The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Seventeen





When Edward Everett got home after the game, it was nearly midnight but the street in front of his house was lined with cars, a party going on next door at the Duboises’. People were crowded on the deck, talking over one another, laughing; an indecipherable hum of voices. He stood for a moment in his garage before going into the house, wondering if he would be able to make out Renee’s voice or her laugh. What was the occasion? he wondered, thinking back through the years when he’d have been invited as her date and then her husband. It’s a Renee-came-to-her-senses-and-left-him bash, he thought, simultaneously hearing his mother’s voice, although she had been dead for years: Stop the pity party.

He closed the garage and crossed the yard in the shadows, not wanting anyone to see him. When he reached his deck, he found the bouquet of roses he’d left for Renee leaning against the back door, the card unopened. On the envelope, she had written two words in the angular printing she’d learned in her brief time as an architecture student, the same hand in which she annotated her drawings and elevations: “Please don’t.” He tucked the flowers under his arm, got out his key and went inside.

There, he discovered that Grizzly was having a seizure. Edward Everett knew it even before he saw the dog; he could hear his claws clicking in a steady rhythm against the tile. Indeed, Grizzly was lying there, quivering, his water dish overturned, his hindquarters wet, his front paws beating the floor, his head shaking side to side. Edward Everett set the roses onto the counter and went to the linen closet to fetch a towel, which he slipped under the dog’s head to make him more comfortable. Flipping off the light because the vet to whom he and Renee had taken Grizzly after his first seizure had told them that dark and quiet would help the dog recover more quickly, he sat on the floor beside him, stroking his fur, while the dog’s eyes squinted at him in a way that seemed beseeching. “I wish I could stop it, boy,” he said as the dog continued to quake.

Sitting on his kitchen floor until the seizure ended, he listened intently to the loud conversation next door, wondering if Renee’s voice or laugh would emerge from the general noise. “No, no, no, no,” a man said. There was an explosion of laughter, the squeak of someone raising a plastic cooler lid, the pffft when they opened the beer.

He had met the Duboises on the day he moved in: Ron and Rhonda and their three children, whose names also began with “R”: Ron Junior, Renee and Rose. Ron Junior was still in high school then and Ron and Rhonda had sent him over to help Edward Everett carry in boxes from the U-Haul and then had invited him for Sunday dinner. “You can’t have a thing unpacked yet,” Rhonda had said when he protested. “It’s just ussens and some KFC. Hope you won’t be offended by paper plates and plastic sporks.”

It was a crowded table: Ron and Rhonda; their three kids; Rose’s fiancé, Chuck; Ron Junior’s girlfriend, April; Renee’s husband, Art. The Duboises were all plump except for Renee, who had earned a college scholarship for track and still jogged four days a week. Everyone talked at once, nearly shouting, everyone reaching across everyone else for the bucket of legs and breasts, for the dish of potatoes and gravy, and he could make out nothing of what they discussed: it was as if they were piecing together conversations they had been having for years, arguing over ridiculous topics:

I found this picture, remember that Halloween …

You promised.

Speaking of that, Chuck, I heard that Paula was back in town.

Almost simultaneously, they all sang, It’s too late to turn back now, exploding into guffaws.

During the off-season, when Edward Everett was home on Sundays, they sometimes asked him back and began inviting him for family parties: for Chuck and Rose’s wedding reception; for the send-off when Ron Junior joined the Army; for Ron Junior’s wedding, when he and April decided to get married just before he was deployed to Iraq for his first tour. That was the start of his relationship with Renee.

Then, the yard was crowded with out-of-town relatives who had come to wish Ron Junior and April well and Ron Junior “Godspeed.” Over and over, tipsy, bleary-eyed uncles, aunts and cousins came up to him, asking, “Who are you, exactly?” Tired of explaining himself—“I’m just the neighbor”—and wanting to be useful, he’d gone into the kitchen and started scrubbing a pot in which Rhonda had burned the chili. At one point, while he was elbow-deep in the blackened water, his hands raw from the Brillo pad, Renee wandered in looking for ice.

“Hello, baseball man,” she shouted, obviously drunk. “Got you on KP.” She had shed the beige suit jacket she’d worn for the ceremony, and her white blouse was untucked from the skirt.

“I just thought I’d give your folks a head start on cleaning all this up,” he said. Out in the yard, April and her father were dancing to some country song, while the other guests stood along the perimeter, every once in a while a camera flash exploding.

“You’re a saint,” she said. “Saint. Saint. Saint.”

“Not really,” he said. “More like a lot of sins to make up for.”

There was no ice in the freezer and when Renee went to the bedroom where everyone had dropped their coats and came back with her purse, fishing out her car keys, he stopped her. “You can’t drive.”

“A saint and a safety patrol boy,” she said. “I’m fine, really.” But he had insisted, telling her he would take her for the ice. He rinsed his hands under the faucet and poured the dark water in the pot down the drain; disappointed at his lack of progress, he filled the pot with dish soap and water to soak, and followed her to her car.

It was a four-year-old red Corvette—a consolation prize for her recent divorce, she said—with a standard transmission. He had driven nothing but automatics for years, and twice before they even got to the end of his street, he killed it, letting off the clutch too quickly. Then lurching onto Carter, shifting from first to second, he ground the gears.

“I’ve only made three payments on this thing,” she said. “Be careful.”

On the way back from the Quik Stop, two bags of ice on the floor at Renee’s feet, she abruptly struck the dash with her fist while they were stopped at a traffic signal. “F*ck,” she said. “F*ck, f*ck, f*ck.” Her sudden violence startled him; his foot slid off the clutch and the Corvette leaped forward and died. The signal changed to green and the driver of the jacked-up Chevy pickup behind them began flashing its high beams, honking. Edward Everett found the button for the window, lowered it and waved the pickup around. As it roared past, a teenaged boy riding in the bed flung a plastic drink cup at them. It spattered against the windshield, ice and soda trailing across the glass. He managed to get the car started and pulled through the intersection, stopping at the curb.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“His second cousin!” she said, opening her door and stumbling out, falling to her knees on the sidewalk. He thought she was going to start vomiting but she pushed herself up and started walking at a quick pace up the street in the direction of the store.

He turned off the ignition, pulled himself out of the car—men his age with bad knees were not meant for Corvettes—and followed. “Where are you going?”

“Not back there. ‘Where’s Art?’ ‘How’s Art?’ How the f*ck should I know how Art’s doing? But I know who he’s doing. His second cousin; that’s who he’s doing.” She let out a shriek and sat down heavily on a bound stack of newspapers on a step outside a newsstand. “Does that sound like we should be on Jerry Springer? ‘Man Leaves Wife for Cousin.’ ” She laughed and fell off the stack of newspapers, bumping her head against the door to the newsstand. He bent to help her back up but she swatted his hand away, sitting up against the door, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I was crazy about him. Shouldn’t that be enough? No. ‘We couldn’t help it,’ he said. ‘You understand.’ Understand what? ‘Love,’ he said. ‘Love doesn’t recognize …’ ”

“What?” Edward Everett asked.

“Love doesn’t recognize … F*ck, I don’t remember. Something about the two of them at fourteen and innocent love enduring and blah blah blah.”

“You should go back,” he said, gently. “Ronnie’s leaving and you’d regret—”

She gazed up at him. “You must think I’m crazy,” she said. “I mean, I don’t even know you. You’re the man who comes over for chicken on Sundays. Chicken Ed.”

“Saint Chicken Ed,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you back.” When she stood, she leaned into him; he thought it was to keep her balance, but she put her arms around his neck and pressed against him, moving her face upward toward his. “You’re just drunk,” he said, stepping back from her, and helped her to the car. When they got back to the party, she bounded out, holding the bag of ice aloft, not waiting for him. “The Icewoman Cometh,” she announced brightly, and the guests applauded. Edward Everett took her keys inside, left them on the counter, and went home.

Two weeks later, the evening after he returned from a road trip, she knocked on his back door as he sat at the kitchen table, studying his game logs.

“I saw the light on,” she said, holding a six-pack of Coors before her. “Price of admission?” After he invited her in, she twisted two cans out of their plastic yokes, set them on the table and, without asking, opened his refrigerator and put the rest of the beer onto the top shelf. “Whoa,” she said, swinging the door wider. “Are you on a hunger strike?” The contents of the refrigerator were spare: a twelve-pack of Diet Coke, half a package of American cheese, a quart of half-and-half; in a drawer, two molding oranges.

“I just got back after ten days,” he said, closing the door.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get off on that kind of foot.” She picked up her beer from the table, but then set it back down without opening it and leaned against the counter. “I thought about never bringing this up,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes.

“What?”

She gave him a sideways look, one he would eventually come to know well, the look that would tell him that she knew he was holding something back. “It,” she said. “I wasn’t going to bring it up, but then you’d be at Sunday dinner sometime and …”

“And what?”

“I don’t know. And you’d tell everyone. You’d say, ‘Gosh, Renee. Remember that time you got so drunk at Ronnie and April’s party and you tried to kiss me?’ ”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“I know. Or pretty much thought you wouldn’t. My therapist—” She sighed. “Christ. I haven’t even told my folks I’m seeing a therapist. But here I am, spilling everything.”

“You just got divorced,” he said. “A lot of people do that after a divorce.”

“You mean, a lot of weak people do that.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She shrugged. “Defensiveness is another of my foibles. Keep a list.” She picked her beer up, opened it and took a sip. “This is probably a mistake, after last time.”

“I’ll stop you at one,” he said.

“Oh, I see your game. You just want to keep more of my beer for yourself. Anyway, my therapist said I needed to confront the demons that most frighten me. Her words.”

“See, you confronted what you were afraid of and it turned out to be nothing.”

“As it usually does,” she said. “What’s all this?” She pointed her beer can toward the cards spread out on the table.

“Long answer or short?”

“Another of the symptoms of my neurosis is insomnia, so the longer the better.”

“Not even an insomniac wants to hear the long,” he said. “Short. It’s homework.”

But she’d insisted; they had sat at the table and he had started explaining the cards to her. An hour later, after he had let her copy his starting pitcher’s statistics from the scorebook onto a card, she pointed to the column that noted his ratio of fly ball outs to ground ball outs. “In a small park, he would get bombed,” she said.

“You’ve done this before,” he said.

“Just a quick study.”

“I wish Winslow would be as quick a study, then he’d understand why I keep telling him he needs to stop coming inside so much to certain hitters.” He began gathering the cards to put them back into the accordion folder.

“Thanks for this,” she said. “You were pretty brave, letting a crazy woman into your house in the middle of the night.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “And you’re not so crazy.”

When she got up to go, he walked her to the door and she had surprised him with a hug. It was quick and asexual at first, like the hug between an uncle and a niece, her hips back and to the side, but then something shifted between them and then, bang, they were kissing, the first time he had kissed a woman in a year at that point, and he was thinking, She’s not drunk this time. Then thinking, She’s on the rebound and she’s your neighbor’s daughter. Then thinking, Stop thinking. Then, bang, they were dating; bang, they got married and she moved into his house and he got her a dog that wasn’t smart enough to know he was her dog and not his dog; then, bang, he came home from a road trip to find her moved out.

Next door, at his former in-laws’, someone let out a loud belch that echoed, everyone laughing. If it were anyone else, he could ask them to take it inside, but if he went to the Duboises’, it would be awkward. The day after he’d come home from the road trip and learned that Renee had moved out, he had seen Rhonda in her yard, rolling the trash can in from the curb, and he’d raised his hand in greeting, a gesture he had done perfunctorily for years, even before she was his mother-in-law. But this time, she had turned her head away as if his gesture embarrassed her. Too, Renee might be there; the notion struck him that she might be with another man. He saw her sitting close to him, her hand on his knee as she once would have had hers on his, taking a sip from the man’s beer can as she used to from his.

It was nearly twelve-thirty when the dog finally stopped quaking and laid his head onto his front paws, exhausted from the seizure. Edward Everett knew he ought to get to bed but, as he often was after a game, he was too wired. He sat at the kitchen table and, with Grizzly sleeping at his feet, got out the accordion file containing his game log cards, opened the scorebook and started to make his entries.

The game had been miserable. When he and Webber reached the park, it was the bottom of the third inning and he could tell it was going badly even without seeing the scoreboard: in the dugout, the players slumped against the back wall, stunned. It was eight–two, all but one of Clinton’s runs unearned. Collier’s box was empty save for a thin high school kid who slouched in an aisle seat, slurping a maxi-sized soda. Edward Everett had no idea how many fans had been there at first pitch but by the time he and Webber arrived, the crowd was thin, wide gaps among the clusters of people. In the top row just beyond the left field foul line, a solitary couple huddled under a stadium blanket, the nearest fans to them fifty yards off.

When he sat next to Dominici on the bench, his coach handed him the scorebook without a comment, tapping the column where he had been tracking errors by making pencil ticks. Six.

“Really?” Edward Everett said. Dominici shook his head; in sadness, not denial. Edward Everett flipped the book over to the side on which Dominici had been scoring Clinton’s innings at the plate. To his chagrin, the story was there: E-4, E-4, E-4, E-4, E-4, E-4. Error on the second baseman.

“How is this possible?” he asked.

“They smelled the blood.” Dominici shrugged. “They’ve been punching the ball to right all game.”

He glanced down the bench toward Nelson, who sat at the far end, his head bowed. Edward Everett handed the book to Dominici and walked the length of the dugout toward Nelson. As he passed each player, they all looked away as if they were complicit in some collective guilt. He sat next to Nelson, who lowered his head even more. Edward Everett regarded him. Nelson was a kid. His fingernails were uneven and caked with dirt; his uniform pants were mottled with grass stains and there were pinholes in his white sanitary socks.

“I’m sorry, Skip,” he said in a quiet voice.

“You’re not a second baseman,” he said, and added, “Ross.” Nelson looked up at him. Edward Everett never used his players’ first names: it was “Nelson” or “Nels.”

He wanted to tell Nelson that it was Webber who’d failed them, Webber who had all the talent but not much of anything else, as if the human body only had so much capacity for qualities and his talent had pushed everything else out of him: dedication, responsibility. Edward Everett wished he had a player with Webber’s talent and Nelson’s everything else. If life were a movie or if it compensated people like Nelson for selflessness, he’d have been the star of the game. His line in the box score would read three hits in three at-bats with five runs driven in. But life wasn’t a movie. Edward Everett considered sending Nelson out to left field the next inning, letting him play where he felt comfortable. But the kid was so defeated, his six errors would weigh on him in the outfield, would weigh on him at the plate. Instead, he said, “Why don’t you call it a night, Nels. Head on home. Tomorrow …” He shrugged. But Nelson stayed.

Now, at his kitchen table, Edward Everett shuffled through the game log cards, looking for Nelson’s, and began entering the numbers from the game—the half-dozen errors, the two times at bat and the string of zeros all the way across, save for the column for strikeouts, where he wrote a “2.” He looked at the other side of the scorebook, running his finger down the notations for each Clinton player’s time at the plate, looking for any four–threes, any four–sixes, any six–fours—any notation that would indicate that Nelson had made a single play in the field, a single assist, a single put-out, but there were none. Clinton had hit six ground balls to him and he’d kicked all six.

Meanwhile, Webber had played as if his fight with Katrina had never happened. Edward Everett had considered punishing him, keeping him on the bench, but with Nelson out of the lineup, there was no choice. In three times at bat, he’d had a double and a triple, and in the ninth, although the game was ten–four by then, he’d dashed with his back to the plate into the gap in left center, dived, caught a flare that few players on any level might have been able to reach and then, from his knees, threw a strike to second base for what should have been a double play, the Clinton runner leaving too soon. The umpire, however, had clearly not expected Webber to make the play and was out of position for the call; he ruled the runner safe although the throw beat him by two steps.

While for Webber it was just one more night in what should be his inevitable march toward the major leagues, there was no way to mitigate what happened for Nelson. Not in the world of Marc Johansen, MS, MBA. No way to mitigate the long string of mediocrity on Nelson’s game log card for the season. His willingness to embarrass himself at second, suffer the boos of the crowd and the disappointment of his teammates—because Webber decided that fighting with a woman who wasn’t interested in him was more important than showing up—didn’t add points to his .227 batting average, didn’t compensate for the long string of zeros in the columns for doubles, triples, home runs, runs batted in.

He slid Nelson’s card back into the expandable file, knowing that soon there would be no card for him there because Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, didn’t have patience for human interest stories. Hell, he realized, it wasn’t just Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, who didn’t care for human interest stories: it was baseball itself.