“They’ll come anyway,” I said.
“We’re playing the Cards on Saturday,” Jake noted, as if that would mean something. Lee just stared at him. “They’re only one game ahead right now.”
“I’m sure,” Lee said coldly, “that the team can do it without you sitting on the sidelines, ok?”
Jake had just had knee surgery, or at least the surgery was still recent enough that he wasn’t allowed to play. He said nothing, steering us out of the city and toward the countryside where he and Lee had purchased an estate. I lived in an apartment, or if I was feeling particularly sophisticated and continental, a flat. They lived on an estate.
“How much is this going to cost?” I asked, thinking of my family’s penchant for silk-filled coffins as plump and comfortable as a newly-made bed. There is something about death that makes normally thrifty Southerners suddenly want to start throwing money at things like the flower girl at a big wedding. For a moment I wondered if I could talk my sister into going with simplicity and honesty for once in her life, but the thought passed as quickly as it had come. My mother’s funeral was a magisterial thing, complete with a choir and white-gloved pall-bearers. It was like burying a Kennedy.
“Daddy had insurance,” Lee said. “It’s covered.”
“So,” Jake began, punching up the speed now that we had left the city. “How’s teaching?” Beyond my window, the strip malls and strip joints dissolved into a solid wall of green, dripping from the trees and sliding along pastures still dotted with humped cattle. Even the foliage was melting and it was only May.
“Fine,” I answered. “I’m really fond of my students.” I blushed all over. It was amazing how easily I could embarrass myself in my own head. “I mean, they’re doing some good writing.” This was a lie. College writing classes were where students learned they were crappy writers. They wouldn’t be any good until they’d been gone for a while, immersed in the real world and soaked in the everyday tragedy of bills and children and work. But by then, of course, it would be too late. They would be out of time.
“That’s great,” he said and suddenly we all had nothing to say to one another. Not an hour off the plane and I was desperately wishing I could somehow bury my father without talking to my family. Mercifully, the drive was almost over. Jake steered the massive car through the narrow, kudzu-covered gate that was far too ostentatious for any house, even that one. “We’re here,” he noted, and indeed we were, arriving into a grand Gothic novel. Lee lived well, in the family tradition. The house covered the land like an enormous marshmallow, white and rounded and mushy in the heat. There were enough Spanish-style roof tiles to pave an entire town. Jake stopped the car in front of the front door, which was hidden somewhere behind a massive curved portico complete with eight columns in whatever the least-decorated style was. My mind supplied “doric,” which just made me feel overeducated and therefore, poorer. He could have parked the car in one of the fifteen or so spots in their garage, which was really more of a car warehouse filled with softly shining antiques lined up like a giant Pez dispenser, but apparently Lee expected to be dropped at the door.
“Where are the boys?” I asked. Stepping out into the heat was like walking into a greenhouse.
“At school,” Lee said with the air of someone being extraordinarily patient with a stupid person.
“Of course.”
Jake heaved my suitcases out of the back and we scuffled into the cool, dark air of the interior. Leaving my bags by the door, Jake and I immediately collapsed on opposite couches in the family room, fanning ourselves like patrons at the opera. Lee stood in the kitchen, flipping idly through her mail.
“Damn,” she said suddenly. “Jake, come here please.”
He stared at me for a moment, perhaps hoping I could save him, but I didn’t know what to say to spare him from Lee’s wrath, much less did I have the energy to do it after the heat.
“What, honey?”
“Here,” she hissed, pointing to a spot directly in front of her. I looked away then, listening to them even though I didn’t really want to any more. “What’s this?”
There was a moment’s silence as he examined whatever she’d handed him.
“I... I guess I just didn’t remember to... do it.”
“Clearly,” she spat. “For heaven’s sake, Jake, do I have to do everything? Do I? You know what this is doing to me.”
“I know, honey,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He sounded like he might cry again. I had never liked men who cried. Never mind that it was a terrible double standard and that I, like all single women, perpetually bitched about the general lack of sensitivity among today’s males, but when it came down to it, crying just seemed girly. I stood up and tried to slip past them.
“Where are you going?” Lee said. “The boys will be home any minute. Don’t you want to see them?”
“I’m just going to go put my bags upstairs,” I told her, snatching up the suitcases before either of them could say anything.
Lee’s house had large, white bedrooms. Almost every house I’d ever slept in had white bedroom walls, but nowhere else was everything so snowy, so downy, so obviously opulent. If I had a guest, they slept on the couch. I sank slowly into the enormous comforter covering the king bed in one of the two spare rooms – I liked this one for the veranda, though the other one had a hot tub in the bathroom – and stared up at the shifting patterns of light on the ceiling. The door slid open almost silently across the thick carpet and my sister’s nyloned feet padded to the edge of the bed, then paused.
“Yeah?” I didn’t turn and she didn’t sit down.
“I thought we could go over tomorrow and deal with dad’s stuff.” Her voice was the same modulated purr as when she was talking about new curtains or their summer cabin in Maine.
When I sat up and examined her, her cheeks and the tip of her narrow nose were a sheer, rubbed pink. She smiled at me, and though for most people, it would have been more of a grimace, it seemed as suddenly familiar as my father’s famously toothy grin. “Okay,” I agreed, and reached out to squeeze one of her brittle hands. “Let’s go home.” For the first time since I arrived, perhaps even since I had last flown away from this place, it seemed like an ideal place to be.
Best Wishes
1998
Three days after Billy Wells had his heart attack in the dugout of the University ball field, Ben got his wish for his own office, but by then, he no longer wanted it. It was horrifying, he mused, watching Lee pack her father’s personal belongings into a large cardboard box, how quickly over twenty years of habitation could be erased from a space.
“I’ll just leave all this stuff,” she said, addressing the filing cabinets. She seemed to be refusing to look at him. He wasn’t sure if this was a recent thing or something she had always done and he had simply never needed her to speak directly to his face before.
“Ok,” Ben said, realizing he was not even sure what the cabinets contained. In the seventeen years he had worked with Billy Wells, he had never had occasion to open one of the dark green metal drawers. It bothered him to know now that he could just jerk one open and see what was inside. Lee stared for a moment at the small cactus in a brown plastic pot sitting at the edge of Billy’s desk.
“You want this?” she asked and handed it to him without waiting for an answer.
Ben had never particularly cared for the eldest Wells daughter. She was haughty and distant, like cheerleaders in high school. But in this moment, as she scraped up a small pile of paperclips and deposited them back in the drawer, he was almost overwhelmed with the urge to comfort her, if only because it would comfort him as well. Grown men weren’t supposed to grieve openly, but to suck it up manfully by finding the nearest bar and downing just enough beer to avoid poisoning themselves. This left Ben, who had stopped drinking entirely when he was twenty-eight, with very little to fall back on.
It had genuinely never occurred to Ben that Billy might die. The morning of their last game, Be
n had walked out onto his porch at precisely seven o’clock and seen Billy chugging up his drive, sweat coloring his stomach and back in dark stains against his blue DeSoto t-shirt. The weekday morning jog was a ritual for Billy, and Ben had never known him to miss a single day in fourteen years unless they were under hurricane watch. Seven miles, from Billy’s house in the suburbs to Ben’s home in the back country, and then a tumbler of room temperature water and a clean towel later, Billy would turn and make his way back down the gravel drive, puffing and grunting like a pug. Ben had watched his friend’s red face and lean body as he approached that morning and been a bit envious of Billy’s enduring health.
“Woo!” Billy had shouted across the silent lawn. “Gonna be a goddamned scorcher.”
“Probably,” Ben had replied, handing him the towel before the water. “It’s May, after all.”
Billy rubbed his sweat from his hair to his face to the towel in great sweeps. Exchanging the slick towel for the water, he drank it all in one long, gulping attempt.
“So,” Ben had said. “Ready for tonight’s game?”
“Damn ready,” Billy had replied, straightening up and stretching his muscles. “Don’t know about the boys, though.”
“They’re fine,” Ben had said gently. “You want to come in for a minute? I’m scrambling eggs, if you want some.”
“God,” Billy had laughed, “you’re so fucking domestic, McDunnough. You’d make someone a fine wife.”
Later that night in the dugout, with their boys winning easily and the soft sun touching the outfield wall, Billy had turned to him and whispered: “Damn, McDunnough, my heart’s pounding.” Ben, in a brief second of clarity, had looked at their boys out on the field, their uniforms glowing like angels, and told Billy it was the glory of his life that caused his heart to leap. And perhaps it was.
Billy’s daughter closed the desk door with a solid push of her palm and turned to look at him, finally. She had black eyes and hair, which Ben knew were just like her mother’s, but she lacked Edie’s kindness, her generosity. Billy’s gruffness had rubbed off in unintended ways on his eldest daughter, so much so that the two had rarely spoken as she grew older. Billy had always favored Casey anyway, and not just because she shared her father’s stocky build and thick brown hair. Her father had favored her, Ben knew, because despite how she looked, it was she who had gained her mother’s personality and strength. “So,” he said, leaning against his own desk and picking at the vinyl blotter hanging rakishly over the edge, “is Casey back in town?”
Lee looked up and he immediately regretted asking. She had such a knowing look, as if she had expected him to say something about Casey and he had somehow lived up to her small expectations.
“She is,” she said, pondering the stapler for a moment before putting it down on top of a filing cabinet. Her face had regained its studied composure, but he knew better than to believe the calm.
He nodded and went back to picking at the blotter, waiting for Lee to strike. It didn’t take long.
“Would you like me to tell her something?” Lee asked, her voice deceptively light.
“No, that’s all right,” Ben replied, feeling annoyed and patronized and wondering when it became a big problem to just want to know how someone was. He was so tired of talking around things, he just wanted to ask and be answered.
She nodded and finished packing by jamming a three-ring binder down on top of everything else with a dramatic push.
“So... ” she said, drawing the word out. Leaning against her father’s desk, she mirrored his position and smiled. He wondered if she ever wore anything but black. She looked, he thought, like a rock star, or maybe a very thin Italian actress. “…What are you going to do now?”
It was such a loaded question. For the last three days, Ben had been rolling those seven words over in his own head like a religious chant. Slipping into bed at night, filled with a dull mourning that occasionally broke over him like a wave, he had tried to avoid hearing it. It just seemed so selfish, to be concerned with his own future when the one man he had grown to value over all others lay waiting for burial in a satin-lined coffin fit for a former head of state. His own needs, in times like this, became so petty, didn’t they? But he was still annoyed, and couldn’t help it, that she was asking. What did anyone do after the death of a friend, a family member? He grieved.
In the last few hours of the evening, before sleep finally knocked him cold, he remembered how it had been back in ‘76, when he had realized that his pitching career was over. He had been twenty-two years-old, uneducated, and injured so badly that his left arm seemed more like lead than an appendage he had been born with. And yet, in one brief moment of his hospital stay, he had experienced an epiphany, like realizing that he would die. The future, he saw, was not the straight line he had been led to believe, but existed as a vast hemisphere. He could travel in an infinite number of directions from his starting point, with the only restriction being that he could not, no matter how much he wished it, go back. That second of unlimited freedom had floored him. Of course, over the next few months, even years, it had not seemed so perfectly clear, but wasn’t one moment of clarity better than none at all? And what to make of that same future now? Tethered by years of living, he was no longer sure that his life could be maneuvered in any direction he chose. He wasn’t even young enough to believe he couldn’t escape, somehow, into his past.
What was he going to do? He knew, though it hadn’t happened yet, that the university would have to approach him with options. He had his retirement fund, he could buy out of that. However, what he would do financially wasn’t the question. Would they keep him? Would they make him an offer? Would they slide someone new in right over his head as if he didn’t exist? Right now, he would put his money on dismissal. But Ben had been putting his money on dismissal for years, and it hadn’t happened yet, so who knew? Tomorrow he could find that fate, often so argumentative and tricky, had decided to deal him the one lucky hand he’d never had. It was a possibility, the way death was a possibility, the way rain was a possibility.
What was he going to do? Run away, perhaps. Pick himself up from the banality of this small chosen slice of life and go adventuring. Find a new route. Pack a brown paper grocery bag full of clothing and head out on the road. Of course, at forty-four years-old, with a house he owned outright and a hatchback that had seen better days, all of this became as unlikely as say, suddenly restarting his career in pro ball. The injury that had ended his career, that had sent him into a brief and yet powerfully personal Hall of Blame, might as well have crippled him physically. He could no more just pick up and leave than he could throw a ninety mile-an-hour fastball right at the batter’s weak spot.
So he answered truthfully, as had become his nature. Why lie anymore?
“I don’t know,” he said. “Guess I’ll just have to wait and see.”
Lee nodded. This answer seemed to please her, as if his uncertainty was deserved in the face of her father’s death. He didn’t dare make assumptions, he didn’t dare move up to take over for a man so great that no one, not even today, could talk pitching without talking about “Wild” Billy Wells. Best of the best, cream of the crop, top of the line. And Ben McDunnough, who had played a mere two and a half years before his arm had given way, who had gone out not in a blaze of glory but in a quick burst of agony, could no more claim the dead man’s place than he could have out-thrown him while he lived.
“Well, good luck,” she said, picking up the box and tucking it under her arm the way she might carry a baby.
“Do you want me to...?” He gestured to the box and she shook her head.
“It’s not heavy,” she said and with a nod, opened the door to the office and slipped dramatically away, leaving a trail of vanilla and gloom. Ben sat for a moment, staring after her, half expecting her to reappear to claim something else of Billy’s, the grim reaper of the small office. His chair, perhaps. The stapler. But in the end, he had to come to the uncomfo
rtable conclusion that the office was, for the moment, his. Wandering over to the file cabinet, he jerked open a drawer. It held only a few dark green hanging folders with nothing in them. The next drawer yielded an empty manila folder labeled “Expense Reports.” Ben smiled and gently pushed it shut.
What was he going to do?
The knock on the door was not completely unexpected. He had been sitting at his desk for the last half hour, turning a pencil over and over between his fingers, rolling it down his hands and then drawing it back up. Of course someone would knock, he knew suddenly. That was what he was down here waiting for.
“Ben?” Sandy Miller from Human Resources poked her head around the door and smiled at him. He could practically feel the ax swing above his head.
“Sandy,” he said and motioned her in.
“Ben,” she began, steering Billy’s old chair over to face him across his desk. “I know you’re wondering where you stand.”
He thought, oddly, that he knew exactly where he stood. It was where he was going that puzzled him. But there was no point in trying to explain this to someone like Sandy, with her little self-made career in academia. Should she be fired tomorrow, she would know at least the direction in which the rest of her life lay, like being able to see the path through the woods, even if the destination is miles off.
“I suppose so,” he answered.
“We would like to offer you an opportunity to be heard, if you’d like one.”
“I would,” he said, but wasn’t entirely sure what they expected him to say.
“Well then, the Board...” she hesitated, as people always did when bringing up the Board, “... will agree to hold a hearing to determine your fitness as a candidate for head coach.”
Though he would have thought seventeen years of assistant coaching, two College World Series and multiple awards would have been far more informative than a few hours of debate, he simply nodded. Of course they did.
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