retired two years ago, and he started training when he was ten and doing it full-time when he was seventeen, I think? So…it’s almost fifty years.”
“But no lobster boat for you.”
“It wasn’t encouraged for girls so much when I was little. Plus, I think I knew from watching my dad that it was brutal. I never saw him before school, and then he’d get home right around when I had dinner ready.”
“Good lord. I don’t think I could heat up soup when I was that age.”
She smiled. “Well, he was the one working hard. His back was—it is—a nightmare from hauling up the traps. He’s had surgery on it a few different times, that’s part of why he finally retired. He always wanted to make sure I felt like I could do whatever I wanted. ‘There’s more to life than eight hundred traps,’ he used to tell me.”
“Eight hundred traps?”
“That’s how many one guy can have.”
“That’s a lot of lobster.”
“It is. I think I…figured there were easier ways to live.” She put her hands flat on the table. “Which I guess turned out to mean marrying a doctor.”
“Did you want to do something else?” he asked.
She sighed. “I think every plan I ever had involved everything happening later. You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It’s like a pool where you can’t touch the bottom. I knew there would be something else, but it was always after. After, after. It was like I was waiting for something to start, and I was actually in the middle of it the whole time. Does that make sense?”
“It does.”
She picked at a thread on the sleeve of her robe. “You never wanted to do anything else besides baseball?”
He made a sound like pffft. “No. Never.”
“Did your parents mind?”
He thought about it. “I don’t think anybody wants their kid to have exactly one plan that could end in the time it takes for him to take a baseball to the eye socket. But they eventually gave up and went for it. Pushed me really hard to go to this All-Star Camp, and that’s where I decided I wanted to go to Cornell…and you know the rest.”
She remembered the smack of the pinecone against the fence when she was spying on him in the dark, and she wondered if he did this everywhere all the time, with oranges in supermarket alleys and snow globes behind souvenir shops and sea urchins from the tide pools into the sides of bleached-out boathouses, hurling everything over and over until it finally fell apart. She wanted to know if he thought he’d go back to pitching. She wanted to ask all the questions she’d promised she wouldn’t—was he crazy, was he messed up, did something happen, what happened?
“I’m just saying,” she told him, “that my dad is going to talk to you a lot about lobsters.”
“I’m ready. My dad might ask about your homeowner’s policy.”
“Can’t wait.”
* * *
—
The door of Kell’s house opened, and Lilly, Andy’s five-year-old, looked up at them. “Hello and welcome to Thanksgiving!” she said. She was the more adventurous dresser of the girls, hostessing today in brown-and-white checked pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt featuring a frog made of sequins.
“Hello, lightning bug,” Evvie said.
“Hey there, Lilly Buck,” Dean added, giving her hair a muss with his right hand.
“Dean, dooooooon’t-uuuuh,” Lilly wailed with a grin, then she took off running into the house.
“Oh, boy, she is nuts about you, that one,” Evvie said. A warm wave of turkey fumes drew them into the living room, where Frank Ashton was making short work of a dish of peanuts while voices chattered in the kitchen. Lilly had disappeared back into the finished basement, where her sister surely awaited with whatever inflatable fort or elaborate robot kit their grandmother had secured for them. Evvie called out a greeting. “Don’t get up, Pop,” she said as she bent to hug him and press her cheek to his. “How are you?”
He patted her encircling arm. “Oh, I’m doin’ fine, sweetheart.” She still loved the sound of her father’s voice. She gave him an extra squeeze before she let go.
“Dad, this is my friend Dean,” Evvie said.
Dean shook her father’s hand. “Good to meet you.”
“You, too. And I promised Eveleth I’m not going to say anything about baseball.” Evvie froze.
“Right on,” Dean said with a nod. “Excuse me a minute, I’m going to go kiss my mom.” He took the pumpkin bread from Evvie and turned toward the kitchen.