they had their first lunch, Connie’s son went off with his father. “He’s taking him turkey hunting,” Connie told Edward Everett, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head. “ ‘I’m going to make a man out of him,’ ” she said, imitating her ex-husband’s laconic way of speaking. She invited Edward Everett for dinner on Saturday night, telling him she would make him a home-cooked meal. When he arrived, bringing a bottle of wine, the house was redolent of meatloaf and boiling potatoes. She greeted him at the door wearing an off-white canvas apron that had “Mom’s Kitchen” spelled out in awkward, childish letters that he guessed her son had finger-painted. She gave him a peck on the cheek and rushed back to the kitchen because a timer dinged. In the kitchen, she had set the table with china and crystal goblets, two at each place—a red-wine glass and a water glass—and silver. “I never have adult company,” she said quickly when she saw him looking at the table. “It’s an indulgence, I know. There’s a corkscrew in the drawer here.” She gave the top drawer next to the stove a shove with her hip as she turned off the gas flame under the boiling potatoes and then poured them into a colander in the sink. He opened the drawer, which was a jumble of miscellaneous junk: transistor radio batteries, half-used rolls of Scotch tape, a coil of picture wire, a coffee-stained instruction manual for a dishwasher. It was, it struck him—as someone who had not lived in the same city for long over the last decade—the junk drawer of someone who had stayed put. He found the corkscrew and opened the wine, pouring out two glasses. He set one on the counter beside the stove for Connie and leaned against the sink drinking his. “Are you trying to get me drunk?” she asked, winking, then poured the boiled potatoes into a mixing bowl and took a break to sip her wine.
During dinner, Connie talked about people they’d gone to school with—Derek Colombo, who’d died when his fishing boat sank the year before; Felix Chase, who’d gone off to be a priest but who had met a woman while he was in the seminary, forsaken the priesthood, married her and had five children already, crammed into a tiny ranch house on the western edge of town, “Poor as church mice but happy as a lark,” she’d said. They were all merged into adulthood—lawyers, teachers, coal miners, a veterinarian; owners of hardware stores, service stations—so many with children and mortgages and revolving credit accounts at Sears that they used to furnish those houses, and here he had been, in some sort of limbo, waiting for his life to start, as if he were forever in a train depot, always on his way elsewhere, wherever the club that owned his contract told him to go, living in places that always had the feel of temporariness: boarding in houses owned by widows who needed the rent to pay the mortgage, living in houses owned by former ballplayers who sometimes let the rent slide in exchange for some nineteen-year-old kid listening, for the fifteenth time, to a story about the day their landlord hit a home run off Dizzy Dean in a spring training game back in 1935; living four players to a one-bedroom apartment, sleeping on a cheap couch someone found in an alley next to a dumpster; because none of it mattered, none of the addresses were where you’d end up, all of them just stops on a journey toward the major leagues.
As they cleared the table after they finished eating, it occurred to him that this was the sort of life he could have if he wanted it: domestic, living in the same house for years on end. It was, it struck him, not a bad life. All he had to do was get off the train once and for all: sell flour; hunker down with a woman he’d make his wife; raise up some kids.
One day, he realized he was part of a family. Poof; just like that, not anything he had set out to acquire but something he just found he had. It was four weeks after their lunch in the tearoom. They were in line at a crowded grocery on a Saturday afternoon in mid-May, waiting among customers with carts piled as high as if they’d just received a bulletin that the store was closing forever, and they