by Linda Holmes
He stayed at her house for thirteen days. Kell kept the girls and brought him clothes, and every day, someone would bring stew, bread, soup, casseroles. Andy would accept it all at the door and promise to give her their love. The school brought in substitutes for his classes. Evvie’s father called every day to hear again that she didn’t want him to come over, didn’t want to see anyone. Andy made Evvie take showers, he coaxed and prodded and bribed her to eat, and although he had a bed in her guest room, about half the nights he slept curled against her, because sometimes she could take Benadryl and doze off with an arm draped over her but not without one.
Tim’s parents took care of the funeral arrangements, and Andy brought Evvie. He had her charcoal gray wool dress cleaned, drove her to the church, and held her up again as she received mourners. Mourners who, like him, didn’t know she had been packing the car when the hospital called. Every five or ten minutes, he’d lean down by her ear and say, “You’re okay.” And whenever he did, a fresh jolt of pain went through her. She could have sworn that every time, her heart pumped acid straight to the tips of her fingers. This was the first time the words seemed to bounce around inside her skull: Monster, monster.
He brought Evvie back home, and she went straight to bed. She mostly cried and slept and poked at bowls of soup and pieces of toast that he carried upstairs on a tray. After a while, he got her to watch a couple of movies with him—nothing too silly, nothing too sad, nothing with car accidents in it. “I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I’m so sorry, Ev. How can I help you?” And she’d pull the blankets back over her head. After a few days, she came downstairs to eat, and after a few more, they started talking about when she’d be ready to be by herself.
When he reemerged, she knew people asked about her everywhere he went, because he would pass her their best wishes. And she knew how they praised him even when he didn’t tell her, because she’d overheard it more than once: “You’re so good to her.” “She’s so lucky to have you.” “I don’t know what that girl would do without you, Andrew.” This still happened, from time to time, even with people who regularly saw Evvie herself. They wanted Andy to say how she really was. They wanted him to translate her reticence and explain her absences from places they expected her to be.
“You were leaving him,” he repeated. “So all that time afterward…it wasn’t because you missed him. Or was it?”
Evvie shook her head. “I had no idea what to do.”
“Evvie, did…did he hurt you? Were you scared of him?”
Does dreading every conversation with him count? Does tensing up when he came into the room count? “No,” she said. “I had told him I wouldn’t talk about the marriage stuff with you. And I didn’t know for sure that I was going to go until I did it, and…I didn’t say anything. I was going to call you.”
He nodded. “You were going to leave town,” he said. It was not a question. He would know she couldn’t have been planning to leave Tim and stay in Calcasset. She had to have intended to go farther away than that.
“Yes,” she said.
“You weren’t going to say goodbye to me, or your dad…my girls.”
“No, I wasn’t.” She almost explained that she was leaving notes for them, but it seemed like it would make it worse.
“Evvie…I would have helped, I would have helped you find somewhere to live. I would have taken you anywhere.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t say anything to anybody.”
He never raised his voice, not the whole time. “You were the first person I told that I was getting a divorce. I told you before I told my own mother. I can’t believe I had no idea.”
She was sure Andy was watching a slideshow in his head of those days bringing food to her bedroom upstairs, and of himself at Tim’s funeral leaning down by her ear, and of the two of them at the tree-planting ceremony, and she knew he was changing the captions on all those pictures. He’d told her over and over that he understood everything she thought was strange, wrong, bad, ill-suited to the circumstances. The loss explained all of it, he thought. The grief did. But now he had to take all those pictures out again, and it felt inevitable to her that as he searched for new tags to place on them, sooner or later he’d get to Here is a picture of her lying. “I didn’t want to answer questions about it,” she said. “I thought everyone would blame me.”
“You thought I would blame you?” He didn’t have to tell her how unfair it was or that he’d never given her reason to think anything like that. He was right, and it didn’t change the fact that she had intended to leave him nothing but a note, after which he’d have spent the same thirteen days comforting her father. She could argue, but it was true: she’d been ready to walk away from all of them with no goodbye. She’d have visited. She’d have called. But being really gone was what she had intended. Being really, really gone.
“No,” she said. “No, of course not, of course I knew you wouldn’t. I don’t know what I thought.” It was the two of them, and the faint pick-a pick-a, and the furnace kicking on. “I’m sorry.”
He nodded, but what he said was “You don’t have to be sorry.”
She looked down and noticed for the first time that she still wore her ring, and he didn’t. He’d taken his ring off two months after Lori moved out. Andy had been married and was now unmarried, de-married. She was differently married, but forever.
“I want to know we’re okay.”
He nodded. “Of course. Of course we’re okay.” He turned to her. “It’s a lot to think about.”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes.
Andy looked at his watch and said, “I don’t want to keep you up. And to be honest, I should get home. I have work in the morning. It’s been a long day. I just didn’t want to go to sleep with it out there.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m glad we got to talk.” They stopped at the door. “Andy, I’m sorry that’s how you found all this out, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“No, I understand.” He jangled his keys in his hand. “Maybe I fell down on the job.”
“You didn’t. I didn’t want anybody to know. So nobody knew.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah.” He repeated it—“Yeah”—and walked toward the door.
“See you Saturday?” she asked as he stepped out onto the porch.
“Sure.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Ev.” He went down the steps to his car and waved, and she shut the door behind him.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, EVVIE WAS reading in the living room when she got a text from Andy: Hey—have to cancel tmrw AM. Wknd plans with M. Should be back next wk. okay?
She stared at it for a minute, then hit reply. She typed, Sure, have fun. Then she backed up and changed it to Sure! Have fun!
Well, that looks sarcastic, she thought, and changed it to Sure. Have fun!
The next morning, she was puttering in the kitchen doing the dishes when she heard the distinctive rings and bumps of the pinball machine. She poked her head into the apartment. “Can I watch?”
“You can as long as you don’t make fun of me,” he said without looking away from the game. “Wait, it’s Saturday,” he said over the bells. “Aren’t you supposed to be out with Andy?”
“He canceled,” she said as she walked over to the machine and leaned on the side. “Girlfriend plans.”
“Ooh, the other woman,” Dean said. “How do you feel about that?”
“Well, it means I have to make my own pancakes, which is a drag.”
“I don’t think that’s what I was asking.”
“No, I know it wasn’t. I’m happy he’s happy. I wish he didn’t have to cancel, but I don’t blame him. Or her, or whoever. If I were dating him, I wouldn’t want him to have a standing commitment every Saturday morning. I’d expect him to be able to go out, or go away, or…stay in. Or
whatever.”
“Or whatever,” he repeated. “Everything’s okay with you guys?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” He swore gently and let a new silver ball go.
“Don’t expect me to be jealous, it’s such a cliché. She’s not the first person he’s dated in the last four years; she’s just lasted the longest.”
“I thought maybe you didn’t like her.”
“I don’t know her very well. I mean, I know her, and she was at his birthday in February, but I haven’t talked to her much.”
“She’s probably terrified,” Dean said, as he knocked the machine with his hip.
“I think that’s cheating, if you bump into it,” Evvie said. “And she’s terrified of what?”
“She’s probably terrified of you.”
“Why would she be terrified of me?”
“Seriously? Evvie, how many people, since she started dating Andrew, do you think have told her that they thought he was dating you? Or waiting to date you? Or trying to date you? You live here; you know all this bored-ass gossip. I get you guys—you know, sort of—but if I were Monica, I’d think you would be like…some crazy combination of his mother, his ex-wife, his older sister, and his manager. You’ve got to admit, it’s…you know.”
“No, what?”
“Intense.”
“Well, I don’t think she’s going to have to see much of me anytime soon, so she’s got that going for her. And what do you mean by you get us ‘sort of’?”
“I’m saying it’s unusual.”
“What’s unusual?”
“This platonic soulmate thing you do is not something that most people do.”
“No, I know.” A buzzer went off. “It just…it happened, you know?”
“Fate?”
“Domestic necessity,” she said. “When he got divorced, Lilly was a baby and Rose was a toddler. And Lori was…poof.” She made a motion with her hands like a magic trick. “Did you know she took all the spoons? For some reason, when she set up her new place, she wanted more spoons. He wanted it to be over, and he wanted it to be easy, so he told her—even though, for the record, I told him not to—‘Take whatever you want.’ So she took all the spoons from their kitchen. I went over there one morning a week after Lori moved out, and Rose was trying to eat cereal with a plastic fork.”
“Kell didn’t order five of everything for him?”
“He didn’t tell her. But he told me. So I brought him some spoons. And I bought him a cookbook. I stayed with them when he had to go out. I was staying with them the night Lori called and said her mom had died, and I rubbed Rose’s back until she fell asleep. I taught Andy…well, I tried to teach him how to braid their hair.”
“He told me you saved his life.”
“He did?”
“Yeah.” The ball Dean was playing rolled down into the depths, and he looked hard at her. “And all I’m saying is: that takes up space. He’s got kids, an ex, a mother, he’s got his regular friends. And he’s got you, the totally no-big-deal platonic woman friend he tells everybody saved his life.” He reached over to the nearby coffee table and grabbed a sip of coffee. “All I’m saying is that it could be intense.”
“Point taken. You really have seen a lot of psychologists. So, what are you up to today besides this?”
“Well, there’s some conditioning work with the team, and then I’m supposed to talk to this reporter.” At her surprised look, he nodded as he shot a new ball. “I know. I like this one, though. He wants to write about what guys do after they’re done. He said he wanted to profile somebody who didn’t retire voluntarily. That was his expression. ‘Didn’t retire voluntarily.’ It’s a fuckin’ polite way of saying ‘crashed so hard you left a crater they turned into a swimming hole.’ ”
“And you’re sure you want to talk to him?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m sure, no. But at some point, I have to figure out what I’m doing besides living in your house and bumming around with a bunch of high school juniors. I’m going to have to stick my head out eventually and see whether it’s six more weeks of winter out there or what.”
“Mm, I’m afraid you already missed Groundhog Day.”
“Well, then for St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll stick my head out and see if there’s six more weeks of not-Irish idiots throwing up on the sidewalk.”
“There you go.”
Watching Dean try to play pinball turned out to be a pretty decent way to blow a weekend morning. Still, she missed the coffee warmups, and the bacon, and she missed sitting across from someone who found a babysitter every single weekend, so they could sit around and talk about nothing in particular.
* * *
—
The following Thursday, Andy texted her: Can’t do Sat. Can you get together Sun.? Crazy busy wknd w/M & Lil & Ro.
She wrote back: Busy here too. Let’s regroup next weekend. Then she deleted the text she’d drafted and saved and never quite sent, which said, Can’t wait to see you Saturday. Sorry we’ve been missing each other, hope we can talk.
* * *
—
The article Dean had been interviewed for appeared in the second week of March, during spring training. It was the first spring training he hadn’t been part of in eleven years. The piece was supposed to be published online at ten o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday when it was raining in Maine but undoubtedly gorgeous in Tampa. Dean stayed in the apartment with his iPad and his coffee and a bagel. Upstairs with her laptop, Evvie refreshed the site and watched a few movie trailers—she hadn’t been to the movies in almost two years. Knowing he was downstairs waiting, she also waited. Nothing doing right at 10:00. 10:02. 10:05. But at 10:07, she saw it at the top of the column of stories: “After Baseball: Eight Players on Having Free Time, Paying for Drinks, and Moving On.” Six of the guys had retired after long careers, and one quit young to focus on his family. And then there was Dean, whom the writer called “at first glance, perhaps the most famous washout in twenty-first-century sports.”
But in the piece, Dean talked affectionately about the town where he now lived (he called it “the opposite of New York in pretty much every way”) and the boys on the teams he was coaching (“You miss a bunch of bozos giving you shit once it’s gone, so I’m lucky I met these bozos when I did”). The magazine article version of Dean could easily have been in the running for Mellowest Man Alive, explaining that “the team did everything to try to help” and “sometimes you have to know when you’re not an asset anymore” and “I’d be pretty ungrateful to complain about eleven seasons of professional baseball and three trips to the World Series. I was lucky. I’m still lucky.” He talked about the trip to Boston to get the pinball machine, which it seemed he’d showed the reporter during a visit Evvie didn’t realize had even happened. The reporter had even talked to Somerville Bill, who said that Dean was “a good fella, for a Yankee.”
Dean had not told the reporter he sometimes sneaked off to the local minor-league field to pitch at two in the morning, clanging the ball off the chain-link, ringed by flashlights. He didn’t describe hurling pinecones at her fence until they exploded when he went to take out the trash. He didn’t tell the reporter he had felt like he was pitching with someone else’s arm. Instead, he showed the reporter a well-adjusted, super-relaxed Dean “They Named Choking After Me, But It’s Fine” Tenney. The King of Chill.
Then, at the end, the reporter wrote this: “Sometimes, Tenney reaches over with his left arm to rub his right shoulder, like he still uses it every day. I ask him at one point whether it bothers him. ‘I’m just a creaky old man,’ he tells me. ‘Though it could always be my arm telling me to get the hell off the couch and go do my job.’ He smiles and adds, ‘It’s one of those.’ I’m not sure whether he’s kidding.”
Evvie got to the end of the article and sta
red at a picture of Dean, credited to a staff photographer. In it, Dean, dressed in a warm coat and a Yankees cap, sat on a stack of lobster crates on a boat called the Second Chance, which she knew belonged to one of her dad’s friends. He had offered the photographer a mild squint, a slightly scruffy face that spoke of hard times and intrigue. And sex, though maybe only to her.
She could imagine how elated a photographer must have been to take Dean out for a shoot and find a boat called the Second Chance for him to sit on. It might as well have been called the Floating Blunt-Force Metaphor. It was exactly what Andy had always said—that someday, the press would long for Dean to fight his way back. They’d want to forgive him, and it wouldn’t be because they were merciful. It would be because the flavor had gone out of hating him like it goes out of cheap gum, and now they needed to taste something different.
She closed the laptop and went down to the kitchen, where she made tea and waited. When the kettle whistled, he appeared. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she answered, dropping her teabag into her cup. “The piece is nice.”
“He’s a good guy,” Dean said, resting in the doorway on one shoulder. “It’s honest. I recognize myself.”
“It was funny about your arm,” she said. “What you said about how maybe your arm wants to pitch.”
She knew without turning around that he was tilting his head like he didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. Like he hadn’t just read it. “I didn’t say my arm wants to pitch.”
She didn’t turn around. “You said maybe. You said maybe your shoulder hurts because your arm wants to do its job.”