Evvie Drake Starts Over

Because she has bad dreams upstairs in the bed that she shared with Tim, Evvie sleeps in the little blue apartment that is her favorite part of the large house Tim bought for them. She lies on the apartment floor, where she feels most comfortable.

Almost a year passes since Tim’s death. Awake at four a.m., Evvie makes tea. Randomly, she picks up a Sports Illustrated magazine with a profile of an outstanding Yankees pitcher no longer able to perform; the headline calls him a head case. She responds, “Way ahead of you” (11). Months later, she still considers herself a monster for not loving Tim at the end.

Evvie sits with Andy at a diner where they have shared Saturday breakfast ever since Andy's wife left him and his two girls. He quizzes her about the empty apartment in her house. She discovers he has a friend, Dean, a star baseball pitcher who left the game abruptly. She makes the connection that he is the athlete referred to in Sports Illustrated who is the “head case.” As they discuss the possibility of Dean moving in, Evvie asks if Andy is trying to fix her up with Dean. Andy remarks that Dean asked the very same question and that, no, it is not a setup. Andy adds that Dean could pay about $800 a month which he knows would help Evvie with her bills. She promises to keep an open mind and to meet Dean to determine if he is the right tenant.

Dean arrives at Andy’s house. They get reacquainted while drinking beer. In their extended conversation, Dean tells Andy he has been to ten different kinds of psychiatrists and counselors for help and tried many different treatments to no avail. He still cannot pitch. Andy mentions he has a friend in Calcasset who has an apartment Dean can rent for $800.

Dean reflects on everything that he has been through trying to recover his baseball career. He recognizes the hopelessness of his situation. Holmes writes, “[Dean] waited for elementary school and then high school to be over so he could move on to what was next. But that was when he had known what was next. Now his only plans were for dinner and bring his duffle in from the truck” (25).

Evvie reflects on the possibility of having a tenant when Dean shows up. She finds him surprisingly good looking, something Andy did not mention. They have a pleasant conversation. Evvie asks about his trip from New York City to Calcasset, Maine. Dean mentions that he prefers to listen to public radio over sports radio. Evvie mentions that she likes public radio, too, and podcasts. They commit together that neither will bring up the other’s past. She will not talk about baseball, and Dean will not talk about her relationship with her late husband. He agrees to lease the apartment.

Evvie and Dean become better acquainted as he moves in. She tells him all about Calcasset, including the fact that the town has a minor league baseball team, the Claws. Evvie offers to take him to one of the Claws baseball games, assuming he doesn't find it weird. He says he is interested in attending a game. She tells him her father, Frank, is a retired lobsterman and that her mother, Eileen, left them when she was only eight years old. Each feels relaxed and receptive to Dean becoming Evvie’s tenant.

Andy accompanies Evvie to a special service at the hospital. Friends, family, and former co-workers, all of whom perceive Tim as a near saint, plant a tree in his honor. Evvie tries her best to appear appropriately sad because she is the only one who knows she did not love him and wanted to leave him. She also knows that, when people see her with Andy, they think the two are having a love affair. Evvie reflects on the difference between Tim's public self—patient and generous—and his private self—demeaning and hostile.

Holmes relates the backstory of how they met in high school, with Tim sweeping Evvie off her feet. He gave her a ride in his new car during a rainstorm. Holmes writes, “‘It's my car,’ he said. ‘It's new. Sometime when it's not raining out, I'll open the sunroof for you.’ Sometime. He blinked a future into existence. It was sorcery” (47).

Evvie was on track to become valedictorian, but she purposely backed off her studies and became the salutatorian so Tim could take the top honor. Evvie remembers Tim did not receive the award as the outstanding graduating student, so his parents contacted the sponsors of the award, who created a totally separate honor that went to Tim. Henceforth the new award became a permanent part of the Calcasset school system.

People leaving the ceremony try to encourage Evvie to get out more. They commonly believe she has become a recluse because she is grieving so much over losing the perfect husband.

Andy drops Evvie off at her home. She says she is going to run errands, but instead she spends the rest of the day lying on her bed as a thunderstorm develops. At the height of the thunderstorm, she hears someone moving around outside. It is Dean with his duffel bag preparing to move in. She watches him pick up a pinecone and throw it repeatedly against the fence until the cone explodes.

Later, Dean asks Evvie how the tree planting ceremony was for her. As she fights off tears, she admits to Dean that she loved Tim when they first got together but did not love him at the end. She swears him to secrecy because not even Andy knows this.

Evvie researches the “yips,” the inexplicable loss of control that some athletes experience at the height of their careers.

A reporter named Ellen Boyd shows up on Evvie's doorstep when Dean is gone. Although the reporter pretends to have some friendly questions, she quickly demonstrating she is writing a sensational tabloid piece about Dean. She asks several questions that are invasive and misleading. Quickly, Evvie chases Ellen off the steps, throwing the reporter’s notebook out into the yard and letting her know she is unwelcome.

Ellen’s story is published on the Internet within the hour. Evvie is terribly upset, wondering how Dean will take the news. Dean is not at all upset. He tells Evvie that the collapse of his career subjected him to a great many highly critical stories that were very personal. He compliments Evvie on the way she handled the reporter and gives her a high-five. Dean says, “So trust me, the people I have left are not going to get all upset because you yelled at a reporter. And I appreciate what you did” (64).

Ted Finch, the coach of the Calcasset High School Hawks, visits Dean and asks him if he will be an assistant baseball coach. Dean is reluctant to accept but quickly develops a kinship with the coach. Finch offers a simple opinion about what happened to Dean as a baseball player: “I don't much go in for all this ‘head case’ stuff. Every guy wakes up one day, finds out he's done. Coaches, too” (66). Dean decides that he will give coaching the high school team a try.

Evvie and Dean begin to watch television programs together on the giant screen TV that she would never have bought for herself but was really glad that he did. He asks why Tim, who was thought to be so talented, would come back to work in such a tiny, rural area. Evvie says that, if he had been anyone anywhere else, he would just would have been a cute boy from the country. Here in his hometown, he was something very special. She expresses that Tim was extremely nice as long as you didn't live with him.

Dean and Evvie decide they will keep the door between the house and the apartment propped open except at night.

Evvie prepares to celebrate her first Thanksgiving in public after skipping the previous year’s meal because of its proximity to Tim's death. This will be a large Thanksgiving gathering because Andy's mother, Kell, is throwing it for Dean's parents, Evvie's dad, and Andy's children.

They gather at Andy’s house to celebrate. This is a chance for Dean to meet Frank, Evvie’s father. Dean quickly puts his foot in his mouth by saying that he had promised Evvie he would not talk about baseball. The conversation continues with Frank offering a blessing, in which he says he is grateful that Evvie is so strong and upright in the face of losing the husband whom she dearly loved. Evvie stops him angrily, trying to squelch his rambling “blessing” and eventually yelling at him. Momentarily, however, she apologizes to her dad and the guests, who attribute her outburst to grief over Tim’s death.

On the ride back to their house after the Thanksgiving meal, Dean confronts Evvie about being dishonest with her father regarding her true feelings about Tim. He says if she wants to be happy, she must tell people the truth. Evvie confronts him in return, saying the same principle applies to him. She offers to cancel their deal about being quiet about certain topics, but he refuses. Dean asks why Tim, as a well-paid professional, did not leave behind life insurance. Evvie replies that he did leave money to her, but she does not intend to spend any of it. She says nobody knows this and swears him to secrecy.

As the evening ends, Dean surprises Evvie with their first kiss: “[…]he suddenly bent down toward her and she turned her face toward him with absolutely no time to react, and he kissed her on the forehead, just right of center. […] ‘Happy…Thanksgiving,’ she weakly called after him. Her fingers went up to her forehead’” (90).

On the day that a very unflattering article about Dean appears in Esquire magazine, Andy shows up at Evvie’s house for her to babysit his two daughters, Rose and Lilly, while he takes Dean for a drink. They talk about how unfair the article is. The article culminates with a harsh judgment of Dean:

Tenney is not a pitcher anymore. He is now a bogeyman fantasy. He is a living, breathing worst-case scenario for anyone who has achieved any level of success. This is the story in which all your hard work turns out to be nothing. This is the story in which your life, for no apparent reason, becomes a draft of the book it's no longer being written, abandoned at a table without even a final word (94).

Evvie discusses the way that, just as Dean has been forced into conventional roles by sports media, so too is she placed in a box because she is a widow. She realizes she will always be called a widow unless she remarries, but she can never call herself single again.

After watching The Little Mermaid, Rose and Evvie have a conversation about Christmas and what Rose should get for her mom's boyfriend. Evvie recommends that Rose give him a tie.