man had been wrapping loaves of fresh-baked pumpernickel, and the scent of the bread made his stomach gurgle. Through the door to the sales floor, he was watching the owner’s sister chat with customers, pluck sugar cookies and banana nut muffins from the display case and drop them into white bags. She was pretty—how such a person could be related to someone as unappealing as the owner was beyond his understanding. She was twenty-one or twenty-two and reminded him slightly of Julie: redheaded, wearing a sweater with a V-neck that showed the curve of her breasts disappearing into her robin’s egg blue bra whenever she bent to fetch a sheet of baker’s tissue from the shelves behind the register. He was wondering how he could manage to talk to her rather than her unpleasant brother, when he realized his uncle was talking about him.
“Ed would know,” he was saying.
“What?” he said.
“How the Pirates are going to do this year.”
He had no idea; he hadn’t paid attention to the game since the letter from the Cardinals arrived. Every week, The Sporting News showed up in the mail (a gift from his mother) but he had not opened a single issue. In one, he knew, in an agate type column listing player transactions, was his name, followed by the single word: “Released.” The rest of the paper would be optimistic projections for the season: the promising rookies, the feel-good stories about veterans making gallant comebacks, articles about players he knew. He could tolerate none of it.
“If their pitching holds up, they have a shot,” he said, cringing because he sounded like the TV sportscasters he despised: jovial and slick-haired, spouting clichés that he and his teammates laughed about in the clubhouse. You have to score if you’re going to win in this game. You play them one at a time.
“Ed here played for the Cardinals,” his uncle said.
“That so?” the baker said, dubious.
“Yes,” Edward Everett said. In the shop, the baker’s sister was leaning across the glass counter toward a man wearing a weathered leather cowboy hat over stringy blond hair. “Yes,” Edward Everett repeated in a tone that held more defiance than he intended.
“Ed got hurt last year in a game … where was it?” his uncle asked.
“Montreal,” Edward Everett said. In the shop, the baker’s sister playfully tugged on the cowboy’s hair. The cowboy grabbed her hand and she laughed, snatching it away.
“Really?” the baker said. “I played in high school. But that was—man, the Cardinals. Brad Gibson. Lou Brock.”
Bob Gibson, Edward Everett wanted to correct him, but a look from his uncle prevented him from doing so.
“Yeah, Gibson, Brock. All those guys,” Edward Everett’s uncle said, reaching up to squeeze the back of Edward Everett’s neck in an affectionate manner. “Maybe you guys could compare notes sometime.”
“Sure,” the baker said.
His baseball career became as much a means of closing deals as were the bits of information on the cards in his uncle’s file box or the jokes he told. At first, Edward Everett felt uneasy, both because his ambition had become a kind of currency to exchange for contracts for a half ton or a ton of flour a month and because of the false impressions he left with people, talking about Brock and Gibson as if he knew them, although he had never spoken more than a word to Brock and had not actually played with Gibson, who had retired the season before his one-and-only in the major leagues. He had, in fact, only been in the room with him once, at a dinner the organization held for Gibson the spring the pitcher announced he was retiring. It was in the St. Petersburg Hilton, in a banquet hall decorated with a life-sized cardboard image of Gibson delivering a pitch, heaving it as he did with the entirety of his being, a wonderment of balance, able to stay upright at the same time he was flinging not merely the ball but his self toward the hitter. As a minor league player, Edward Everett had been at a table near the kitchen, and several times a server carrying out trays of steak dinners banged into his chair. He and the other minor leaguers had been in awe at the dinner, speaking among themselves in quiet voices as if they were in a church, while Gibson’s former teammates at tables near the dais told loud stories and every once in a while erupted in raucous laughter. They were men used to