Later that evening, Edward Everett went out to the grocery store to buy dog food, a dozen roses wrapped in cellophane and a card he addressed to Renee, writing inside it simply . The previous time she left him, not long after last Thanksgiving, he had courted her to win her back, tucking flowers under her windshield wiper at work, bringing chocolate to her office, emailing articles he found online that he thought she would find interesting. A few days before Christmas, she agreed to meet him for dinner. “But only dinner,” she had said. “We’ll take it slow.” Dinner had ended with them in bed. “You laid successful siege at the gates to my heart,” she said in a drowsy voice just before she fell to sleep. Perhaps that was what she needed again: his attention, when he hadn’t been giving it to her, preoccupied as he became in-season.
He waited until the Duboises’ house next door was dark, then carried the roses between the two backyards, creeping up the steps to the deck, and leaned the bouquet against their door. As he placed it, the wrapper crinkled and he froze, wondering if anyone had heard. A possum rustled leaves in one of Renee’s mother’s flower beds. In the distance, a car with a broken muffler accelerated. But nothing in the house stirred.
Chapter Fifteen
The next morning, Edward Everett as usual got to the ballpark before anyone else, seven-forty, long before his two coaches or the trainer or clubhouse assistant would appear.
As he let himself in and entered the code to disarm the security system, he nearly stumbled over a pallet of unopened boxes marked “Programs.” They had been delivered since the last time he’d been there and were already out of date, he knew, more than four weeks late, one of the consequences of the team owner Bob Collier’s budget-cutting—acting as his own general manager after the previous GM had taken a job with the Marlins organization, using a college intern in the public relations staff at his meat company to do the team’s publicity. A nearly anorexic blonde, she had confessed to Edward Everett in a voice that squeaked that, while she had played soccer in high school, she knew little about baseball and would he mind terribly reading the bios of the players she had tried to write before the yearbook went to press? Three of the players in the yearbook were already gone, one traded to the St. Louis organization, one promoted to double-A and one out of baseball—Tom Packer, an infielder who had left in the second week of the season to join a church group volunteering in Kenya. Sitting in Edward Everett’s office to tell him, Packer wouldn’t meet his eye. “My girlfriend showed me this documentary on YouTube,” he said in explanation, his neck coloring as if he were admitting to some great wrong rather than a decision to help the poor. “I feel real bad, letting you guys down like this. I hope you can forgive me, Skip.” His team was, in fact, still a man short on the roster as, while the big club had replaced the first two players, it had yet to replace Packer. Wryly, Edward Everett thought of it as punishment for Packer’s skewed priorities, at least in the eye of the organization, feeding the hungry and tending the sick instead of working to improve his pivot on double plays and his sense of the strike zone.
In his office, Edward Everett switched on his computer and, while it booted up, took the coffeepot to a sink in the shower room and filled it with water. By the time he got back to his office, put in a new filter, spooned out coffee and poured the water into the reservoir, the box on the computer screen was asking for his log-in and password. The big club had sent him an email not long ago, reminding him that he was supposed to change his password every month, but he had a hard enough time remembering any of his passwords. His entire life was a password: his debit card PIN number, the password for his bank account online, his log-in for baseballamerica.com, and so he hadn’t changed it in four years. It was still Renee’s birthday, 112363.
While the computer went through its start-up sequence, and water began dripping through the filter, he opened the scorebook from the last game they had gotten in before the rains shut everything down so he