Evvie Drake Starts Over(44)

She tapped the side of her mug with her fingers. “Why do you go out in the middle of the night and pitch in the cold? Why did I find you out there throwing at nothing like a crazy person? What are you doing out there?”

“Well, you found me out there because you followed me,” he told her in a tense, measured tone. “You found me out there because you got out of bed at two o’clock in the morning in your pajamas and drove around looking for me. I mean, maybe we should talk about that. You want to explain why you’re driving around in the middle of the night looking for clues like you’re on fuckin’ Murder, She Wrote?”

“I’m trying to be your friend. I’m trying to understand. You tell me you’re fine—”

“Look, sometimes it feels good to do something normal. You have a ballpark, I don’t have a job. When I got here, I didn’t know anybody except Andy. I like fields. It feels familiar, that’s all it is. You’re making too much out of it. I’m not going to be able to explain how it feels that I can’t pitch, no matter how many times you ask me.”

“What about pinecones?” she asked. “Do you like pinecones? Is that familiar?”

Again with that same look. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw you out there, picking up a pinecone off the ground and pitching it at the fence over and over until you blew it up. Do you do that everywhere? Do you walk around throwing things? Is that why you rub your shoulder? Because you can’t stop throwing at nothing until you hurt yourself?”

Dean fired back, but not quite the way she thought he might. “What’s with you and Andy? Why haven’t you been meeting up on Saturdays?”

   She shook her head like she had water in her ear. “What are you—what does that have to do with anything?”

“Who knows you?” he asked.

Eveleth stared back at him. Am I going to faint? Because that would be weird. “What do you mean, ‘who knows you’?”

“You want to be my friend, you want to ask me about things you saw when I didn’t know you were looking, but who knows you? I don’t. Andy doesn’t, your dad doesn’t. I’m thinking your husband didn’t. I live in your house, and you say we’re friends, but I don’t think I have the first fucking clue what’s going on with you. Now you want to quiz me about what happens in the middle of the night? Forget it. You want me to deal with my shit, you know what I say? You first.”

She felt her pulse in her head. She looked down at her cup and saw that the fingers resting on its handle were shaking. She stood up and walked over to the upper row of cabinets. She swung one open and took out one of the china plates with the little yellow flowers. The ones that looked like they’d be at home in a dollhouse. She turned back to Dean and held it vertically so he could see it.

“It’s a plate. What?”

She lifted the plate until it was about even with her forehead, then, without taking her eyes off him, she opened her hand and let it fall. Time seemed to catch for an instant, the way a word catches in your throat before you say it. But when the plate hit the ground, it exploded with a percussive glee.

Dean jumped in his seat. “What the fuck?”

“I live here,” she said. “Right? I live here. My dishes. That’s what you said. You said if I don’t want them, I should get new ones.” She turned back to the cabinet and took out a cereal bowl. This time, she didn’t drop it—she flung it at the tile floor, where the pieces broke harder, skittered farther.

He didn’t say anything. He just stared.

She took down another plate. Used both hands. For some reason, when this one hit the ground, it didn’t break. She threw it right—threw it wrong—and it landed flat, and it survived. She bent down, picked it up, and looked at him.

   “I get it,” he said, holding up one hand. “You don’t have to break them. I get it.”

She pulled her arm back and plowed the plate into the side of the kitchen table, where most of it broke away, leaving her holding a piece in her hand. She dropped it on the growing pile by her feet.

“Eveleth, Jesus,” Dean said, standing up and pushing his chair back from the table.

She turned around and took the rest of the plates—the other six—down in a stack, which she set on the counter. She broke them, one by one, smashing some against the counter or the table before letting them land on the kitchen floor, and Dean stood and watched with his arms folded. She threw one while she thought about the time Tim called her an idiot when she couldn’t find her keys, and the bits of it slid and skidded across the kitchen floor until they were under the refrigerator and beside the dishwasher.

When they were all dashed to pieces—every plate she’d ever eaten dinner on at nine thirty at night after she’d given up on Tim coming home, every plate she’d put in front of him for his birthday breakfast with a candle in a stack of French toast—she stopped. She was hot and dizzy and her heart was pounding, and Dean was still silent. Then he walked toward her, kicking broken dishes out of the way, clearing himself a path to where she was standing. He got right next to her, until she recognized the smell of his laundry detergent.

He reached behind her, over her shoulder, and she wondered if she was about to feel his hand on the back of her neck. Fortunately, before she could close her eyes or otherwise behave like a person transparently hoping to be kissed, she saw that he’d pulled down a bowl, which he finished off with a snap of his wrist—a snap that had once been worth many millions of dollars a year.