Evvie Drake Starts Over(20)

Dean began to see the cloudy outlines of this visit sharpen. “Okay,” he said, affecting the noncommittal eyebrow wrinkle of a man who didn’t get it. Maybe Ted wouldn’t be able to bring himself to explain it. Maybe Dean wouldn’t have to say no.

“Well, you’re a pro. You’ve worked with the best, you’ve handled pressure. It’s not baseball, but I’m pretty sure it would kinda translate. I was hoping you’d maybe be willing—”

“Oh.” Dean looked at him even more quizzically. “Coach, you know that I washed out of professional sports, right? That’s pretty much what I’m known for.”

Finch shrugged his big shoulders. “Yuh. I know about all that.” He rattled what sounded like a big set of keys, school keys, coach keys, in his pocket. “I don’t much go in for all this ‘head case’ stuff. Every guy wakes up one day, finds out he’s done. Coaches, too.”

Dean paused, waiting to find the argument ridiculous, something a small-town coach would say because he didn’t understand big-time sports. But he found himself giving a nod of grudging acknowledgment instead. “I guess you’re right about that.”

“Nobody’s ready. Doesn’t always happen when they’re in the middle of a game, I give you that. Doesn’t always happen on television. Doesn’t always make the news. More often it’s the foot speed or they’re hurt all the time. Sometimes they wear out. But they all wake up done. You might have woke up done, but you’re still the best these boys are ever going to meet, chances are. I think it’d be good for them, knowing that life’s not all one thing, as far as win and lose.”

   Dean had to admit there was some sense in it. He could at least explain what it took to get him where he’d been, even if he didn’t know a damn thing about how to stay there. Maybe he could even do them some good. He could at least tell them not to give their money to quacks in the event they did become professional athletes and did make a lot of money and then did spectacularly implode.

Still, there had already been one reporter at Evvie’s door. He felt bad enough about drawing one to her house; he didn’t want to draw them to the school or to football practice, and who knew whether the football team would even want to hear from somebody who not only didn’t play football but was pretty much set on fire and sent out of town because he couldn’t outpitch the guys on a high school staff?

“We’d keep it quiet,” Coach Finch told him, mind-reading as a man might learn to do after spending twenty years reading the complex behavioral signals of the seventeen-year-old male New Englander. “Not a show. Just talk to some kids. And if it works out, who knows? You help run drills, you do a little assistant coaching maybe, instead of sitting inside playing video games like I bet you’re doing.”

Dean chuckled. “I haven’t played football since high school, and I wasn’t that good.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea, Coach. Kids are online, all that, people talk.”

Finch shrugged again, waved that hand again. “Eh. My boys are solid. I tell ’em it’s not for Twitter, they’ll keep it quiet much as they can.” This was Dean’s favorite part—it came out nawt fuh Twittah.

“I hate to tell you, Coach, but I think they all gave up Twitter. That’s for old guys like you and me. I think now you have to tell them it’s not for…something else. Instagram, maybe.”

“Oh, for the love of Gawd,” Coach muttered. “I get a hold of whatever they’re doing with their phones and they’re on to something else. It’s like grabbin’ at eels.” He continued: “Anyway, they’re good boys. Worst thing that happens, everybody finds out you’re working with a bunch of kids. Right now, they’re sayin’ you’ve gone dog-bone loony, so you’ve got nothing to lose, right?”

   Dean had played for an awful lot of coaches. And Coach Finch of the Calcasset High School Hawks was the first one who’d ever come to him for a favor and called it a favor. Hard to say no.





IN THE THIRD WEEK OF October, Dean opened the apartment door and called to the living room, where Evvie was reading a dancer’s diary from the 1920s, to tell her that it was ten minutes to Halls of Power, a dopey political soap they made a point of watching at the time when it aired, but mutually vowed to deny they knew anything about if they were ever asked.

When the door wasn’t closed, they could hear well between his apartment and her kitchen, and sometimes they’d leave it open so they could chat while she made dinner or he opened a bunch of his forwarded mail. Now and then, if she made something she was particularly proud of, he’d come in and eat with her, or she’d flop into one of his club chairs with a beer and he’d tell her on-the-road athlete stories, which they’d agreed didn’t count as talking about baseball. He told her about a guy he’d hid from an angry ex-girlfriend, two guys he’d smuggled into a hotel when they missed curfew, and a time he’d had to sneak into his hotel room naked, trying to block the view of himself with a towel and an electric guitar.

“I still can’t believe you got this ridiculous, enormous TV,” she said, settling in for Halls of Power, “that I really love.” He’d mounted it on the wall opposite the club chairs, so she flopped into her seat and threw her feet over the arm. “Remind me where we were,” she said.