by Joe Schuster
One was happy to hear from him, Audrey, a new-accounts clerk he’d met when he took one of his Spanish-speaking players to the bank to help him open an account. “Ed,” she said in a delighted voice when he told her who he was. “We must be on the same wavelength.” She had a confession, she said. “I called you once but didn’t have the nerve to leave a message. And now here you are. It’s kismet.” But soon, she was crying, going on about her most recent boyfriend, whom she’d learned too late was married with a baby on the way; going on about a fight she’d had with a co-worker who, she was convinced, had dinged her car in the parking lot but denied it. He remembered why he’d stopped seeing her and as soon as he could graciously do so, got off the phone, agreeing vaguely when she suggested he drive over to see her after the season ended.
On another night—after a one–nothing win, another gem for Sandford, the win coming when Mraz ended it with a ninth-inning home run arcing over the decaying green wall in left—he called directory assistance in Osterville and asked for the number for McLaughlin, Randall, and called it without hesitating because if he hesitated he would come to his senses. Even as the phone rang, he thought, Hang up. As it rang a second time, he thought: Hang up. In the middle of the third ring, Connie answered in a cheery voice and he was caught off guard.
“Hi,” he croaked out.
“Can I help you?” she asked from six hundred fifteen miles away.
“Con?” he said.
“Who is this?” she asked, and when he told her, she exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh. Ed. My Lord, it’s been … well, a lot of water under, as they say.”
“Yes,” he said. “Too long.”
“Your name came up last year, at the reunion. Forty years since high school, if you can believe that. People started asking about people who weren’t there.”
He wondered if she was still married to McLaughlin, how he could ask. He saw them starting out slowly, phone calls every couple of weeks. When the season was over and he was at the end of baseball, he could drive over to see her. They could have dinner; maybe the Victorian tearoom where they’d had their first, awful date thirty years earlier was still open. They’d see how things went. The thought struck him: was she jowly, double-chinned, her white hair thinning? He was no prize, though: not obese, but slow, achy in the morning, his knee forever in pain.
“How’s Billy?” he asked, her son’s name pushing into his memory: the frail boy yelling “Stop” when they wanted to put the giant stuffed bear into the trunk.
She laughed. “He’s William now. Not Billy. His son, William Junior, got married last year and they’re expecting a baby. I keep saying, ‘I’m too young to be a great-grandmother.’ What about you? I’ll bet you’re married and have a whole passel of kids.”
“No,” he said. “I was. Married, I mean.” He shrugged, although she couldn’t possibly see that over the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, a touch of what seemed genuine concern in her voice. He waited for her to tell him about herself, about marrying McLaughlin and divorcing him—a rebound relationship after he had gone off to Erie.
“Randy and I …” Got divorced, he waited for her to say, but she went on. “I guess you don’t know. I married Randy McLaughlin. It’s been thirty years.” She laughed. “I can hear you thinking, him? But he’s a dear, a good daddy to Billy. William, I mean. We should all get together sometime if you’re over this way.”
Edward Everett wanted the call to end after he learned that she and Randy McLaughlin were still together, but he couldn’t graciously hang up until the conversation came to some kind of ending. Finally, she said, “Oh, Randy just drove up. He would love to say hey.”
“I’d like to,” he lied, “but I have a conference call in fifteen minutes and I have to go over some game logs beforehand.”
“Conference call? This late at night?”
“The director of PD is … Well, he wants what he wants when he wants it.”
“I know the type. Now that you have my number, don’t be a stranger. And I’ve got yours off caller ID. William gave us this fancy phone package for Christmas. It’s all beyond me. Call waiting. Wireless Internet.” From the background of where she was, he heard a male voice calling, “Hello? Hon?”
“I need to get going here, Connie.”
“Sure, stay in touch.”
He started to hang up but not before, from her end, he heard her say, “You won’t believe …”
He sat in the darkness, folding the scrap of paper with her number in half, then in quarters, then eighths, until it was so small he couldn’t make any more folds in it. He pushed himself out of the chair and used the foot lever to spring open the trash can and dropped the scrap on top of the coffee filter from earlier in the day and went to bed.
Two days later, on the weekend before the All-Star break, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, emailed to say he wanted to meet. “I’m in St. Louis for family business,” he wrote. “Am overnighting a plane ticket for Sunday. Meet Monday. Directions attached.” Short, efficient. Edward Everett wondered if Claussen’s email from Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, just before the organization had fired him had been as curt.
Chapter Twenty-nine
It had been years since he’d flown and it was only when his stomach gave its slight drop as the plane lifted from the tarmac in Cedar Rapids that he remembered how much he hated it, the anxious moments as the jets roared to give the plane its lift, the precarious bounce of the wing outside his window seat, making him question the integrity of bolts and welds; the mechanical grinding and bump as the wheels retracted; his ears filling, giving him the illusion that sound was traveling from another room—the muted hum of conversation, the scratch of paper from the woman beside him turning the pages of a pulp mystery novel, the nervous clicking of a ballpoint pen button by a woman across the aisle.
Before they finished their climb, rain began pelting the window beside him, the drops slithering like silver slugs across the scratched and clouded plastic. He pulled down the plastic shade and closed his eyes, his pulse thrumming in his jaw. A baby behind him wailed and the woman beside him closed her book.
“I really hate flying,” she said. She was near his age, gray-haired, wearing a peach silk blouse tucked neatly into a charcoal pencil skirt, small, heart-shaped diamond studs in her earlobes, her manicured nails polished pale pink. “Yet, here I am again.”
“I haven’t done it in almost fifteen years,” Edward Everett said.
The woman gave a small, hoarse laugh, her breath clearly that of a smoker, peppermint not fully masking the tobacco odor. “Dummy me; I’m up here a dozen times a year for business. My doctor usually gives me a scrip for Ativan but it makes me feel so stupid sleepy. I didn’t take it this time, since I’m going to see my daughter and granddaughter, and she’s old enough that she’d notice if I seemed drunk.” She made her voice small and high-pitched. “Mommy, why is Gamma falling down?”
When the plane leveled off, she gave him a polite half-smile and went back to her book. He opened the shade beside him and saw that the sky was blue, the rain clouds beneath them, illuminated periodically by a pulsing pale light. Around him, everyone seemed to be relaxing, only forty more minutes in the air ahead of them. Across the aisle, the woman with the pen was writing what appeared to be thank-you notes onto cards so highly calendered they glinted under the ceiling light. She was, he realized, most likely a recent bride, her all-but-useless right hand curled in on itself, a clear symptom of cerebral palsy, nonetheless happy as any woman he had ever seen, glancing appreciatively toward her new husband.
As if she understood his thinking, the woman beside him said in a quiet tone, “They seem happy. I give them five years.”
“Five?” he asked.
“But then, I’m eternally romantic,” she replied, a laugh rattling in her throat. She opened a small silver clutch that had been pressed between her hip and the side of her seat but then snapped it shut and held it on her lap. “You’d think after all of my time in the
air I’d remember I can’t smoke.” She opened her purse again and canted it toward him so that he could see she was fingering a cigarette she’d loosened from a pack of Tareytons. “Sad, isn’t it?” She set down her purse and returned to her book. Edward Everett leaned his head back, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
He gave up after several minutes when he heard the flight attendant beginning to push the refreshment cart up the aisle, popping open cans of Coke and Sprite, pouring coffee into plastic cups, unscrewing caps from one-ounce bottles of booze. When the cart was beside them, the woman who shared his row sat up.
“Rum and Coke,” she said, plucking up her purse again and snapping it open, fishing out a ten-dollar bill.
“Anything for you, sir?” the attendant asked, already fixing the woman her drink.
“I hope you won’t make me drink alone,” the woman said.
“Okay,” he said. “Bud Light?”
He leaned forward to take out his wallet but the woman laid her hand on his arm. “The least I can do is buy.”
“You don’t have to,” he said, pulling his wallet from his hip pocket.
“I’m paying for two,” the woman said to the attendant, who glanced in Edward Everett’s direction for his approval. He gave her a small shrug and put his wallet away.
When they had their drinks, the woman clicked her plastic cup against his. “To long life.” She took a sip. “I shouldn’t have said what I did about that couple. I’m sure they’ll be insufferably adoring even when they’re a hundred.”
“That’s a long while to be insufferably adoring,” he said.
“All right, then, ninety-five.”
They sat in silence, sipping their drinks, until the woman gave him a slight smile, a gesture he took to mean she was releasing him from further social obligation. She went back to her book and he regretted not having one himself. He plucked the in-flight catalog from the pocket of the seat in front of him and read it idly: good-looking men and women wearing polo shirts with the airline’s logo stitched above a pocket; a dozen golf balls resting in a polished wood box; carved wooden ducks—so many things no one needed. He closed it, returned it to the pocket just as the plane gave a shudder and the woman let out a gasp, some of her drink splashing out of the cup, spotting her blouse. “Damn,” she said, opening her purse and taking out a wadded tissue, blotting at the stains darkening the silk. “That’s not going away.”
“Would some water help?” he asked, raising a hand to signal the flight attendant.
“Not on silk,” she said, continuing to dab at her blouse. She unlatched her seatbelt and turned sideways toward him. “How bad is it?” One obvious teardrop-shaped spot, perhaps half an inch long, was surrounded by an irregular pattern of tiny dots.
“It’s not that terrible,” he lied. She sat back in her seat again and closed her eyes. “Fuck,” she said through a clenched jaw, then drained her drink and raised her hand, shaking her glass, an ice cube spiraling out and bouncing onto the aisle. “Stewardess?” she called. “A second rum and Coke.” She took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching two manicured fingers to his forearm. “It’s only a blouse.”
The flight attendant delivered the drink. “This one is on me,” Edward Everett said, taking out his wallet, pulling out a five-dollar bill and offering it to the flight attendant before the woman could open her purse. Rather than protest, she gave him a smile of acknowledgment and took the drink. “Even without taking a sip, I know this second one will be a royal mistake.” The plane gave another shudder. “This is the first time I’ve gone to visit my daughter and her little girl since—” She shook her head. “Never mind. You don’t want to hear my sad story.”
“I don’t have anywhere else I need to be,” he said.
“You’re sweet, but it’s really all right.”
They sat in silence, the woman clearly caught in a reverie, as every so often she shook her head and let out a short hiss with her tongue against her teeth.
“You know,” she said at last. “I’m a good person. When my mother lost her mind—that’s a terrible way to put it but it’s the truth—who took care of her? Lord, not my father.” She tapped a finger against her sternum. “Me. When my husband. My ex-husband decided, after finishing law school, not to take the bar because he was no longer passionate about the law, did I ask him if he was crazy or did I take a second job so he could become a luthier? A luthier. Right again. When my daughter—never mind, but if your answer was that I was there for her when her father wouldn’t speak to her, well, right again.” She shook her head. “Then when I find my backbone and tell my husband—who made all of eleven hundred dollars last year selling two guitars—that I was leaving, does anything go right? Correct. I have to sell the house we bought because of money I earned so I can pay him for his half. His half.” She paused. “I should’ve had the Ativan,” she said. “No muss, no fuss, no stain on a hundred-dollar blouse.” She giggled. “If I pronounce it ‘bluss’ instead, it rhymes. No muss, no fuss, no stain on a hundred-dollar bluss. It could be a book by Dr. Seuss I read to Avril.” She took a swallow of her drink. “Tell me, who names their daughter ‘Avril’?”
“I’m guessing your daughter did.”
“Actually, the idea was her partner’s. Her female partner.” She gave him a sideways look. “I’m open-minded. When her father wouldn’t talk to her after she came out, I supported her. Hell, sisterhood, rah, and all that, but this is not what I—I really need to be quiet.” She gave his shoulder a good-natured nudge. “Altitude plus alcohol equals … I don’t know, ‘A’ something. Ambivalence. Airheadedness. I don’t know, give me an ‘A’ word that works here.”
The alcohol from the beer had made his mind fuzzy and so all of the words that occurred to him made no sense: “aardvark,” “ambition,” “Aaron.” Still, he offered, “ ‘Aerial’?”
She gave out a laugh. “I’m definitely aerial.” She held out her right hand. “Meg.”
“Ed,” he said, and they shook.
“Well, Edward, what takes you to St. Louis?”
He considered telling her the truth but he had no grasp on what the truth was. I’ve been summoned, he thought before settling on an answer more vague. “Business.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “Business seems … well, business. Oh, I think we’re starting to descend.” She leaned across him to peer out. He could both feel and smell her breath, now a more complicated warm mix of tobacco, mint and rum. He realized that one of the buttons of her blouse had come undone and he could see the swell of her small breasts above a red lace bra. When he shifted his eyes, he saw that she was watching him. Instead of being incensed, however, she gave a quick wink, sat up, snapped open her purse, removed a tube of lipstick and began making herself up. It was clear they were, indeed, moving to lower altitudes; wisps of the cloud bank they’d been above drifted across the wing, at first seeming like smoke dispersing, and then the cabin darkened slightly as they moved more fully into the clouds. From beneath them, he could hear the thunk of the landing gear doors, followed by a mechanical hum.
“I think I’ve monopolized our time together, Edward,” she said. “Telling you all about my troubles and asking you nothing about yourself. What business are you in?”
“Flour,” he said impulsively.
She arched an eyebrow. “You’re a florist?”
“No,” he said. “I sell flour to, you know, groceries and—”
The mechanical hum resumed, quieted, and then resumed again, changing in pitch.
“My grandfather was a wheat farmer in Kansas,” she said. “Maybe some of your flour comes from there. Wouldn’t it be funny if you were selling something that grew on the land where I used to play?”
The plane banked as it began moving through to the underside of the clouds. He could see a broad expanse of countryside but they were too high for him to distinguish landmarks in the irregular checkerboard of browns and greens. The mechanical hu
m began again; it became clear to him that something was wrong as the hum resumed, ceased, resumed and ceased again. The flight attendant who had served their drinks hurried past, moving toward the front of the plane.
“Who do you work for?” she asked.
Half-distracted, he gave her the name of the mill he and his uncle had sold for.
“I don’t know them.”
He had no idea whether they were still in business. “You most likely wouldn’t, unless—it’s commercial. Bakeries, private labels,” he said, dredging the phrase “private label” out of that past with his uncle. Again, the mechanical hum began, and this time it was persistent, a grinding sound with a pitch that rose and fell.
“Private label,” she said, waggling her head from side to side. “La di—” And then she furrowed her brow, studying his face. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s—” he began but then the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, his words not quite audible above the thrum of the engine and the continued mechanical grinding beneath Edward Everett’s feet. All he could make out was the phrase “hydraulic system” and the words “approach” and “gear.” The flight attendant was moving unsteadily up the aisle, pausing at each row, bracing herself on seat backs, bending to say something to passengers as she stopped. When she got to their row, her voice was even but Edward Everett could nonetheless sense tension, as her eyes would not meet either his or Meg’s. “Everything’s going to be fine,” she said. “There’s a glitch in the hydraulics that the crew are working to resolve.”
“What does that mean?” Meg asked. “The hydraulics.”
The flight attendant hesitated. “The crew has everything under control,” she said, then moved on to the row behind them.
“ ‘Hydraulics’ equals shit soup,” a man across the aisle and a row back said.
Meg let out a bitter laugh. “Of course.” She shook her head. “Thank you, God.”
The plane arced and he could once more see the countryside beneath them, the long blue snake of a river. The “fasten seatbelt” sign lit up with a ding and the captain’s voice came over the intercom again, clear this time, his tone making Edward Everett wonder if in pilot school they learned how to deliver bad news in a reassuring way.