Evvie Drake Starts Over(9)

He looked around the empty space. “It looks great, just right. I know you weren’t sure about renting it out. Not knowing me and everything.”

“I thought about it more after I talked to Andy. It makes a lot of sense. It can be open-ended, you don’t have to get into a big”—she waved her hand—“a big thing that’s not convenient for your situation. It’s more space than I need.”

He nodded slowly. “House rules? Other stuff?”

“No smoking. Do you have pets?”

“I don’t have pets, and I also don’t smoke. True story, by the way: a friend of mine had a Great Dane who used to try to eat his Marlboro Lights. Wound up in the dog hospital once.”

“Well, at least they were lights.”

“Yeah, he pulled through. You’re not a dog person?”

“No, I am. Always meant to get one. I guess I didn’t get around to it.”

“Ah, that happens,” Dean said. “Andy said you were asking $800?”

“To be honest, Andy was asking $800,” she said. “He does all my negotiating.”

   “Seems reasonable.” Dean smiled and looked out the window, where the biggest tree in the yard shook. “Getting windy out there.”

It got quiet. She heard a car go by outside, and more wind. A swarm of leaves blew across the yard. “It seems like a cup-of-tea day,” she said, finally. “I assume you like Gatorade or something. Do you drink tea?”

“I do drink tea, when it’s cold,” he said. “Hot Gatorade is not good.”

Back in the kitchen, they sat across from each other at her wooden table. She wished she’d thrown out the wilting bunch of parsley she was storing in a jar of water. “So you grew up with Andy in Denver.” He nodded. “What was after that?”

“I went to Cornell to play baseball. Graduated from there, then I got drafted, played in the minors in a couple different places, and then I went to the Marlins in 2008.”

“Mi…ami Marlins?” she ventured.

“Exactly. But back then, the Florida Marlins, before they got the new stadium. So I lived down in Miami for a couple years, then I got traded to the Yankees, and I went to New York. And now I’m unemployed. You?”

“Nowhere near that interesting. I grew up right here, in Calcasset. My husband, Tim, and I went to USC, and then he went to medical school out there. Then Tim did his residency in Portland. I lived up here, so we were semi-long-distance. Then he moved to Calcasset, and we got married and got this house. That was four years ago.”

When he immediately looked at the floor, it seemed likely that Andy had told him how the story ended, at least as much as Andy knew himself. His version did not include her in her car with her birth certificate and a wad of cash.

Dean looked back at her. “I’m sorry about all that, by the way,” he said.

“Yeah, thank you.” She nodded. Her mind was digging through options, seeking for anything else to ask. “How long were you thinking of staying?”

   “I don’t know. Six months? A year at the most. I’ll have to get back to New York, that’s where my real life is. But right now, I’m kind of clearing my head.” He smiled. “That’s about as far as I’ve gotten for now.”

She nodded. “I can relate.”

The amount of time people who have just met are supposed to look directly at each other, particularly without talking, is a unit that’s both very short and very precise. When you exceed it, you get suspicious, or you get threatened, or you get this flicker of accidental intimacy, like you’ve peeked at the person naked through a shower door. They both smiled, and it ended. “Right,” she said. “So, I think you should take it. The apartment. You should take it.” She could see that he was carefully considering whether to say something. “What?” she asked.

“I’m wondering if I should promise you no funny stuff or something.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Do you need me to promise you no funny stuff?”

Now he seemed a little more serious. “I do think we should have a deal.” She looked at him expectantly. “You don’t ask me about baseball,” he said, “and I don’t ask you about your husband.”

She blinked. “I didn’t ask you about baseball.”

“I know. I didn’t ask you about your husband.”

“But you want to have an official arrangement.”

He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know how much you know about it, Evvie, but I have had a shitty year. A shitty couple of years. And I have talked about it a lot. And I think maybe you’re in the same position. If you’re okay with this, you’d be doing me a favor, and you’d be doing me an even bigger favor if it can just be normal. I’ll say hi, and you can say hi, and we won’t do, you know, the whole thing with the mysterious sad lady and the exiled…fuckup.”

She squinted at him a little. “So, like, as an example, I won’t mention that ‘exile’ and ‘fuckup’ both strike me as a little unfair.”

   “Right. And I won’t ask you why ‘mysterious sad lady’ doesn’t.”

Her hand stretched out across the table. Instead of taking it in his handshake hand, his business hand, he took it in the hand on the same side. “Do we have a deal?” he asked.