The Might Have Been by Joe Schuster

Author:Joe Schuster
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345532466
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

On his sixtieth birthday, the drains backed up in the ballpark. Collier called him at four-thirty in the morning, waking him from a dream that dissipated almost immediately: something about his father and a navy blue jacket that was too tight.

“It’s a mess,” Collier said without returning Edward Everett’s groggy hello. “It’s a shit hole. Literally.”

After the call, Edward Everett got up and realized that the power had gone out in his house in a storm he had slept through. The face of his alarm clock was blank and when he clicked the lamp on the bedside table, nothing happened. He took a shower that began as lukewarm and became cold before he had rinsed his hair, and shaved by standing a flashlight upend on the vanity, leaning in close enough to the mirror that his breath fogged it over. The bulb cast a pale cone of light toward the ceiling that reflected in the mirror, making his face seem gray and indistinct. He was sure that he’d left patches of whiskers on his cheek and neck, but it would have to do.

In the kitchen, he filled the dog’s water and food dishes, and went to let him out into the backyard to do his business but found that a bough from his oak tree had fallen onto the steps to the yard. He tried lifting the bough but it was surprisingly heavy. He gave it a shove but realized that it was not entirely severed from the tree and that, to move it, he would have to get a saw and cut the flesh that still connected the bough to the trunk. That would have to wait until later.

He took Grizzly to the front yard. As the dog trotted over the lawn searching for a place to do his business, Edward Everett surveyed the damage from the storm. Next door, the Duboises’ Bradford pear had snapped and lay at the curb. At Mrs. Greiner’s across the street, the limb of a maple lay across her walk and there were branches down in other yards as well. Not a light shone: not the porch light that the Maxwells left on every night because their twenty-year-old son worked the overnight shift at Walmart, not even the streetlight in front of the Duboises’ that Ron Senior had once shot out with a BB gun in a fit of love for Rhonda when she had the flu and complained she couldn’t sleep because of the light.

Much of the rest of the town was in similar condition. For a long stretch of his drive to the ballpark, it was dark, traffic lights out for blocks. At some intersections, the police had set up temporary stop signs in the middle of the road, and down one street, Algeier, he could see the work lights of a Central Iowa Power Cooperative crew, hear the generator rumbling, watch a workman riding a cherry picker up alongside a utility pole where there was a downed wire.

At the ballpark, he pulled into the lot beside Collier’s silver Escalade.

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