graciously do so, got off the phone, agreeing vaguely when she suggested he drive over to see her after the season ended.
On another night—after a one–nothing win, another gem for Sandford, the win coming when Mraz ended it with a ninth-inning home run arcing over the decaying green wall in left—he called directory assistance in Osterville and asked for the number for McLaughlin, Randall, and called it without hesitating because if he hesitated he would come to his senses. Even as the phone rang, he thought, Hang up. As it rang a second time, he thought: Hang up. In the middle of the third ring, Connie answered in a cheery voice and he was caught off guard.
“Hi,” he croaked out.
“Can I help you?” she asked from six hundred fifteen miles away.
“Con?” he said.
“Who is this?” she asked, and when he told her, she exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh. Ed. My Lord, it’s been … well, a lot of water under, as they say.”
“Yes,” he said. “Too long.”
“Your name came up last year, at the reunion. Forty years since high school, if you can believe that. People started asking about people who weren’t there.”
He wondered if she was still married to McLaughlin, how he could ask. He saw them starting out slowly, phone calls every couple of weeks. When the season was over and he was at the end of baseball, he could drive over to see her. They could have dinner; maybe the Victorian tearoom where they’d had their first, awful date thirty years earlier was still open. They’d see how things went. The thought struck him: was she jowly, double-chinned, her white hair thinning? He was no prize, though: not obese, but slow, achy in the morning, his knee forever in pain.
“How’s Billy?” he asked, her son’s name pushing into his memory: the frail boy yelling “Stop” when they wanted to put the giant stuffed bear into the trunk.
She laughed. “He’s William now. Not Billy. His son, William Junior, got married last year and they’re expecting a baby. I keep saying, ‘I’m too young to be a great-grandmother.’ What about you? I’ll bet you’re married and have a whole passel of kids.”
“No,” he said. “I was. Married, I mean.” He shrugged, although she couldn’t possibly see that over the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, a touch of what seemed genuine concern in her voice. He waited for her to tell him about herself, about marrying McLaughlin and divorcing him—a rebound relationship after he had gone off to Erie.
“Randy and I …” Got divorced, he waited for her to say, but she went on. “I guess you don’t know. I married Randy McLaughlin. It’s been thirty years.” She laughed. “I can hear you thinking, him? But he’s a dear, a good daddy to Billy. William, I mean. We should all get together sometime if you’re over this way.”
Edward Everett wanted the call to end after he learned that she and Randy McLaughlin were still together, but he couldn’t graciously hang up until the conversation came to some kind of ending. Finally, she said, “Oh, Randy just drove up. He would love to say hey.”
“I’d like to,” he lied, “but I have a conference call in fifteen minutes and I have to go over some game logs beforehand.”
“Conference call? This late at night?”
“The director of PD is … Well, he wants what he wants when he wants it.”
“I know the type. Now that you have my number, don’t be a stranger. And I’ve got yours off caller ID. William gave us this fancy phone package for Christmas. It’s all beyond me. Call waiting. Wireless Internet.” From the background of where she was, he heard a male voice calling, “Hello? Hon?”
“I need to get going here, Connie.”
“Sure, stay in touch.”
He started to hang up but not before, from her end, he heard her say, “You won’t believe …”
He sat in the darkness, folding the scrap of paper with her number in half, then in quarters, then eighths, until it was so small he couldn’t make any more folds in it. He pushed himself out of the chair and used the foot lever to spring open the trash can and dropped the scrap on top of the coffee filter from earlier in the day and went to bed.
Two days later, on the weekend before the All-Star break, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, emailed to say he wanted to meet. “I’m in St. Louis for family business,” he wrote. “Am overnighting a plane ticket for Sunday.