had a good life,” she would say when he complained about feeling stiff on waking in the morning, when, before the season started, he sometimes said that he was ready for bed as early as nine p.m., when he asked her to repeat something she had said.
For the days that remained of the home stand after he received the divorce papers, the joke came back to him often but it was no longer funny. Until now, sixty was another generation, not his. Even when he had turned sixty, it hadn’t seemed anything more than a number he would write on a form that asked “age.” Sixty was his mother when he lived with her after his injury in Montreal, his mother counting out blood pressure and cholesterol pills at the breakfast table. Sixty was his uncle dying of a heart attack four years after Edward Everett stopped working with him, too many steaks and cigarettes.
But now, with his wife gone and as he waited for the “Organizational Changes” email with his name in it, he felt the full brunt of sixty: sixty and no idea of how he’d arrived there so quickly; sixty and no notion of where he would be next year. You’ve had a good life. You’ve had a good life.
At the ballpark—not quite a ballpark—he went through the motions, twenty years of managing making it like riding a bike, still saying the right things, making the right moves, knowing when to pull a pitcher, when to pinch-hit, when to shift the fielders in a situation where a hitter would be more likely to hit the other way, effective enough that they went on a winning streak, the home stand nine wins and two losses.
Then, after the games, he cleared out quickly, often even before all of his players had gone home. Two nights after Sandford’s gem of a game, alone in the damp locker room, the dripping showerheads leaking water even more rapidly, the pipes developing a whine, it struck him that his father had hung himself in such a place, bitter over the fateful “no” he had said to the man who became one of the greatest football coaches in college history. What had sent him over the edge? he wondered. Did suicide sit in the body like a cancer gene, waiting, inevitable? Was it festering in him?
But at home, things were no better. He began over and over the steps he knew he needed to take. He studied the financial form attached to the divorce agreement—assets, debts, property—but every time he set out to make progress on it, it seemed daunting. How much was his car worth? How much could he sell his house for? As for his bank statements, they were all a jumble, stacked in a drawer, still in their envelopes and in no particular order: May 2007 on top of January 2003 on top of March 2006. How had he let it get to such a state? He put the financial disclosure aside, still blank, and went down to his basement, regarding the boxes that filled so much of the space there, so many things he had no need to hold on to, thinking he should haul them to the curb, take them to the Goodwill, but it all seemed so overwhelming and so he went back upstairs, closing the door on the chaos.
Renee haunted the house—the bedroom, yes, where he lay awake at night, seeing her with whoever represented her “moving on,” a man younger than he was, faceless, propping himself above Renee on his elbows, driving into her, Renee’s face fixed in a way he remembered too well, her eyes squeezed shut, her lips parted slightly, on the very edge of coming. They were in the living room, on the sofa, on the floor. In the kitchen, as he shook dog food out of the bag into Grizzly’s bowl, they were with him at the table, Renee leaning across toward her faceless “moving on,” a foot nudging his foot. (I have an idea, the two stumbling toward the bedroom.) He wondered if the man had been there when he’d been on the road, and stripped the bed, looking for proof, knowing at the same time it was ludicrous, the ghost of stains mottling the mattress pad offering him evidence of nothing.
To avoid seeing them, the hours away from the ballpark became a wasteland of television and junk food; he wallowed in nostalgia (But then, wasn’t that the purpose of nostalgia,