by Linda Holmes
Evvie had shown the card to her dad and said, “She didn’t even write ‘Happy birthday.’ ”
Frank had taken the card from her and looked at it all over. “No,” he’d said tightly. “She sure didn’t.” But then he pointed to the preprinted writing. “Well, it says ‘birthday’ there. Maybe she didn’t want to say it again.” He squeezed Evvie’s shoulder.
“I think she’s mad at me,” Evvie told her dad, laying the card on top of the coat.
“She’s not mad at you,” Frank had said evenly. “I promise you, you hear me? She’s not mad at you.”
Evvie had felt herself starting to cry and dug her fingers into her palms. “Then why doesn’t she come home?”
He’d led her into the living room and they’d sat down next to each other on the beat-up green couch. “Your mom,” he started, “is down there thinking about a lot of things. But she loves you, Eveleth. She didn’t leave because of you.” He put his hand on his daughter’s cheek. “That’s important.”
Eveleth had looked down and said to him in something of a choked voice, “I’d never leave.”
“Me neither,” Frank had told her. Then he tapped her under the chin so she’d look him in the eye. “Hey. Me neither.”
Her fortunes were a mixed bag: widow with a huge house, no real job, a semidetached best friend, and what seemed to be an appointment in three days to have sex with one of the best pitchers of the last twenty years. But she was smart enough to know that maybe her most important lucky break was one of her first: that when he’d told her “me neither,” he meant it. And now, looking at him eating a bowl of good chowder, ignoring the sore back she knew he had almost all the time, she could only hope to be as good to him. “I love you, Pop.”
He reached over and squeezed her fingers. “I love you, too, honey.”
ON THURSDAY, EVVIE GAVE DEAN a cup of coffee in the morning and he kissed her goodbye on the forehead. And then, as he headed out the door, he said, “Five o’clock, right?”
She nodded. “Five o’clock.”
“Be ready to go.”
“I’ll be ready. I hope you picked out someplace good.”
“Oh, I did. Bring a bag in case we stay over. Also, I have a proposition.”
Evvie snorted. “I’ll bet.”
“You have a dirty mind,” he said in a low voice. “What I meant is that I propose that this dinner is back on old rules. No husband, no baseball.”
“All right, agreed.”
“So anything you have, get it out of your system now.”
“Okay. Wait: my husband was a jerk.”
“Well, sometimes I watch myself strike people out on YouTube.”
“All right, good enough. Now go to school. Teenagers are waiting for you to mold their character.”
When he was gone, she went upstairs and into her closet, where she’d stashed a white bag with elegant black letters that said CATHERINE’S. This was a lingerie boutique that, in fact, Monica had recommended to her via text after being sworn to secrecy.
Weird question: do you have a favorite place for pretty lacy things? I’m looking to upgrade and I haven’t shopped in ages.
YES. Go to Catherine’s in Bangor. Worth the trip. Beautiful not trashy, good for everyday and special occasions. There was a winky face. She couldn’t blame Monica for the winky face. She deserved the winky face.
Thank you. PLEASE don’t tell Andy I asked you about this.
Monica had texted back the smiley face with the zippered mouth.
Well, it certainly qualified as a special occasion, if being a special occasion had anything to do with having been neglected for so long on this front that she’d pretty much forgotten whatever moves she’d ever had, not that she’d ever had much call for moves. She’d picked out a pink two-piece set, a red set, and a black set, and she’d hand-washed them all in the sink in Woolite the previous day, then hung them to dry and put them back in the bag in the closet, as if she were quarantining their wickedness away from the rest of the apparel, lest her sweatshirts be scandalized. She picked out the black ones and laid them on the bed.
In the afternoon, she sat in the tub, shaving and trimming various zones with a precision she’d previously associated with building ships in bottles, then slathering everything with lotion. Wishing she’d had a pedicure, she scraped at her softened heels with a pumice stone and sprayed her feet with a peppermint foot spray.
Out of the tub, she wrapped up in a robe and went downstairs, where she ate a peanut butter sandwich in her bare feet and tried to relax. In September it would be two years since Tim had died, which meant she hadn’t had any sex of any kind in even longer than that, and she hadn’t had any with anyone except Tim, ever. She hadn’t thought about it all that much until recently—it was part of widowhood, part of not being a wife anymore, and it was all wrapped up with her other questions about what she should do now that everything she’d planned originally and also everything she’d planned as her escape had evaporated.
She remembered wondering in that first December whether this meant that she would never have sex again. What if nobody else had any interest? What if she just didn’t feel like it, forever? What if there was a rule she hadn’t read that required her to abstain until Tim’s parents died? What if the town passed a resolution to encase her in glass and prop her up in front of the post office as her late husband’s memorial installation?
It was sometime after the peanut butter sandwich when she decided to do something stupid. She opened her laptop and googled “Dean Tenney girlfriend.” Then she clicked on “Images.”
“Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuck,” she said softly. She’d known about Melanie Kopps, the actress he’d been seen with right before the end of his career. She was a redhead, with super-pale skin and eyebrows that looked like she won them playing poker with Audrey Hepburn’s ghost. In one picture, she clung to Dean’s arm in a green dress that plunged almost to her waist, which was to say almost to what there was of her waist. But here, too, was a picture of Dean with a professional surfer, who was blond with powerful shoulders and a splash of freckles. And then Dean with a singer named Bev Bo, who was famous for mixing gentle vocals with an electric cello. She was also really, really beautiful, with dark skin and gorgeous black hair.
Evvie slammed the computer shut and went to the bathroom mirror. She had two acne scars on her forehead. She had one slightly dark spot of undetermined origin on her cheek that a dermatologist had assured her was not lying in wait to kill her. Her nose was slightly crooked, and her front teeth were, too. Through the robe, she poked herself in the softness of her belly with all her fingers. She put her hands on the sides of her waist and sucked in her breath. She had tree-trunk legs, according to a girl who’d been briefly in her class in ninth grade, and while she’d always been reasonably satisfied with her boobs, they already weren’t quite as satisfactory as they’d been when she was twenty.
Evvie leaned in close to the mirror. She picked up tweezers from a little silver tray and squinted. As always, tweezing her left eyebrow made her sneeze, but she cleaned up the space between her brows, the parts where little straggler hairs kind of disorganizedly wandered toward her temples, and some that just didn’t belong where they were, like calves somehow separated from the herd. She rubbed her face with a cream cleanser, hoping it wasn’t the kind with plastic beads that were bad for dolphins or turtles or whatever it was, and she followed it with a moisturizer that promoted itself as “revitalizing.” She hadn’t yet turned to “anti-aging,” but she figured “revitalizing” was for over thirty and under forty, “anti-aging” was for over forty and under seventy, and then when you were seventy, you just told everybody to fuck off. She put three drops of an eye serum under each eye, because eye skin was apparently not made of regular skin, and she slicked her lips with a balm she suspected was secretly made in the same factory as ChapStick, but at
the end of the mixing process, instead of pouring it into a tube, they poured it into a little round plastic thing, added a drop of vanilla, and sold it for sixteen dollars.
Her hair had a natural curl to it, which she’d battled intermittently for a few years in high school after she overheard her grandmother Ashton telling her exhausted father that he ought to do something about “that rat’s nest.” Aw, Gran, rest her soul, preferably in a highly judgmental salon waiting area forever and ever. Sometimes Evvie blew her hair out straight when she was dressing up—back when she dressed up, that is—but if she did it now, it would look like she was trying too hard, wouldn’t it? The idea here was to look like she happened to be a sex goddess, not like she spent the entire day on it. So she settled for a curl-taming lotion and hoped for the best.
And then, to the closet. She picked through a drawer full of jeans until she found her nicest and darkest ones, the straight-leg pair that she considered the most flattering. She put them on the bed and started sifting through hangers in her closet. She had a black slouchy top with a ribbed waistband, and a black wrap top that tied at the side, and a lightweight short-sleeved sweater. Without knowing where they were going, it seemed awfully hard to pick. The idea was to achieve a result that was only possible with sustained effort, but without giving the appearance of any effort at all. She could not look like she was not trying. She could not look like she was trying.
She pulled out the sweater and laid it on the bed. But what about a whole different approach? What if she wore her Decemberists concert shirt? Wouldn’t that be casual? Wouldn’t that be effortless? He’d come home, and she’d be padding around the kitchen in her—no, that would be different jeans, and not nice enough for dinner, and for the love of God, she thought, just pick something. So she slipped out of the robe and shimmied into the black underwear and wiggled everything that belonged in it into the black bra, and then she slipped on the jeans and the sweater and gave her hair a toss. She was almost done. Almost.
She went back into the bathroom and took out her little makeup bag. Foundation would be too much; she’d look made-up. She wasn’t sure Dean had ever seen her in a whole made-up face before; what if he thought it was weird? She was pretty sure this was a sex date; what if something got on the pillow? How old was this bottle, anyway? No, no, just a little powder and a little blush, and a little mascara. Oh lord, how old was this mascara? She probably shouldn’t use it, because she had definitely not bought mascara since her husband died (a handy but grim way to date her perishables), but she dabbed it on anyway and promised internally that she would buy new eye makeup before the next time she had sex.
“I’m an adult woman,” she said to herself in the mirror. “This is stupid.”
She wandered downstairs and into the living room, where she plunked down on her sofa and pulled the Sports Illustrated out of the pile of magazines next to her. She noticed that, up in the corner, there was a little square of the photo of Dean and Marco chest-bumping, and a headline across the top that said, “Not So Fast: Is There Life in Baseball’s Exiled ‘Head Case’?”
She found the little article inside, which included a shot of Dean sitting in the dugout three years earlier. His elbow rested on his knee, his cap was in his hand, there was a little bit of sweat on his forehead. She leaned down close to it to look at his eyes. The piece referred to him as “troubled” and “once-brilliant” and “dynamic.” Searching his face, having known him for all these months, Eveleth could think only about how hot he was.
Oh, boy, he was hot. He was…he was smart, and he was sharp and funny, and he’d been so kind to her, and he was a good tenant, and he was a good ballplayer, and he was good with Andy’s kids and Andy’s mom and Eveleth’s dad. He was supportive of the town, and he had helped Evvie’s neighbors shovel their driveways once when it snowed a foot and a half overnight in January. He made good French toast (his new specialty) and a solid grilled cheese, and he was…well, he was getting better at pinball. But God almighty, he was hot. When he’d kissed her the other day, it was like everything between her chest and her knees made that noise she’d made when he showed her his tattoo: that noise, buuuuuuuh.
She went into the kitchen and took down a bottle of wine that she’d picked up the day before while driving back from Catherine’s (which she’d been calling Catherine’s House of Presentable Brassieres in her head for the last twenty-four hours). She peeled away the foil and dug out her corkscrew. It took a little wiggling, but she got it open and glugged a little into a glass. She was leaning on the sink, the glass to her mouth, when she heard the key in the side door. It swung open and he stepped in with a duffel on his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said with a grin. “You look cute. Ready to go?”
* * *
—
They drove about an hour and a half, until they pulled up in front of the Stafford Hotel, tucked into one of the high-end coastal pockets of wealth nestled in between the working marinas and former factory towns. Inside, the hotel restaurant was quiet and dark, but not stuffy, and they slid into a dark-leather booth. “This is nice,” Evvie said. “Who hooked you up with this place?”
“You know how I hate the Internet?”
Evvie nodded. “I know it well, yes.”
“It’s pretty good at restaurants.”
A waitress dropped off menus. “I have to ask you,” Evvie said, “whether it’s a coincidence that this restaurant is in a hotel.”
Dean squinted at her for a minute. “I have no idea what you’re implying.”
There was bread on the table, and some kind of acoustic indie music hanging in the cozy and mostly empty dining room. And as she dipped a hunk of bread in olive oil, he poured her a glass of red wine from the bottle he’d asked for. “So school’s almost over,” she said. “Are you sad it’s ending?”
“Very,” he said. “Did I tell you that Krista Cassidy is going to Purdue on a track scholarship? I ran into her the other day and asked her how she was, and she lays this on me. I never liked high school kids when I was one, but I’m going to miss these guys.”
“Well, they’ll get to tell everyone they know you, which I have a feeling is going to become a pretty good perk.”
Dean raised his glass. “Okay. To…all the great things we’re going to do.”
Her glass dinged against his and they drank. “And to the fact that if modern technology helped you find dinner, it can’t be all bad. Maybe you’ll invent a restaurant-finding app for people who don’t want to run into anyone they know.”
“God, please punch me if I ever tell you I want to build an app. Punch me if I tell you I want to give somebody else money for an app. Or a start-up of any kind. My dad made me promise I wouldn’t give any more money to anybody in a hoodie.”
“Why?”
“I used to be a real sucker for guys who were going to make the world better. No-carbon-footprint vegan chicken tenders, recycling plastic bottles into raincoats, just…you name a guy whose fuckin’ tech idea has a green logo or whose business plan says he can turn shit into not-shit, and I probably gave him money.”
“Why?”
“It beat buying cars. It was a different time, I guess.”
“You know, speaking of that, I have to tell you something,” Evvie said. “I googled your girlfriends.”
“Ah,” he said. “You have questions.”
“They were all very pretty.”
“That’s not a question.”
“No, it’s an observation.”
“So,” he said. “You saw Melanie Kopps, she’s the redhead. An actress. My mom mentioned her. She was a very nice girl.”
“Woman.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Very nice woman. That was my most recent relationship. I dated her for about two years, and we broke up right at the end of my career. Bad breakup, unfortunately.”
Evvie frowned. “Becaus
e of the career stuff?”
Dean shook his head. “Not directly. It wasn’t the best time in the world to be spending a lot of time with me. I was doing all these treatments, I was a grump all the time. Plus people blamed her, and I couldn’t do anything about it. But I liked her very much. Who else do you want to ask me about?”
“You dated a surfer.”
“Lindsay,” he said. “That was a while ago. She was an athlete, so she got some of the weird stuff about me that women sometimes didn’t. Liked her a lot, too. That one had a very normal ending, right when I went to the Yankees. She was religious; it was a huge thing with her. And I grew up, you know, as a Christmas and Easter Presbyterian, and we couldn’t pull it together. It was only going to get worse if we got more serious.”
“And you dated Bev Bo.”
“That was about a year, year and a half, but on and off. That was before Melanie. Bev was just getting established. She was touring a lot—not high-end touring back then, but more like back-of-a-van touring. We’d meet up for these very hot weekends, but then we’d go off in different directions. That relationship got me through my first year in New York. She might be the smartest woman I ever dated. She majored in music theory in college.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“About music theory, no. But come to think of it, I did learn that dirty texting is too fuckin’ embarrassing for me. I know everybody does it now, but I swear, the most boring things you do during sex sound totally deviant if you type them out. You’ve done something all your adult life and when you write it down, it’s like, ‘Who would do that?’ I remember trying to describe how I would kiss her shoulder—her fuckin’ shoulder!—and I felt like a farmer talking about how to knock up a horse. I might just be bad at it, though. Describing, not kissing.” He paused. “Are you blushing?”
“No,” she said. “I’m paying close attention.”