“You mean…pitch like a superstar? You mean…make all these fools look like fools? You mean…confound the sports think-piece industry? That? That thing?”
He bent and laid his forehead against hers. He took a deep breath—the deepest, it seemed like—and sighed. “It felt good.”
“To me, too,” she whispered.
“It was only one inning.”
“One thing at a time.”
He straightened up. “Meet you back at the house?”
She nodded. They walked past each other, and as he went to the truck and she went toward her car, they both turned and looked over their left shoulders.
In the car, Evvie cranked an Avett Brothers record she hadn’t listened to in almost two years. Technically, the song was about dying, but it sounded like hope: When I lay down my fears, my hopes and my doubts; the rings on my fingers and the keys to my house; with no hard feelings…
She was still in Dean’s shirt, and even though the night had a clipped chill to it, she left the window halfway down as she made her way out of the parking lot. She could smell the bay’s salted fog from here, and when the music was quiet, she could hear the buoys and horns, sounds of the water where people worked. It was where her dad had come every day for so long, up so early and back so late sometimes, with muck on his boots and his back so sore that he’d asked her to walk on it in her fuzzy pink socks up until she went away to college. She’d gone out on the harbor so many times that she could pick everything out on the shore from far away—the houses right on the water, the restaurant, the dock where the boys she knew had dangled their legs and fished with poles while they drank Cokes and ate Doritos.
She turned up Cherry Lane, which led her to Bancroft, and she saw Dean’s truck in her rearview mirror, and she smiled. She saw her house, her wide porch with the light she’d remembered to leave on, and the driveway, where she pulled in and stopped. She could barely see Dean in the dark, and he whispered “Hey” as he got out of his truck.
“Hey yourself, ace.” She leaned back against the tailgate, and he put one hand on either side of her.
“It’s noisy,” he said, leaning toward her.
“It’s crickets.”
He kissed the corner of her mouth. “Crickets and what?”
“Crickets and…frogs, I think.”
“Let’s go in?”
Evvie nodded, and he followed her up the steps. “So,” she said, “I told you I had something for you.” She walked through the living room to the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, she moved the iced tea aside and took out the bottle of champagne. “In honor of your victory.”
He grinned. “Aww, thanks.” He took the bottle from her and looked at it, then back up at her. “What were you going to do if I bombed?”
She made a face. “That was never going to happen.”
He started to unwrap the foil. “You were a fucking lot more confident than I was, then.” He balled up the foil and threw it at the trash can, where it bounced off the side. “Ignore that. That doesn’t count.”
“Hey, could you see me? When you were pitching? Tell the truth.”
“I tried, but I couldn’t find you,” he said, coaxing out the cork. “I knew you were there, though. I figured you were busy punching people in the face who were saying they’d heard I was crazy.” There was a pop and a misty curl went up from the bottle. He filled two juice glasses.
“Well, here’s to eleven pitches and lots more like them.” They clinked their glasses and drank.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“What made you think I wasn’t going to bomb?”
Evvie shook her head a little. “I’m not even sure. I just knew.”
“You know that even at my very worst, I still knew how to occasionally throw eleven decent pitches in a row, right?” He looked down into his drink.
“How often did you throw eleven that were that good? After things started to slide, I mean.”
“Almost never.” He took another drink.
“Well, there you go. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in all the stuff they had you do. But sometimes, it’s all about the intangibles.”
“The intangibles, huh?”
They looked at each other. This time, she raised an eyebrow. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, boy, I’m going to regret the thing I’m about to say.”