Edward Everett and he watched the evening soften and darken. He thought, If I stick this out, take over my uncle’s territory when he retires, I could have my own house overlooking a pond, where my own wife would bring me a Manhattan just as I finished recording the evidence of our good fortune.
That month, as his uncle suggested, he began buying stock in the company. Many evenings, he went home to his apartment, showered, changed into Levi’s and a T-shirt, and walked down the block to a diner, stopping at a newspaper box just outside to buy a copy of The Wheeling Intelligencer. He sat in a booth beside the front window and, after ordering, turned first to the stock pages and, running his finger down the column of agate type, found the symbol for the mill, GnFlr, to check the closing price for the day before. It rarely varied more than a quarter point, but was up three of every five days. It gave him satisfaction: partly it was watching his investment growing, but also partly because he had a sense that he was participating in something larger than himself, something he couldn’t understand fully, owning pieces of the American economy. Within two years, he estimated, the value of his stock would reach several thousand dollars, nearly as much as he earned for some seasons in the minor leagues: so much money for doing nothing, checking a box on a form that sat in a file drawer in an office somewhere he’d never been. In five or six years, he could cash it in and buy a house—a small one, yes, but a house nonetheless. It struck him that he had been foolish to give so many of his years to a game that gave so little back, realizing that, only half a year removed from it, he was already thinking of his life in terms of investment and return. If he’d gone to work for his uncle six or seven years ago, he’d have that house now.
As he ate his dinner—generally fried chicken and mashed potatoes but sometimes a chopped steak and fries—he went through the newspaper, reading nearly every page: the national and international news, the local news, the features, the comic strips, but avoiding the sports section. Merely glancing at an article about baseball was something painful, even as he thought he’d moved beyond it, like seeing the published engagement announcement of a girl he once dated. It was enough to remind him that, for the first time since he’d been eighteen, he wasn’t part of the baseball machinery in some way. In the past, he had a sense of the game as a giant Rube Goldberg mechanism, with every player, himself included, a cog: a third baseman in Atlanta tears a hamstring trying to beat out a ground ball and goes down for six weeks; the Braves trade with the White Sox for a third baseman and a shortstop from Richmond. In the Sox system, a pitcher and a middle infielder get their release to make room for the players the Sox acquired. And on and on, gears turning, levers pulling, the machinery grinding, hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye.
Chapter Eleven
In the middle of April, he began dating a woman he had grown up with, Connie Heidrich, after he saw her when he and his uncle made a call at the high school where she taught English. It was near the end of the school day when they got there, a stormy afternoon. Edward Everett’s uncle was edgy, in a foul mood; he’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to sell flour to the school’s food service director for more than a decade, he said, and at their previous stop, the baker had complained that his last shipment of flour had weevils in it. “Look at this,” he’d said, opening a plastic vat, revealing pale insects burrowing into the flour, scurrying up the sides. It was evident to Edward Everett that the fault probably lay with the baker; his kitchen was filthy. Stainless steel bowls sat unwashed in the large sink and the floor was so covered in grease that Edward Everett’s uncle had slipped coming in, only keeping his balance by steadying himself with a hand on the doorframe. Despite this, Edward Everett’s uncle said only that he would pass on the baker’s concern to the mill. Back in the car, however, he said, “I should have. Shit. Shit.”
Then, on the way to the school, they