Evvie Drake Starts Over(28)

“Night,” she said, like always. But then, not like always, he suddenly bent down toward her and she turned her face toward him with absolutely no time to react, and he kissed her on the forehead, just right of center.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said and went off into his apartment and shut the door for the night.

“Happy…Thanksgiving,” she weakly called after him. Her fingers went up to her forehead.





THE ESSAY WAS CALLED “TOWARD a Philosophy of Failure.” It ran in Esquire in December, and it set out to define how Americans process, write about, feel about, and define failure. It used four case studies, and one of them was former New York superstar pitcher Dean Tenney, who was the example of a type the writer was unseemly proud of having named: “The WTFailure.”

He said that it was one thing to process a failure in which a good idea didn’t pan out or a series of unexpected obstacles placed success out of reach. But it was another to see failure, as he put it, “float free of all common sense.” He wrote:


Tenney will be remembered like New Coke. He will be like Edsel, but in human form. He began as a prospect. A physical marvel. A specimen standing for all that we can do. But none of that will matter now. Now it would be better if he’d never succeeded at all. Because now, all that will be remembered is balls sailing past catchers, runners baffled by their good fortune barreling toward home, and teammates straining not to speak ill. If you’re watching, there is nothing to explain any of it or to tell you it couldn’t happen to you—not unless you listen to the murmurs of players who believe this is a matter of mental weakness and broken minds unable to repair themselves. Those murmurs are real. And they are real about Tenney specifically.

    Tenney is not a pitcher anymore. He is now a bogeyman fantasy. He is a living, breathing worst-case scenario for anyone who has achieved any level of success. This is the story in which all your hard work turns out to mean nothing. This is the story in which your life, for no apparent reason, becomes the draft of a book that’s no longer being written, abandoned at a table without even a final word.



In the evening on the Monday in December when these words were published, Andy’s car pulled up in Evvie’s driveway. Evvie opened the door to two girls bundled up in pink and purple coats, and their father, who shot her a wary look the minute he saw her face. “Those assholes,” he mouthed. She nodded.

“Come in, come in,” she said to Rose and Lilly, taking their coats. “You guys go upstairs and get in the big bed, and I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

“Little Mermaid!” Lilly shrieked.

“We’ll talk about it. Be nice to your sister, Lill. Slumber party manners, remember?”

“Little Mermaid!” Lilly shrieked again as she and Rose ran up the rest of the stairs.

Andy cringed. “Sounds like you’re going to have a lot on your hands. Thanks for doing this. Has he said anything to you?” Andy asked.

“No,” Evvie said. “He went into the apartment, shut the door, didn’t say a word.”

“Okay. I’m just going to take him for a drink, see if he feels like talking.” He and Evvie walked into the kitchen, and Andy yelled Dean’s name toward the apartment. “Hey, you ready to go?”

   “Give me a few minutes.” Dean sounded tired.

Andy and Evvie sat at the kitchen table. She raised one eyebrow. “So, how is the new woman friend?”

Evvie knew Andy had taken Monica Bell, a teacher at the high school, out a couple of times since he met her at a party, but he hadn’t said much more than that. Now he grinned. “She’s fun. We went to the movies, to that thing with the French guy who was in the other one, the one with Jessica Chastain that you didn’t like.”

“Right, yes. It was Bryce Dallas Howard and the guy is Canadian, but yes.”

“Whatever. Anyway, we saw that, and we had dinner at the Fontaine. It was nice. I like her. You’ll like her.”

“That’s good.” Evvie could see them in her head, sitting at one of the tables in the corner of the restaurant, walking into the movie theater, sitting together. It felt so intrusive to imagine it down to the dinner forks and where they’d sit in the theater, but she didn’t know how not to. “It sounds nice.”

“You know…you could do that someday.” Andy cocked his head at her. “If you decided you wanted to, you could.”

“What, take out Monica Bell?” She knew. She knew it was unfairly glib, and it was a stalling tactic, and it was snotty, and it sounded like she was making fun of his new friend. He rolled his eyes, and she held up one hand. “Sorry. I know what you meant. I’m not even thinking about that. At all.”

“And you don’t have to. I’m not saying that. There’s nothing worse than the guy who starts dating somebody and all of a sudden, everybody else has to do it. I promise you, I am not that guy.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t think you were.”

“I’m being your friend.”

“I know you are.”

“I’m saying you could.”

“I know I could.” She was almost sure she couldn’t. She knew he meant it in two ways—that dating was possible and that dating was something no one would judge her for, because enough time had passed. She was quite sure he was wrong about both. In the immortal language of the baseball sex metaphor, she couldn’t even imagine getting into uniform, let alone making it to first base. “I’ll think about it. It still feels wrong.”