The Might Have Been (44 page)

Nelson tilted his head to the side in a manner that suggested he was weighing the story that Edward Everett had told. It was, he knew, a fantastic story.

“In fact, he’s on his way here now,” Edward Everett said. He saw a red Prius moving between sunlight and shadow as it passed beneath the trees lining the street. No, not a Prius. That was Renee’s car in her new circumstances. The car approaching was a Maverick, like the one he drove when he sold flour. “I was just waiting to take him to the game. Him and his son. My grandson. He’s never been before but he’s going today. His first game.”

In the closet, the dog was stirring. Edward Everett could hear the hangers clanging as Grizzly got to his feet, rustling the coats.

He saw the Maverick slowing outside, the driver—someone who had been there countless times by then and so knew all of the neighbors, and they knew him—rolling down his window, waving at Mrs. Greiner, who was digging in her flower bed, waving at Ron Dubois next door, setting up a ladder to paint his fascia board. They knew his grandson, too, the boy waving from the passenger seat.
I’m going to see my grandpa!

Your grandpa is such a lucky man!

Edward Everett stood up and moved toward the door. “I think I hear him coming up the steps.” Nelson leaned forward and they both looked toward the door, listening for footsteps on the stone stairs.

It could happen
, Edward Everett thought.
It could happen. My son is going to knock on the door. He’s going to knock on the door right now
.

I’m so glad to see you
, he would say when he opened the door.
I’m so happy you’re finally here
.

I
n November, Nelson’s widow sent back the cashier’s check he had given her. He was in the breakfast nook in his house in Heredia when his housekeeper, Lucia, brought the mail she had picked up from the post office the afternoon before, several weeks-old copies of
The Sporting News
, a calendar for the next year Meg had made using photographs of Grizzly—Grizzly sleeping on her canopied bed; Grizzly sunning himself on her porch; Grizzly on his hind legs, begging for a snack—a handful of bills and a plain white envelope with no return address that the Perabo City post office had forwarded to him in Costa Rica. Even before he opened it, he knew what it would contain, since it was the third time Cindy Nelson had returned the check. The other times she’d done so with no note, but this time there was one, two words, unsigned: “Please stop.”

He had tried to give the check to her the first time at Nelson’s wake, leaving an envelope in the wicker basket on the table with the guest book outside the parlor where Nelson’s body lay in a closed casket; three thousand dollars. On the memo line he’d had the bank teller type, “For your children.” Three days later, when he came home from the hardware store with Meg—back from buying closet organizers, wire racks for his kitchen cupboards, mulch for his neglected
flower beds, all to “stage his house” for sale, Meg said—the envelope lay on his back deck.

“Oh, a fan letter,” Meg said, stepping over it, carrying in a bag.

“Not quite,” Edward Everett said, bending to pick it up.

After he told her what it was, Meg said, “I can’t believe you would do that for her, after what her husband put you through.”

I don’t see it that way
, Edward Everett thought, but he only shook his head and mailed the check the next day to Nelson’s widow again, in care of her brother at the Lakeport Police Department. Four days later, it came back again, this time in the mail, with no return address. When he sent it a third time—a week before he got on a plane for Costa Rica—and it didn’t come back, he thought maybe she had finally accepted it, forgiven him, seen it as a chance to do a small thing for her son and daughter who had lost their father. But then, almost two months after that, it found him again.

When no one came to the door—when the son Edward Everett had never met didn’t pull to the curb in a 1973 Maverick; didn’t, on his way up the front walk, wave to Ron Dubois touching up the paint on the fascia board under his gutters; didn’t knock on the door in the distinctive manner Edward Everett might have recognized had his son ever been there—Nelson stood up from the couch. Edward Everett shut his eyes in a way he would always think of as cowardly, and waited for the gunshot, wondering, would he hear it first? What he did hear was the front door creaking open and then clicking shut, gently, as if whoever closed it wanted to be certain he did not damage the door or the frame. As he sat, quaking, thinking,
It’s over
, telling himself to call someone, from outside came what sounded like a single, quick hammer blow driving a nail, and then someone shouted, “Oh, my God.” He pushed himself out of the chair but his legs were so weak he fell back again. By the time he managed to get outside, Ron Dubois was sprinting from his yard into Edward Everett’s faster than he would have thought someone sixty pounds overweight could move, yanking his paint-spattered T-shirt over his head. “For God’s sake, Ed, call 911,” he shouted.

Then Ron was kneeling on the lawn and laying his shirt delicately
over Nelson’s face, blood pooling on the grass. When Ron glanced up, he said, “Don’t look.”

Although Meg told him he shouldn’t, he went to the wake. The lot was so full he had to park on the street, and at first he thought it was for Nelson, that some of his former teammates had come, but it wasn’t. A man who had operated an Italian restaurant for thirty-seven years had also died and his wake was in a large double parlor, the room shoulder to shoulder with people talking in muted tones, every once in a while someone laughing. Nelson was in an anteroom near the back, and when Edward Everett arrived, there were only four people there, Nelson’s wife and her brother, and an older man and woman he imagined were Nelson’s parents. He stopped to sign the guest book and lay his envelope in the basket, where there was only one other card. As he stepped into the parlor, Nelson’s widow looked toward the doorway with expectation but then her eyes narrowed and she said something quietly to her brother. Everyone there turned in his direction as Earl approached him. “You really shouldn’t be here,” he said to Edward Everett, cupping a hand beneath his elbow to guide him back out.

To think that any of the team would come was absurd, he realized later. Nelson had been right; the team closed up like a vacuum after you left, especially if you were a lunatic who couldn’t let go when the game told you to. They had all scattered by then anyway, left town disappointed when they lost the final, Quad Cities the one celebrating the meaningless championship in the middle of the infield in that sorry, sorry ballpark.

Of course they wouldn’t come to the wake, because they all hated Nelson, although most would soon learn they were more kin to him than they might have thought—maybe not enough kin to shoot themselves but enough that the release note they received would gnaw at them for a long time. Some would call Edward Everett as he had called Hoppel. “What if,” some would ask. “What if I learned to switch-hit?” “What if I worked on my slider?”
What if, what if?
He told them, “No; you’re a different person now.” When they pushed
further, he said gently, “Be grateful for the life you have rather than regret the one you don’t.”

In the breakfast nook in his small house in Heredia, he took the check he had tried to give to Nelson’s widow and put it on the refrigerator with a magnet, alongside the photo that Meg had sent him, one that she had Photoshopped, the one of his son about to ride off on his bicycle. She had added him to the image and unless he studied it closely he really did seem to be there, as if he were the person his son was looking toward for approval:
You’ll be fine; I’ll be here when you ride back
. He would keep sending the check to Nelson’s widow until she stopped returning it. Since it was a cashier’s check, he would have no way of knowing whether she cashed it or just tore it up. Either way, he had given her the money.

At eight o’clock, he called a car to pick him up to take him to the ballpark, and when he reached it, there were already forty boys there, some as young as thirteen, none older than eighteen, all serious and eager, playing catch before any of the coaches had to tell them to do so. Some of their fathers were there as well, sitting in the shade of the roof over the grandstand, and when Edward Everett walked onto the field, the ten boys the club had assigned to him for the day gathered around him, their fathers leaning forward in the stands, clasping their hands on the seat backs in front of them, all of them waiting for Edward Everett to tell them something that would change their lives forever.

I owe more than I can express to Amanda Urban for her advocacy and Jennifer Smith for her smart editorial guidance, and to Ken Cook and Margot Livesey, who read drafts of this novel and whose insightful criticism helped shape it. This book would not exist without the generosity of all of them. Thanks also to those who encouraged me, especially Debra Carpenter, Tony DiMartino, John Eschen, Eileen Solomon, Kirk Swearingen, and my parents and brothers and sisters. Thank you, as well, to Webster University for time to work on this during parts of two sabbaticals. Much of my understanding of a life in baseball came from interviews I did for a number of articles I wrote about ballplayers whose major league careers lasted less than a full season, and I am grateful to the editors who assigned those articles, especially David Levine and Steve Zesch, and to the many players I interviewed for them, especially Rich Beck, Doug Clarey, Chip Coulter, Jeff Doyle, Ed Phillips, Herman (Ham) Schultehenrich, Bill Southworth and Robert Slaybaugh, whose tragic injury in a spring training game kept him from ever appearing in the major leagues. I also owe a debt to every writing teacher who has graced my life, especially, in chronological order, Thomas Hoobler, Carl Smith, Shannon Ravenel, Jean Thompson and Richard Russo.