The Might Have Been (20 page)

“Grizzly,” Renee snapped as the dog began shaking himself, sending a shower of brown water over everything.

“It doesn’t make a difference,” he said, regretting letting her inside even given her condition and the weather. Despite his hours of cleaning, the boxes of player records made the house seem even more cluttered than when she had moved out; the cards he’d foolishly spread across the couch had left a dark stain. He scooped up some as an invitation to sit, disappointed that she would never know the effort he had made to get ready for her.

She laughed at his invitation. “I can’t sit. Not like this.” She turned, lifting the hem of her coat so that he could see the wet seat of her slacks.

“It wouldn’t matter,” he said, nodding toward the ruined couch.

“Oh, that poor thing.” Renee shook her head. “It’s not even six months old.”

“I’m sure we could get it cleaned,” he said.

Renee winced, narrowing her eyes, her meaning clear:
There is no we
. “I didn’t expect you to be here when I came,” she said. “I thought I’d just stick Grizzly in the kitchen, leave a note, and you’d find him when you got home.”

“There’s no game today,” he said.

“Rain never stopped you from going to the ballpark before. ‘Neither rain nor snow nor’ something something something ‘will keep this manager from his appointed rounds.’ Or however that little joke used to go.”

“I stayed home on some rain days,” he said, attempting to not let his defensiveness show in his voice.

She sighed. “This is why I wanted to come when you weren’t here. I want this to be as easy as possible.”

Easy for whom?
he thought.

“For both of us,” she said, as though she knew what he’d been thinking. “Please, can we just not get into anything?”

From the kitchen, he could hear Grizzly shoving his plastic dog bowl around, his signal that he was hungry.

“You’d better feed him before he tears the house down,” Renee said, snapping open her purse and taking out an envelope. “Here,”
she said, holding it out to him. When he didn’t take it immediately, she gestured that he should.

“Doesn’t the sheriff usually serve these?” he asked, still not taking the envelope.

“Serve?”

“Divorce papers.”

She let out a small laugh. “These aren’t the divorce papers.” She pushed the envelope toward him. When he opened it, he saw it contained a photocopy of a signed, notarized quitclaim, removing her name from the deed to the house, dated two or three days before he had left on a ten-day swing through Wisconsin and Illinois, the road trip from which he returned to find her gone—dated, he realized, while they were still living in the same house; already filed while she was making his favorite dinner the day before he departed for the road trip, her mother’s ziti recipe. Already filed when, in bed later, he had stroked her hip, for years a signal that he wanted to make love, and she had said quietly, “I think the dinner upset my stomach,” before turning over and going to sleep.

“The house was yours before we got married,” she said. “It was generous for you to put my name on it but now it’s yours again.”

“Where are you staying?” He refolded the form and slipped it into the envelope.

She narrowed her eyes, suggesting he had crossed a line he hadn’t known was there, then said, “If you look at our savings, you’ll see I withdrew what I figure I put in. If you think I’m off, let me know and I’ll take another look. If I made a mistake, I’ll reimburse you.” She laced her forearm through the strap on her purse and pointed to the living room. “You were cleaning the house, weren’t you?”

“How can you tell?”

She pointed to the floor beside the overstuffed chair. “The ten years or whatever of
The Sporting News
and whatnot. They’re gone.”

He flushed. “I was trying—” he said, intending to explain about the water in the basement and his wanting to salvage the records of his former players.

“That was sweet,” she said. “But I’m not coming back. It’s not like last time.”

“I still have no idea why you left,” he said.

She sighed. “Looking in the rearview mirror makes it difficult to see the road before us,” she said. It sounded like something she had read in one of her self-help books. He saw her taking out the yellow marker she sometimes used, drawing a decisive line through the passage. She turned the doorknob to let herself out but then paused. “My dad—please don’t bring him into this,” she said. When he didn’t respond, she said, “Please?”

“All right,” he said.

Then she was out the door, raising her umbrella, and down the walk toward her car. He watched her through the window to see if she turned back, showed a glimmer of regret. She didn’t; she went to the car, opened the door, closed her umbrella and got in. After waiting a moment to let a passing FedEx van go by, she pulled from the curb and was off, down the street.

In the kitchen, Grizzly was licking the food bowl, although it was totally clean.

“Mom’s gone,” Edward Everett said, immediately realizing how pathetic he sounded. “Come on, boy.” He scratched the dog behind his ear as a gentle means of distracting his attention from the bowl. He had once made the mistake of plucking it off the floor when the dog was licking it and Grizzly snapped at him. Now, when the dog lifted his head from the bowl, Edward Everett picked it up, set it onto the counter and opened the cupboard, looking for the bag of dog food. He located it, squashed under two cans of chili without beans. There was less than a quarter of a cup left, much of it only powder. He poured it into the bowl and set it back on the floor before filling the water dish.

Edward Everett had bought the dog for Renee when they’d been married for four months, just before his first road trip after their wedding. In the days before he was supposed to leave, she became increasingly quiet and he knew it was because she dreaded his being gone, didn’t want to come home to an empty house after working at the bank all day. “Your folks are next door,” he said.

“Oh, so I should be the little girl running home to Mommy and Daddy because I get lonely?” she snapped.

On the morning he was supposed to leave, he woke her early although
she didn’t need to get up for work for another two and a half hours. “I thought you could make me some coffee,” he said, nudging her shoulder with his empty thermos.

“You want me to get out of bed at”—she squinted at the clock on her bedside table—“three fifty-eight? To make you coffee?”

“Is that unreasonable?” he’d asked.

She’d sat up, pushed the blankets to the foot of the bed, plucked her glasses off the bedside table and gone out to the kitchen. When he heard her banging cupboard doors, he’d gone to the garage to get the puppy he’d bought the night before and left there, a quaking ball of fur no bigger than his fist, bedded down on two towels he’d laid in a cardboard box. He hadn’t counted on the towels being soaked with urine, three tiny turds the size of little smokie sausages scattered in the box, or that there’d be feces stuck to the dog’s fur. By the time he got the dog cleaned up and wrapped in yet another towel, Renee was already back in bed, the coffeemaker hissing. He’d taken the dog and sat on the side of the bed but she lay there with her back to him, clearly fuming.

“Renee,” he said.

“Maybe by the time you get back, I’ll be speaking to you again.”

He laid the dog against her neck, where it tried to nestle against her for the body heat. Renee swatted at it.

“No. Just go.”

The dog whimpered and Renee turned over. Edward Everett snatched it away so she wouldn’t roll over onto it.

“Don’t kill it,” he said. “It’s not the dog’s fault that your husband is a jerk who asks you to make coffee at three fifty-eight.”

“What dog?” she said, sitting up. He held it out to her. “You bought me a dog?” she said, taking it and pressing her nose against the dog’s.

For some reason, however, the dog didn’t understand that he was Renee’s, or that Edward Everett, in fact, didn’t like dogs. When Edward Everett was home, Grizzly followed him from room to room. When he sat at the kitchen table, writing up the reports he sent to the big club, the dog lay at his feet. At night, he wanted to sleep at the foot of the bed on Edward Everett’s side. When he and Renee made
love, they had to close the dog in the kitchen with a baby gate because, in the same room with them, he pawed furiously at the box spring. In the kitchen, he would whine and bark the entire time. “I swear he’s your father’s agent,” Edward Everett once said when they sat in the kitchen, having eggs at midnight. “It’s not enough that your father is next door, thinking, ‘What’s he doing to my little girl?’ He has to have the dog spy on me, too.”

Cracking an egg into a bowl, she’d laughed. “Daddy’s girl is past forty, been married once before and lived in sin twice. He doesn’t give us a thought.”

Now the dog finished his meager dinner quickly and began pushing the dish across the floor, lapping at it furiously, obviously still hungry. “Sorry,” Edward Everett said. “I guess I’m a lousy husband and a lousy dog owner.” Grizzly looked up at him, his face seeming to express a canine disappointment that mirrored, in a way, Renee’s, cocking his head to one side and blinking at him slowly.

Later that evening, Edward Everett went out to the grocery store to buy dog food, a dozen roses wrapped in cellophane and a card he addressed to Renee, writing inside it simply
. The previous time she left him, not long after last Thanksgiving, he had courted her to win her back, tucking flowers under her windshield wiper at work, bringing chocolate to her office, emailing articles he found online that he thought she would find interesting. A few days before Christmas, she agreed to meet him for dinner. “But only dinner,” she had said. “We’ll take it slow.” Dinner had ended with them in bed. “You laid successful siege at the gates to my heart,” she said in a drowsy voice just before she fell to sleep. Perhaps that was what she needed again: his attention, when he hadn’t been giving it to her, preoccupied as he became in-season.

He waited until the Duboises’ house next door was dark, then carried the roses between the two backyards, creeping up the steps to the deck, and leaned the bouquet against their door. As he placed it, the wrapper crinkled and he froze, wondering if anyone had heard. A possum rustled leaves in one of Renee’s mother’s flower beds. In the distance, a car with a broken muffler accelerated. But nothing in the house stirred.

T
he next morning, Edward Everett as usual got to the ballpark before anyone else, seven-forty, long before his two coaches or the trainer or clubhouse assistant would appear.

As he let himself in and entered the code to disarm the security system, he nearly stumbled over a pallet of unopened boxes marked “Programs.” They had been delivered since the last time he’d been there and were already out of date, he knew, more than four weeks late, one of the consequences of the team owner Bob Collier’s budget-cutting—acting as his own general manager after the previous GM had taken a job with the Marlins organization, using a college intern in the public relations staff at his meat company to do the team’s publicity. A nearly anorexic blonde, she had confessed to Edward Everett in a voice that squeaked that, while she had played soccer in high school, she knew little about baseball and would he mind terribly reading the bios of the players she had tried to write before the yearbook went to press? Three of the players in the yearbook were already gone, one traded to the St. Louis organization, one promoted to double-A and one out of baseball—Tom Packer, an infielder who had left in the second week of the season to join a church group volunteering in Kenya. Sitting in Edward Everett’s office to tell him, Packer wouldn’t meet his eye. “My girlfriend showed me
this documentary on YouTube,” he said in explanation, his neck coloring as if he were admitting to some great wrong rather than a decision to help the poor. “I feel real bad, letting you guys down like this. I hope you can forgive me, Skip.” His team was, in fact, still a man short on the roster as, while the big club had replaced the first two players, it had yet to replace Packer. Wryly, Edward Everett thought of it as punishment for Packer’s skewed priorities, at least in the eye of the organization, feeding the hungry and tending the sick instead of working to improve his pivot on double plays and his sense of the strike zone.

In his office, Edward Everett switched on his computer and, while it booted up, took the coffeepot to a sink in the shower room and filled it with water. By the time he got back to his office, put in a new filter, spooned out coffee and poured the water into the reservoir, the box on the computer screen was asking for his log-in and password. The big club had sent him an email not long ago, reminding him that he was supposed to change his password every month, but he had a hard enough time remembering any of his passwords. His entire life was a password: his debit card PIN number, the password for his bank account online, his log-in for baseballamerica.com, and so he hadn’t changed it in four years. It was still Renee’s birthday, 112363.

While the computer went through its start-up sequence, and water began dripping through the filter, he opened the scorebook from the last game they had gotten in before the rains shut everything down so he could enter the stats onto his game log cards; it was a five–four win in the ninth inning, his kind of ball when he was a player; David Martinez, his leadoff hitter, bunting down the third base line with the fielder playing back, a stolen base, a wild throw into center field by the catcher, trying to nab him at second, sending him to third and then scoring on a ground ball to first. Transcribing his players’ cards was tedious, senseless work—at least according to the big club. Last fall, not long after they hired a new director of player development—a thirty-something-year-old who seemed proud that he had never played a day of professional ball and who signed his emails “Marc Johansen, MS, MBA”—the team had sent
him to a ten-week course at the junior college to learn a suite of statistical computer programs. “You’ve got a lot of what I call ‘Old World’ knowledge,” Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, said when he told Edward Everett he was asking him to learn the programs. “Just think of how valuable you’ll be if you can marry that ‘Old World’ to the twenty-first century.” Although Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had phrased it as a request, Edward Everett knew he had no choice: shortly after Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, took his job, he’d sent an email to the organization. “I know that when changes occur at the top, everyone gets nervous. I want to assure you that we won’t make any personnel moves for at least sixty days.” The subtext was clear: starting on the sixty-first day, no one had a guaranteed job.