The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  Edward Everett hovered in the background, watching his uncle work. If someone glanced in his direction, he would give a smile and say, “I’m just here to learn from the pro.” His uncle had told him to say that. “Jokes,” he said, shrugging. Jokes break the ice. Jokes make people like you. Jokes make the sale.

  In his second week, at a family-run bakery in Otto, overlooking the Ohio River, his uncle drew him into the conversation for the first time. It was a sale that was not going well. The owner—a thin young man with a face pockmarked by acne scars, who wore his pants high on his waist, secured by bright yellow suspenders—countered every claim Edward Everett’s uncle made with one of his own: Our current supplier gives a larger discount. Our current supplier can respond to special orders within forty-eight hours. It was past one in the afternoon and Edward Everett was hungry, leaning against a stainless steel counter, where the man had been wrapping loaves of fresh-baked pumpernickel, and the scent of the bread made his stomach gurgle. Through the door to the sales floor, he was watching the owner’s sister chat with customers, pluck sugar cookies and banana nut muffins from the display case and drop them into white bags. She was pretty—how such a person could be related to someone as unappealing as the owner was beyond his understanding. She was twenty-one or twenty-two and reminded him slightly of Julie: redheaded, wearing a sweater with a V-neck that showed the curve of her breasts disappearing into her robin’s egg blue bra whenever she bent to fetch a sheet of baker’s tissue from the shelves behind the register. He was wondering how he could manage to talk to her rather than her unpleasant brother, when he realized his uncle was talking about him.

  “Ed would know,” he was saying.

  “What?” he said.

  “How the Pirates are going to do this year.”

  He had no idea; he hadn’t paid attention to the game since the letter from the Cardinals arrived. Every week, The Sporting News showed up in the mail (a gift from his mother) but he had not opened a single issue. In one, he knew, in an agate type column listing player transactions, was his name, followed by the single word: “Released.” The rest of the paper would be optimistic projections for the season: the promising rookies, the feel-good stories about veterans making gallant comebacks, articles about players he knew. He could tolerate none of it.

  “If their pitching holds up, they have a shot,” he said, cringing because he sounded like the TV sportscasters he despised: jovial and slick-haired, spouting clichés that he and his teammates laughed about in the clubhouse. You have to score if you’re going to win in this game. You play them one at a time.

  “Ed here played for the Cardinals,” his uncle said.

  “That so?” the baker said, dubious.

  “Yes,” Edward Everett said. In the shop, the baker’s sister was leaning across the glass counter toward a man wearing a weathered leather cowboy hat over stringy blond hair. “Yes,” Edward Everett repeated in a tone that held more defiance than he intended.

  “Ed got hurt last year in a game … where was it?” his uncle asked.

  “Montreal,” Edward Everett said. In the shop, the baker’s sister playfully tugged on the cowboy’s hair. The cowboy grabbed her hand and she laughed, snatching it away.

  “Really?” the baker said. “I played in high school. But that was—man, the Cardinals. Brad Gibson. Lou Brock.”

  Bob Gibson, Edward Everett wanted to correct him, but a look from his uncle prevented him from doing so.

  “Yeah, Gibson, Brock. All those guys,” Edward Everett’s uncle said, reaching up to squeeze the back of Edward Everett’s neck in an affectionate manner. “Maybe you guys could compare notes sometime.”

  “Sure,” the baker said.

  His baseball career became as much a means of closing deals as were the bits of information on the cards in his uncle’s file box or the jokes he told. At first, Edward Everett felt uneasy, both because his ambition had become a kind of currency to exchange for contracts for a half ton or a ton of flour a month and because of the false impressions he left with people, talking about Brock and Gibson as if he knew them, although he had never spoken more than a word to Brock and had not actually played with Gibson, who had retired the season before his one-and-only in the major leagues. He had, in fact, only been in the room with him once, at a dinner the organization held for Gibson the spring the pitcher announced he was retiring. It was in the St. Petersburg Hilton, in a banquet hall decorated with a life-sized cardboard image of Gibson delivering a pitch, heaving it as he did with the entirety of his being, a wonderment of balance, able to stay upright at the same time he was flinging not merely the ball but his self toward the hitter. As a minor league player, Edward Everett had been at a table near the kitchen, and several times a server carrying out trays of steak dinners banged into his chair. He and the other minor leaguers had been in awe at the dinner, speaking among themselves in quiet voices as if they were in a church, while Gibson’s former teammates at tables near the dais told loud stories and every once in a while erupted in raucous laughter. They were men used to deference and privilege and Edward Everett watched them, wondering if he ever would belong among them. At one point, a stranger opened the door and peeked in: a gaunt man with his greasy black hair in an obvious comb-over. He gave a slow blink and Edward Everett caught his eye. He realized that, to the man with the comb-over, he was no different than the men at the loud tables, part of the fraternity. He leaned into the player beside him and made a comment about the waitress who’d just brushed against him laying a roll onto his plate. The player laughed and Edward Everett glanced again at the man with the comb-over, who blushed, shutting the door.

  The bakers and grocers in his uncle’s territory were, in their own ways, that man with bad hair. They drove Cadillacs or Lincolns; they spent January in Florida or Arizona; they earned ten times what Edward Everett ever had but, in his presence, they became again their boyish selves who had dreamed of playing ball, asking, What’s it like up there? as if he had been to a country their passports would not allow them to enter.

  He told them stories—some true, some embellished, some patently false.

  “Never disappoint,” his uncle told him, and he didn’t. If they asked about Gibson, he gave them the Gibson he thought they wanted. If they wanted a Gibson who was a fierce competitor, he described a Gibson who knocked down a hitter with a high-and-tight pitch; if they wanted a friendly Gibson, he invented a story about Gibson fronting a rookie meal money, telling him to forget about paying it back.

  In the first week of February, his uncle took him to lunch at a country club he belonged to in St. Martinsville. It was past the noon rush and the tables were mostly empty, white-coated busboys gathering tablecloths and replacing them with fresh linens. They knew his uncle there; the hostess chatted with him in an easy way as she led them to a table beside a large window that looked out onto the golf course. The temperature was in the twenties but the course was free of snow and outside a foursome trailed up a slight rise in the tenth fairway, pulling wheeled golf carts behind them.

  “Gotta admire the passion,” his uncle said, nodding toward the golfers and taking a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, extracting one and lighting it with a silver lighter engraved with his initials and the logo of the flour company.

  A waitress brought a tumbler of scotch and water on the rocks and set it in front of his uncle although Edward Everett had not heard him order a drink.

  “Thanks, dear,” his uncle said, giving her a slight pat on her hip.

  “Would you …” she said, nodding to Edward Everett.

  “Yes, he would,” his uncle said, and the waitress left them there.

  “I don’t really—” Edward Everett said.

  “Today you do,” his uncle said, reaching into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and pulling out a cream-colored business envelope with the word “Ed” typed where an address would be. His uncle held it out for him and gestured with a slight nod that he should take it. “Go ahead a
nd open it,” he said. Inside was a payroll check for January from the mill: one thousand thirty-seven dollars and eleven cents, along with a check stub enumerating deductions for Social Security, state and federal taxes. Aside from his signing bonus ten years earlier he had never held a single check for so much money.

  “In two more months, you can get the health insurance,” his uncle said. “You can also sign up for payroll deductions for the stock plan.”

  The waitress came back with a drink for him and his uncle picked up his own glass and clinked it against Edward Everett’s. “L’chaim,” he said, taking a swallow. Edward Everett took a drink himself. He had expected it to burn but it didn’t. Instead, it filled his entire body with a sense of warmth.

  “Your mom asked if I would take you under my wing. She’s had a hard time. Even before your dad—may he rest in peace.” His uncle traced a perfunctory sign of the cross. “I thought, Hell, I’ll do it for a month, tell her we gave it our best shot, but …” His uncle shrugged. “You’re raw but you have more of a gift than you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you do when we go to see someone?”

  “I pretty much listen—” Edward Everett was going to say, to you, but his uncle interrupted with enthusiasm.

  “Exactamundo. You listen. But the other thing you do is, those stories are great.”

  Edward Everett blushed. I make them up, he wanted to confess.

  “I know they’re bullshit,” his uncle said. “I know something about who played when. Roger Maris quit, what? Ten years ago? And Gibson: the guy would have to be schizophrenic as hell if he was all the people you described.” His uncle gave a laugh that shook his entire body. “People don’t buy flour. Flour’s flour. Our flour. Their flour. This other guy’s flour. They buy you. Well, mostly I like to think they buy me, but …” He laughed. “I just had one of the best months I’ve had in, shit, I don’t know when.”

  Edward Everett wondered how much his uncle earned if the mill was paying him more than twelve hundred dollars gross for trailing him like a lost puppy. He had always thought of his uncle as a fat, ridiculous man, especially compared with his own father, who had done all the calisthenics he’d asked his football players to do up until the day he hung himself when Edward Everett was twelve. At family parties or Fourth of July picnics, whenever the two stood side by side in the requisite photos, they seemed like random strangers caught in the frame of the camera’s lens, not men who had shared the same bed until the older one, Edward Everett’s father, turned ten. Yet, for all of Edward Everett’s father’s fame in the town—for all of the photos of him in the back pages of the weekly newspaper where it ran the sports articles, for all of the backslapping by the men of the town whenever Edward Everett went out with him—it was, he realized, his uncle who was successful, the silly man with the belly people joked about (How long are you going to carry that child, Stan?) rather than his father, whom people compared to Gary Cooper. So many of his parents’ conversations suddenly made sense: when they needed a new transmission for their nine-year-old Buick, when the water heater went out the day before a Thanksgiving when his parents were hosting seventeen people for dinner. Let’s ask Stan. Let’s ask Stan. As a boy, Edward Everett had thought his uncle some sort of savant to whom his parents went when they were stumped and needed guidance. Why, I think I’d take it to a mechanic. Why, I think it would be a good idea to call a plumber. Sitting with him in the country club, as the waitress set identical plates of filet mignon, roasted red potatoes and asparagus in front of them, he realized for the first time that it wasn’t his uncle’s wisdom his parents were after, but his generosity: the First National Bank of Stanley Yates.

  “You didn’t have to do this,” Edward Everett said, cutting into his steak.

  His uncle glanced up, steak sauce speckling his chin and cheeks. “Family’s family,” he said, picking up an asparagus spear with his fingers and folding it whole into his mouth.

  Chapter Ten

  His uncle began letting him take the lead on some sales calls, although he botched many at first. While his uncle knew unit prices and shipping lead times, Edward Everett had to page slowly through tabbed sections of the catalog binder his uncle had given him and calculate quantity breaks by doing math on a scratch pad tucked into the binder. Often, in his haste to quote a price, he made an error and it was only after he had told it to the customer that he would realize he had forgotten to carry a digit from one column to the next or had forgotten that two thousand pounds made a ton, not one thousand. Still, his uncle was patient and explained his awkwardness using baseball references, calling him “Rookie,” joking about giving him a tryout. His income continued to rise. By March, his check was for nearly fifteen hundred dollars.

  They went to a men’s clothing store in Braverton, where his uncle helped him pick out three suits: a charcoal pinstripe, a navy blue and a tan. A tiny man who may have been in his eighties measured Edward Everett, standing on tiptoe to stretch the tape from shoulder to shoulder. His touch was so delicate and he moved the measuring tape from shoulder to arm and around his neck so quickly, Edward Everett wondered if he was merely making a show of it, but when he picked up the suits they fit him better than anything else he had ever owned. It came to more than five hundred dollars but when he flinched at the bill, his uncle said, “It’s not an expense; it’s an investment.”

  He moved out of his mother’s house, renting an apartment upstairs from the weekly paper; every Tuesday morning at three, the roar and vibration of the press shook him from his sleep. He bought a car, a four-year-old Ford Maverick. “Buy American,” his uncle advised. “A lot of these guys fought in the big one and wouldn’t like to see you pull up in a piece of Jap crap.” Despite his car, his uncle still picked him up in the morning because it made little sense for them to drive separately, since they were going to the same bakers and grocers and purchasing agents’ offices.

  On the first Monday in April, his uncle brought Edward Everett to his house so he could begin teaching him the bookkeeping part of their work. Edward Everett had never been to his uncle’s house—not this one anyway. When his father was alive, his uncle had lived not far from them, in a modest three-bedroom place on a tree-filled lot. Some years before Edward Everett began working with him, however, he had bought ten acres that had been part of a prosperous dairy farm that once belonged to the district’s congressman, who had to sell it to pay legal bills when he got into trouble for skimming campaign contributions for a D.C. townhouse for his mistress. Edward Everett’s uncle and aunt had built a sprawling ranch house on the property: three bedrooms, three full baths, a large dining room with a vaulted ceiling. His uncle’s office was at the back of the house, where a large picture window looked out onto a pond the congressman had stocked with trout.

  It was after seven in the evening and the sun was setting on the other side of a windbreak of maples on the far edge of the pond. Three ducks settled onto the water and paddled lazily. Edward Everett could hear his aunt in the kitchen, making dinner: the creak of the hinges on the broiler as she opened it to turn the steaks they were going to eat, and then the juices of the steaks sizzling. As she worked, she sang a song quietly but still loud enough that Edward Everett could make out that she didn’t know many of the words: “The moment I dada before I dada dadada, I say a little prayer for you.” At his desk, Edward Everett’s uncle leafed through a thick red-and-black ledger, each page a neat line of names and columns of quantities, dollars and dates. His uncle invited him to sit in his leather chair to enter the day’s orders and gave him a fountain pen, a gold-and-tortoise Visconti that weighed more than any pen Edward Everett had ever held. He took his time, as if he had never written a letter or a figure before, making each stroke deliberately, nervous about ruining the precision of the other lines on the page. The totals staggered him: he knew they had been selling what he considered a lot of flour but, adding the figures, he saw that their sales over the two and a half weeks record
ed on that page approached fifty thousand dollars.

  “Hon, I’m making a Manhattan for myself,” his aunt called from the kitchen. “Can I make one for you and Ed?”

  “Sure,” his uncle said, not waiting for Edward Everett to answer.

  Edward Everett’s aunt brought the drinks to the office and they sipped them, his aunt and uncle side by side on a leather couch, Edward Everett in a matching upholstered wing chair. His aunt and uncle chatted but Edward Everett didn’t really listen, catching only snatches of their conversation: a banquet at which his uncle was going to receive some sort of award from the diocese for fund-raising, a friend who’d had quadruple bypass surgery and who, three days out of the hospital, was already smoking a pack a day. His aunt, who was heavy with a round face, was not what he would think of as an attractive woman, but it was obvious his uncle loved her by the way he touched one of her plump knees to make a point or when he laughed at a story she told him about a misunderstanding at the butcher’s.