The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  “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 fuck 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 … Fuck, 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 p
itch 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.

  Chapter Eighteen

  On his sixtieth birthday, the drains backed up in the ballpark. Collier called him at four-thirty in the morning, waking him from a dream that dissipated almost immediately: something about his father and a navy blue jacket that was too tight.

  “It’s a mess,” Collier said without returning Edward Everett’s groggy hello. “It’s a shit hole. Literally.”

  After the call, Edward Everett got up and realized that the power had gone out in his house in a storm he had slept through. The face of his alarm clock was blank and when he clicked the lamp on the bedside table, nothing happened. He took a shower that began as lukewarm and became cold before he had rinsed his hair, and shaved by standing a flashlight upend on the vanity, leaning in close enough to the mirror that his breath fogged it over. The bulb cast a pale cone of light toward the ceiling that reflected in the mirror, making his face seem gray and indistinct. He was sure that he’d left patches of whiskers on his cheek and neck, but it would have to do.

  In the kitchen, he filled the dog’s water and food dishes, and went to let him out into the backyard to do his business but found that a bough from his oak tree had fallen onto the steps to the yard. He tried lifting the bough but it was surprisingly heavy. He gave it a shove but realized that it was not entirely severed from the tree and that, to move it, he would have to get a saw and cut the flesh that still connected the bough to the trunk. That would have to wait until later.

  He took Grizzly to the front yard. As the dog trotted over the lawn searching for a place to do his business, Edward Everett surveyed the damage from the storm. Next door, the Duboises’ Bradford pear had snapped and lay at the curb. At Mrs. Greiner’s across the street, the limb of a maple lay across her walk and there were branches down in other yards as well. Not a light shone: not the porch light that the Maxwells left on every night because their twenty-year-old son worked the overnight shift at Walmart, not even the streetlight in front of the Duboises’ that Ron Senior had once shot out with a BB gun in a fit of love for Rhonda when she had the flu and complained she couldn’t sleep because of the light.

  Much of the rest of the town was in similar condition. For a long stretch of his drive to the ballpark, it was dark, traffic lights out for blocks. At some intersections, the police had set up temporary stop signs in the middle of the road, and down one street, Algeier, he could see the work lights of a Central Iowa Power Cooperative crew, hear the generator rumbling, watch a workman riding a cherry picker up alongside a utility pole where there was a downed wire.

  At the ballpark, he pulled into the lot beside Collier’s silver Escalade. The only other vehicle there was the rusted, fifteen-year-old powder blue Plymouth mini-van that Pete Winston, the night watchman, drove. Edward Everett found them in the home clubhouse, standing at the edge of the darkened shower room, the beams of their flashlights bouncing off the walls and the black pool of sewage.

  “I can’t tell if it’s going down,” Collier said.

  Winston crouched like the catcher he once had been and focused his flashlight on the center of the room, where the drain was.

  “This really sucks the sow’s teat,” Collier said when he saw Edward Everett. The shower room was perhaps three inches deep in black ooze; flecks of
paper floated on the surface and the stench was so overpowering that Edward Everett had to cover his nose with his hand to keep from choking. Around the drain, the sewage bubbled slowly.

  “I can’t afford any more work on this fucking white elephant of a ballpark,” Collier said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “That’s what it is, all right,” Winston said, standing up, wiping his hands on the legs of his jeans. “The visitor clubhouse is the same. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault, Win,” Collier said. The three stood at the edge of the shower room for another moment, staring at the sludge. Edward Everett may have been mistaken but it seemed it had receded while they were there; the line of concrete that was merely coated instead of submerged seemed to be as much as two inches wide now, whereas it had perhaps been an inch when he’d arrived. Still, at the rate it was sliding back down the drain, it could be hours until it was gone. Then someone would have to clean it up.

  As if Winston had read his mind, he said, “You know, Claire and I would come in with mops and some bleach and scour the place real good if that’d help.”

  “I’d give you a hundred dollars,” Collier said.

  “Shoot, Mr. Collier. I’d feel like I was taking advantage of someone’s misfortune if you paid me that much. Make it fifty.”

  Collier regarded Winston. If Edward Everett hadn’t been there he was certain Collier would have taken the offer but, glancing at Edward Everett, he said, “No, we’ll keep it the hundred.”

  Later, after Winston left them, Collier and Edward Everett stood together in the parking lot. Suddenly the hillside above the ballpark became illuminated as, all along it, the lights in a hundred houses came on. Near the highest point of the hill was Collier’s home, a massive, five-thousand-square-foot place on an acre lot. The entire western side of the house was a sunroom with a vaulted ceiling. As the lights there went on, the west wall gleaming, he said, “Shit,” and pulled his cellphone out of his pants pocket. “Ginger, turn off the damn lights. We’re burning a hundred dollars’ worth of electricity and it’s five-thirty in the fucking morning.” He ended the call and put his phone back into his pocket. Edward Everett had no idea whether he had actually spoken to his wife or just left a message, but a moment later the house went dark.