narrowing her eyes, her meaning clear: There is no we. “I didn’t expect you to be here when I came,” she said. “I thought I’d just stick Grizzly in the kitchen, leave a note, and you’d find him when you got home.”
“There’s no game today,” he said.
“Rain never stopped you from going to the ballpark before. ‘Neither rain nor snow nor’ something something something ‘will keep this manager from his appointed rounds.’ Or however that little joke used to go.”
“I stayed home on some rain days,” he said, attempting to not let his defensiveness show in his voice.
She sighed. “This is why I wanted to come when you weren’t here. I want this to be as easy as possible.”
Easy for whom? he thought.
“For both of us,” she said, as though she knew what he’d been thinking. “Please, can we just not get into anything?”
From the kitchen, he could hear Grizzly shoving his plastic dog bowl around, his signal that he was hungry.
“You’d better feed him before he tears the house down,” Renee said, snapping open her purse and taking out an envelope. “Here,” she said, holding it out to him. When he didn’t take it immediately, she gestured that he should.
“Doesn’t the sheriff usually serve these?” he asked, still not taking the envelope.
“Serve?”
“Divorce papers.”
She let out a small laugh. “These aren’t the divorce papers.” She pushed the envelope toward him. When he opened it, he saw it contained a photocopy of a signed, notarized quitclaim, removing her name from the deed to the house, dated two or three days before he had left on a ten-day swing through Wisconsin and Illinois, the road trip from which he returned to find her gone—dated, he realized, while they were still living in the same house; already filed while she was making his favorite dinner the day before he departed for the road trip, her mother’s ziti recipe. Already filed when, in bed later, he had stroked her hip, for years a signal that he wanted to make love, and she had said quietly, “I think the dinner upset my stomach,” before turning over and going to sleep.
“The house was yours before we got married,” she said. “It was generous for you to put my name on it but now it’s yours again.”
“Where are you staying?” He refolded the form and slipped it into the envelope.
She narrowed her eyes, suggesting he had crossed a line he hadn’t known was there, then said, “If you look at our savings, you’ll see I withdrew what I figure I put in. If you think I’m off, let me know and I’ll take another look. If I made a mistake, I’ll reimburse you.” She laced her forearm through the strap on her purse and pointed to the living room. “You were cleaning the house, weren’t you?”
“How can you tell?”
She pointed to the floor beside the overstuffed chair. “The ten years or whatever of The Sporting News and whatnot. They’re gone.”
He flushed. “I was trying—” he said, intending to explain about the water in the basement and his wanting to salvage the records of his former players.
“That was sweet,” she said. “But I’m not coming back. It’s not like last time.”
“I still have no idea why you left,” he said.
She sighed. “Looking in the rearview mirror makes it difficult to see the road before us,” she said. It sounded like something she had read in one of her self-help books. He saw her taking out the yellow marker she sometimes used, drawing a decisive line through the passage. She turned the doorknob to let herself out but then paused. “My dad—please don’t bring him into this,” she said. When he didn’t respond, she said, “Please?”
“All right,” he said.
Then she was out the door, raising her umbrella, and down the walk toward her car. He watched her through the window to see if she turned back, showed a glimmer of regret. She didn’t; she went to the car, opened the door, closed her umbrella and got in. After waiting a moment to let a passing FedEx van go by, she pulled from the curb and was off, down the street.
In the kitchen, Grizzly was licking the food bowl, although it was totally clean.
“Mom’s gone,” Edward Everett said, immediately realizing how pathetic he sounded. “Come on, boy.” He scratched the dog behind his ear as a gentle means of distracting his attention from the bowl. He had once made the mistake of plucking it off the floor when the dog