by Linda Holmes
At the table, Stuart got right to the point. “You hear anything from Evvie these days?”
Angie shook her head. “Stuart, I thought we were going to work up to that. Is this working up to it?”
Stuart shrugged. “I’m up to it.”
Dean spooned potatoes onto his plate. “I get a text from her here and there. But not really. That…ended.”
“Well, that’s dumb.”
“Stuart,” Angie said again. “Maybe take it easy?”
“You don’t think it’s dumb?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Dean buttered a piece of bread. “Well, Dad, the head case stuff, she couldn’t get used to. She pushed and pushed and pushed for me to try to get back into pitching, and when it didn’t work out, she pretty much invited me to leave.”
“I didn’t realize she cared that much about baseball,” Angie said.
“Yeah, I gotta say that doesn’t sound right,” Stuart agreed.
“Believe me, she was pretty relentless,” Dean told them. “It was like you guys with All-Star Camp all over again.”
Angie and Stuart looked at each other. “Now, wait a minute,” Angie said. “Tell me how you think you got to All-Star Camp.”
“You guys badgered me until I agreed to go.”
Dean’s mother gave this contemptuous “Ha!” and his father, simultaneously, said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?”
Stuart speared a piece of chicken. “You’re remembering that wrong, pal.”
“How? What’s your version?”
“You brought home that brochure, said you’d been invited, but it was pretty clear it was going to be hard work with a lot of guys you didn’t know. It seemed like it spooked you. You told me and Mom you didn’t want to do it. We said, ‘Are you sure?’ You said yes. Next day, that brochure’s on the table again. We ask you again, ‘Well, now, do you want to do this, Dean-o?’ ‘No, no, I don’t want to.’ ”
“You were adamant,” Angie added.
“But the thing keeps showing up. Every time you walk off with it saying you don’t want to go, it shows up again. I told your mother, ‘Angie, either Dean wants to go to this or we’ve got a ghost that wants him to.’ ”
Angie laughed. “You did, I forgot that.”
“So the next day, you come home and you say, ‘You know what I found out today, Dad? I found out Teddy’s going to that All-Star Camp.’ And that’s when I said, you know, ‘Go. You’re going.’ ‘Badgered’ you, for goodness’ sake.”
Dean frowned. “That’s bizarre. I don’t remember doing that at all.”
“You know I’d tell you if your dad was fantasizing,” Angie said. “But that’s the way I remember it, too. You dropped hints. And more hints. And even more hints. I think we were invited to badger you.”
“What,” Stuart said, “did you leave a bunch of brochures lying around for Evvie, too?”
Dean was quiet for a minute. “Dammit.”
ON THE LAST FRIDAY IN March, just before eleven in the morning, Evvie took the quick drive into Calcasset with a white box next to her on the passenger seat, addressed to Dean in New York. She pulled up to the curb near the post office and climbed out with the box in her arms. The sun was not fully out, but it was trying, and a gull soared over her, cawing. Just as she neared the doors, they swung open, and Dr. Paul Schramm came through them, with a huge pile of mail rubber-banded together. He’d finally retired, and now and then, Evvie’s dad would tell her something he’d heard about where the Schramms were, where their postcards back to friends were coming from. “Eveleth, hello!” he said.
“Hi, Dr. Schramm.” She shifted the package under her arm. “That’s a lot of letters you’ve got there.”
“Hey, I keep telling you to call me Paul,” he said. He looked down at the stack. “Helen and I were in Nova Scotia for a couple of weeks, so they held it for us. I’m sure it’s mostly junk. How are you? I heard you sold the house.”
“I did, I did.” She nodded. “A very nice guy who has a printing business in Augusta bought it. I’m sure you’ll meet him in the next few weeks.”
“Must have been hard to part with.”
“It was. It was a beautiful house, but much too big now that it’s only me.” And just like that, Tim floated briefly between them like a stream of blown bubbles.
Dr. Schramm nodded gently. “I can imagine. And you’re living out on KBI now, right? Nice as your old house was, I’ve always loved those cottages. My aunt lived out there for years. I used to sit on her deck and look at the boats.”
“I do a lot of that myself. I still have work to do on it,” she said. “I’ll tell you what: once I get it in shape, I’ll have you and Helen out for dinner, okay? We’ll eat on the deck.”
“I’m going to take you up on that,” he said with a nod. “You take care, honey.”
“You, too, Paul.” She pulled the heavy door open and went up to the counter. She set the box down.
“First class mail?” said the clerk, without looking at her.
Evvie smoothed her hand over the address label, and closed her eyes for a second. Please, please, please. Then she opened them and said, “Yes. Please.”
* * *
—
A few days after she mailed the package, Evvie woke up when the light started to brighten the bedroom, and the minute she opened her eyes, she was confronted by a plaintive, damp-eyed stare.
“Oh, hello there, pup,” she said to Webster, reaching down to scratch him behind the ear. He closed his eyes blissfully but briefly, then resumed staring sadness daggers from his position sitting on the floor next to the bed. “Are you hungry?” she asked. His ears twitched. “Should we get food?” He hopped up and stood, and she threw back the covers. “Let’s go get breakfast!” She heard Webster gallop around the corner, through the living room, and into the kitchen, where she heard his claws skid across the floor as he tried in vain to stop.
In the kitchen, she emptied a cup of food into Webster’s dish, then put the coffee on. It was nine in the morning. Maybe Dean would be having breakfast. Maybe he was with someone. She should have asked Andy if he was seeing anyone before she sent that package. She should have asked him if he was. She put on sweatpants and her fleece jacket to take Webster for a walk along the lane that led from her house out to the main road.
She and Webster walked out the lane every day, through a thick swath of evergreens, and every day, she thought consciously about smiling and trying to meet the neighbors. This house was about twenty minutes from her old one, still near her dad, still near Andy and his kids. But it was a new neighborhood, to the degree it was any neighborhood at all, and one where the houses were so far apart that it was too easy to feel like she lived all alone.
Back at the house, she took Webster off his leash and then she made herself something to eat, checking her phone entirely too often, wondering if she’d hear anything today. After a while, she went into her living room, where she could see the fog was fading and she was beginning to be able to make out the boats through the window.
As she went to settle herself on the couch with a book, she froze in the living room and put a hand to her heart. If she’d been asked if she could still pick out Dean’s truck’s engine in a list of ten similar rumbles, she’d have denied that she could, but now she knew differently, because the minute she heard it, she was sure. She had only the dog to look at, so she said to him, “Hey, pup, who’s that?” Still inexperienced and unsure what absolute loyalty required in the face of an obvious intruder, Webster yipped at the sound of the truck with as much menacing excitement as a twelve-pound puppy can muster.
Evvie went to the front door and opened it in time to see Dean pull up next to her car and step out. After six months of intermittent texting and the occasional wistfully sexy dream—okay, also the o
ccasional wistfully sexy daydream—her mind had smoothed the edges of his looks. It remembered that he was tall and dark-haired with mossy green eyes, and it remembered the shape of his shoulders and the tilt of his hips. But as he approached with a sloping smile, she realized it had discarded the mole on his cheek and the fact that he walked with a slight hitch in his step.
They stood on opposite sides of the door, both smiling. And then he held up a black baseball glove with pink laces. Taped to the palm was her note. In big black letters, she had written: I MISS YOU.
“You lose your glove?” he asked.
She bit her lip. “I thought you’d text me. Or call. I didn’t expect you to come all the way up here. I’d have come to you.”
He didn’t often smolder at her willfully, but he did in this moment. He met her eyes, and he said, “This was faster.”
Her face got hot, her knees got wobbly. “You should come in,” she said, opening the door.
IT FELT SO FAMILIAR HAVING him pass her in her new doorway, as she again encountered that shoulder, as she showed him into her house. As soon as he was inside, he turned around and pulled her in, his hands linked across her back. “I hope it’s okay I showed up. I got home last night from a tournament where I was coaching, and it was too late to call. I was going to call you today, but I woke up at four in the morning, and once I figured out I could be here by lunch, I just…left.”
She nodded, smiling. “It’s okay you showed up.” He leaned over and kissed her, and at first, she floated in it, putting her hands on his arms, remembering what it felt like, hearing her own heart. When she felt him pull her in tighter, she dug her fingers into his back. In the months without him, she’d forgotten and somehow not forgotten at the same time; it was like hearing the first lyrics of a song and realizing you can sing all the rest.
Suddenly, Webster yipped and jumped up on Dean’s legs, inspecting him for signs of danger, hot dogs, or past encounters with cats. “Webster, Webster,” she said as Dean pulled back from her, crouched down, and scratched Webster’s ears, rendering any security function instantly moot.
“So this is the dog,” he said.
“Yes. This is Webster.”
“Because?”
Evvie laughed. “When I showed him to Andy and Monica, she asked me what kind of a dog he was, and I said a shepherd mix, because that’s what they told me at the rescue. But Andy said, ‘He looks like the dog who’s in the dictionary under “dog.” ’ So I named him Webster.”
“You also got a house.”
“I did! You want to see? I mean, can you stay a while?”
He pushed a bit of her hair behind her ear. “Yes.”
“Okay. C’mon.” She led him through the kitchen and showed him the new table in her combined living and dining room. “Big enough for my dad and Kell and Andy and all his people to come over for family stuff. Over there, I have a woodstove.” They walked into the room with the huge picture windows, which were now offering a limited view of a few of the nearest boats. “And this is my view.”
“Holy shit,” he said softly. “This is great.”
“Yeah. I love it. My realtor heard me say that I had always wanted a house on the water, so she brought me out here. The carpeting’s all old, and the appliances in the kitchen are, you know. More ‘charming’ than ‘modern’? But I love it. I’m willing to work on it.” She hugged herself at the elbows. “How’s New York? Should we sit down?” He nodded, and they sat in the two club chairs that were very much like the ones he’d had in his apartment.
“New York is good. I’m back in my old place in my old neighborhood, and a lot of my friends are around. I’ve gone back to being able to see guys I knew before without feeling fucking terrible, so that’s a good thing. I do some coaching sometimes, I do clinics.”
“How’s…everything else? Are you happy?”
He was quiet, and then he said, “Are you? You want to tell me why you sent me your glove?” His words hung there and hung there. “You’re up, Minnesota.”
Finally, Evvie took a breath. “I have wanted to call you. But there was a lot I had to do that just couldn’t wait,” she said. “The house, my mom, work. A ton of therapy.”
“Learn anything interesting?”
She fidgeted, picking at one of her fingernails. “Believe me, we’ll get there eventually. There’s plenty. Mostly, I just wanted to tell you that I wish I’d done a bunch of things differently. I should’ve listened better. Fixers want to fix, and I wanted to fix something. I wanted to help. And I shouldn’t have pushed.” She took a breath. “But I also think that in fairness to me, you—”
He held up one hand. “Evvie, I wanted to fix it, too, and I should have just said that, and it wasn’t fair that I didn’t. I said yes to the game. I said yes to everything. You were right. The pinecones, the park in the middle of the night. I really wanted it all back.” He reached down to pet the dog. “But, Ev, when it didn’t work, when it looked like I was maybe going to be a high school gym teacher, it seemed like you thought that wasn’t enough.”
This cut deep, right between her ribs. “Dean, I didn’t want you to be able to pitch because it would mean you were enough.” They looked at each other. “I wanted you to be able to pitch because it would mean that I was enough.”
He wrinkled his brow. It wasn’t even disbelief, just curiosity. And then it dissolved. “You’re enough.”
She nodded. “So are you.” She smiled and took a deep breath. “Therapy, right? You know, the dog was her idea.”
“You got a prescription for a dog?”
“Not exactly, she can’t prescribe anything. If that happens, that will be the psychiatrist that I also have. No, my therapist thought that since I’m still trying to figure out my life and give it some structure, having somebody like Webster, who demands that I get out of the house, would be a positive thing.”
He nodded slowly. “This is a lot.”
“Yeah, well, I’m really broken,” Evvie told him brightly.
“Oh, sure, me, too.”
* * *
—
They sat and talked in the living room into the afternoon, and when it started to rain, they watched the drops speckle the water and wet down the lobster boats, and Evvie took her wool plaid blanket out of the trunk in the sitting room and draped it over her legs. She made tea and showed Dean how to put up a fire in the woodstove, and she shared her informal research about what kinds of wood burned best.
Dean picked up Webster’s favorite toy, made from old T-shirts Evvie had braided together, and engaged in a lengthy battle of tugging and wrestling that also included significant growling by both parties. Evvie smacked Dean on the elbow and said not to torture her dog, and Dean said to take it up with the dog, and Webster wore himself out and walked over to lie by the woodstove.
When it got to the late afternoon, Evvie poured bourbon and made snacks, and they sat on the love seat with their feet on the coffee table and listened to the new episode of the true-crime podcast they’d both been following. Dean rolled his eyes and complained that the people were clearly never going to solve the case, and Evvie passed him a peanut butter cracker and said it was about the journey. He reached over and hooked his index finger through hers.
The show ended, and Evvie suggested they take Webster for a walk. They took the long way, up the lane and out to the road, then down around the curve of the inlet to a short little bridge that connected Calcasset to the island where Evvie lived now. There was so little water that cars rambled over the bridge in only a few seconds, but if you asked everyone along Evvie’s curved road, they’d say they lived on Kettle Bay Island, as if it were an isolated hamlet. Evvie explained that there were, in fact, also islands in the bay that you couldn’t drive to, that you had to take a ferry to. She particularly liked one where there was a lobster fishery and a tiny town that swirled with tourist
s in the summer. She’d take him out there sometime, she said, when the weather was warmer. As they walked, she held the leash in one hand and he put his arm around her shoulders.
When they got back, they curled up on the couch and turned on the TV. Immediately, they both cracked up. “It had to be baseball,” Evvie said.
“Oh, it’s not just baseball,” Dean told her. “It’s opening day.”
She gestured toward the game with the remote control. “You want to watch this?”
“Are you kidding? I want to know how much you’ve picked up.”
So they watched for a while. Dean told her which guys he knew, which pitcher he could tell could have used one or two more spring training starts, and which hitters had changed their stances. And sometimes, they stopped to make out or have a snack. That was the perfect way to watch a game, he told her.
They ate at the table as it got dark outside. Evvie explained that she was only a couple of weeks away from starting work with Nona. She’d added some transcription clients and was doing a few hours of paperwork a week for Betsey, with whom she’d become friendly while she was buying her place. It wasn’t quite what she wanted yet, but it was work, and she was paying her mortgage with her own money.
They did the dishes, standing next to each other by the sink, and then they went back into the big room by the big windows and sank into the big chairs, and they could hear the water slapping the boats. She let Webster out one more time, into the little fenced-in yard her dad had built for him, and as she stood in the open door to call him inside, she felt Dean slide his arms around her waist. He whispered in her ear that he wanted to see her room, and she laughed, and the dog came inside and settled himself. She took Dean down the hall, where he noticed right off that she had a new bed. It was not the one she’d slept in with her husband; it was not the one she’d slept in with him. It was one she’d only slept in alone—and, of course, with Webster, when he jumped up, which he was emphatically not supposed to do. But tell that to a puppy.