a dead man? He considered throwing them away but felt a twinge of guilt: these clothes had once been something his father would have run his hands across as he flipped through the shirts, trying to decide what to put on his body that day. So he had hauled them around for nearly half his life. But, by now, certainly whatever obligation he had to them as remnants of his father had expired; they were just pieces of stitched cotton and rayon.
Out making his runs to charity, he noticed that so many of the landmarks of his life had disappeared. The jeweler’s where he found Renee’s ring was shut, the name and hours of operation painted on the glass front door nearly chipped away: how long had it been closed? The office of the physical therapist where he’d gone after surgery on what had been his good knee had vanished—the operation necessary because too many years of favoring his injured one wore the other out as well. Now the building was missing, just a dark gap between a bowling alley and a nail-and-tanning salon. When had that happened? Gone, too, was the diner where he’d met the first woman he dated when he moved to Perabo City—Sheila? Shirley? She’d been a waitress, they’d flirted, he left her extravagant tips—five dollars for a four-dollar meal—and they’d seen each other for two months.
It was not just the ball club that was leaving town: the town was leaving town.
One night, as he watched a bearded man and his skinny wife win a new refrigerator on The Newlywed Game, he could hear another party next door at the Duboises’. He moved through the kitchen and out onto his deck, easing the door closed, wincing at the sharp click of the latch, and stood in the shadow, listening. On the deck next door, all he could make out were silhouettes of perhaps a dozen people, voices overlapping voices, until he heard Rhonda exclaim, “Oh, Neh Neh,” her nickname for Renee that she resurrected when she’d been drinking. He stepped farther out onto his deck, squinting into the night as if it would make the dark forms somehow distinct. Renee’s laugh came back to him, followed by a male voice: “If I’d known this, I’d never—” Never what? Never have taken you from your husband.
He went back inside. Grizzly lay sleeping in his corner of the kitchen and he raised his head, briefly and indifferently, and then pawed at his bedding for a moment before going back to sleep. In the living room, The Newlywed Game had given way to The Dating Game, and as the host introduced the three bachelors sitting smugly on their high stools—all wide lapels, permed hair and toothy smiles—and the bachelorette began asking them questions peppered with double entendres, Edward Everett got the itch to call women he’d known, and the next day he did. Certainly one was stuck in her own bit of stasis while everyone else rushed on into their private futures; certainly one would exclaim, Oh. I was just thinking of you. Anita answered the phone, breathless after dashing inside from unloading groceries from the car, she said, thinking it was her daughter calling to be picked up from dance class, and then was confused when Edward Everett told her who he was. Magda, whom he’d met on her second day in the country after she’d emigrated from Poland, didn’t answer but her answering machine had two voices on it: “Hi, this is Roger. And Maaaagdaaaa! We’re probably out walking our Weimaraners. Leave a message.” Some had just disappeared: Sharon’s number was disconnected; Liz’s belonged to a body shop.
One was happy to hear from him, Audrey, a new-accounts clerk he’d met when he took one of his Spanish-speaking players to the bank to help him open an account. “Ed,” she said in a delighted voice when he told her who he was. “We must be on the same wavelength.” She had a confession, she said. “I called you once but didn’t have the nerve to leave a message. And now here you are. It’s kismet.” But soon, she was crying, going on about her most recent boyfriend, whom she’d learned too late was married with a baby on the way; going on about a fight she’d had with a co-worker who, she was convinced, had dinged her car in the parking lot but denied it. He remembered why he’d stopped seeing her and as soon as he could