The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  The drink relaxed Edward Everett and he watched the evening soften and darken. He thought, If I stick this out, take over my uncle’s territory when he retires, I could have my own house overlooking a pond, where my own wife would bring me a Manhattan just as I finished recording the evidence of our good fortune.

  That month, as his uncle suggested, he began buying stock in the company. Many evenings, he went home to his apartment, showered, changed into Levi’s and a T-shirt, and walked down the block to a diner, stopping at a newspaper box just outside to buy a copy of The Wheeling Intelligencer. He sat in a booth beside the front window and, after ordering, turned first to the stock pages and, running his finger down the column of agate type, found the symbol for the mill, GnFlr, to check the closing price for the day before. It rarely varied more than a quarter point, but was up three of every five days. It gave him satisfaction: partly it was watching his investment growing, but also partly because he had a sense that he was participating in something larger than himself, something he couldn’t understand fully, owning pieces of the American economy. Within two years, he estimated, the value of his stock would reach several thousand dollars, nearly as much as he earned for some seasons in the minor leagues: so much money for doing nothing, checking a box on a form that sat in a file drawer in an office somewhere he’d never been. In five or six years, he could cash it in and buy a house—a small one, yes, but a house nonetheless. It struck him that he had been foolish to give so many of his years to a game that gave so little back, realizing that, only half a year removed from it, he was already thinking of his life in terms of investment and return. If he’d gone to work for his uncle six or seven years ago, he’d have that house now.

  As he ate his dinner—generally fried chicken and mashed potatoes but sometimes a chopped steak and fries—he went through the newspaper, reading nearly every page: the national and international news, the local news, the features, the comic strips, but avoiding the sports section. Merely glancing at an article about baseball was something painful, even as he thought he’d moved beyond it, like seeing the published engagement announcement of a girl he once dated. It was enough to remind him that, for the first time since he’d been eighteen, he wasn’t part of the baseball machinery in some way. In the past, he had a sense of the game as a giant Rube Goldberg mechanism, with every player, himself included, a cog: a third baseman in Atlanta tears a hamstring trying to beat out a ground ball and goes down for six weeks; the Braves trade with the White Sox for a third baseman and a shortstop from Richmond. In the Sox system, a pitcher and a middle infielder get their release to make room for the players the Sox acquired. And on and on, gears turning, levers pulling, the machinery grinding, hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye.

  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 Ever
ett 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.