to the movies in almost two years. Knowing he was downstairs waiting, she also waited. Nothing doing right at 10:00. 10:02. 10:05. But at 10:07, she saw it at the top of the column of stories: “After Baseball: Eight Players on Having Free Time, Paying for Drinks, and Moving On.” Six of the guys had retired after long careers, and one quit young to focus on his family. And then there was Dean, whom the writer called “at first glance, perhaps the most famous washout in twenty-first-century sports.”
But in the piece, Dean talked affectionately about the town where he now lived (he called it “the opposite of New York in pretty much every way”) and the boys on the teams he was coaching (“You miss a bunch of bozos giving you shit once it’s gone, so I’m lucky I met these bozos when I did”). The magazine article version of Dean could easily have been in the running for Mellowest Man Alive, explaining that “the team did everything to try to help” and “sometimes you have to know when you’re not an asset anymore” and “I’d be pretty ungrateful to complain about eleven seasons of professional baseball and three trips to the World Series. I was lucky. I’m still lucky.” He talked about the trip to Boston to get the pinball machine, which it seemed he’d showed the reporter during a visit Evvie didn’t realize had even happened. The reporter had even talked to Somerville Bill, who said that Dean was “a good fella, for a Yankee.”
Dean had not told the reporter he sometimes sneaked off to the local minor-league field to pitch at two in the morning, clanging the ball off the chain-link, ringed by flashlights. He didn’t describe hurling pinecones at her fence until they exploded when he went to take out the trash. He didn’t tell the reporter he had felt like he was pitching with someone else’s arm. Instead, he showed the reporter a well-adjusted, super-relaxed Dean “They Named Choking After Me, But It’s Fine” Tenney. The King of Chill.
Then, at the end, the reporter wrote this: “Sometimes, Tenney reaches over with his left arm to rub his right shoulder, like he still uses it every day. I ask him at one point whether it bothers him. ‘I’m just a creaky old man,’ he tells me. ‘Though it could always be my arm telling me to get the hell off the couch and go do my job.’ He smiles and adds, ‘It’s one of those.’ I’m not sure whether he’s kidding.”
Evvie got to the end of the article and stared at a picture of Dean, credited to a staff photographer. In it, Dean, dressed in a warm coat and a Yankees cap, sat on a stack of lobster crates on a boat called the Second Chance, which she knew belonged to one of her dad’s friends. He had offered the photographer a mild squint, a slightly scruffy face that spoke of hard times and intrigue. And sex, though maybe only to her.
She could imagine how elated a photographer must have been to take Dean out for a shoot and find a boat called the Second Chance for him to sit on. It might as well have been called the Floating Blunt-Force Metaphor. It was exactly what Andy had always said—that someday, the press would long for Dean to fight his way back. They’d want to forgive him, and it wouldn’t be because they were merciful. It would be because the flavor had gone out of hating him like it goes out of cheap gum, and now they needed to taste something different.
She closed the laptop and went down to the kitchen, where she made tea and waited. When the kettle whistled, he appeared. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she answered, dropping her teabag into her cup. “The piece is nice.”
“He’s a good guy,” Dean said, resting in the doorway on one shoulder. “It’s honest. I recognize myself.”
“It was funny about your arm,” she said. “What you said about how maybe your arm wants to pitch.”
She knew without turning around that he was tilting his head like he didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. Like he hadn’t just read it. “I didn’t say my arm wants to pitch.”
She didn’t turn around. “You said maybe. You said maybe your shoulder hurts because your arm wants to do its job.”
“I was kidding.”
“So you don’t want to get back to pitching.” She turned around and sat down. Then