listen—” Edward Everett was going to say, to you, but his uncle interrupted with enthusiasm.
“Exactamundo. You listen. But the other thing you do is, those stories are great.”
Edward Everett blushed. I make them up, he wanted to confess.
“I know they’re bullshit,” his uncle said. “I know something about who played when. Roger Maris quit, what? Ten years ago? And Gibson: the guy would have to be schizophrenic as hell if he was all the people you described.” His uncle gave a laugh that shook his entire body. “People don’t buy flour. Flour’s flour. Our flour. Their flour. This other guy’s flour. They buy you. Well, mostly I like to think they buy me, but …” He laughed. “I just had one of the best months I’ve had in, shit, I don’t know when.”
Edward Everett wondered how much his uncle earned if the mill was paying him more than twelve hundred dollars gross for trailing him like a lost puppy. He had always thought of his uncle as a fat, ridiculous man, especially compared with his own father, who had done all the calisthenics he’d asked his football players to do up until the day he hung himself when Edward Everett was twelve. At family parties or Fourth of July picnics, whenever the two stood side by side in the requisite photos, they seemed like random strangers caught in the frame of the camera’s lens, not men who had shared the same bed until the older one, Edward Everett’s father, turned ten. Yet, for all of Edward Everett’s father’s fame in the town—for all of the photos of him in the back pages of the weekly newspaper where it ran the sports articles, for all of the backslapping by the men of the town whenever Edward Everett went out with him—it was, he realized, his uncle who was successful, the silly man with the belly people joked about (How long are you going to carry that child, Stan?) rather than his father, whom people compared to Gary Cooper. So many of his parents’ conversations suddenly made sense: when they needed a new transmission for their nine-year-old Buick, when the water heater went out the day before a Thanksgiving when his parents were hosting seventeen people for dinner. Let’s ask Stan. Let’s ask Stan. As a boy, Edward Everett had thought his uncle some sort of savant to whom his parents went when they were stumped and needed guidance. Why, I think I’d take it to a mechanic. Why, I think it would be a good idea to call a plumber. Sitting with him in the country club, as the waitress set identical plates of filet mignon, roasted red potatoes and asparagus in front of them, he realized for the first time that it wasn’t his uncle’s wisdom his parents were after, but his generosity: the First National Bank of Stanley Yates.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Edward Everett said, cutting into his steak.
His uncle glanced up, steak sauce speckling his chin and cheeks. “Family’s family,” he said, picking up an asparagus spear with his fingers and folding it whole into his mouth.
Chapter Ten
His uncle began letting him take the lead on some sales calls, although he botched many at first. While his uncle knew unit prices and shipping lead times, Edward Everett had to page slowly through tabbed sections of the catalog binder his uncle had given him and calculate quantity breaks by doing math on a scratch pad tucked into the binder. Often, in his haste to quote a price, he made an error and it was only after he had told it to the customer that he would realize he had forgotten to carry a digit from one column to the next or had forgotten that two thousand pounds made a ton, not one thousand. Still, his uncle was patient and explained his awkwardness using baseball references, calling him “Rookie,” joking about giving him a tryout. His income continued to rise. By March, his check was for nearly fifteen hundred dollars.
They went to a men’s clothing store in Braverton, where his uncle helped him pick out three suits: a charcoal pinstripe, a navy blue and a tan. A tiny man who may have been in his eighties measured Edward Everett, standing on tiptoe to stretch the tape from shoulder to shoulder. His touch was so delicate and he moved the measuring tape from shoulder to arm and around his neck so quickly, Edward Everett wondered if he was merely