She pulled her arm back and plowed the plate into the side of the kitchen table, where most of it broke away, leaving her holding a piece in her hand. She dropped it on the growing pile by her feet.
“Eveleth, Jesus,” Dean said, standing up and pushing his chair back from the table.
She turned around and took the rest of the plates—the other six—down in a stack, which she set on the counter. She broke them, one by one, smashing some against the counter or the table before letting them land on the kitchen floor, and Dean stood and watched with his arms folded. She threw one while she thought about the time Tim called her an idiot when she couldn’t find her keys, and the bits of it slid and skidded across the kitchen floor until they were under the refrigerator and beside the dishwasher.
When they were all dashed to pieces—every plate she’d ever eaten dinner on at nine thirty at night after she’d given up on Tim coming home, every plate she’d put in front of him for his birthday breakfast with a candle in a stack of French toast—she stopped. She was hot and dizzy and her heart was pounding, and Dean was still silent. Then he walked toward her, kicking broken dishes out of the way, clearing himself a path to where she was standing. He got right next to her, until she recognized the smell of his laundry detergent.
He reached behind her, over her shoulder, and she wondered if she was about to feel his hand on the back of her neck. Fortunately, before she could close her eyes or otherwise behave like a person transparently hoping to be kissed, she saw that he’d pulled down a bowl, which he finished off with a snap of his wrist—a snap that had once been worth many millions of dollars a year.
In a movie, they’d have wound up laughing, and maybe even tickling each other. There would have been joy in it. But they just stood by her sink and smashed eight dinner plates, eight cereal bowls, and eight salad plates. When he handed her that last plate, she held it straight out in front of her, almost reverently, and she uncurled her fingers and just let the weight of it not rest in her hand anymore. The plate broke into such little pieces on the floor that it stopped being. The sound crested and stopped, and then they were alone together, standing on a little tile island in a sea of broken yellow flowers. She lifted her left hand to push a scraggle of hair away from her pink face, and he cringed. “Ah, you’re hurt.”
It wasn’t a surprise that surrounding herself with shards of broken dishes had given her a cut between two of her fingers. It was more surprising to confirm, as she turned her hands over, front and back, that there wasn’t more blood. She ran her hand under cold water and washed it, and Dean got a clean paper towel and pressed it to the cut. “I’ve got it,” Evvie said, taking over, but he put his hand on top of hers.
“Make sure you press down,” he said. “It’ll stop.”
He was so tall that she should have anticipated the sheer size of his hand, but how stumpy her fingers looked under his made her chuckle. “You have paws like a Great Dane puppy,” she murmured.
“Yeah. You know, they still do some things well,” he said.
She looked up at him. There was a little scar over his eyebrow. Almost definitely, she figured, it was the result of having been hit with a ball. A cut must have opened up. Maybe he had been little, like she’d been when she fell on a piece of glass and got four stitches in her knee. Maybe not. For as long as it took to blink, she could see herself in her mind, fastening a bandage over his eye.
He peeked under the paper at the cut. “I think you’re going to live.”
Evvie kept looking at his hands, and she slid her eyes up his arm to his shoulder. In there somewhere. In there somewhere, was the answer. “You should teach me how to pitch,” she said.
He laughed. “What?”
“You should teach me how to pitch,” she repeated.
“What for?”
“So I’ll know how it feels to pitch.”
“What for?” he repeated.
She shrugged. “So I’ll know how it feels not to pitch.”