by Linda Holmes
He’d folded it up, saying, “Maybe.”
The weather for the Spring Dance could not have been better. There was a lazy breeze, and there were almost no clouds. People packed blankets into car trunks for lawn picnics and threw in light jackets for when it got cooler later. In the parking lot, it already smelled like hot frying oil, girls were trying on earrings that a woman in Camden made from recycled plastic, and they were setting up the speakers by the stage where the band—brought up from Boston—would be playing before the game.
Back in the kitchen at 26 Bancroft, Evvie packed a canvas tote bag with her sunglasses and her Claws seat cushion and a long-sleeved shirt Dean had loaned her after he noticed that the zipper on her jacket was broken. He had his door shut, and after putting her ear close to it and hearing that he was still listening to one of the podcasts she was trying to hook him on, she opened a side cabinet and took down the champagne bottle by the foil at the neck. She put her hand on the label and closed her eyes for luck, then swiftly moved it into the refrigerator, hiding it behind a pitcher of iced tea.
As she was getting ready to make herself something to eat before she left, he emerged from his apartment in jeans and a green Henley, with his duffel over his shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “I’m taking off.”
She put down the tote. “You feeling all right?”
“Sure, yeah.” He hitched the bag up on his shoulder. “Little nervous, I guess.”
She nodded. “You’re going to be great.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “It’s going to be a real shitshow if I’m not.”
“It’s a fun game to raise money. It’s not that different from coaching. You’re doing what you know how to do.”
“Everybody’s kind of forgotten my sad ass,” he said. “I don’t know if reminding them is that smart.”
“I chased what’s-her-face off the porch, didn’t I? I can do it again if I have to.”
“You’re ready to be the muscle, huh?”
“Whatever it takes.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You’re fantastic. I just…feel like you should know. I don’t know if you know.”
She leaned back against the sink. “So are you. And as scary as I know this is, all you have to do is the same thing I’ve already seen you do.”
“If I fuck it up, it’s going to be the biggest flop this place ever saw.”
She waved her hand. “That’s not true. You’d be way behind a second-grader falling on her face, dressed like a box of Cheerios. That’s the great thing about failing here. You’re still beating the elementary school students who face-plant for our amusement.”
He laughed and rubbed his jaw. “Hey, can I ask you a favor?”
“Sure.”
“It’s going to sound…I don’t know how it’s going to sound. But they told me it’s general admission. Could you try to set up behind the plate?” He made a straight-ahead gesture with his hands, like he was helping to park a plane.
Her first thought was that he wanted her to be able to see whether the pitches were good. Her second thought was that he wanted her to have a good seat. It took three thoughts to get what he meant.
“I can. You want me to wave or something? I don’t know if you’ll really be able to see me.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I’ll know, though. Who knows? It might help. I’m ready to try anything.”
“That’s sweet. I think I’m honored.”
“I should get going,” he said, not going. He stood with his keys in his hand, fiddling with them, dangling the ring from different fingers. “I’m fucking nervous.”
Her intent when she took the first step was to get some kind of perfect, knee-melting hug, where he smelled her hair, where she smelled his neck, where they lingered in a strange, suspended, secret clutch. But as soon as she moved, he looked right at her and dropped the bag from his shoulder. It slid down his arm and went bump on the floor. It pulled his shirt to the side, and she saw his collarbone. And a step later, he let his keys go from his fingers, and they clattered on the tile. Just as she got to him, in one motion, he grabbed her Claws cap by the brim and tossed it behind her.
All she could think as she finally, finally kissed him was finally, finally. She crossed her wrists behind his head and felt his hands on her, his fingers digging into her hip bones. He made a surprised little noise, or maybe they both did.
It was a little sloppy and imperfect, or maybe perfect, because they’d never done it before. Toothpaste, scruff, breath, Dean’s hand creeping an inch under her shirt at her waist, a joint in his shoulder that popped like a cracked knuckle when he shifted his arms to hold her tighter. That was all that really registered. That and finally, finally.
They pulled apart slowly, and she stepped back. She put her hands in her hair and realized he’d halfway dislodged her small ponytail. “I forgot to give the go sign,” she said, leaning her hands on the table behind her.
He grinned and rubbed one hand over his cheek. “It’s okay, I got it.”
She reached down to get her cap, then looked at him with a little flash of concern. “Oh my God, I know you have to go. I know it’s a big day. I didn’t plan that or anything. I didn’t mean to…do something confusing.”
He picked his keys up off the floor and hoisted the duffel onto his shoulder. “Evvie, that was…not confusing.” He started out the kitchen door, and before he went, he turned back around. “Lotta things. Not confusing.” He paused, then added, “I’m sorry if I messed up your hair.” He winked and left.
EVVIE MET UP WITH ANDY and Monica and the girls on the way in, so they could sit together. When she saw Lilly’s hair in two neat French braids, Evvie leaned down to inspect it. “My lightning bug, it looks like your dad finally figured out your hair.”
“My dad can’t do anything,” Lilly said matter-of-factly. “Monica did it. She did my best braids ever.”
“Ah, of course she did.” Evvie stood back up and gave Monica a thumbs-up, marveling at the way a kindergartener could deliver a shot to the solar plexus without even looking up from her cotton candy.
Of everyone in the stands except some of the players’ wives and girlfriends and a couple of people on the Claws’ staff, only Evvie and Andy and Monica knew that Dean Tenney was going to come out of the dugout and pitch the fourth inning. They’d picked the fourth because the game would be underway, but he wouldn’t be responsible—well, any more responsible than necessary—for how it turned out.
The Claws were leading 3–2 when the Explorers came up in the top of the fourth. Between the third and fourth innings, Gloria Rubia, the principal of Calcasset High, came out and read a list of Top Ten Cafeteria Improvements We’d Like to See, written by the senior class. (“6. Skee-Ball.”)
Evvie shifted in her seat, adjusted her cap. Andy looked over at her. “Are you gonna be okay whatever happens here?” She nodded, and he smiled. “Okay.”
Over the loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, with a very special announcement, please welcome the owner of the Calcasset Claws, Ginger Buckley!”
A roar. Ginger was a straight-up eccentric dowager in the best sense, the heir to her late husband’s Kentucky-based whiskey empire. In the mid-1990s, after he died in his early fifties in a small plane crash, she’d packed up and left the South because she’d grown up out East and missed the ocean. Now she lived in a decommissioned and renovated lighthouse all the way at the end of a jetty, with three rescue greyhounds and a constant stream of freeloading grandchildren she adored. In 2009, she’d bought the Claws, as she put it, “for my adopted hometown to enjoy forever and ever.” She came to every game, often putting a papery silver space blanket over her bright red hair when it rained, and now and then, she took to the field to deliver important news.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Spring Dance!” she said into a microphone with pink baubles aroun
d the handle that was reserved for her alone. A roar. “How’s everyone enjoying it so far?” Another roar. “Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Another. “Sometimes we like to invite very special friends to play in this game, and we bend a few rules”—she leaned teasingly to one side—“to make it possible.” She glanced over at the Claws’ dugout. “We are very pleased that this year, we can welcome one of our recent arrivals in town”—the first gasps were here—“to take a turn pitching. Calcasset, give your warmest welcome to the assistant coach of the Calcasset High Hawks and our good friend, Dean Tenney.”
Eveleth saw him jog out of the dugout, and she heard the cheer that got so loud it was almost a buzz in her ear. At the pitcher’s mound, he shook Ginger’s hand, and she walked off the field, waving her pink microphone in the air and pumping her other fist. The catcher, Marco Galvez, who also worked at the Honda dealership in Thomaston, set up behind the plate, and Dean looked down at the ball in his hand. “It’s warm-ups, it’s fine,” she muttered to herself. “Just breathe.” All she heard was hollering, but her mind was still enthusiastically replaying the memory of his fingers finding the skin on her back.
He wound up. He rotated, and the ball left his hand, and 2,500 people knew that whatever this was, they could say they were there for it later.
It went thump into Marco’s mitt, and a cheer went up. Marco lobbed it back. And by the time Evvie looked up again, she saw a sea of phones in the crowd, held up, some briefly to catch a photo and then back into pockets with something like shame, some documenting with video. And some, she assumed, would soon be streaming it live, and one of those streams would be spotted and shared by someone famous, and people would stand at bus stops and sit in restaurants and pause games on their computers and mute the television because there was live streaming video of Dean Tenney, who might be about to embarrass himself by being unable to put the ball over the plate at a game where the national anthem had been sung by the seven-woman, two-man glee club from a local senior center.
She looked at Andy next to her and took a deep breath in. He reached over and squeezed her arm. Monica mouthed, “Good luck.” Evvie watched Dean successfully take a few more warm-up pitches, and then she was almost sure she saw him look into the stands. Should I wave? I definitely should not wave. Should I stand up? Should I have worn brighter colors? She rubbed her hands on her thighs and leaned forward as if to whisper in his ear. You can do it, you can do it, you’re fine.
The batter was Brian Staggs, a compact Freeport outfielder with a squatty stance and a caffeinated or otherwise sloshed cheering section. The program said he was nineteen. That meant that as a fifteen-year-old high school freshman, he had probably been watching Dean pitch for the Yankees. If he came from around here, there was a good chance he was a Red Sox kid. He might be batting against his adolescent mortal enemy. A lot of them might.
Staggs twitched the end of his bat. Dean held the ball at his chest. Evvie sucked her breath in and held it. There went the leg, the body, the arm, the ball. And there went Staggs rotating his shoulders to swing, and there went the bat in an impotent swat, and there went the ball smacking into Marco’s mitt. A fat, deep, punishing punch of a sound that would have sounded great from under the bleachers. Andy bellowed beside her, Rose and Lilly clapped their hands, and Evvie exhaled.
It was one pitch. Just one. Even at his worst, he’d sometimes been able to get off one decent pitch—he’d told her so. He’d even had a couple of passable games. But he’d also told her that very often, right away, even before his problems started, he’d known whether he had his stuff or not. He talked about it as this feeling, like the way you know someone is watching you or the way you know you’re getting a cold when you feel the first dry tickle in the back of your throat. She wondered whether he knew now.
The crowd had gone from revelers at a local charity event to aspiring witnesses to some flavor of history. They’d have been even louder if half of them weren’t texting or tweeting or using one finger to write Dean Tenney in bright blue chicken scratches and draw an arrow on a grainy eight-second video of Dean getting the ball back from Marco.
And it was not just one pitch. A crowd that regularly watches good minor-league pitchers can tell when it’s suddenly visited by very good major-league pitchers. Dean threw hard. Like, hard. His fastball was rude, thrown at guys who could only either watch it as it passed or swing at it when it already had. Staggs, Carlos Stanfield, and Mickey Cudahy all struck out. Four pitches, three pitches, and four pitches. Cudahy had been kicking around for years, and he’d even batted against Dean once years before. When the last of the four pitches to him was called a strike, Evvie saw him smile at Dean and point at him with the bat.
Dean Tenney, who had walked off the field in New York being called a fuckin’ head case, walked off the field in Calcasset, Maine, being figuratively lifted onto the shoulders of 2,500 people cheering and who knew how many glued to their phones. Marco ran out and leapt at him for a righteous chest-bump that was perfectly captured by Charlotte Penney, a ninth-grader in the front row on the first-base side. Charlotte tweeted the video, which was passed on by her cousin Brenda, then by Brenda’s boyfriend Steve, then by Steve’s dad Rick, then by Rick’s college roommate Michael McCasey, a sports journalist at a very small news site, and then by Walt Willette, a sports journalist at a very big news site. This all took four minutes.
The team surrounded him as they left the field. They patted his back, they shook his hand, and Evvie could see that they were chattering and thanking and marveling. They’d been afraid they were going to get whatever he had turned into that hadn’t been Dean Tenney, but they’d gotten Dean Tenney, at least in the fourth. Brett Bradley, who played first base, leaned over as they walked toward the dugout and said something that made Dean laugh—and laugh hard, clapping Brett on the shoulder. Just as he was about to leave the field, Dean turned and looked right toward where she was, like he could see her, even though it seemed like he couldn’t have. Monica leaned in front of Andy and put her hand on top of Evvie’s. “Well, we couldn’t have hoped for much better than that.” She raised her eyebrows. “He looked amazing out there.”
“Yeah, he sure did,” Evvie said.
The most-shared tweet labeled #DeanTenney carried the video and said, “A very nice moment for a nice guy who’s had a very bad couple of years.” The second most-shared tweet carried a photo of the team around Dean, congratulating him. It said, “Congratulations, fuckwit u have 4 world series wins. u struck out 3 scrubs in an exibition [sic] in bumblefuck MAINE.”
Dean spent the rest of the game in the dugout with the Claws where Evvie couldn’t see him. She held Lilly on her lap for a while, she ate a pretzel, and she received a few visitors who wanted to lean over and goggle their eyes at her about whether she’d known this was going to happen. All she’d tell them was, “I had a feeling he might show up.” She took out her phone and saw that Dean’s name was trending pretty much everywhere, that his surprise appearance was in the list of headlines on SI.com, and that ESPN had decided in its first version of the story that Dean had been living as a “recluse,” which would be news to the high school athletes whose backs he’d been slapping for the last six or seven months.
All in all, she was pretty sure that if he popped out of the dugout right now, she’d leave an Evvie-shaped puff of smoke behind as she Road-Runnered down to the field to climb him like a tree.
Andy leaned over. “You look happy,” he said.
She smiled. “I am.”
“I’m glad.” He went back to explaining the backstory of Ginger’s lighthouse to Monica, who was dividing her time between listening to that and shelling peanuts for Lilly.
Evvie picked up Dean’s shirt and scooted her arms into it, pulling it tight around her and sneaking a sniff of the collar while she pretended to look at a spot on the ground. The sun was starting to slip away and leave an orange thrum behind it, and th
e lights in the park glowed white. A breeze blew her hair back from her cheeks, and she closed her eyes and licked pretzel salt off her lip. Oh, that’s right, she thought. I remember having good days.
WHEN THE GAME WAS OVER, Evvie said good night to Andy and Monica and the girls and went and waited by Dean’s truck, leaning against the driver’s side door, trying to look busy on her phone. By now, the Portland paper had sent their sports reporter up, and it seemed like there would be others. Tomorrow, the motel in town would be fully booked, there wouldn’t be a rental car to be found any closer than Brunswick, and she’d be back to shooing reporters off her porch. Only this time, they’d be here to take it all back. Maybe Ellen Boyd would show up with her little leather notebook to say she was sorry and apparently Dean wasn’t drinking and maybe they hadn’t been having an affair and maybe she didn’t know anything. Maybe Ellen Boyd would admit that nobody called Tim Doc, and that Evvie had never threatened her, and that there was nothing wrong with Dean at all. Maybe Ellen Boyd would fall down Evvie’s steps and land with her face in the flowerbed.
“Ma’am, you’re leaning on my truck.”
She looked up. He was the absolute picture of hoo boy howdy in his jeans and his Henley and a brand new Calcasset Claws jacket. She stuffed her phone into her pocket and ran toward him. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” she said as she hurled herself at him. He grabbed her and she felt her toes leave the pavement, then he set her down and gave her one quick smooch right on the mouth. “I cannot believe how good you looked,” she said. “I can’t believe it. You looked amazing. How do you feel?”
He put his hands on the back of his neck. “I don’t even know.”
“Well, you should know. You should feel amazing. Those guys got up there, they never even saw it coming. I almost felt bad for them, they looked so pitiful and—”