The Might Have Been (15 page)

After they finished and were walking back to his car, he felt as if he’d been holding his breath for the entire hour they’d been there. He was unsure whether it was the restaurant or that, after almost ten years, he and Connie had nothing to talk about. He would take her home, make a polite comment about how they should do this again, and then not call her, but on their way back to her house, they’d passed the building where his apartment was and she’d said, “Don’t you live upstairs there?” He’d been surprised she’d known that. “I’d like to see it,” she said. Upstairs, he regretted inviting her in. He was not the best of housekeepers. The suit he’d worn the day before lay crumpled on the couch in the living room, and the can of Pabst he’d drunk while he was watching
The Rockford Files
was on its side on the floor beside his chair, still dripping beer. But she’d said, “This is actually charming.” Not long after that, he was kissing her.

Twice since then, she’d come to his apartment in the early evening, while her mother visited with Billy, and they’d made love. With the windows open and the sound of voices passing beneath his apartment, he felt as if they were having sex in a public place and wondered if the people whose conversations he caught pieces of could also hear the noises they made: his headboard banging against the wall, Connie’s whimpers when she had an orgasm, his groan when he had his own. “… the prices …” a woman’s voice said once. “… your schoolwork …” said another. “… liver and onions …” said still another.

The weekend after they had their first lunch, Connie’s son went off with his father. “He’s taking him turkey hunting,” Connie told Edward Everett, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head. “ ‘I’m going to make a man out of him,’ ” she said, imitating her ex-husband’s laconic way of speaking. She invited Edward Everett for dinner on Saturday night, telling him she would make him a home-cooked meal. When he arrived, bringing a bottle of wine, the house was redolent of meatloaf and boiling potatoes. She greeted him at the door wearing an off-white canvas apron that had “Mom’s Kitchen” spelled out in awkward, childish letters that he guessed her son had
finger-painted. She gave him a peck on the cheek and rushed back to the kitchen because a timer
ding
ed. In the kitchen, she had set the table with china and crystal goblets, two at each place—a red-wine glass and a water glass—and silver. “I never have adult company,” she said quickly when she saw him looking at the table. “It’s an indulgence, I know. There’s a corkscrew in the drawer here.” She gave the top drawer next to the stove a shove with her hip as she turned off the gas flame under the boiling potatoes and then poured them into a colander in the sink. He opened the drawer, which was a jumble of miscellaneous junk: transistor radio batteries, half-used rolls of Scotch tape, a coil of picture wire, a coffee-stained instruction manual for a dishwasher. It was, it struck him—as someone who had not lived in the same city for long over the last decade—the junk drawer of someone who had stayed put. He found the corkscrew and opened the wine, pouring out two glasses. He set one on the counter beside the stove for Connie and leaned against the sink drinking his. “Are you trying to get me drunk?” she asked, winking, then poured the boiled potatoes into a mixing bowl and took a break to sip her wine.

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 shingle 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
.