her glass and tapped her fingers against it. “Let’s see. Being married to Tim was like…it was like paddling a boat, but for ten years. And you’re not getting anywhere, and you’re ready to stop. But the farther you get, the more you think, ‘Well, I’ll just go another hundred yards. In case it’s right up there. So I didn’t take this whole trip for nothing.’ ”
He nodded. “You know, I used to wish I blew out my elbow or shattered my fucking wrist. So I could point at it and go, ‘That, that’s why.’ ”
She turned in the chair to lean over and pour herself another drink, almost feeling guilty about the fact that she could make her body do what she wanted so effortlessly. “Was it a woman?” she asked.
There was that third of a smile again. “Why do you want to know if it was a woman?”
She shrugged as she put her feet back over the arm of the chair. “I’m curious.”
“Yeah, but why do you specifically want to know if it was a woman? What, you want to know if there’s one now?”
She laughed, an incautious whiskey laugh. “Well, you’re not supposed to say that, haven’t you ever heard of subtext?”
“It was not a woman. And there is not one now. Consider that text.”
She met his eyes for a second, touched her bottom lip with her thumb, then sat up abruptly. “I should go. I should sleep, I shouldn’t…” She put the rest of her drink down on the table. “If I drink that, I’ll get sloppy.”
“I don’t mind.”
She felt the pink creep into her cheeks, and she got up and turned away from him. She teetered slightly and leaned for a second on the arm of the chair, but she didn’t turn back. “Okay, thank you, this was fun,” she called back as she crossed over into her kitchen. “Good night, Dean.”
“Good night, Eveleth, Minnesota, way up by Canada,” he called back.
WHEN DEAN TENNEY WAS IN the minors and living in a rented room in Albuquerque, he and the team had their season-ending party at the home of a local honest-to-God railroad magnate named Fitz Holley. Holley’s sprawling Victorian was fusty and untouchable inside, like Colonel Mustard should be bonking Miss Scarlet on the head with a candlestick over by the bar. But in his dark-wood, cigar-scented rec room, there was a restored vintage pinball machine with pinup girls painted on it. The bells rang, the flippers popped satisfyingly, and there was no way to describe the movement of the ball without resorting to noises like sproing. Dean loved it. He wanted it, or he wanted one just like it. It went on a list of the things he would get when everything worked out.
Everything did work out for a while, of course, and when he lived in New York, he would sometimes look at listings for pinball machines. But he found that they tended to be pop-culture kitsch—Gilligan’s Island machines and KISS machines and Michael Jordan machines. He’d bought some high-end dartboards, but when he stopped being able to pitch, something about throwing darts had seemed so ridiculous—even though he found he could still do it, which, what the hell—that he gave them to buddies before he moved.
Then in February, while he was living at Evvie’s, a friend who lived in Boston tipped him off that a guy he knew was unloading the prized possession of his recently deceased father: a 1956 pinball machine in good condition that could be had for a reasonable price. Really, for a relatively-not-unreasonable price. It wasn’t the kind of money he’d be able to spend forever, but it was money he could still spend now. He looked at a few pictures that were in his email, and while there were no pinup girls, it was sharp, painted with race cars. Sold. The only catch was that Dean had to come down to Boston to pick it up, which was almost a four-hour drive.
He explained all this to Evvie over coffee on a chilly Thursday morning, and she raised her eyebrow at the pinup girls and laughed about the KISS machines, and she was polite enough not to ask how much he was paying for this pinball machine with which he presumably intended to unleash all kinds of clanks and dings and brrrrrrrrings in her house at whatever time of day. “So when are you going to retrieve this thing?” she asked.