The Might Have Been (25 page)

“I won’t,” Edward Everett said, feeling light-headed from relief that he was being spared but, at the same time, guilt from the lie he’d have to live with Phillips.

Back on the bus hours later, as dawn lightened the eastern horizon, Edward Everett asked Phillips, “Ever think about giving all this up?”

Phillips said, “Naw, man. Hell, guys kill to do this.”

“Seriously, what would you do if you couldn’t do this anymore?”

Phillips gave him a stricken look. “Skip say something? Fuck. It was two games.”

“No,” Edward Everett said. “Skip didn’t say anything. I was just—”

“Just feeling old,” a player behind him said. “Gramps is just feeling his age.”

“You’re right,” he said, but thinking:
It’s not just two games. Anyone but you can see that hitters are catching up to your fastball; your slider isn’t breaking. Anyone can see that in triple-A they’d pound you
. But he said none of it, simply repeated, “Feeling old. Don’t let it happen to you.”

For the first time since he had signed the contract after the tryout in Cleveland, he felt fear that he had made a mistake, one from which he could not recover: leaving Connie, giving up the job his uncle had given him, a job that would have guaranteed him a comfortable life for however many decades he lived, a life in which he’d eventually be one of the well-dressed men with Cadillacs, trips to Europe, extended winter stays in Arizona.

The next morning, he slipped into a phone booth at the back of the Denny’s where the team went for breakfast, poured a handful of quarters into the coin slot, dialed Connie’s number, but an old man with some kind of Eastern European accent answered.

“I’m trying to reach Connie Heidrich,” he said loudly into the mouthpiece.

The old man said something he couldn’t understand and Edward Everett said again, more slowly, “Con. Nie. Hei. Drich.”

The old man said something Edward Everett could not understand, maybe in Polish or some other language, and then hung up. He called his mother.

“What’s wrong, Ed?” she said, her voice anxious. “Did you get hurt again?”

“No. I’m fine. I just called for the heck of it.”

She let out a breath that whistled in the earpiece. “You never just call …”

He had wanted to ask her, by the by, just making conversation, did she ever see Connie anymore? But now he couldn’t because the question would have a weight he hadn’t meant her to perceive—a weight that she’d read as his coming to his senses, realizing she’d been right and he’d been wrong when he walked away from the life he could have had: the job selling for the mill, the pre-fab family with Connie and Billy. When he’d told her he was taking the Indians’ offer, six-fifty a month at double-A Erie, her face softened in the same way he imagined it would if he told her he had cancer. “Oh,” she said. She was clipping coupons from the Sunday
Wheeling Intelligencer
and she closed the paper, laid down her scissors and ran her hand over the slick coupon insert.

“What did Connie say?”

“I haven’t told her yet,” he said.

“I see,” she said, and he couldn’t read the meaning in that. “And your uncle?”

“I’ll tell him—”

She calmly picked up her scissors again and began cutting around the border for a coupon for breakfast cereal. “Your father had forty-seven dollars in the bank when he died,” she said. “Twenty-some years of working. Forty-seven dollars.” She shrugged. “What’s that, two dollars a year?”

“It’s not—”

She slammed the scissors onto the table with surprising force. He couldn’t remember a time when she had responded with overt anger. She was a long-sufferer, someone who won arguments with his father by silences that could go on forever. Once, when his father decided that he’d had enough of the Catholic Church and announced one Sunday that he would no longer accompany her to Mass, she was silent for a week. A week of his father teasing and cajoling; a week of
her refusal to speak, punctuated by the sounds she made as she went about her work: the whisk of a wooden spoon on the side of a saucepan; the clink of dishes put away in the cupboard; the chopping of cabbage. After a week, his father was in the driver’s seat of their Studebaker at quarter to eight the next Sunday, waiting to drive her and Edward Everett to Mass.

“You kids have no idea. You think a Depression can’t happen again.”

“A Depression isn’t—”

“You go down to Liar’s Bench, on Chestnut, and ask those men who sit there all day drinking. ‘Oh, no, the mine can’t close!’ It closed! ‘Oh, no, milk prices will never—’ ”

“I signed a contract,” he said.

She nodded, got up, took her scissors to the utility drawer in the kitchen, opened it, set the scissors into it, closed it, and left the room without another word.

On the phone with her from Vandalia, he chatted for a few minutes, listening to her complain about the new pastor, who was using guitars at Sunday Mass instead of the organ; he asked about her sister, about the ladies in the altar society.

“What’s this really about?” she said at last, interrupting him.

He hesitated. In the restaurant, Phillips was jumping out of his booth as if he’d been burned, swiping his hands over his pants legs, which were stained with what appeared to be coffee. Across the table from him, a player they all called Ox was laughing. “I was just wondering what had ever happened to Connie—”

“Oh, Ed,” his mother said. “You can’t go back, honey.”

“I wasn’t talking about going back. She just crossed my mind.”

“She got married. A year ago. To Randy McLaughlin. He’s a vet in Somerville. You went to high school with him.”

He remembered McLaughlin, a boy who, in Edward Everett’s memory, wore braces the entire four years of high school. Could that be possible, or was just one image of McLaughlin frozen in his memory and that became the sum and substance of McLaughlin: the kid with glasses, braces and red hair, writing meticulous lab notes in biology class as he delicately separated the skin over the belly of a frog?

It surprised him to realize that he had thought, all the while he was on his pinball journey of a life, that everyone else would stay put, that Connie would be waiting, as if she were a deposit he’d made in some sort of lifestyle savings account: deposit it, forget about it and go back to make a withdrawal when he was ready.

“That’s great,” he said, feeling foolish. For calling her. For thinking he could get off the bus in the middle of Illinois, roll the clock back to before the point at which he’d made his decision that, he saw, had ruined his life.

Four days later, however, Edward Everett had three hits in four times at bat, the last a run-scoring double that meant the win. As he came off the field after Urbana went down in order in the bottom of the ninth, a father with a young boy waved him over to the box seats behind the third base dugout. The boy held up a baseball shyly, along with a pen. “You were amazing,” the father said as Edward Everett scrawled his name across the ball and handed it back to the boy, who rubbed his thumb over the signature in a reverential way. By the time he got to the clubhouse, Phillips was in their manager’s office, his head bowed, while Johnson pushed a Kleenex box across the desk toward him. The rest of the locker room was loud: players snapping towels at one another. Ox, who’d hit a home run, pounded his chest like a triumphant ape, leaping onto a bench. They were jubilant, he knew—because of the victory, yes, but more because they weren’t the one in Johnson’s office, the one who’d sit there alone after Johnson left so he could compose himself, the one who would wait until they were all gone, on the bus, before he ventured out of the office and began stuffing his equipment into a duffel bag for the last time, the one on his way back to the World none of them wanted to see again.

O
n the morning after Edward Everett’s birthday, Collier woke him again with a phone call. It was a more civil hour: six o’clock. Although the blinds across his bedroom window were closed, he could, nonetheless, tell that outside the day was clear.

“Don’t tell me that the drains backed up again,” Edward Everett said.

“No. All cleaned up. I just want you to come up to the house for a chat.”

He knew whatever Collier wanted to discuss would not be good news. In most years, Collier invited Edward Everett to his house only twice—once with the entire team for a pre-season barbecue the week before their first game, and again when he asked Edward Everett to come to his Christmas party, where most of the other people were Collier’s customers. Then, although he was officially a guest, Edward Everett felt more like part of the catering staff circulating drinks and canapés, serving up his stories of major league ball like conversational hors d’oeuvres. It was little different from when he’d told the stories with his uncle—except then they’d put money in his pocket, while at Collier’s parties the stories only earned him flat champagne and greasy, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts.

Driving to Collier’s home in the hills, Edward Everett passed
home after home where the residents were still cleaning up after the storm, taking chain saws to boughs that lay in driveways, sweeping detritus from their front walks. At one house, two boys carried out a rolled-up carpet that had obviously gotten soaked, the smaller boy struggling to keep his grip around it. At another, a woman used a snow shovel to scoop shingles from her lawn.

At the entrance to Collier’s drive, Edward Everett pulled up to the wrought-iron gate, rolled down his window and pressed the “call” button on the intercom. Collier’s voice responded almost immediately, crackling with static. “Come on up the drive, boy.” Almost simultaneously, the electric gate swung open. At the front door, he pressed the bell. It played a chime version of some country song that Ginger liked but which Edward Everett could never remember the name of.

“That,” Collier said, raising the coffee mug he held toward the chimes mounted to the wall beside the door, “needs to go. The dishwasher man comes. ‘Tender Years.’ The electrician comes. ‘Tender Years.’ Her little girl’s friend comes for a sleepover. ‘Tender Years.’ It’s going to have me in the insane asylum.”

Collier led him back through the house. It was cleaning day; women in black slacks and white blouses worked throughout the rooms: one vacuumed the living room, while another polished the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen and a third stood on a step stool in the dining room, spraying Windex on the windows.

In the kitchen on the way to the sunroom, Collier asked Edward Everett if he wanted coffee. When he nodded, Collier said to the woman kneeling at the base of the refrigerator, cleaning it, “Honey, will you get Ed here a cup of coffee?” To his embarrassment, Edward Everett realized she was perhaps ten years older than he was. Without a word, she pushed herself to stand with some difficulty, opened the kitchen cupboard, took down a mug stamped with “Collier’s Fine Meats” in silver foil and poured out a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker sitting on the counter.

“Cream? Sugar?” she asked. Edward Everett preferred cream but he said, “Black is fine.” She nodded, handed the cup to him and then, using the face of the refrigerator to support herself, got back down
onto her knees to resume her cleaning, first wiping away the fingerprints she left when she used the fridge to steady herself.

In the sunroom, Collier settled into one of two massive recliners that sat dead center in the room. “I can’t stand cleaning day,” he said, flipping the lever to lean back the chair. “I feel like the Czechs in 1939, invaded. I don’t have any space of my own.”

He indicated with a gesture that Edward Everett should take the other chair. Sitting, he had the feeling of being in a stadium skybox at life’s fifty-yard line. From here, he could look down the hill, through the yards of Collier’s neighbors—their gated streets, their miniature English rose gardens, their patios with five-thousand-dollar stainless steel barbecue grills—down into the yards of the more modest homes, the ranches and split-levels on postage-stamp yards, ending, at the bottom of the hill, in trailer parks and industrial buildings and finally the Flann River. It was as if the town’s topography were a geographic bar chart of wealth: the higher you were, the more you had. While he could not see his own house, he could spot the beginning of his neighborhood—roughly three-quarters of the way down—and, farther still, the ballpark. Near gate three, what seemed from this perspective a miniature beverage truck of some sort sat, the driver wheeling a handcart stacked with cases of beer or soda inside.

“I still remember the first time I sat here when the house was mine,” Collier said. “It was, I don’t know, seven, seven-thirty, and from here I could look down into the ballpark. It was November and I called the night guard and told him to turn on the lights. At first he didn’t believe it was me and wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘Hell, you’ll believe it’s me when I kick your butt and fire you.’ When the lights came on, it was the most beautiful thing. ‘It’s my ballpark,’ I thought. ‘My family name is on that ballpark.’ ” Collier laughed. “Cost me a boatload of money just to turn on the lights for an hour, but what the fuck.”

Edward Everett knew that Collier had not invited him to the house to reminisce, but he let Collier have his moment, sitting in silence, looking down the hill toward the ballpark. It had never, in the time since Edward Everett came to Perabo City, looked charming in the daylight. Up close, the cracks in the walls were evident; in places,
great chunks of concrete were missing and, in a few of the hollowed-out spots, pigeons nested, the walls and walkways around them spattered with droppings. Edward Everett had not had many chances to see the park from a distance at night, when it was lit up, but on the occasions he had—when Collier rented it out for district high school football championships or a clown rodeo—it had looked like a small gem, the light towers washing out nearly everything that surrounded it, the warehouses, the buildings of Collier’s meatpacking business, the Diamond Trailer Park where home run balls sometimes knocked out windows. Then, it was almost enough to make up for the ugliness that bordered on it. At night, glowing, it made the entire town appear beautiful.