The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Eleven





In the middle of April, he began dating a woman he had grown up with, Connie Heidrich, after he saw her when he and his uncle made a call at the high school where she taught English. It was near the end of the school day when they got there, a stormy afternoon. Edward Everett’s uncle was edgy, in a foul mood; he’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to sell flour to the school’s food service director for more than a decade, he said, and at their previous stop, the baker had complained that his last shipment of flour had weevils in it. “Look at this,” he’d said, opening a plastic vat, revealing pale insects burrowing into the flour, scurrying up the sides. It was evident to Edward Everett that the fault probably lay with the baker; his kitchen was filthy. Stainless steel bowls sat unwashed in the large sink and the floor was so covered in grease that Edward Everett’s uncle had slipped coming in, only keeping his balance by steadying himself with a hand on the doorframe. Despite this, Edward Everett’s uncle said only that he would pass on the baker’s concern to the mill. Back in the car, however, he said, “I should have. Shit. Shit.”

Then, on the way to the school, they ran into the foul weather. One moment they were cruising at eighty miles an hour on the interstate, under a partly cloudy sky, and the next, as they crested a rise and started descending into a valley, the sky was black, rain and hail banging against the roof of the car and washing across the windshield. Edward Everett’s uncle refused to slow down, plowing on past more timid drivers until the Cadillac came upon a cattle truck lumbering in the lane ahead of them. Edward Everett’s uncle stepped hard on the brake and they started fishtailing, Edward Everett certain they’d slam into the back of the truck. A half-dozen Holsteins turned to look at them but seemed unconcerned. Somehow, his uncle slipped into a space in the right-hand lane just in front of a Rambler, then skidded onto the grassy berm before he regained control and stopped.

“Don’t tell your,” his uncle said. “Jesus, I.”

They sat on the shoulder while passing traffic sprayed their car with rainwater. When he found a break in the flow, Edward Everett’s uncle merged and went on to the school, taking his time. There, in the lot, they made a dash for the building. By the time they reached it, Edward Everett was soaked, his shoes oozing rainwater.

The food service manager’s office was just off the cafeteria, a small, windowless room that stank of onions and fryer grease. The office was cluttered, the desk a jumble of file folders partly spilling onto the floor. Balanced on one precarious pile was a cafeteria tray holding the remnants of a half-eaten sloppy joe and a mound of baked beans. There were only two chairs in the office, the swivel chair behind the desk where the food service manager sat and a molded Plexiglas chair stacked with magazines and newspapers. The food service manager—a grossly overweight man whose bulk was squeezed between the arms of his desk chair—did not offer the second chair to either Edward Everett or his uncle and they stood there, Edward Everett thought, like two boys who had been summoned to the principal’s office for not doing their homework.

“We’ve been over this,” the food service manager said, not quite looking at them but instead watching a chewed-up pencil he rolled between his palms. “We’re pretty locked in …”

“We’ve got a new pricing structure,” Edward Everett’s uncle said, opening his briefcase by balancing it against his thighs, snapping the brass latches, and then reaching inside to pluck out a sheet of paper filled with columns of numbers. “I think you’ll find—”

“We’re really …” The food service manager finished his sentence by waving the pencil as if he were a conductor signaling an orchestra to stop playing. “Savvy?”

“Look,” Edward Everett’s uncle said. “I don’t know why you have to be—”

The food service manager let out a laugh. “You go talk to Dick Thornberg and ask him why I have to be.”

“Dick Thornberg,” his uncle said.

“That’s right,” the food service manager said, giving his uncle an odd smile.

“I see,” his uncle said, returning the pricing sheet to his briefcase and snapping it shut with an exaggerated flourish. “I’ll sure give old Dick a call.”

Edward Everett felt as if his uncle and the food service manager were speaking a language he did not understand and he cocked his head quizzically toward his uncle, but if his uncle noticed, he gave him no sign and they left the office.

Upstairs in the main hall, most of the students were gone. From the band room came a discordant version of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” one of the tubas letting out a blatt a beat behind the others in his section.

“Not one of our red-letter days,” his uncle said. “We’ll get them tomorrow.”

Outside, the rain was still falling but its vehemence had abated. In the distance, beyond the neighborhoods that marched up the hillside away from the school, pale patches of sky appeared amid the clouds. A car pulled to the curb, a battered gray Rambler missing its left front quarter panel. The driver, a woman, pushed open the door in a way that suggested the hinges were worn, hopped out, leaving the engine running, and dashed for the entrance, holding a newspaper over her head as a makeshift umbrella.

“Whew,” she said, ducking into the door that Edward Everett held open for her. “That’s one wet afternoon out there.” She rolled the newspaper and then twisted it, squeezing out the water; it ran black along her forearm. “That was not the smar—” she caught herself in mid-word and cocked her head. “Ed?” she asked, narrowing her eyes as if squinting would bring him into clearer focus.

“I’m sorry,” he began but then realized he did recognize her. “Connie?”

“Oh, crap,” she said, covering her face with her hand. When she removed it, newsprint smudged her cheeks and forehead. “I look like, well, not at the height of my pulchritude. I thought you were off …” She held the newspaper as if it were a bat and swung it, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth in imitation of a ball hitting the bat, darkened drops of rainwater spattering Edward Everett and his uncle.

“I was,” he said. “I got hurt and—this is my uncle, Stan. I’m working with him.”

“We were just calling on your Mr. Osgood,” his uncle said.

She laughed. “He’s hardly my Mr. Osgood.”

“He’s a tough nut to crack,” Edward Everett’s uncle said.

“With ‘nut’ being the operative word,” Connie said. “I’d better—I left a stack of term papers on my desk that if I don’t grade this weekend, my American Lit students are going to revolt on Monday.”

“You’re teaching here?” Edward Everett asked.

“My second year,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but Margaret and I …” his uncle said. “George Jones is at the Jamboree tonight and I need to get on home. I don’t mean to break up the reunion.”

“I need to skedaddle myself,” Connie said. “Paper grading! Friday night fun!” She turned to go but stopped. “I’d love to catch up, Ed.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Do you have a piece of paper? I’ll give you my number.”

Edward Everett fished out the small spiral notebook he carried in his shirt pocket and took out a pen, handing both to her. She took them, scribbled her name and number into the notebook and started to give them back to him but then snatched the pen away. “This I’ll keep as a hostage until you do call me. That way, it takes all the pressure off. We’re not making a date. You’ll just be retrieving your pen.”



Within a week and a half, they were seeing each other. On a Sunday morning, he was waking in her house for the first time and he realized that, without ever planning it, he had been with her nearly every day since he first ran into her. He was alone in her house; she had gone for a jog at sunrise, giving him a quiet kiss on the forehead that he dimly remembered as he lay in her bed, contemplating getting up. From down the hall, he could smell a pot of coffee simmering. She’d been divorced for seven years by then—a Polaroid marriage, she called it, wed at eighteen, divorced a few days after she turned twenty, not even old enough to celebrate the end of her marriage with a legal glass of champagne—and her bedroom was decorated as if she had tried fiercely to eliminate any trace of masculinity: the bed was canopied with a scalloped lily-print fabric, posters of Degas dancers hung on the walls and a crystal bowl on the bureau held potpourri so pungent he wondered if she had bought it anticipating he would, indeed, spend the night. They’d actually slept together the first time they’d gone out, the previous Sunday. He’d picked her up to have lunch. She hadn’t wanted him to come to the door because she had a son, a nine-year-old who had bad eyesight, asthma and a horrible father. She’d enumerated the conditions as if they were of the same magnitude of affliction. “It’s too soon for him to meet you,” she’d said, and then rushed to add, blushing, “Not that he ever needs to meet you. It’s just lunch, nothing more.” He sat in his Maverick at the curb, the engine idling, listening to WPOP out of Wheeling, an upbeat tune about a boy and girl who share an umbrella at a bus stop and end up marrying.

At Connie’s house, a small hand drew back the curtain over a window but then snatched itself away as if he’d been burned, no doubt because someone had scolded him for spying on Edward Everett. A moment later, Connie came down the walk to his car. As a girl, she had taken dance lessons since she was three and, for as long as he could remember, her movements all possessed a certain fluid quality, no matter how ordinary: taking a pen out of her purse, opening a math text, scratching her calf while listening to one of their teachers. They were paired as partners for a chemistry experiment once. It was early fall in their senior year and Connie had worn a sleeveless blouse. As she used a pipette to measure drops of sodium hydroxide into a beaker holding a copper wire, Edward Everett could see the slight curve of her breast and an edge of lace from her bra. He had no idea what the scent was that she gave off (her shampoo, some perfume) but he was certain that he would pass out from inhaling it. They’d almost gone out not long after, when he’d learned that she and her boyfriend, Lloyd, who played linebacker for the school with a vicious aggression, had broken up. The day he found out that they were no longer a couple—it was a Tuesday, he remembered—he’d gone to her locker to wait for her and while she stowed her books, they’d agreed to go see Fantastic Voyage. On Thursday, however, she told him she’d discovered she was pregnant and would be marrying Lloyd and before graduation she’d changed her place in the line of students, from somewhere in the middle as an “H” to the front, as an “Adams,” directly in front of her husband as they marched into the football stadium, Lloyd clowning, pointing at Connie, making a gesture above his own belly describing an arc in the air, and then giving a thumbs-up.

Walking toward Edward Everett’s car, Connie still had her girlish grace, absently taking a strand of her hair that blew across her face and tucking it behind her right ear, giving him a shy smile as she opened the car door and got in.

They’d had lunch at a tearoom in a hundred-year-old brick house that was a Victorian museum, not the sort of restaurant he would have chosen ordinarily, with its delicate sandwiches and meager salads, a restaurant that catered to women like his mother, who saw it as a bastion of finery in a town that otherwise offered taverns and corner diners. He had suggested it because he thought it was the sort of place Connie would prefer, but while they ate he realized they were, by twenty years, the youngest people in the place and that, aside from a rotund ruddy-faced man in a blue serge suit and a polka-dotted bow tie, he was the only male. Their conversation went in fits and starts, as if they could never land on a subject either had much to say about: her taking six and a half years to finish college because of her son, Billy; her ex-husband’s mocking her when she told him she wanted to become a teacher; Edward Everett’s expurgated stories of playing ball in towns not much larger than their own.

After they finished and were walking back to his car, he felt as if he’d been holding his breath for the entire hour they’d been there. He was unsure whether it was the restaurant or that, after almost ten years, he and Connie had nothing to talk about. He would take her home, make a polite comment about how they should do this again, and then not call her, but on their way back to her house, they’d passed the building where his apartment was and she’d said, “Don’t you live upstairs there?” He’d been surprised she’d known that. “I’d like to see it,” she said. Upstairs, he regretted inviting her in. He was not the best of housekeepers. The suit he’d worn the day before lay crumpled on the couch in the living room, and the can of Pabst he’d drunk while he was watching The Rockford Files was on its side on the floor beside his chair, still dripping beer. But she’d said, “This is actually charming.” Not long after that, he was kissing her.

Twice since then, she’d come to his apartment in the early evening, while her mother visited with Billy, and they’d made love. With the windows open and the sound of voices passing beneath his apartment, he felt as if they were having sex in a public place and wondered if the people whose conversations he caught pieces of could also hear the noises they made: his headboard banging against the wall, Connie’s whimpers when she had an orgasm, his groan when he had his own. “… the prices …” a woman’s voice said once. “… your schoolwork …” said another. “… liver and onions …” said still another.

The weekend after they had their first lunch, Connie’s son went off with his father. “He’s taking him turkey hunting,” Connie told Edward Everett, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head. “ ‘I’m going to make a man out of him,’ ” she said, imitating her ex-husband’s laconic way of speaking. She invited Edward Everett for dinner on Saturday night, telling him she would make him a home-cooked meal. When he arrived, bringing a bottle of wine, the house was redolent of meatloaf and boiling potatoes. She greeted him at the door wearing an off-white canvas apron that had “Mom’s Kitchen” spelled out in awkward, childish letters that he guessed her son had finger-painted. She gave him a peck on the cheek and rushed back to the kitchen because a timer dinged. In the kitchen, she had set the table with china and crystal goblets, two at each place—a red-wine glass and a water glass—and silver. “I never have adult company,” she said quickly when she saw him looking at the table. “It’s an indulgence, I know. There’s a corkscrew in the drawer here.” She gave the top drawer next to the stove a shove with her hip as she turned off the gas flame under the boiling potatoes and then poured them into a colander in the sink. He opened the drawer, which was a jumble of miscellaneous junk: transistor radio batteries, half-used rolls of Scotch tape, a coil of picture wire, a coffee-stained instruction manual for a dishwasher. It was, it struck him—as someone who had not lived in the same city for long over the last decade—the junk drawer of someone who had stayed put. He found the corkscrew and opened the wine, pouring out two glasses. He set one on the counter beside the stove for Connie and leaned against the sink drinking his. “Are you trying to get me drunk?” she asked, winking, then poured the boiled potatoes into a mixing bowl and took a break to sip her wine.

During dinner, Connie talked about people they’d gone to school with—Derek Colombo, who’d died when his fishing boat sank the year before; Felix Chase, who’d gone off to be a priest but who had met a woman while he was in the seminary, forsaken the priesthood, married her and had five children already, crammed into a tiny ranch house on the western edge of town, “Poor as church mice but happy as a lark,” she’d said. They were all merged into adulthood—lawyers, teachers, coal miners, a veterinarian; owners of hardware stores, service stations—so many with children and mortgages and revolving credit accounts at Sears that they used to furnish those houses, and here he had been, in some sort of limbo, waiting for his life to start, as if he were forever in a train depot, always on his way elsewhere, wherever the club that owned his contract told him to go, living in places that always had the feel of temporariness: boarding in houses owned by widows who needed the rent to pay the mortgage, living in houses owned by former ballplayers who sometimes let the rent slide in exchange for some nineteen-year-old kid listening, for the fifteenth time, to a story about the day their landlord hit a home run off Dizzy Dean in a spring training game back in 1935; living four players to a one-bedroom apartment, sleeping on a cheap couch someone found in an alley next to a dumpster; because none of it mattered, none of the addresses were where you’d end up, all of them just stops on a journey toward the major leagues.

As they cleared the table after they finished eating, it occurred to him that this was the sort of life he could have if he wanted it: domestic, living in the same house for years on end. It was, it struck him, not a bad life. All he had to do was get off the train once and for all: sell flour; hunker down with a woman he’d make his wife; raise up some kids.

One day, he realized he was part of a family. Poof; just like that, not anything he had set out to acquire but something he just found he had. It was four weeks after their lunch in the tearoom. They were in line at a crowded grocery on a Saturday afternoon in mid-May, waiting among customers with carts piled as high as if they’d just received a bulletin that the store was closing forever, and they would never be able to buy another ounce of food: hams and beef roasts, cellophane packages of hot dogs, bags of potato chips, cases of Pepsi. He was standing behind Connie, affectionately resting his chin on the top of her head as she flipped through a Ladies’ Home Journal, stopping at a two-page spread on gardens for small yards. “What do you think?” she asked. “We could do a variation of this in the back.” The photograph showed a yard in Wisconsin where the owners had replaced most of the back lawn with an English-style garden, a white rose vine climbing an arbor, two Adirondack chairs in the shade of a flowering dogwood, a folded newspaper resting in the seat of one of them as if the occupant had just gone into the house for a glass of tea.

More than the photograph, however, what struck Edward Everett was Connie’s use of the word “we,” as if he already had moved into her home and had enough ownership to say, “I’d prefer pink roses over white,” one of the Adirondack chairs his chair, where he’d sit on Sundays, reading the financial pages. With his increasing income on top of her modest one as a schoolteacher, it struck him, they could renovate the house. Standing with her in the grocery line, waiting to pay for their ground beef and cold cuts and macaroni salad, her house transformed in his head as if he were watching a time-lapse movie like those he’d seen in high school, showing a caterpillar’s evolution to butterfly: the stained living room carpeting replaced with hardwood; the cracked linoleum in the kitchen replaced with tile like his uncle had; the mildewed asbestos shingles replaced with vinyl siding.

They began spending even more time together, doing what they called “everyday life” instead of merely dating. He kept his small apartment over the newspaper but, aside from going there to pick up his mail and fresh clothing, he was, for all intents and purposes, living with Connie and her son. In the evenings, as she washed dishes and quizzed her son on spelling words and state capitals, he spread his purchase orders across the kitchen table and made entries into his account ledger. After they finished their work, they watched television, Edward Everett and Connie on the couch, Billy sprawled on the floor, head propped on two cushions, laughing at shows he thought he should have found inane but, in their company, enjoyed: Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter, before Connie sent Billy to bed.

At first, they made love every night—quietly because Connie didn’t want Billy to hear them. But within a week and a half, her period came and their abstinence for those days brought them to what she said was, ironically, a new sort of intimacy: the comfort of a man and woman sleeping in the same bed because it was where they slept and not because they were just there to have sex. At first, he found it odd to be beside her without making love—he’d never been in bed with a woman unless they were going to have sex. Then he, too, saw it as she did: they were becoming comfortable living side by side, sleeping side by side.

One Sunday, after a rainstorm when her gutters had overflowed, he climbed an extension ladder and hefted himself onto the roof so he could clean the gutters, scooping out foul-smelling handfuls of leaves and maple seeds, filling half a dozen lawn-and-leaf bags with the detritus. As he cleaned them, he saw that the gutters themselves were in sorry condition: bent where tree limbs had fallen onto them, riddled with holes where they had rusted. The entire roof, in fact, was in poor shape. At one point, as he shifted his weight to move so he could reach the next length of gutter, a piece of a shingle broke off, slid down the roof and sailed into the yard, where Connie was collecting branches.

“Hey,” she called, picking up the fragment. “You destroying my roof up there?”

“Just seeing if you’re paying attention,” he said.

The next week, he called a former high school teammate, Ralph Sellers, who ran a roofing company with his father, and bought Connie a new roof without telling her: eleven hundred twelve dollars and eighteen cents. A year ago, the sum would have seemed insurmountable but he had it in the bank—his account was by then close to four thousand dollars, as he had few expenses—and it stunned him how easy life was with money in the bank. A year earlier, late in the month, before payday, he and his teammates scouted for all-you-could-eat breakfasts at church halls and went four at a time to a Red Lobster, split one dinner and filled up on bread-and-butter refills a waitress brought them. Standing in line at the bank to pick up the cashier’s check to pay Ralph, while a customer in front of him argued about an overdraft, Edward Everett realized he had more in the bank now than he had earned for the entire season five years earlier in double-A ball.

Three mornings later, just after Connie turned the corner from the house, driving first Billy and then herself to school, Edward Everett met Ralph at her house and handed him the bank envelope holding the cashier’s check. As he signed the paperwork for the job, a massive dump truck backed into Connie’s drive and two workmen scampered up to the roof, where they began scraping the shingles off more quickly than Edward Everett could have imagined, pushing entire sections of shingles into the truck’s bed.

He left them there, the workers trotting across the roof with as much certainty as he had jogging on flat ground, and went off to make his calls for the day. He’d scheduled appointments only until two that afternoon because he wanted to be at the house before Connie arrived; when he got there, the workers were using an electric nail gun to attach the ridge cap. Ralph was sitting in his pickup, smoking. “Wanna take a look?” he asked, and led Edward Everett up the ladder to survey the roof. It was beautiful, the tar at the seams glistening. Ralph stepped out onto the shingles, the ceramic grit crunching under his work boots. He crouched and ran a hand appreciatively over the work while Edward Everett stood on the ladder, reluctant to step out onto the roof in his good suit. “You and Con getting married?” Ralph asked.

“I don’t know,” Edward Everett said.

Above them, one of the workers was coiling the extension cord for the nail gun while the other swept nails and cut shingle fragments toward the roof edge.

“You gotta be a helluva lot better for her than Lloyd.” Ralph turned to his workers. “We got time to get to the Chestnut job. It’s small and the daylight will hold.”

Then they were gone, the driveway and roof cleaner than when they had come. An hour and a half later, when Connie returned with Billy, they were both in a sour mood. Edward Everett was cleaning the house, vacuuming the living room carpet, when he saw Connie’s Rambler pull into the drive and went outside to meet them.

“Ed? Is something wrong?” Connie said from the driver’s seat.

“Everything’s fine,” he said, opening her door. Behind her, Billy stared glumly out the window for a moment, then unbuckled his seatbelt and went inside without a word.

“I was worried when I saw you here already.”

“Nothing wrong,” he said. “What …” He nodded toward the front door, which had just closed behind Billy.

“The f*cking father from hell strikes again,” Connie said, picking up her briefcase from the passenger seat and getting out. She gave Edward Everett a distracted kiss, all but missing his mouth. “It was Father’s Day. They do it in May because the actual Father’s Day … anyway, they have a lunch and a music program and an art exhibit. ‘Drawings of My Dad.’ Except the a*shole …” She let out a muted scream.

Edward Everett glanced at the roof, wondering if he should call it to her attention now or wait until later, when she had vented her rage toward her ex-husband.

“He worked so hard on his drawing. He even had his grandpa bring him teensy pieces of coal so he could glue them to the paper so—” Then she peered past him, her glance upward. “What? Something looks—” She took a step toward the house, then took several steps backward, until she was standing in the street, her eyes narrowed.

“I got you a new roof,” he said.

“A new—”

“The old one—Ralph said it’s a wonder you didn’t have leaks.”

“But I can’t afford to pay you back for this.”

“It’s a gift,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, shaking her head, her voice serious.

“I had the money.”

“It’s not right,” she said.

“What if we were engaged?” he asked, surprised as the words came out of his mouth. He hadn’t even considered the notion seriously to that point; at times, when they were all at a McDonald’s, Billy blowing a straw wrapper toward his mother after he tore it off to drink his Coke; when they were standing shoulder to shoulder, watching drain cleaner pour into the kitchen sink to clear a clog—at times like that, a vision came to him of being a family, but he had never put the words together into a coherent sentence: engaged, married, father. Even as he said it, the thought nudged him: it’s too soon.

But she said, “Engaged? Most men would just give a girl a ring; you gave me an engagement roof. The last of the red-hot romantics.” Then they were standing at the edge of the street, kissing, while a Volkswagen Beetle swung out to the middle of the street so as to avoid them, giving them a feeble bleat of its horn.

The next evening, he took her to Pence’s Jewelers in St. Martinsville to pick out a proper ring—a two-thirds-carat diamond in a shape the jeweler called a “marquise,” seven hundred fifteen dollars, and, after he went back to pick it up after it had been sized, she cried when he slipped it onto her finger.

“Billy! Billy!” she called to her son, who was in his room, writing an essay about the Blessed Virgin. When he came out, she showed him the ring, clapping her hands in delight. “You’re getting a new dad,” she said, hugging him hard. As she let him go, Billy regarded Edward Everett shyly. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can go back and do your homework.” After he was gone, Connie said, “He gets quiet when he gets excited. He will love you. He’ll finally have a dad who isn’t an A-number-one jerk-of-the-century.”

Then she dashed out to the kitchen and began making phone calls. “You’ll never guess what,” she began each of them.

Two days later, when he went by his apartment to pick up his mail and begin packing to move permanently into Connie’s house—what would be his house—he found an envelope addressed to him at his mother’s and forwarded to his apartment. There was no return address, and a Chicago, Illinois, postmark. When he opened it, he found a blank sheet of typing paper folded around a Polaroid snapshot.

It was of a hospital nursery, shot through what was obviously the glass window in the hall that allowed visitors to view the newborn children. At the center of the picture was a crib that held one of the infants. Edward Everett couldn’t make out many of the features: the baby wore a sky blue sleeper, his hands mittened, his head covered in a blue bonnet. Whoever had taken the picture had not thought about the effect the glass would have on the image because of the flash: in the upper left corner of the snapshot, a bright circle of light washed out part of the frame. The glass also captured a reflected ghost of the person taking the photo, a woman in a robe and nightgown, her face almost entirely obscured by the camera she held up to take the picture: Julie. There was no note save for, on the back of the photograph, the smeared word, “Boy,” and the date, April 22, 1977.

It shocked him to realize that he hadn’t thought of Julie in months. When he’d first gotten home from Montreal and was convalescing at his mother’s house, he tried vainly to call her but the number he knew was not in service. One day, he dialed it four times, punching the buttons slowly, wondering if perhaps his fingers had pressed an incorrect number, but all he got was a series of tones and a recorded voice: “The number you have dialed is not a working number. If you feel you have reached this number in error …”

He tried to remember the name of the small town her parents lived in and got out a road atlas, turned to the state of Illinois and ran his eye down the list of cities and towns. Several times, his eye caught a name that he thought was correct, only to spot farther down the column another town he was equally certain was the one she’d told him she was from: Alton. No, Benton; something “-ton.” No, maybe it wasn’t “-ton,” but “-ham”: Chatham.

He thought he recalled she was from the southern half of the state, so he began running his eye across the map itself, but the disorganized array of names dotted along the interstates and county roads only made him all the more confused. He was no longer certain it had two syllables: Carlinville? Effingham? Carbondale?

Holding the photograph in his hand, he tried once more the number that had been hers, knowing it would not abruptly turn into her number once again. In the moment before he heard the series of tones and the recorded voice, he realized he was holding his breath: if it rang and she answered, his life would suddenly become very different than he expected, than he hoped. But it did not ring; he heard the tones, the recorded message.

He hung up and regarded the photograph again. He could not make out any feature of the baby with any clarity: it was someone who belonged to the category “baby” and he realized he should think in some profound way: My son. I have a son, but if there was a connection between him and the infant, maybe the geographic distance between them stretched their bond too thin to have any palpable effect on him. He slipped the photo into his wallet, then took it out again: how would he explain it to Connie the next time they were out and he went to pay for a restaurant check and she saw it:

What’s that?

I have something I need to tell you.

Briefly, he thought about tearing it up or burning it, but it was a picture of his son after all, even though it appeared he might never see the boy or perhaps hear of him again. He slipped it into his pocket and, when he got out to the car, put it into the glove compartment, beneath the highway maps and the folder with the receipts from his oil changes and tire rotations, and drove to Connie’s, where they were going to meet someone he planned to hire to replace the guttering. Slowly, he was rebuilding her house: next week, carpeting; the week after, a carpenter to replace the rotted boards in the porch. His bank account was dwindling but it did not concern him. Beginning in August, his uncle had told him, he was going to be dividing his territory, giving part to Edward Everett. He would earn close to three thousand a month, his uncle said, adding, “I’ve been wanting to slow down. In a few years, the entire thing will be yours.”

When he reached Connie’s house and she greeted him at the door, he thought for a moment of telling her about the baby. She saw the hesitation on his face.

“What?” she said. “Do you have some other surprise you’re going to spring on me, beyond a new roof and an engagement out of the blue?”

A long while later—the first time he confessed to another soul that he had a son—he would remember that opportunity on her porch as an invitation to one kind of life he might have had, but instead became the moment in which a lie began weaving itself into his life. I’ll tell her sometime, he thought, just not now.

“I’m just crazy about you, is all,” he said.