Everett said, laying his hand on Webber’s shoulder.
“Skip,” Webber said, covering his face with his right hand. Edward Everett couldn’t tell for sure, but he appeared to be crying.
On the way to the ballpark, after they’d climbed down the fire escape—thirty minutes past first pitch, Edward Everett noted with anger when he looked at the digital clock in his dash—Webber was silent, staring out the passenger window. At a stoplight, the fountain in front of the Rand National Bank was on and three young children with their shoes off were kicking in the water while two women chatted nearby. He glanced at Webber. It struck him that, despite his enormous talent, he was still little more than a boy.
A week earlier, late in a game that P. City was leading by a run, Pittsfield had runners on second and third with nobody out. The hitter sent a line drive up the middle, over second base. Edward Everett resigned himself to two runs scoring but Webber ranged far to his left, diving for the ball. Just before it got to him, it hit the bag and bounced seemingly out of Webber’s reach, but he snatched it with his bare hand, belly-flopped onto the ground, leaped to his feet and fired home, where Vila took the throw and slapped a tag on the runner. It was one of the most remarkable plays Edward Everett had seen in forty years of professional ball but, since the high school kid Collier hired to record the games hadn’t shown up, there was no highlight video of it. The play was gone, save for in Edward Everett’s memory. Long after, he sat at his computer, trying to describe it for Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, but gave up—partly because he was no kind of writer but also because, unless it fit into a cell on a spreadsheet, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, would have no interest in it.
As the light changed to green Edward Everett was trying to reconcile the two Webbers: the man who had both the physical ability to make the play and the game sense to know, in a fraction of a second, what to do when he had the ball, with the boy who was still near, in many ways, to the children kicking in the fountain. He was trying to think of something to say that would bring him out of his sorrow and put him back in whatever state he had to be in to make the kind of play he’d made nine days earlier, when Webber let out a bitter laugh.
“My dad had it right. Women is just bitches,” he said. “Them that ain’t bitches is just cunts.”
Chapter Seventeen
When Edward Everett got home after the game, it was nearly midnight but the street in front of his house was lined with cars, a party going on next door at the Duboises’. People were crowded on the deck, talking over one another, laughing; an indecipherable hum of voices. He stood for a moment in his garage before going into the house, wondering if he would be able to make out Renee’s voice or her laugh. What was the occasion? he wondered, thinking back through the years when he’d have been invited as her date and then her husband. It’s a Renee-came-to-her-senses-and-left-him bash, he thought, simultaneously hearing his mother’s voice, although she had been dead for years: Stop the pity party.
He closed the garage and crossed the yard in the shadows, not wanting anyone to see him. When he reached his deck, he found the bouquet of roses he’d left for Renee leaning against the back door, the card unopened. On the envelope, she had written two words in the angular printing she’d learned in her brief time as an architecture student, the same hand in which she annotated her drawings and elevations: “Please don’t.” He tucked the flowers under his arm, got out his key and went inside.
There, he discovered that Grizzly was having a seizure. Edward Everett knew it even before he saw the dog; he could hear his claws clicking in a steady rhythm against the tile. Indeed, Grizzly was lying there, quivering, his water dish overturned, his hindquarters wet, his front paws beating the floor, his head shaking side to side. Edward Everett set the roses onto the counter and went to the linen closet to fetch a towel, which he slipped under the dog’s head to make him more comfortable. Flipping off the light because the vet to