by Linda Holmes
He nodded slowly. “Seventy-five percent cut to Christmas, zero percent mercy for horrible children.”
“Yes,” she said. “Zero percent.”
“Where does the name ‘Eveleth’ come from?” he asked, wrinkling his forehead. “Is it a family name? Is it the Viking goddess of lobsters or something?”
She shook her head. “Eveleth is in Minnesota. Way up north, cold as fu-huh-huck. It’s maybe forty miles from Canada. It’s where my mom was born. Her dad worked in an iron mine.”
“They have iron mining in Minnesota?”
“They used to.”
“They don’t now?”
“Not like they used to.”
“How in the hell did she wind up married to a lobsterman from Maine?” Dean asked. He finished his drink, took her glass from her, and poured them both a little more.
“She went to college in Boston, and one summer, she came up here to be a counselor at an arts camp that’s not around anymore. He was working as a sternman for a buddy of his, and they met at a bar. It was some kind of…infatuation, I guess, and she moved up here and they had me. I’m sure it seemed very romantic to her. Very adventurous. But she missed home, so she called me Eveleth. I am named after my mother’s unhappiness.” She raised her glass toward him, then took a sip. Normally, she’d hear what she was going to say in her head before it came out of her mouth. Right now, it was the other way around.
Dean looked hard at her, like he might pull on this thread, but he didn’t. “My oldest brother, Tom, is an engineer. Mark works for a tech startup that does something with touch screens or some shit. Brian is an accountant. And I, my parents’ youngest boy, now have a wrestling move informally named after me. Do you want to know what it is?”
“Probably not.”
“Guess what it is.”
She scrunched up her face. “I don’t want to guess what it is.”
“It’s choking.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I was afraid that was what it was.”
Just then, the wind kicked up and the window rattled again. “It’s serious out there,” he said.
“It’s terrible out there.” She drank, and she sighed. “I want to be in Fiji or something.”
“You have a lot of wishes for a lady who wants to give away all her money.” He arched an eyebrow. “You could go to Fiji.”
“I told you, I don’t want the money.”
He held up one hand. “No, you told me you do want it, but you won’t take it. Which I think is crazy. Although you may have read in a few places that I’m also crazy, so take that for whatever it’s worth.”
“You know what’s crazy?” she said. “I can’t take it, but I can’t give it back. That’s why I lied. I can’t figure out where to put it. How’s that for crazy? I mean, what should have happened is it should have gone to his parents. This whole thing is such a freak show that giving his already rich parents a giant wad of money would be the right thing to do. But I can’t give it to them.”
“Why not?”
Her smile was thin. “How would I explain it? It’s his life insurance. I was his wife. They’d want me to have it. They’d never take it unless I explained why I wouldn’t keep it. I’m not going to snap them in half after everything they’ve been through by telling them I didn’t love him anymore. I’m not going to tell them that as long as I don’t take the money, it’s like I left him. And that I want to believe I would have left him.”
“Can you give it to your dad?”
Evvie snorted. “There is zero chance my father would take money from me, or that would obviously be the first thing I would do with it.”
“I’m still not sure I know why you don’t keep it. It came from an insurance company, and you need it more than those assholes. What am I missing?”
She looked down into her glass. “It’s just…I can’t. I can’t. It’s bad enough I lived off him when he was alive.”
“It’s how life insurance works, Evvie. People need money. It’s for this. It’s for this exactly. They’re not paying for how sad you are; they’re paying for the money he was making that you don’t have now.”
“So he dies, and I keep the money, and that’s how I stay alive, and I drift in and out of all these rooms in this great big house and I get old and I’m just nothing—”
Dean sat up and put his glass on the table. “All right, first of all, missy—”
“ ‘Missy’?” She was a little drunk. They were both a little drunk.
“First of all, missy, you’re not nothing. You wouldn’t be nothing if you put that fucking school-band shirt on and that hairball sweater and moped on your couch until you were eighty, so I don’t want to hear that.” He took a drink and then said to the bottom of his glass, “Jesus, who was this fucker?”
“I should give you the money,” she said. “You can have it as long as you don’t tell anyone I gave it to you.”
“I don’t need it. I made good money right up until I stopped making any money. And even though I blew a lot of it on startups making engines running on turkey shit or whatever, I have some left.”
“What was it like?”
“What was what like?”
“Not being able to pitch.”
He squinted at her. “What was it like being married to him?”
“I asked you first.” She bobbed one dangling foot up and down.
“It was a lot like being able to pitch,” he said, “but if you sucked.”
She just kept it up with that foot.
“Okay. If I asked you to get up and walk across the room, what would you do first?” he asked.
“I guess I’d…get up?”
“Right. And it would happen without you thinking about it, because you know how to get up out of a chair. I mean, what would happen, what would really happen, is you’d put your hand down next to you and you’d lift yourself up a little. You’d scoot back and you’d lift your legs up, and you’d turn and put your feet on the ground. Then you’d shift your weight onto them and straighten your legs, and…are you getting what I’m talking about?” She tipped her head a bit in response. “You’d get out of the fucking chair. You tell your body to get up? It gets up. It knows how. If you pitched for twenty years, same thing. You’re not explaining to yourself how to pitch every time. You’re trying to hit a spot that’s sixty feet away an inch to the left, inch to the right. That’s where your work is. And then you wake up one day and it’s…to you, you’re doing the same thing. But all of a sudden, it’s like you’re trying to bend a fucking spoon with your mind.” He took a drink. “It was like trying to pitch with somebody else’s arm. That’s what it was like.”
“Well, hell,” she said. “That’s sad.”
“It wasn’t great.” He raised his eyebrows. “Now you go.”
She drained her glass and tapped her fingers against it. “Let’s see. Being married to Tim was like…it was like paddling a boat, but for ten years. And you’re not getting anywhere, and you’re ready to stop. But the farther you get, the more you think, ‘Well, I’ll just go another hundred yards. In case it’s right up there. So I didn’t take this whole trip for nothing.’ ”
He nodded. “You know, I used to wish I blew out my elbow or shattered my fucking wrist. So I could point at it and go, ‘That, that’s why.’ ”
She turned in the chair to lean over and pour herself another drink, almost feeling guilty about the fact that she could make her body do what she wanted so effortlessly. “Was it a woman?” she asked.
There was that third of a smile again. “Why do you want to know if it was a woman?”
She shrugged as she put her feet back over the arm of the chair. “I’m curious.”
“Yeah, but why do you specifically want to know if it was a woman? What, you want to know if there’s one now?”
She laughed, an incautious whiskey laugh. “Well, you’re not supposed to say that, haven’t you ever heard of subtext?”
“It was not a woman. And there is not one now. Consider that text.”
She met his eyes for a second, touched her bottom lip with her thumb, then sat up abruptly. “I should go. I should sleep, I shouldn’t…” She put the rest of her drink down on the table. “If I drink that, I’ll get sloppy.”
“I don’t mind.”
She felt the pink creep into her cheeks, and she got up and turned away from him. She teetered slightly and leaned for a second on the arm of the chair, but she didn’t turn back. “Okay, thank you, this was fun,” she called back as she crossed over into her kitchen. “Good night, Dean.”
“Good night, Eveleth, Minnesota, way up by Canada,” he called back.
WHEN DEAN TENNEY WAS IN the minors and living in a rented room in Albuquerque, he and the team had their season-ending party at the home of a local honest-to-God railroad magnate named Fitz Holley. Holley’s sprawling Victorian was fusty and untouchable inside, like Colonel Mustard should be bonking Miss Scarlet on the head with a candlestick over by the bar. But in his dark-wood, cigar-scented rec room, there was a restored vintage pinball machine with pinup girls painted on it. The bells rang, the flippers popped satisfyingly, and there was no way to describe the movement of the ball without resorting to noises like sproing. Dean loved it. He wanted it, or he wanted one just like it. It went on a list of the things he would get when everything worked out.
Everything did work out for a while, of course, and when he lived in New York, he would sometimes look at listings for pinball machines. But he found that they tended to be pop-culture kitsch—Gilligan’s Island machines and KISS machines and Michael Jordan machines. He’d bought some high-end dartboards, but when he stopped being able to pitch, something about throwing darts had seemed so ridiculous—even though he found he could still do it, which, what the hell—that he gave them to buddies before he moved.
Then in February, while he was living at Evvie’s, a friend who lived in Boston tipped him off that a guy he knew was unloading the prized possession of his recently deceased father: a 1956 pinball machine in good condition that could be had for a reasonable price. Really, for a relatively-not-unreasonable price. It wasn’t the kind of money he’d be able to spend forever, but it was money he could still spend now. He looked at a few pictures that were in his email, and while there were no pinup girls, it was sharp, painted with race cars. Sold. The only catch was that Dean had to come down to Boston to pick it up, which was almost a four-hour drive.
He explained all this to Evvie over coffee on a chilly Thursday morning, and she raised her eyebrow at the pinup girls and laughed about the KISS machines, and she was polite enough not to ask how much he was paying for this pinball machine with which he presumably intended to unleash all kinds of clanks and dings and brrrrrrrrings in her house at whatever time of day. “So when are you going to retrieve this thing?” she asked.
“Sunday,” he said. “You want to come?”
“To Boston?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s almost four hours each way in my truck, and I’ve been trying all the podcasts on your list, but I don’t think I can listen to that many. That is a lot of close looks at the simple poetry of making manhole covers and shit. You should come keep me company. Besides, you told me you wanted to get out of the house more. This is way out. This is get up early, get on the road, get down there, help load a pinball machine into my truck, come back, help haul a pinball machine inside—”
She laughed. “Oh, now I’m working on this trip?”
“You bet,” he answered. “Hey, you’re up to it, you told me you’re half iron miner.”
“I’m one-quarter iron miner. One-quarter iron miner, one-quarter Minnesotan quilter, and one-half New England lobster people.”
“I can’t use the quilting, but the rest sounds hearty. You should come.”
“If you need company that badly, you could ask Andy.”
“You know the music he listens to.”
“He’s better than I am with the manual labor, though.”
“Quit stalling, Minnesota. You coming or not?”
“Will you buy me a cruller at Dunkin’ Donuts?”
“There’s Dunkin’ Donuts here.”
“It’s not the same. I want Boston Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“Yes, I’ll buy you a cruller at Boston Dunkin’ Donuts.”
And just like that, she agreed that she’d drive down with Dean on Sunday to pick up the pinball machine he wanted. The widow and the exiled baseball player were road-tripping to fetch a heavy, expensive toy to put in an apartment he didn’t intend to stay in that long. And in an isolated moment in her kitchen, it seemed like an entirely logical thing for them to do.
* * *
—
Sunday morning, Evvie slid two eggs over medium onto a plate for Dean and split a bagel—half for him, half for her. “I made breakfast,” she called.
Dean came into her kitchen in a New York Giants jersey. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. “What?” he asked.
“We’re driving almost four hours down there and four hours back, and in the middle, we have to pick up a pinball machine. You’re going to make time for a bar fight?”
“I’m not going to get in a bar fight. Be glad it’s not the Yankees.”
After breakfast, she dumped the dishes into the sink, grabbed her coat and keys, and met Dean outside, where he was warming up the truck. She slid in beside him and was seized briefly by the thought of hopping back out and wrapping herself in blankets for the day. She had three DVR’d episodes of Survivor she hadn’t even watched, and she could choose not to bump along for four hours in a truck for the pleasure of helping a grown man move a half-ton tchotchke. The couch was warm, the truck was cold, Boston was far.
But Dean threw the truck into reverse. “All right, let’s do this,” he said, and they were crunching over her gravel driveway.
Eveleth had seen Calcasset from what she believed to be every possible angle: she’d stood at some time or another on every corner and looked at every building. But it had been forever since she’d looked at it while leaving. She’d imagined this view quite a bit, not that long ago. She’d imagined herself behind the wheel of her Honda, taking Route 1 to the south, just like they were doing now. But instead of sitting in the driver’s seat, she was looking out the window and wiggling out of her coat. And instead of forever, she’d be gone only today.
“So, I have a question.” Dean interrupted this line of thought, and none too soon.
“Yes.” She turned to face him.
“Will there still be cereal-box races this year? I’m going to be pissed off if there are no cereal-box races.”
“There should be. They’re eager to restore them to their rightful position as a mundane element of a minor local attraction that’s not mired in a scandal that involves dirty competition and illicit affairs. Maybe they’ll retire the Cheerios box, though. They could hang it from the lights over right field.”
“That’s about the right amount of dignity,” he said.
“Are you going to come to a Claws game with me?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I…wasn’t sure if you hated it or missed it or what.”
“You mean baseball? Hell yeah, I miss it. Are you kidding? It’s all I did for most of my life. If you think I’m overspending on this pinball machine, you should see what I spent trying to get back into baseball. I would have given them my other arm if they could make the good one work the way it was supposed to.”
Evvie hooked her phone up to the truck stereo and put some music on.
The middle part of Maine, all the way from Bar Harbor to Portland, hangs down like stalactites that drip little islands into the Atlantic. It’s divi
ded by rivers and harbors with cozy names that sound like brands of bubble bath or places boats sink in folk songs: Sheepscot River, Damariscotta River, Linekin Bay. Route 1 skips down the coast, ducking into tourist towns like Wiscasset and Bath and Brunswick before it almost regretfully meets up in Portland with 95, which stomps down from Bangor and Augusta a little farther inland.
As they approached Freeport, which was a little more than an hour south of Calcasset, Dean pointed at one of the signs. “Hey, we’re going past the L.L.Bean store; did you need a tent with a dog door or some boots that are rated for eighty-five degrees below zero?”
“I’ve been in that store,” she said. “It’s huge. It’s full of men who want to find themselves but will settle for getting poison ivy on their balls instead. Tim was upset they didn’t have a wedding registry.”
Dean frowned. “What kinds of wedding presents did he want to register for at L.L.Bean?”
“Sleeping bags,” she said, “and canteens and backpacks and stuff. He had just moved back up here, and he wanted us to be outdoor people, I think. It never happened. He swore at a bunch of tent poles and that was about it.”
About another hour south, they passed a billboard that said, VICTORY TATTOO NEXT EXIT 4 MILES: AWARD-WINNING INK.
“Hey, did you need an award-winning tattoo?” she asked. “We could stop off.”
“I have a tattoo,” he said.
She turned toward him. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I got it when I signed my first contract. I was drunk, though, and even though I was out of college, it’s very high school yearbook.”
“Where is it? I mean, unless it’s—”
He grabbed the right side of his jersey with one hand and, keeping the other hand on the wheel, he yanked it up to reveal a good part of his right side. His eyes were still on the road, so he didn’t see her mouth open and then close as she took in his side, his skin, a patch of the belly that drummed against his shirt when he laughed. Something in her knees answered this with an appreciative pulse, and it came to her with bell-pealing clarity: Oh, right, she thought. Lust.