by Linda Holmes
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Tim held it over me, if you can believe that. We were fighting one time, years later, and he said, ‘You’re so ungrateful, Eveleth. I might have kept you from losing the one parent you still have.’ He said that to me. Right out loud, to my face.”
“I believe you.”
“I know.” She paused, tapping the door with her fingers. She thought he might say something, but he didn’t. “Another time, he was mad at me when I was a half-hour late to a dinner that was at seven, because he’d told me to meet him at seven thirty. I tell him, ‘You said seven thirty.’ He says, ‘Evvie, I told you seven. You were reading.’ It was like that with everything. He breaks his own phone throwing it down while he’s watching hockey? Must be defective, because he put it down totally normally, even though I watched him hurl it at the floor. He even did it with stupid things. Just stupid, stupid things. If he left the door unlocked, it was because I told him I’d locked it. If I didn’t get a phone message back when there were phone messages, it wasn’t because he forgot to give it to me, it was because I didn’t pay attention.”
She figured Dean was sneaking a look over at her from the driver’s seat, and she stared hard out the window. When they were near home, they drove by Dacey Park, where the Claws played, where the Calcasset Braves had played before that, and she pointed it out to him. “What happens to it in the winter?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “It sits empty. The team hibernates, the park hibernates. We all do, I guess.” She stared out at the white lawns and the mostly bare trees. “Have you ever played baseball in the snow?”
“Not a lot,” he said. “You try not to. Pitching especially, when it’s cold, your fingers don’t work very well. But sometimes, in fall games, it happens.”
He pulled into the driveway, and she reluctantly slid out of the passenger seat into what was now officially the cold of late November. They left their shoes by the door to let the last bits of snow melt onto the mat and she flopped down onto the couch. “You want to hang out? Should we see whether there’s something on TV?” she asked.
“No, I’m going to sit here for a minute and see if I can digest the second piece of pie I definitely shouldn’t have had.” He sat next to her and they both leaned back, stuffed with dinner and reluctant to move. Finally, he turned his head. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.” She turned her face toward his.
“You told your dad you’re making ends meet.”
“Yeah. You pay me, I pay my bills.”
“Not to be morbid, but…you were married to a doctor. Why didn’t he have life insurance?”
“He had life insurance.”
“Andy said he didn’t.”
“Ah. Well, yeah. I told Andy he didn’t.” Dean looked at her. “Yes. I lied.”
“Why would you lie about life insurance?”
“So he wouldn’t ask me about it.”
“Did you…get the money?” He raised one eyebrow.
She blinked twice and thought for a minute, then she took a breath. “If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone. Not even Andy.”
“Okay.”
She looked back up at the ceiling. “I have it, but it’s not mine.”
“You gave it away?”
Evvie closed her eyes. “I’m going to. Everything got done, everything got cleared, they sent me a check. I went to a lawyer, I put it far away from my own money. It’s…sitting.”
“You don’t want it?” he asked.
She turned back to him and chose this moment to notice how long his eyelashes were. Not the point. “Well, Dean, it’s money. I have bills. Of course I want it.”
“But you’re not using it.”
She turned away again so she was looking at the ceiling. “Nope.”
“You want to tell me why?”
She breathed evenly, still gazing upward. “Not really. Not right now.”
He looked up there, too. “Little weird,” he finally said.
She laughed. “So are you.”
They lit up the gas fireplace and sat there resting their hands on their full bellies and doubling back to the evening’s better pieces of local gossip until he finally admitted he was beat and he was going to get some sleep. She sat up, and he hauled himself off the couch with considerable and noisy effort, then stood stretching out his back and shoulders and rubbing the back of his neck. “All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Night,” she said, like always. But then, not like always, he suddenly bent down toward her and she turned her face toward him with absolutely no time to react, and he kissed her on the forehead, just right of center.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said and went off into his apartment and shut the door for the night.
“Happy…Thanksgiving,” she weakly called after him. Her fingers went up to her forehead.
THE ESSAY WAS CALLED “TOWARD a Philosophy of Failure.” It ran in Esquire in December, and it set out to define how Americans process, write about, feel about, and define failure. It used four case studies, and one of them was former New York superstar pitcher Dean Tenney, who was the example of a type the writer was unseemly proud of having named: “The WTFailure.”
He said that it was one thing to process a failure in which a good idea didn’t pan out or a series of unexpected obstacles placed success out of reach. But it was another to see failure, as he put it, “float free of all common sense.” He wrote:
Tenney will be remembered like New Coke. He will be like Edsel, but in human form. He began as a prospect. A physical marvel. A specimen standing for all that we can do. But none of that will matter now. Now it would be better if he’d never succeeded at all. Because now, all that will be remembered is balls sailing past catchers, runners baffled by their good fortune barreling toward home, and teammates straining not to speak ill. If you’re watching, there is nothing to explain any of it or to tell you it couldn’t happen to you—not unless you listen to the murmurs of players who believe this is a matter of mental weakness and broken minds unable to repair themselves. Those murmurs are real. And they are real about Tenney specifically.
Tenney is not a pitcher anymore. He is now a bogeyman fantasy. He is a living, breathing worst-case scenario for anyone who has achieved any level of success. This is the story in which all your hard work turns out to mean nothing. This is the story in which your life, for no apparent reason, becomes the draft of a book that’s no longer being written, abandoned at a table without even a final word.
In the evening on the Monday in December when these words were published, Andy’s car pulled up in Evvie’s driveway. Evvie opened the door to two girls bundled up in pink and purple coats, and their father, who shot her a wary look the minute he saw her face. “Those assholes,” he mouthed. She nodded.
“Come in, come in,” she said to Rose and Lilly, taking their coats. “You guys go upstairs and get in the big bed, and I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Little Mermaid!” Lilly shrieked.
“We’ll talk about it. Be nice to your sister, Lill. Slumber party manners, remember?”
“Little Mermaid!” Lilly shrieked again as she and Rose ran up the rest of the stairs.
Andy cringed. “Sounds like you’re going to have a lot on your hands. Thanks for doing this. Has he said anything to you?” Andy asked.
“No,” Evvie said. “He went into the apartment, shut the door, didn’t say a word.”
“Okay. I’m just going to take him for a drink, see if he feels like talking.” He and Evvie walked into the kitchen, and Andy yelled Dean’s name toward the apartment. “Hey, you ready to go?”
“Give me a few minutes.” Dean sounded tired.
Andy and Evvie sat at the kitchen table. She raised one eyebrow. “So, how is the new woman friend?”
Evvie knew Andy
had taken Monica Bell, a teacher at the high school, out a couple of times since he met her at a party, but he hadn’t said much more than that. Now he grinned. “She’s fun. We went to the movies, to that thing with the French guy who was in the other one, the one with Jessica Chastain that you didn’t like.”
“Right, yes. It was Bryce Dallas Howard and the guy is Canadian, but yes.”
“Whatever. Anyway, we saw that, and we had dinner at the Fontaine. It was nice. I like her. You’ll like her.”
“That’s good.” Evvie could see them in her head, sitting at one of the tables in the corner of the restaurant, walking into the movie theater, sitting together. It felt so intrusive to imagine it down to the dinner forks and where they’d sit in the theater, but she didn’t know how not to. “It sounds nice.”
“You know…you could do that someday.” Andy cocked his head at her. “If you decided you wanted to, you could.”
“What, take out Monica Bell?” She knew. She knew it was unfairly glib, and it was a stalling tactic, and it was snotty, and it sounded like she was making fun of his new friend. He rolled his eyes, and she held up one hand. “Sorry. I know what you meant. I’m not even thinking about that. At all.”
“And you don’t have to. I’m not saying that. There’s nothing worse than the guy who starts dating somebody and all of a sudden, everybody else has to do it. I promise you, I am not that guy.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t think you were.”
“I’m being your friend.”
“I know you are.”
“I’m saying you could.”
“I know I could.” She was almost sure she couldn’t. She knew he meant it in two ways—that dating was possible and that dating was something no one would judge her for, because enough time had passed. She was quite sure he was wrong about both. In the immortal language of the baseball sex metaphor, she couldn’t even imagine getting into uniform, let alone making it to first base. “I’ll think about it. It still feels wrong.”
“Why?”
“You know. The…widow thing. The other day, I was working on this interview—it was that guy Jason I sometimes work for? He interviewed a professor about women immediately after World War II, and they talked about this soldier’s widow, and I realized that the whole time since Tim died, I’ve never called myself a widow. Or his widow. I don’t walk around introducing myself, ‘I’m Eveleth Drake, Dr. Timothy Drake’s widow.’ I’m the Widow Drake.”
“I’m not sure people really do that outside of the BBC.”
“I started thinking about it as a word, you know? ‘Widow.’ It’s strange that there has to be a word for ‘a lady who was married to someone who died.’ But it’s real. It’s me. I am a widow right now, right this minute. And honestly, I’m a widow all the time. I’m a widow everywhere I go, which explains why I feel like one, constantly. I looked it up in the dictionary, though, and if I get married again, I’m not a widow anymore. Even though I still married him and he’s still gone.”
He frowned. “That’s weird.”
“Isn’t it? It’s like the comatose princess who can only wake up if somebody kisses her.”
“Well, she’s sleeping,” Andy clarified.
“Who’s sleeping?”
“The princess. Whose name is Sleeping Beauty, not Comatose Princess. I’ve read fairy tales more recently than you have, so you can trust me, she’s just sleeping. But I see your point.”
“It’s weird,” Eveleth told him, “having this thing about me that’s because I was married before, and I can’t ever get rid of it unless I get married again. Do you realize I can’t ever just be single? I can only be married or be a widow, ever.”
Andy thought for a minute, then held up one finger. “What would you be if you got remarried and then you got divorced?”
“Huh,” she said. “I think then I’d be divorced.”
“What if you got remarried and then it got annulled?”
“Then I think I’d go back to being a widow.” She stared down at the table. “I’m horrible. I have to get myself a project or something. When it’s cold and I’m not working, I sit around and it’s like I can feel all my bones.”
“What does that mean? Feel all your bones?”
“I feel my bones. I mean, I get very aware of the fact that I’m lucky I have them, because if I didn’t, I would basically be a suitcase worth of muscles and skin and fat and a bag of organs like you get with a turkey.”
“Wow, gross.”
“Sorry,” she said, a little more quietly. “I guess I’m afraid I seem like a sad story, too.”
“Well, you don’t. I mean, I wouldn’t go around telling people the thing about the bag of turkey. But everybody just wants you to be happy. Go get your project, and then they can talk to you about whatever you’re doing, and they can stop asking me what to say to you, and I can retire from my job as the Eveleth Whisperer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That you have to be the whisperer.”
“Can I suggest for your project that you take a class in not apologizing all the time?”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, Jesus.” He hollered, “Dean, get out here, would you?”
Dean’s door opened, and he walked through the kitchen, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “See you, Ev.”
Andy shot her a look. “Okay, then. I don’t know how late it’ll be. Their PJs are in the bag by the door. Thank you again. Text me if Lilly rips your eardrum in half.”
“Will do.” From the window in her living room, Evvie watched Andy’s taillights until she couldn’t see them anymore.
* * *
—
By the time The Little Mermaid was over, Evvie’s room had gone quiet. Lilly had conked out halfway through and was now a tangle of limbs extending across half the bed, while Rose curled against Evvie’s side on the other half. When the credits rolled and Evvie shut off the DVD player, she leaned over to peek at Lilly, whose open mouth was smashed against her pillow. Evvie leaned over and whispered to Rose, “Your sister is even more asleep than usual.” Rose pushed herself up to peer across Evvie’s body, then lay back down. “She’s pretty funny,” Evvie said softly.
Rose rolled her eyes and returned Evvie’s hushed tone. “She’s loud.”
“She is loud. I think she wore herself out singing along.” Evvie smoothed Rose’s hair. “Are you getting excited for Christmas?”
Rose shrugged. “I guess.”
“You guess? You don’t want any presents?”
Rose’s one-sided smile was one of the things she’d gotten from Lori. “No, I want presents.”
Evvie slid down and pulled the blankets up tighter over them both. “What’s the matter, my girl?”
Rose sighed, and it made Evvie think that seven was too young to have a sigh like that in her vocabulary. A sarcastic sigh, yes. An angry-and-frustrated sigh, yes. But not one that sounded like a fifty-year-old diner waitress. “I’m going to my mom’s for Christmas, and she says I have to get Fred a present.” Fred was Lori’s boyfriend, a Charleston furniture designer she had met a few years ago, not long after she and Andy separated.
“And you don’t want to?”
“I’m only supposed to have to find presents for my family,” Rose said.
Evvie nodded. “Ah.” It could only be the first or second year the kid would have picked out her own gifts for anyone, but Rose’s quiet picking at her fingernails certainly spoke of a trespass against some expectation. “Well, lots of people buy presents for friends, too, you know.”
“Do you and my dad get each other presents?”
“No,” Evvie said. “But that’s because we’re lazy and we hate shopping.” Rose smiled. “Your dad would buy me some potato chips from the vending machine and I’d buy him a hot dog
at the gas station.”
Rose laughed into her pajama sleeve, then she started rolling and unrolling the edge of the blanket. “Fred is so boring. He’s nice, but all he talks about is chairs.”
“Does he like anything else? Sports? Music? Books?”
Rose turned to look at Evvie and paused, making her eyes as big as she possibly could, before saying, “He lit’rally only talks about chairs.”
Evvie squinted hard at Rose. “How about…golf? Does he play golf?”
Rose shook her head. “He doesn’t do anything.” She waited a perfect beat. “Just chairs.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Evvie said. “Get him a tie.”
“You think he wants a tie?”
“No, probably not. But ties and perfume and candy dishes and stuff have been perfectly okay for hundreds of years when people don’t know what to buy. A tie is a nice, safe present.”
“I don’t know if it’s good enough,” Rose said.
Evvie grabbed Rose’s hand, admiring her long fingers. “You know what? You don’t have anything to worry about. Your mom and dad love you, and I’m sure Fred loves you, too. And when Fred sees that you got him something, he’s going to be happy, because it’s a nice thing to do, and because it’s from you.”
“Evvie?”
“Yeah?”
Rose squirmed a little, then said, “I don’t always want to go to my mom’s. I have to pack up all my stuff, and I have to share a room with Lilly. And I just don’t always want to go.”
“I know. And that’s okay.”
“I have to go anyway.” Rose said it flatly, as much to herself as to Evvie.
“Yeah. Right now, pretty much, you do.” Evvie squeezed her hand. “I know you’ll be happy to see her.”
Rose nodded. “Do you have to see your mom, too?”
“Pretty much,” Evvie said. “Not at Christmas, but sometimes. When she’s around.”
“You probably miss her.”