coming in there to see about the pie situation. Anything that’s not covered up, I reserve the right to eat with my hands.” She heard Kell laugh.
When Dean was out of earshot, Evvie leaned down toward her father’s chair. “Pop, what was the one thing I asked you not to do?”
Frank threw his hands up. “I’m not askin’ him anything. You didn’t tell me I couldn’t speak to the man.”
Andy appeared at the top of the basement stairs. “Is Evvie hassling you, Frank?”
“You’ve got that right there, Andrew,” said Frank as he popped four more peanuts into his mouth.
Evvie got up and walked over to her best friend. He hugged her so hard she grimaced. “I’m happy to see you,” he said into her ear.
“Me, too.”
“Your dad and Dean’s dad have been bonding.”