The Might Have Been by Joe Schuster Page A

rested against his. “I’m forty-one,” she said. “It seems old, I know. A girl in my high school got pregnant our freshman year and the baby she had would be your age now. You could be my son; I’m that old.” She began tracing an index finger lightly along the inside of his thigh. “But forty-one isn’t that old. You’ll find that out.”
    “You’re just angry,” he said. “That’s all. You don’t really want to do this.”
    “Maybe angry, yes,” she said. “But I want to do this.” She cupped her hand over his groin. “You do, too. We both need this.”

Chapter Seven
    I n the morning when he woke, she was snoring loudly, lying on her back, tangled in the top sheet, her right breast exposed, her left foot poking out from the bottom of the blanket. The light outside the window suggested it was perhaps six. He studied her. She was not an unattractive woman, despite the fact that she was a good deal older than he was. Her hair was disheveled and he could see now there were gray hairs among the red. On the underside of her bare breast was a dark mole the size of a pencil eraser. He gingerly pulled the sheet up so that it covered her and she startled but stayed asleep.
    Moving slowly, as much because of his cast as from a desire not to wake her, he got out of bed and dressed without showering. He was leaving at seven-thirty. If she was still asleep, he would write a note saying she could stay until checkout time. He wondered what she would do. Could she face her family after the scene last night? Was forty-one old enough that maybe how your mother and sister regarded you didn’t matter?
    He wondered what kind of life she had, where she lived. She had said something about Indiana, but that was where she lived when she was younger. He realized it had been two years or more since he’d slept with a woman he didn’t know well. When he was a youngerballplayer, and certain of his power, in life and over women, he often slept with girls whose names he didn’t know. They waited outside the ballparks, in the shadows away from the lamps that arced over the parking lots surrounding it, stepping into the light when the players began filing out of the locker room. He thought of them as a kind of sexual smorgasbord: tonight, maybe someone tall and thin; tomorrow, maybe a plump brunette. He never understood the attraction the women felt for him and his teammates, why baseball was such an aphrodisiac. At the level they were at when they rolled into Ottumwa, Zanesville, Parkersburg, they had no money to speak of. The boyfriends the girls forsook earned more fixing cars or running a separator at the dairy than Edward Everett and his teammates did; they were better prospects, more stable.
    Last night, they had knocked his suitcase and clothing off the bed, scattering it on the floor. He eased himself up, hopped to a wooden chair pushed up against the desk and pulled it out. Awkwardly, he moved it until it was beside the bed, sat down, opened the suitcase and began picking up his clothing, folding it as neatly as he could, pressing it into the suitcase. What didn’t fit, he would leave behind. It didn’t matter anymore.
    Someone knocked on the door. It was too early for the maid, wasn’t it? Maybe the manager had figured out who he was even though Frank had the wrong name.
    He pushed himself from the chair and, bracing himself on the wall, hopped to the door. The knock came again, five muffled ticks against the wood. “Coming,” he said in a voice he hoped was loud enough that whoever it was could hear but that wouldn’t wake Estelle. He glanced at her just as he reached the door to see if she was still sleeping. She was, muttering something he couldn’t make out. “Coming,” he said again.
    When he reached the door, he flicked the dead bolt and turned the knob, hopping backwards two or three steps to allow the door to swing inward.
    It was Julie. She stood in the hall, holding a small overnight case and a makeup