by Linda Holmes
“You know this was for charity, right?”
“They were pitiful for charity. Charitably pitiful. Nobody got close to anything you threw the whole time.”
“You know it was eleven pitches, right?”
“Yes, I know it was eleven pitches. But it was eleven great pitches. You had your stuff, I couldn’t believe it. Everybody was so excited, and so happy for you, and—”
“And we won the game.”
“Right! We won the game! I forgot we won the game! I’m very happy about that, too.” She bounced up and down on her toes. “I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of you. Oh! And I have something for you at home.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
She laughed and held up her index finger. “Not what I meant.”
He leaned down toward her. “Okay, but can we still make out in the kitchen a little bit more? I barely got your hair messed up and then I had this thing I had to do.”
“You mean…pitch like a superstar? You mean…make all these fools look like fools? You mean…confound the sports think-piece industry? That? That thing?”
He bent and laid his forehead against hers. He took a deep breath—the deepest, it seemed like—and sighed. “It felt good.”
“To me, too,” she whispered.
“It was only one inning.”
“One thing at a time.”
He straightened up. “Meet you back at the house?”
She nodded. They walked past each other, and as he went to the truck and she went toward her car, they both turned and looked over their left shoulders.
In the car, Evvie cranked an Avett Brothers record she hadn’t listened to in almost two years. Technically, the song was about dying, but it sounded like hope: When I lay down my fears, my hopes and my doubts; the rings on my fingers and the keys to my house; with no hard feelings…
She was still in Dean’s shirt, and even though the night had a clipped chill to it, she left the window halfway down as she made her way out of the parking lot. She could smell the bay’s salted fog from here, and when the music was quiet, she could hear the buoys and horns, sounds of the water where people worked. It was where her dad had come every day for so long, up so early and back so late sometimes, with muck on his boots and his back so sore that he’d asked her to walk on it in her fuzzy pink socks up until she went away to college. She’d gone out on the harbor so many times that she could pick everything out on the shore from far away—the houses right on the water, the restaurant, the dock where the boys she knew had dangled their legs and fished with poles while they drank Cokes and ate Doritos.
She turned up Cherry Lane, which led her to Bancroft, and she saw Dean’s truck in her rearview mirror, and she smiled. She saw her house, her wide porch with the light she’d remembered to leave on, and the driveway, where she pulled in and stopped. She could barely see Dean in the dark, and he whispered “Hey” as he got out of his truck.
“Hey yourself, ace.” She leaned back against the tailgate, and he put one hand on either side of her.
“It’s noisy,” he said, leaning toward her.
“It’s crickets.”
He kissed the corner of her mouth. “Crickets and what?”
“Crickets and…frogs, I think.”
“Let’s go in?”
Evvie nodded, and he followed her up the steps. “So,” she said, “I told you I had something for you.” She walked through the living room to the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, she moved the iced tea aside and took out the bottle of champagne. “In honor of your victory.”
He grinned. “Aww, thanks.” He took the bottle from her and looked at it, then back up at her. “What were you going to do if I bombed?”
She made a face. “That was never going to happen.”
He started to unwrap the foil. “You were a fucking lot more confident than I was, then.” He balled up the foil and threw it at the trash can, where it bounced off the side. “Ignore that. That doesn’t count.”
“Hey, could you see me? When you were pitching? Tell the truth.”
“I tried, but I couldn’t find you,” he said, coaxing out the cork. “I knew you were there, though. I figured you were busy punching people in the face who were saying they’d heard I was crazy.” There was a pop and a misty curl went up from the bottle. He filled two juice glasses.
“Well, here’s to eleven pitches and lots more like them.” They clinked their glasses and drank.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“What made you think I wasn’t going to bomb?”
Evvie shook her head a little. “I’m not even sure. I just knew.”
“You know that even at my very worst, I still knew how to occasionally throw eleven decent pitches in a row, right?” He looked down into his drink.
“How often did you throw eleven that were that good? After things started to slide, I mean.”
“Almost never.” He took another drink.
“Well, there you go. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in all the stuff they had you do. But sometimes, it’s all about the intangibles.”
“The intangibles, huh?”
They looked at each other. This time, she raised an eyebrow. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, boy, I’m going to regret the thing I’m about to say.”
Her eyes widened. “What’s the matter?”
He chuckled. “Nothing’s the matter. But I have to tell you the truth. I’m tired. I need about a month under a hot shower before my joints are going to work. And it sucks, because I really want to…hang out.”
She nodded slowly. “I see. You want to hang out.”
“Ev, I just…this was a big deal for me, you know? I feel like it might not be smart, mixing up the things that I care about not fucking up. The other thing, we have more than one day, you know?” He leaned on the sink. “Oh, boy, I’m going to regret it.”
She’d woken up this morning with none of this to consider. None of it had seemed real, and now it all did. It was too much at once. “If I’m completely honest, I’m a little bit relieved.” She felt the muscles in her back relax. “This was so slow, and now it’s so fast, and I’m not sure I should give all the go signs on the same day.” She drank the rest of her champagne and put the glass down on the table. “I mean, I married my high school sweetheart.”
“I know.”
Eveleth leaned forward. “And he died.”
Dean looked confused. “I know. Did I say something wrong?”
“Nope.” She tapped her fingers on the counter behind her.
“Ah,” Dean suddenly said. “You’re saying just him.”
“Just him.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
She pressed on. “So, I’m just saying.”
“You’re just saying what?”
Eveleth looked all around the room—ceiling, floor, stove, sink, cabinet, other cabinet, table—and then at him. “No warranties. Satisfaction not guaranteed.”
He busted out laughing. He put one arm around her waist and pulled on her until she stepped right to him. She was very aware that he seemed to look at her hairline, then her ear, then her cheek, and then her mouth, before he looked her right in the eye. “I’m not worried,” he whispered. And then he kissed her. The first one had been crazy, the second one had been quick, but this felt like the one that had been coming since they met. Kissing Dean was a lot like talking to him: it was easy. Well, it was easy and it made her want to rip her clothes off. So, still similar.
“Maybe we should have a date,” he finally said.
“We already live together,” she said, looking at him sideways. “I don’t think you can go on a date with someone you live with.”
“We don’t live together,” he said. “You’re going up there”—he pointed—“and I’m going in
there.” He pointed again. “That is not living together. Let me take you out.”
“Out where?”
He thought for a minute, tapping his finger on her hip. “Just dinner. Like regular people. Wherever you want.”
“That’s a good offer,” she said. “But maybe we should stay in. I don’t want everybody to gossip. It’s weird. You know I hate…people talking. We can order in. You usually hang out in the kitchen. We’ll eat in the living room.”
“I can do better than that,” he said. “What if we go out of town? Someplace where nobody’s going to care?”
“You’re pretty hot news right now. I’m not sure where that place would be.”
“I’ll figure it out. Someplace small, someplace we can drive to.” He pushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “Let me take you out,” he repeated.
She looked up at him, at his green eyes—gold flecks, thick lashes, such a stupid abundance of good genes—and that little scar he had. She said, “I would love that. When should we go?”
He smiled. “Good. I have to run practice after school Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, so how about Thursday? Thursday dinner. We’ll leave at five since we’re going on the road.” She nodded, and he reached out and kissed the tip of her nose. “All right, Minnesota. Thank you again for everything. Fuck Freeport, and back at it Thursday.”
She frowned as he headed for the apartment. “ ‘Back at it’?”
He called out, “Or whatever,” and he shut his door. Apparently, a sense of mystery now had to be maintained.
THE NEXT DAY, EVVIE CALLED her father and asked if she could bring him some take-out chowder for dinner from Sophie’s. She’d spent the morning reading amazed news reports about how noted failure Dean Tenney had emerged in some tiny hamlet in Maine and pitched, for at least one inning, like he used to. Ellen Boyd had weighed in, as a matter of fact, referring to Dean’s reappearance as “miraculous, grading on a curve of Major League Baseball to exhibition games to raise money for the local PTA.” Eveleth hated the word “bitch” and tried to never use it herself, but she understood in occasional moments why other people liked it.
Her dad, of course, was delighted to have a visit, and when she pulled up a little after six, she saw him standing behind the screen door before she even got out of her car. Paper bag in hand, she climbed out and walked up the cracked stones to him. “Hey, Pop.”
“Hello, sweetheart.” He opened the screen door, and she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“I got soup,” she told him, holding up the bag.
“Well, I got an appetite.”
He still ate at the kitchen table in the same house where she grew up. He wasn’t much of a decorator, so his house was a collection of old things, new things that replaced old things when they finally gave out, and new things that he sometimes allowed Eveleth to give him without objecting. He’d said nothing to her as often as he said “Keep your money” once Tim became a doctor.
“Did you have fun at the game yesterday?” Her dad had been with buddies in a row of lawn chairs by left field.
“Are you kiddin’ me? Best Dance I ever went to. Weather was perfect.”
“The weather was perfect.”
“Won the game.” He waited for her to nod. “Didn’t expect to see Dean out there throwing.”
She smiled as they sat down across from each other. “No, that was sort of a surprise. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. It’s tricky, with all the attention, and with the press and everybody. He wanted to give it a shot and see how it went.”
“He’s feeling good about it?”
“Sure, yeah.” She was trying not to smile too much. And not in too telling a way, not that her father was especially likely to notice.
“Well, he’s lucky he’s got you rootin’ for him. And I’m glad you’ve got company in that big house. I don’t like you being by yourself so much.”
She blew on a spoonful of thick, salty chowder and popped it into her mouth. Sophie’s had opened only a few years ago, but it was already in all the magazines that wrote up the region for summer tourists. “Well, you know, I don’t like you being by yourself so much either,” she said.
“I’m an old man,” he said, opening a plastic packet of oyster crackers and dumping them into his bowl. “You’re a beautiful girl. I don’t want you rattling around that place forever. And if you pardon me saying so, Tim wouldn’t want that for you either.”
She stopped with her spoon in her hand and looked at her father’s freckled hands, decorated all over with little scars. Over his shoulder, on the counter, she could see a tray with his bottles of pills for back pain, for blood pressure, for high cholesterol. Her own hand was soft and pale. “Pop, did you ever think about getting married again? After?”
“Married? No. I met people, of course.”
She remembered no one. “You did?”
He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Your mother left when I was thirty-three years old. What’d you think I did? Talk to the lobsters for twenty-five years?”
“But nobody special?”
“I didn’t say nobody special. I said nobody I thought about getting married to. You gotta remember, sweetheart, I was working on a boat every day. We didn’t have a lot, and it didn’t leave a lot of time for dates.”
Eveleth smiled, but then her mind flashed on a picture of herself and her dad that had been taken when she was about nine. She was holding a fish, her hair in pigtails, while he crouched with his arm around her waist. “And you had a daughter.”
“Sure,” he said. But then he looked up at her expression. “You listen, though, that had nothin’ to do with it. You were my best part. You still are. Don’t get any ideas.”
“Still,” she said, “it would have been a lot for anybody to take on, probably.”
“You’re talking crazy,” he said. “What kind of a nut would want to live with me and not you? It’s more likely my fault you never got a stepmother.” He took a bite. “I’ve been happy. Lucky and happy my whole life. That’s how I want it for you.”
“I know, Pop. I’m trying.” She put down her spoon. “Can I ask you a question? It’s a little personal.”
“All right.”
“How did you know what to do after she was gone?”
He got quiet. Eventually, he folded his hands in front of him and looked at her. “I guess I kept gettin’ out of bed. At first, I felt a little bit like how you feel. I know it’s different, Tim being really gone. But I got up and I went to work, and you went to school. I didn’t sit around and think about it. Might have been good I was busy, I suppose. And then I’d get home, and we’d eat. We couldn’t stop, so we kept going.”
“Did you know why she left? I mean, did it help at all?”
“Your mom was never happy up here. She wanted to be someplace bigger, I think. With more people. But she never told me she was thinking about anything like leaving on a Tuesday before we were awake, if that’s the question. The only thing I know is it was nothing about you. She loved you.”
This, Eveleth firmly believed, was his training kicking in. Somewhere, he’d read how important it was to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault, and he’d never stopped, and he never would. Nothing about you, nothing about you, nothing about you. But this, she had always feared, could not possibly be true. Her mother had decided that Calcasset with her daughter was not as good as Florida without her daughter. It meant something.
Eileen had left on a Tuesday, and when Eveleth had awakened that morning, she’d sat down at the breakfast table to find her father making eggs instead of her mother, when normally he’d be gone already. He’d been wildly excited the night before, because he’d finally bought the boat he always wanted. His very own boat that he could work himself. His own business. It had seemed like something was starting. But now, he looked gray and drawn.
&
nbsp; She’d asked where Mom was, and he’d said, “She went for a walk.” It was years before he told her that on that day, when he woke up, there was a letter on the bedside table next to him, and that it started with the words Dear Frank, I’m sorry but, and that it had taken him hours to decide to read the rest.
That night, “she went for a walk” became “she went away for a while,” and after a week, Frank told his daughter that Eileen had decided that she should live in Florida, and they should stay in their house. Evvie only knew Florida as the place where Walt Disney World was. So to her, this meant her mother was going to be at Walt Disney World all the time, and who could argue with that?
At first, she asked often when they were going to see Mom in Florida, or when Mom was coming to see them. She thought of them as a family with two homes, as if Pompano Beach were her parents’ pied-à-terre. It took two months of not seeing her mother before she fully absorbed the idea that she now lived with her father the way Heidi, in a book Frank had begun reading to her at night, lived with her grandfather in the Alps.
The first time she’d heard that it wasn’t her fault that her mother had left was on her tenth birthday, when she first asked whether it was. After she’d blown out the candles on a cat-shaped birthday cake from Specialty Sweets and pulled the red paper and white ribbon off a box with a new winter coat from her father in it, she’d picked up the card that Eileen had sent. She almost never got mail, so she loved seeing her own name written above their address, and she knew the handwriting from reading and rereading a long letter her mother had sent her about her abandoned ambitions, which Evvie had barely understood. It said things like “I was a very talented dancer! But a lot of things can get in the way of that, and that made me sad. I knew that if I was an unhappy person, I couldn’t be a good mom!”
I am named after my mother’s unhappiness.
On the front of the card was a Scottie dog, and when Evvie opened it, on the inside it said, “Hope your birthday is through the woof.” Eileen had written, “Love, Mom.” Just “Love, Mom.” This card had been in the blue suitcase on the night of Tim’s accident, when Kell saw it in the back of Evvie’s car.