The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  From out on the field, he could hear one of the scouts speaking in a loud voice. He couldn’t make out what he was saying but he knew it was time for everyone to go back down to the field. For another moment, he hesitated. If he left then, he could be at Connie’s house by the time she and Billy got home from school.

  Oh, I wasn’t expecting you so soon.

  One day with flour salesmen was enough.

  He’d take them out for dinner; there was a new putt-putt golf course to which he had promised he’d take Billy and where he intended to let him win.

  Out on the field, the players were warming up again, loosening their arms before the fielding drills. He could hear the slap of so many balls hitting so many gloves, a rapid pop pop pop, and he began walking down toward it. He realized the stiffness in his knee was passing. Indeed, it may be gone altogether and what he was feeling was just the memory of it. He went back to where he’d been sitting in the stands, picked up his glove: should he stay or should he go? Slipping the glove on, working his fingers into it, he realized he had forgotten how much he once had the sense that it was an extension of himself; not a piece of leather tied up with cowhide that he wore, but part of himself.

  He walked the rest of the way toward the field, passing from the shadow over the grandstand and out into full sun. The sky was blue and opportunity beckoned.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On the fourth day of the rain that April, a week after his wife, Renee, left him, Edward Everett discovered water in his basement—a half-dozen rivulets slinking across the concrete from the wall, toward the drain near the water heater. In the ten years he had been in Perabo City, Iowa, he had never had water there before; while his neighbors carried damp boxes of mildewed clothes and books to the curb after heavy spring rains, his basement had stayed dry. That year, however, his luck ran out.

  He was waiting for Renee to bring their dog by; although he had given the Pomeranian to her as a gift, she’d said that what she called her “new circumstances” didn’t allow her to have a dog. He had no idea what her “new circumstances” were, and when he asked her about them during their phone conversation the day before, she only replied, “I’ll have Grizzly there when I get a break at the office.” Then she hung up.

  He had discovered the water when he’d gotten distracted while cleaning the house for her visit; his mind wandering as he carried stacks of The Sporting News and Baseball America to the recycling bin in the corner of the sunporch, he found himself trying to remember the name of a left-handed reliever who had pitched for him a dozen years ago, when he was managing at Quincy, and had gone down to the basement to search the boxes where he’d stored his scorebooks and game log cards. There, he made two discoveries. One, the water: soaking a mound of bags into which he’d folded clothing he’d collected from his mother’s house when she died; soaking the bags of his father’s clothing she had shipped to him years earlier; soaking boxes of canceled checks, photographs; soaking the cardboard boxes in which he kept his handwritten records of every kid who’d ever played for him in the twenty years he’d been managing in the minor leagues.

  The second thing he discovered was more disconcerting: the reliever he remembered clearly—a bulldog of a kid from South Dakota who lost two fingers on his right hand fooling around with a lawn mower when he was six—hadn’t pitched for him at Quincy. Nor, he found after pulling out game logs from several seasons, had he pitched for Missoula or Limon, but Cumberland—and it hadn’t been a dozen years ago, but twenty … and when he recognized the name, Gabe Bullard, he realized he had all of his fingers intact. Who’d had the mangled hand? Had anyone?

  Looking further into the boxes, he found that his mind had also invented players who apparently hadn’t existed. He remembered, for example, an alcoholic, redheaded third baseman named Jamie Fagan who sang with a band in bars after weekend home games, but when he read through every roster he had, there was no Fagan—although he held a clear image of him standing unsteadily on a stage, backed by a guitar and drums, growling out “Born to Run.” Besides Fagan, he recalled a player named Al Reinbach, who had (in his memory) hit for the cycle with a broken arm the team doctor found after the game—although there was no one by that name in any of his records. Where had they come from, these players who didn’t exist but who were more vivid than the actual players whose index cards were soaking with rainwater?

  Although he realized it would ruin the effect he was trying to create for Renee—that he was fine without her and therefore, paradoxically, convince her she had been wrong to leave—he nonetheless brought the boxes upstairs, to see what, if anything, he could salvage of the records that measured out his professional life, and stacked them in the living room and began taking the damp cards out of the more heavily damaged boxes, laying them to dry across his couch and kitchen table. While the rain fell, sometimes turning to hail that banged against his roof, he read the cards: dates, times at bat, hits and errors for players who’d been out of the game for as many as twenty years—some after major league careers much longer than his own; some dead: car accidents, cancer, one of a heart attack while he sat in a school auditorium, watching his six-year-old daughter sing Christmas carols, dressed as an angel.

  In the afternoon, when it became apparent there would, for the second day in a row, be no game that evening, his pitching coach, Biggie Vincent, came by to pay him a hundred dollars toward the thousand Edward Everett had loaned him when his girlfriend needed a root canal. During the off-season, Vincent worked in a waterproofing business with his girlfriend’s brother and, standing on the porch, not wanting to come in since he would drip all over the floor, he said, “You got a problem here, Skip.” He pointed to the front of the house; when Edward Everett poked his head out, he saw a waterfall coursing out of the gutters. “You gotta clean them,” Vincent said. “That’s bad for the foundation. Water gets in the soil and ends up in the basement. And it ain’t pretty what happens.”

  After Vincent left, Edward Everett went outside as the rain fell, crouching at the foundation, the water rolling out of his gutters soaking his hair and jacket. He poked a finger into the ground as if it would let him measure the water beneath the dirt that he worried was ruining his home. He imagined the walls bowing in, eventually giving way.

  When the rain abated, he hauled a stepladder out of the detached garage, climbed to the roof of his sunporch, dragged the ladder up behind him and, from the flat roof of the porch, climbed to the roof over the house. It was foolish, he knew. The ladder was old; the screws that held the spreaders and brackets in place were no longer tight. It wobbled with each step and when he went to pull himself onto the main roof, he had to climb onto the head step, despite the sticker warning him not to, brace himself by gripping the gutter and, trusting that the ladder would not collapse, scramble up.

  On the roof, he had a dizzy moment and sat down on the damp shingles to keep from falling, waiting until his head stopped buzzing, wondering what his neighbors would think if they saw him up there: Crazy coot. He remembered being on a roof years before—what was it, twenty? No, it had to be more. Thirty, thirty-five? Not his roof—that of a woman he was going to marry but didn’t and, in fact, hadn’t thought of in so long it took a bit for her name to push to the surface. Connie. It must be the rain and nothing to do, he thought, opening up my memory like this: former players, former loves.

  His head clear, he stood and did what he should have done last year and so many years before that: clean the leaves and debris out of his gutters. As the trees in his yard spattered him with drops, sometimes so frequently it seemed the rain had started up again, he crawled along the edge, digging into the muck and tossing globs of matted leaves and mud onto the lawn. When he pulled his hand out of the gutter, it reeked as if he had plunged it into the sewer. By the time he finished, his khaki work pants were torn, his knees scratched and bleeding, and rain had started again—only a drizzle at first, but enough that when he stepped onto the slick head step of the ladder, his foot
slipped. He managed to catch his left foot on the third step down but the near fall caused him to shake so much that when he lowered the ladder to the ground, he accidentally dropped it sideways into an azalea, leaving him stranded.

  He considered jumping down but, before he could, a red Prius pulled to the curb and parked. The driver poked an oversized Mid-Iowa Bank golf umbrella out into the increasing rainfall and proceeded up the front walk toward his house. The person stopped at the ladder and tilted the umbrella back, looking up toward the roof. At first he didn’t recognize her: a well-dressed woman in a navy pant-suit and a belted, beige raincoat, her loosely curled blond hair falling just short of her collar.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. It was, he realized, Renee; Renee with her dark hair dyed, curled and shorter than he had ever seen it; Renee dressed more formally than he could remember, save for when they had gone to a wedding or a funeral; Renee driving a car that cost perhaps half of what he earned in a year.

  He tried to think of a joke but none came to him. “The gutters—” he said.

  She clucked her tongue. “Ed, you’re almost sixty. You’re supposed to hire people to do that sort of thing.” Trying to keep her umbrella over herself, she attempted to turn the ladder upright but the wind yanked her umbrella out of her grasp, knocking her off balance. She sat down hard in the midst of a puddle. “Drat it,” she said in a voice more annoyed than angry. Standing, she fetched her umbrella and set the ladder upright.

  “Don’t you fall,” she said, steadying the ladder as he stepped onto it, the ladder quaking, its rear left leg sinking into the wet ground, tilting the ladder to one side. Renee laid her hand against his lower back to support him as he descended.

  “That was not your brightest decision,” she said when he was on the ground. He picked up the ladder, yanking it free from the mud but leaving behind one of the swivel feet when a rivet popped. Rather than carrying it all the way to the garage, he folded it and left it leaning against the side of the house, hidden by two yews. With some satisfaction, he looked at the gutters; rain was no longer spilling over the lip. Maybe water would stop running into his basement; maybe the house wouldn’t collapse after all.

  “Let me go get Grizzly,” she said. She went back down the walk, opened the passenger door on the Prius; the dog hopped out and trotted toward the house.

  “It’s a nice car,” Edward Everett said.

  “Look, can we just go inside?” she said in a way that made him wonder if his observation embarrassed her. “I’m drenched.” Indeed she was; her clearly expensive slacks were soaked, as was her raincoat. Her hair was matted, water dripping down her face.

  “I’m sorry.” He opened the door and stepped back so she could precede him inside after propping her open umbrella on the porch to dry. Grizzly trotted in before both of them, leaving swatches of mud on the hardwood floor and area rug in the living room.

  “Grizzly,” Renee snapped as the dog began shaking himself, sending a shower of brown water over everything.

  “It doesn’t make a difference,” he said, regretting letting her inside even given her condition and the weather. Despite his hours of cleaning, the boxes of player records made the house seem even more cluttered than when she had moved out; the cards he’d foolishly spread across the couch had left a dark stain. He scooped up some as an invitation to sit, disappointed that she would never know the effort he had made to get ready for her.

  She laughed at his invitation. “I can’t sit. Not like this.” She turned, lifting the hem of her coat so that he could see the wet seat of her slacks.

  “It wouldn’t matter,” he said, nodding toward the ruined couch.

  “Oh, that poor thing.” Renee shook her head. “It’s not even six months old.”

  “I’m sure we could get it cleaned,” he said.

  Renee winced, narrowing her eyes, her meaning clear: There is no we. “I didn’t expect you to be here when I came,” she said. “I thought I’d just stick Grizzly in the kitchen, leave a note, and you’d find him when you got home.”

  “There’s no game today,” he said.

  “Rain never stopped you from going to the ballpark before. ‘Neither rain nor snow nor’ something something something ‘will keep this manager from his appointed rounds.’ Or however that little joke used to go.”

  “I stayed home on some rain days,” he said, attempting to not let his defensiveness show in his voice.

  She sighed. “This is why I wanted to come when you weren’t here. I want this to be as easy as possible.”

  Easy for whom? he thought.

  “For both of us,” she said, as though she knew what he’d been thinking. “Please, can we just not get into anything?”

  From the kitchen, he could hear Grizzly shoving his plastic dog bowl around, his signal that he was hungry.

  “You’d better feed him before he tears the house down,” Renee said, snapping open her purse and taking out an envelope. “Here,” she said, holding it out to him. When he didn’t take it immediately, she gestured that he should.

  “Doesn’t the sheriff usually serve these?” he asked, still not taking the envelope.

  “Serve?”

  “Divorce papers.”

  She let out a small laugh. “These aren’t the divorce papers.” She pushed the envelope toward him. When he opened it, he saw it contained a photocopy of a signed, notarized quitclaim, removing her name from the deed to the house, dated two or three days before he had left on a ten-day swing through Wisconsin and Illinois, the road trip from which he returned to find her gone—dated, he realized, while they were still living in the same house; already filed while she was making his favorite dinner the day before he departed for the road trip, her mother’s ziti recipe. Already filed when, in bed later, he had stroked her hip, for years a signal that he wanted to make love, and she had said quietly, “I think the dinner upset my stomach,” before turning over and going to sleep.

  “The house was yours before we got married,” she said. “It was generous for you to put my name on it but now it’s yours again.”

  “Where are you staying?” He refolded the form and slipped it into the envelope.

  She narrowed her eyes, suggesting he had crossed a line he hadn’t known was there, then said, “If you look at our savings, you’ll see I withdrew what I figure I put in. If you think I’m off, let me know and I’ll take another look. If I made a mistake, I’ll reimburse you.” She laced her forearm through the strap on her purse and pointed to the living room. “You were cleaning the house, weren’t you?”

  “How can you tell?”

  She pointed to the floor beside the overstuffed chair. “The ten years or whatever of The Sporting News and whatnot. They’re gone.”

  He flushed. “I was trying—” he said, intending to explain about the water in the basement and his wanting to salvage the records of his former players.

  “That was sweet,” she said. “But I’m not coming back. It’s not like last time.”

  “I still have no idea why you left,” he said.

  She sighed. “Looking in the rearview mirror makes it difficult to see the road before us,” she said. It sounded like something she had read in one of her self-help books. He saw her taking out the yellow marker she sometimes used, drawing a decisive line through the passage. She turned the doorknob to let herself out but then paused. “My dad—please don’t bring him into this,” she said. When he didn’t respond, she said, “Please?”

  “All right,” he said.

  Then she was out the door, raising her umbrella, and down the walk toward her car. He watched her through the window to see if she turned back, showed a glimmer of regret. She didn’t; she went to the car, opened the door, closed her umbrella and got in. After waiting a moment to let a passing FedEx van go by, she pulled from the curb and was off, down the street.

  In the kitchen, Grizzly was licking the food bowl, although it was totally clean.

  “Mom’s gone,” Edward Ever
ett said, immediately realizing how pathetic he sounded. “Come on, boy.” He scratched the dog behind his ear as a gentle means of distracting his attention from the bowl. He had once made the mistake of plucking it off the floor when the dog was licking it and Grizzly snapped at him. Now, when the dog lifted his head from the bowl, Edward Everett picked it up, set it onto the counter and opened the cupboard, looking for the bag of dog food. He located it, squashed under two cans of chili without beans. There was less than a quarter of a cup left, much of it only powder. He poured it into the bowl and set it back on the floor before filling the water dish.

  Edward Everett had bought the dog for Renee when they’d been married for four months, just before his first road trip after their wedding. In the days before he was supposed to leave, she became increasingly quiet and he knew it was because she dreaded his being gone, didn’t want to come home to an empty house after working at the bank all day. “Your folks are next door,” he said.

  “Oh, so I should be the little girl running home to Mommy and Daddy because I get lonely?” she snapped.

  On the morning he was supposed to leave, he woke her early although she didn’t need to get up for work for another two and a half hours. “I thought you could make me some coffee,” he said, nudging her shoulder with his empty thermos.

  “You want me to get out of bed at”—she squinted at the clock on her bedside table—“three fifty-eight? To make you coffee?”