Evvie Drake Starts Over(5)

The door opened and Andy grinned. “Hey, man.” They did the backslap-hug they’d been doing since they were about thirteen, and Andy extended a bottle of beer. “Come on in.”

Andy’s house was a modest green rambler with a lot of wear on the siding. But inside on the living room floor, the girls’ plastic dollhouse was decidedly ornate, with three floors and an elevator on a pulley. Today, it looked like it had been knocked over and set right again, leaving an array of little plastic lamps and furniture on the carpet. A hula hoop leaned against the arm of the sofa, and the sounds of the TV and two girls giggling floated down the hall from behind a closed door. “Welcome to my party house,” Andy said as he gestured to an armchair for Dean to sit. “I’m raging, as you can see.”

Dean grinned. “How old are they now?”

“Rose is seven and Lilly is five.” Andy pushed the hula hoop out of the way and sat on the sofa. “They’re in the playroom watching Ghostbusters for the fiftieth time, so I’m thinking they’ll be lady scientists for Halloween. I’m honestly pretty psyched.” He took a swallow from his own beer. “How was your trip?”

   Dean involuntarily twitched against the memory of his stiffening back. “Long, but it was good. It’s good to see a different place. And good to see you, too. I was trying to think—it’s been, what, three or four years?”

“Yeah.” Andy thought for a minute. “It was right before Lori left, I think. When we came down for your party, your ESPN thing? That would be four years.”

Dean cringed. “Yeah, that. It’s way too long.”

“Well,” Andy said, “since then, Lori left. I still teach math. I’m still single. I recently became the faculty advisor to the yearbook, which I’m counting as coaching a sport. And now you’re pretty much up to date.” His eyes went to a picture of himself and his girls that was sitting on the end table. “It doesn’t seem to have been as much of a surprise to anybody else as it was to me that my marriage didn’t work out.”

Dean picked up a stuffed panda off the floor, then put it back down. “I know I should’ve come up after she left. I meant to, and I didn’t get around to it. I was pretty busy being a big shot.”

“Yeah.” Andy tipped his head to one side. “Pretty brutal, all that.”

Dean laughed into the bottle in his mouth. He swallowed and wiped the corner of his lip with his thumb. “For me, too. Apparently, I’m a fucking disaster.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Oh, I know they do.”

“How have you been doing?”

Dean dropped his head back against the chair. “Not my best year.”

“Yeah.”

“And I have gotten probably a hundred thousand letters and emails and goddamn tweets about it. Mostly from people who know for sure what it would take to fix me.”

“Hard to believe they haven’t solved it yet.”

   Dean smiled. “I mean, did you know this might all be in my head? Did you know that when I went from being able to strike out guys who are going to wind up in the Hall of Fame to barely being able to hit a car with a fucking beanbag it made some people think I had a psychological problem?”

“Psychological, huh?”

“Yeah, the consensus is that it’s all right up here,” Dean said, tapping his temple. “Just need to concentrate. Focus. Get in touch with my inner Zulu warrior.”

“You have to be kidding me. Nobody said Zulu warrior.”

“Oh, hell yes, they did. They said inner Zulu warrior, they said inner Peyton Manning, somebody said inner fucking Hannibal Lecter, like I’d want to find that if I had it. They kept writing to me: ‘Did you try hypnotism?’ ‘Did you read Sun Tzu?’ ‘Did you try a therapist?’ Like I’m trying to fix my arm with a socket wrench and they’re going to save baseball in New York by telling me I need a therapist. Like I’m in the city where baristas write their shamans’ names on your fucking coffee cup, and it’s Margo from Greenpoint who’s going to come up with ‘Try a therapist.’ ‘Thanks, Margo, I never thought about trying a therapist. How would I have known to try a therapist?’?”

Andy nodded. “So you tried a therapist?”

Dean reached over to rub his right shoulder. “Yeah, make your jokes. I went to eight sports psychologists and two psychiatrists.” He started counting off on his fingers. “I did acupuncture, acupressure, suction cups on my shoulder, and candles in my fucking ears—which, ask me about that sometime. I quit gluten, I quit sugar, I quit sex, I had extra sex, I ate no meat, just meat. I took creative movement classes, I was hypnotized a lot, and I learned how to meditate. That’s the one I still do, by the way.” He looked at Andy, who had his mouth twisted into a perplexed curve. “Where did I lose you? Extra sex?”

“No, ‘creative movement classes.’ I think Rose did that.”

“Oh, it’s some elegant shit. It was supposed to help me align my spine, move more naturally. I looked like one of those inflatable tube guys that blows around outside a car dealership. They kept saying I needed to have loose bones. Nobody on Twitter had diagnosed me with tight bones, so fuck the Internet, I guess, right?”