by Tom Perrotta
* * *
THE CARPE Diem was an unassuming place, one of the few blue-collar taverns that had weathered Mapleton’s late-twentieth-century transformation from factory town to bedroom community. Kevin had been going there since he was a young man, back when it was called the Midway Lounge, and the only drafts you could get were Bud and Mich.
He entered through the restaurant door—the bar was in an adjoining room—nodding at the familiar faces as he made his way to the booth in the back, where Pete Thorne and Steve Wiscziewski were already deep in conversation over a pitcher of beer, passing a legal pad back and forth across the table. Unlike Kevin, both men had wives at home, but they usually arrived at the Carpe Diem long before he did.
“Gentlemen,” he said, sliding in beside Steve, a bulky, excitable guy who Laurie always said was a heart attack waiting to happen.
“Don’t worry,” Steve said, filling a clean glass with the dregs from the pitcher and handing it to Kevin. “There’s another on the way.”
“We’re going over the roster.” Pete held up the legal pad. The top page featured a rough sketch of a baseball diamond with names scrawled in the filled positions and question marks by the empty ones. “All we really need is a center fielder and a first baseman. And a couple of subs for insurance.”
“Four or five new players,” said Steve. “That should be doable, right?”
Kevin studied the sketch. “What happened with that Dominican guy you were telling me about? Your housecleaner’s husband?”
Steve shook his head. “Hector’s a cook. He works nights.”
“He might be able to play on the weekends,” Pete added. “That’s at least something.”
Kevin was gratified by the amount of thought and effort the guys were giving to a softball season that was still five or six months away. It was exactly what he’d been hoping for when he convinced the town council to restore funding for the adult recreation programs that had been suspended after the Sudden Departure. People needed a reason to get out of their houses and have a little fun, to look up and realize that the sky hadn’t fallen.
“I’ll tell you what would help,” said Steve. “If we could find a couple left-handed hitters. Right now every guy on the squad is a righty.”
“So what?” Kevin polished off his flat beer in a single gulp. “It’s slow-pitch. None of that strategy stuff really matters.”
“No, you gotta mix it up,” Pete insisted. “Keep the other guys off balance. That’s why Mike was so great. He really gave us that extra dimension.”
The Carpe Diem team had lost only one player on October 14th—Carl Stenhauer, a mediocre pitcher and second-string outfielder—but Mike Whalen, their cleanup hitter and star first baseman, was an indirect casualty as well. Mike’s wife was among the missing, and he still hadn’t recovered from his loss. He and his sons had painted a crude, almost unrecognizable portrait of Nancy on the back wall of their house, and Mike spent most of his nights alone with the mural, communing with her memory.
“I talked to him a few weeks ago,” Kevin said. “But I don’t think he’s gonna play this year. He says his heart’s just not in the game.”
“Keep working on him,” Steve said. “The middle of our lineup’s pretty weak.”
The waitress came by with a new pitcher and refilled everyone’s glasses. They toasted to fresh blood and a winning season.
“It’ll be good to get back on the field,” Kevin said.
“No kidding,” agreed Steve. “Spring’s not spring without softball.”
Pete put down his glass and looked at Kevin.
“So there’s one other thing we wanted to run by you. You remember Judy Dolan? I think she was in your son’s class.”
“Sure. She was a catcher, right? All-county or something?”
“All-state,” Pete corrected him. “She played varsity in college. She’s graduating in June, moving back home for the summer.”
“She’d be quite an asset,” Steve pointed out. “She could take over for me behind the plate, and I could move to first. It would solve a lot of our problems.”
“Wait a second,” Kevin said. “You want the league to go coed?”
“No,” Pete said, exchanging a wary glance with Steve. “That’s exactly what we don’t want.”
“But it’s the Men’s Softball League. If you have women playing, then it’s coed.”
“We don’t want women,” Steve explained. “We just want Judy.”
“You can’t discriminate,” Kevin reminded them. “If you admit one woman, you gotta admit them all.”
“It’s not discrimination,” Pete insisted. “It’s an exception. Besides, Judy’s bigger than I am. If you didn’t look too close, you wouldn’t even know she was a girl.”
“You ever play coed softball?” Steve asked. “It’s about as much fun as all-male Twister.”
“They do it with soccer,” Kevin said. “Everybody seems fine with that.”
“That’s soccer,” Steve said. “They’re all pussies to begin with.”
“Sorry,” Kevin told them. “You can have Judy Dolan or you can have a men’s league. But you can’t have both.”
* * *
THE MEN’S room was a tight squeeze—a dank, windowless space outfitted with a sink, a hand dryer, a trash can, two side-by-side urinals, and a toilet stall—in which it was theoretically possible to have five individuals rubbing shoulders at the same time. Usually this only happened late at night, when guys had drunk so much beer that waiting politely was no longer an option, and by then, everybody was cheerful enough that the obstacle-course aspect of it just seemed like part of the fun.
Right now, though, Kevin had the whole place to himself, or at least he would have if he hadn’t been so aware of Ernie Costello’s friendly face gazing down at him from a framed photograph hanging above and between the two urinals. Ernie was the Midway’s former bartender, a big-bellied guy with a walrus mustache. The wall around his portrait was full of heartfelt graffiti scrawled by his friends and former customers.
We miss you buddy.
You were the best!!!
It’s not the same without you
You’re in our hearts.…
Better make it a double!
Kevin kept his head down, doing his best to ignore the bartender’s beseeching gaze. He’d never been a fan of the memorials that had sprung up all over town in the wake of the Sudden Departure. It didn’t matter if they were discreet—a roadside flower arrangement, a name soaped on the rear window of a car—or big and flashy, like the mountain of teddy bears in a little girl’s front yard, or the question WHERE’S DONNIE? burned into the grass along the entire length of the high school football field. He just didn’t think it was healthy, being reminded all the time of the terrible and incomprehensible thing that had happened. That was why he’d pushed so hard for the Heroes’ Day Parade—it was better to channel the grief into an annual observance, relieve some of the day-to-day pressure on the survivors.
He washed his hands and rubbed them under the useless dryer, wondering if Pete and Steve had inadvertently stumbled onto something with their idea of inviting Judy Dolan onto the team. Like those guys, Kevin preferred to play in a competitive all-male league, where you didn’t have to watch your language or think twice about barreling into the catcher to break up a close play at the plate. But it was starting to look like finding enough players for a serious league was going to be a heavy lift, and he thought a fun coed league might be an alternative worth considering, the greatest good for the greatest many.
* * *
KEVIN LITERALLY bumped into Melissa Hulbert on his way out of the restroom. She was leaning against the wall in the dim alcove, waiting her turn for the ladies’ room, which could accommodate only one person at a time. Later on, he realized that their meeting probably wasn’t a coincidence, but it felt like one. Melissa acted surprised and seemed happier to see him than he might have expected.
“Kevin.” She kissed him on the cheek.
“Wow. Where’ve you been hiding?”
“Melissa.” He made an effort to match the warmth of her greeting. “It’s been a while, huh?”
“Three months,” she informed him. “At least.”
“That long?” He pretended to do the math in his head, then expelled a grunt of fake wonderment. “So how’ve you been?”
“Good.” She shrugged to let him know that good was a bit of an overstatement, then studied him for an anxious moment or two. “Is this okay?”
“What?”
“Me being here.”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t know.” Her smile didn’t quite cancel out the edge in her voice. “I just assumed—”
“No, no,” he assured her. “It’s not like that.”
An older woman Kevin didn’t know emerged from the ladies’ room, mumbling an apology as she slipped by, trailing a vapor cloud of sweet perfume.
“I’m at the bar,” Melissa said, touching him lightly on the arm. “If you feel like buying me a drink.”
Kevin groaned an apology. “I’m here with some friends.”
“Just one drink,” she told him. “I think you owe me that much.”
He owed her a lot more than that, and they both knew it.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough.”
* * *
MELISSA WAS one of three women Kevin had attempted to sleep with since his wife had left, and the only one close to his own age. They’d known each other since they were kids—Kevin was a year ahead of her in school—and they’d even had a little teenage fling the summer before his senior year, a heavy makeout session at the end of a keg party. It was one of those free-pass things—he had a girlfriend, she had a boyfriend, but the girlfriend and the boyfriend both happened to be on vacation—that hadn’t gone nearly as far as he would’ve liked. She was a hottie back then, a wholesome, freckle-faced redhead, with what were widely considered to be the nicest tits in all of Mapleton High. Kevin managed to put his hand on the left one, but only for a tantalizing second or two before she removed it.
Some other time, she told him, with a sadness in her voice that sounded sincere. I promised Bob I’d be good.
But there was no other time, not that summer, and not for the next quarter century. Bob and Melissa went steady all the way through high school and college and ended up getting married. They bounced around a bit before coming home to Mapleton, right around the time Kevin moved back with his own family. Tom was just two at the time, the same age as Melissa’s younger daughter.
They saw each other a lot when the kids were small, at playgrounds and school events and spaghetti dinners. They were never close—never socialized or exchanged more than the usual parental small talk—but there was always that little secret between them, the memory of a summer night, the awareness of a road not taken.
* * *
HE ENDED up buying her three drinks, the first to discharge his debt, the second because he’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to her, and the third because it felt good to have her leg pressing against his while he sipped his bourbon, which was exactly how he’d gotten into trouble the last time.
“Any word from Tom?” she asked.
“Just an e-mail a few months ago. He didn’t say much.”
“Where is he?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere on the West Coast, I think.”
“But he’s okay?”
“Seemed like it.”
“I heard about Holy Wayne,” she said. “What a creep.”
Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell my son was thinking.”
Melissa’s face clouded over with maternal concern.
“It’s hard being young now. It was different for us, you know? It was like a Golden Age. We just didn’t realize it.”
Kevin wanted to object on principle—he was pretty sure most people thought of their own youth as some kind of Golden Age—but in this case she had a point.
“What about Brianna?” he asked. “How’s she doing?”
“Okay.” Melissa sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “Better than last year anyway. She’s got a boyfriend now.”
“That’s good.”
Melissa shrugged. “They met over the summer. Some kind of survivors’ network. They sit around and tell each other how sad they are.”
* * *
IN THEIR previous meeting at the Carpe Diem—the night they ended up going home together—Melissa had talked a lot about her divorce, which had been a minor local scandal. After almost twenty years of marriage, Bob had left her for a younger woman he’d met at work. Melissa was only in her early forties at the time, but it had felt to her as if her life were over, as if she’d been abandoned like some crappy old car on the side of the highway.
Aside from alcohol, the main thing that kept her going was her hatred of the woman who’d stolen her husband. Ginny was twenty-eight, a slim, athletic woman who’d worked as Bob’s assistant. They married as soon as the divorce was final, and tried to start a family. They were apparently having trouble getting pregnant, but Melissa didn’t take much comfort in that. The very thought of Bob even wanting children with another woman was infuriating. What made it even more galling was the fact that her own kids actually liked Ginny. They were more than happy to call their father a cheating bastard, but all they would ever say about his new wife was that she was really nice. As if to prove their point, Ginny made multiple attempts to smooth things over with Melissa, writing several letters in which she apologized for the pain she’d caused, and asking for forgiveness.
I just wanted to hate her in peace, Melissa said. And she wouldn’t even let me do that.
Melissa’s rage was so pure that her main thought on October 14th—once she’d ascertained that her kids were safe—was a wild, unspoken hope that Ginny would be among the victims, that her problematic existence would simply be erased from the world. Bob would suffer as she had suffered; the score would be settled. It might even be possible, under those circumstances, for her to take him back, for the two of them to start over and find a way to reclaim some of what they’d lost.
Can you imagine? she said. That’s how bitter I was.
Everybody had thoughts like that, Kevin reminded her. It’s just that most of us won’t admit it.
Of course it wasn’t Ginny who vanished; it was Bob, while riding the elevator in a parking garage next to his office. There were disruptions in phone and Internet service that day, and Melissa didn’t find out he was missing until around nine o’clock that night, when Ginny herself showed up to break the news. She seemed dazed and groggy, like someone had just awoken her from a long afternoon nap.
Bobby’s gone, she kept muttering. Bobby’s gone.
You know what I said to her?
Melissa had closed her eyes, as if she were trying to wish away the memory.
I said, Good, now you know how it feels.
* * *
THE YEARS had changed some things but not others. Melissa’s freckles had faded, and her hair was no longer red. Her face was fuller, her figure less defined. But her voice and eyes were exactly the same. It was like the girl he’d known had been absorbed into the body of a middle-aged woman. It was Melissa, and it wasn’t.
“You should’ve called me,” she said, pouting sweetly as she laid her hand on his thigh. “We wasted the whole summer.”
“I was embarrassed,” he explained. “I felt like I let you down.”
“You didn’t let me down,” she assured him, her long fingernails tracing cryptic designs on the fabric of his jeans. She was wearing a gray silk blouse, unbuttoned to reveal the scalloped edge of a maroon bra. “It’s no big deal. It happens to everyone.”
“Not to me,” he insisted.
This wasn’t exactly true. He’d had similar malfunctions with Liz Yamamoto, a twenty-five-year-old grad student he’d met on the Internet, and then again with Wendy Halsey, a thirty-two-year-old marathon-running paralegal, but he’d chalk
ed those up to performance anxiety caused by the relative youth of his partners. It was sadder with Melissa, and harder to account for.
They’d gone back to her house, had a glass of wine, and then headed into the bedroom. It felt good, relaxed and natural and totally right—like they were finishing what they’d started back in high school—until the very last moment, when all the life drained out of him. That was a defeat of a different magnitude, a blow from which he still hadn’t recovered.
“It’s scary the first time with a new partner,” she told him. “It hardly ever works right.”
“The voice of experience, huh?”
“Trust me, Kevin. The second time’s a charm.”
He nodded, fully prepared to accept this as a general rule, but just as willing to bet he’d be the exception that proved it wrong. Because even now, with the back of her thumb resting ever so lightly against his crotch, he still wasn’t feeling much of anything beyond a dull throb of anxiety, the vestigial guilt of a married man out in public with another woman. It didn’t seem to matter that his wife had moved out, or that people his age hooked up all the time at the Carpe Diem. Some were married, some weren’t; things were a lot looser on that front than they used to be. It was as if his conscience were stuck in the past, tethered to a set of conditions that no longer existed.
“I don’t know.” He smiled sadly, trying to let her know it was nothing personal. “I just don’t think it’s gonna work.”
“I’ve got some pills,” she whispered. “They’ll fix you right up.”
“Really?” Kevin was intrigued. He’d been thinking about asking his doctor to prescribe something, but hadn’t worked up the nerve. “Where’d you get them?”
“They’re around. You’re not the only guy with this issue.”
“Huh.” His eyes drifted south. Unlike her face, her breasts were still freckled. He remembered them fondly from their previous encounter. “That might work.”
Melissa leaned closer, until her nose was almost touching his. Her hair smelled good, a subtle aura of almonds and honeysuckle.