The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  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 shingl
e 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 fucking 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 asshole …” 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.

  Chapter Twelve

  On the last Sunday of May, Edward Everett, Connie, Billy and Connie’s father, Walter, drove to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play the San Diego Padres. It was Billy’s tenth birthday and he had never seen Major League Baseball before. First pitch was one-fifteen and the drive was an hour and a half but they left at eight-thirty because Billy was so anxious.

  The morning was beautiful: the sky clear. In the thin strip of the West Virginia panhandle they had to cross between Ohio and Pennsylvania, they saw a half-dozen hot-air balloons drifting over the hills; one, decorated like a round American flag, was so low that they could make out the three people in its gondola, a woman and two men; the men wore tuxedos and top hats and the woman a dress that reminded Edward Everett of Gone with the Wind. Almost at the moment their car was alongside the balloon, a gust of wind caught one of the men’s hats and it went sailing, end over end, skittering on the air currents, passing directly over them. Billy rolled down his window and unsnapped his seatbelt. “Hey,” Connie said, thrusting an arm across the seat toward him. He poked his head out of the rear window and waved furiously at the people in the gondola, but they weren’t looking at him and, when the car rounded a bend, the balloons were lost to their sight, save for the uppermost arc of one painted to promote an insurance agency.