They would pay him half again as much as he earned for this season. “We’ll make it a three-year contract,” Johansen had said. “We know you don’t want to leave everything without a guarantee.” Leave what? Edward Everett thought. If he stuck out the full three years, they would give him another year’s salary in deferred compensation to reward him for staying. It was nowhere near twenty-three million dollars but it was something most people didn’t have: a guarantee he wouldn’t be destitute for the rest of his life.
When he got back to the hotel, it was past ten. Parking the car, he thought of himself as he’d been the day before: someone certain he was going to lose his job, someone certain, for how many minutes, that he was going to die in a crash with a hundred strangers. That was a different self. That self was grateful for what amounted to table scraps from the banquet of life, as his father had once said apropos of his own settling. The self shifting the car into “park” and setting the emergency brake as a massive American Airlines jet swooped over him had a guarantee of more than a quarter million dollars over the next thirty-six months, all for leaving a town that no longer had any hold on him and moving to a country he couldn’t even pick out on a map.
Hell, he thought, the self he had been when he left this very lot earlier in the day was a different man. That man had been stunned, that man had despised Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, for the decision Edward Everett was certain would mean deprivation for the rest of his days. That self never would have seen Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, as a living, breathing human being with a mother he’d made unhappy—a mother who made the same pronouncement about her son’s desire to be part of baseball that Edward Everett’s had three decades ago when he had told her that he had signed the minor league contract with the Cleveland organization. We’re brothers of a sort, he thought with a laugh. He’s the rich brother, sure, but brothers.
Just before Edward Everett had left, Johansen walked him out to his car. After he shut off the current to the fence, as Edward Everett was about to open his car door, Johansen had said, his voice kind, “You know, what happened to you was the shit.”
“How do you mean?”
“That injury. Montreal,” Johansen said. “I Googled you. What a day you were having, and then, bang, all over.” Even in the darkness as they stood on either side of the gate, Edward Everett could see Johansen shake his head sadly. “I don’t know how you didn’t give up. Someone else, they’d’ve thrown in the towel. Succumbed to bitterness.”
Touched, Edward Everett said, “It never occurred to me.” Of course, it had—but in this new version of his life, he hadn’t fallen into bitterness over his bad luck.
“It’s probably no consolation,” Johansen said, “but at least you got there. You know? For a minute and a half. I … A lot of guys say that it was the curveball that kept them out of baseball, but for me it was everything. Hit the curve? Hell, I couldn’t hit a fastball. Or a change. Or a ball someone laid out there on a plate and said, ‘Take your best cut.’ ” They shook hands and Johansen said, “You must really love the game.”
“I guess I do,” Edward Everett said.
Walking from his car toward the bright foyer of the hotel, he thought, What a difference a day makes. There was a song like that, it struck him, and he pushed open the door to the air-conditioned lobby humming the tune. He hummed it as he jabbed the button for the elevator and was humming it still when, just as the doors slid open and he waited for two children in swimsuits to exit, a woman coming up behind him spoke his name.
“I kept telling myself I was going to leave in fifteen minutes,” she said when he turned around. Meg. The woman from the flight. “For an hour and a half, I kept saying, ‘Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes,’ but every time fifteen minutes passed, I thought about going back to my daughter’s and how messed up they were—all of their New Age blady-blah about how this had to happen and there was a reason I survived. But then I thought about how I