Evvie Drake Starts Over(73)

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   Evvie didn’t hear much from Dean during the trip, but then, he’d warned her about that. She texted him Good luck! and a red heart on the first full day he was gone, and he texted back, Thanks, Minnesota. Keep things warm while I’m gone. She had laughed at this and blushed, but she had taken the request seriously, sleeping in his bed in the apartment the whole time.

After that one message, she heard nothing at all until Monday morning, when he texted, Should be there by six tonight. Lots to talk about. See you soon.

It was a slow day, hot and lazy, which Evvie spent at the grocery store and the bakery and a little shop where she bought herself a necklace with a white and red enamel baseball charm hanging from it. She kept looking at her phone to see what time it was, to see if he’d texted. He’d been gone three days, but she’d quickly gotten spoiled on the utterly entitled feeling it gave her to know she could reach out whenever she wanted and put her hand on his back, or her arms around his waist, or she could kiss him and pull him into the apartment and get him half naked in seven seconds.

As six o’clock passed, she walked around the kitchen, sat down again, got up, sat down in the living room, got up, went back to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, went into the bathroom and brushed her hair, and wound up back at the kitchen table. And at about twenty minutes past six, she heard the truck pull in and stop. She wondered whether to run out the door, or open the door, or stand up, but she sat where she was until the side door opened and he stood there with his bag over his shoulder and his keys in his hand. “Hey,” he said. He dropped the keys on the table.

   “Hey.” Now she stood, went over to him, and slid her arms around him. “I’m happy to see you.” She reached up and kissed him.

“I’m happy to see you, too.” He kissed her again, this time on the forehead. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing big, I don’t think. I mostly hung out here. It’s been hot. I had lunch with Kell one day.” Why, she wondered, are we talking about this? Why isn’t he saying anything? “How did it go?”

They stepped back from each other, and he slid off his jacket and put it on a hook by the door. He turned back to her and crossed his arms. He shook his head. “I threw it into the stands, Ev.”

She felt it in her chest. “What do you mean?” She held up one hand. “Sit down and tell me. I’ll get you a drink.” She went to the refrigerator and got him a bottle of beer.

“I threw it into the stands. I threw it two feet wide, I threw it a foot high, I threw it all over the fuckin’ place. That was Friday, so we tried it again on Saturday, and I hit the poor kid they had standing in the batter’s box. Clocked him right on the fuckin’ elbow. They’d brought a specialist—or another specialist, a new specialist—and I talked to him for quite a while yesterday. And by the afternoon, we’d all agreed that it was a nice chance to catch up, but that was about it.” He drank from the bottle and shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing?” she said.

He sighed like he was trying to blow out a candle with it. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I thought this was going to be different. It was like the shittiest practice any of us ever went to. I threw a couple that were not quite where I wanted them, and he was like, ‘Form looks good, looks good, stay loose.’ But I knew. I can tell.”

“What do you think happened?”

He looked down at the table. “The same thing that happened for two years before I came up here, which is I don’t have a fucking clue what happened.” He didn’t even say this unkindly. He said it as if he were telling her what happened, as if he were saying, Well, the flange needed tightening, and they were using the wrong washer. “The specialist asked me a lot of questions, had me do a bunch of exercises. I passed everything. They did a couple of MRIs, and other than the fact that my shoulder and my elbow both basically look like they got weedwacked from the inside out, there’s nothing wrong.”

   “You don’t have the thing where your arm falls off?”

He smiled. “Not falls off. Comes apart in the middle.”

“That’s not a lot better.”

“Well, I don’t have that, no. But I don’t have anything. I’m still a fucking head case, so nothing’s changed. Apparently, a year is about how long it takes me to forget that I already tried everything, most things five or six times, and it’s time to stop fucking embarrassing myself.”

“Wait, you’re quitting?”

He looked up at her slowly. “Yes. It’s fully, totally over.”

“But I saw you pitch a month ago.”

“And a bunch of people watched me throw into the stands yesterday.”

The thump of the ball into the mitt. “You can’t quit.”

“Yes. I can quit. I am quitting. I am not pitching anymore.”

She shook her head. “I’m so sorry. I feel like I should have gone with you.”

He shook his head, his shoulders, all in a gesture of loose bafflement. “To do what?”

“I don’t know. To be there with you, I guess.”

“You didn’t miss a good time.”

“Not to have a good time. Just, do you remember when you asked me to be behind the plate at the Spring Dance? Do you remember that you said it helped that I was back there, even if you couldn’t see me? I feel like this is what happened, we didn’t follow the rules of what made it work, we didn’t do it the same way. It can still work, but we have to do it the same way—”