I clink my glass against his and then tip back my head to take a long sip, wondering if he can sense it, too. The wrongness of this place.
Chapter 3
Sam turns up the radio, a can of Brooklyn Lager gripped in his hand. “Bottom of the eighth, two outs,” the announcer known as Teddy from Freddy murmurs from the speaker, with that slow-rolling delivery that has made him famous across Maryland. “Bo Tucker takes the plate. Fast pitch. High pop up to right field. And . . . it’s an out.”
“Damn it,” Sam yells, squeezing the can so hard he sloshes lukewarm lager all over his lap. The game goes to a commercial as the phone buzzes on the passenger’s seat. A text message from Annie.
Hello dear husband.
He checks the stopwatch on his phone—forty-six minutes—and opens another beer as a woman appears suddenly, walking toward Sam’s car. He slides the beer can, his third in the last forty-six minutes, between his knees, and she startles when she sees him, clutches her purse. He can’t blame her. He’s a dude drinking beer and listening to minor league baseball in the parking lot of a long-term elderly care facility. He understands the optics.
She side-eyes him as she passes, and Sam smiles, a weak attempt to convince her he’s not as creepy as he looks. It’s the woman who runs the dining hall, Gloria something, whipping up soft foods three times a day, fettuccine Alfredo every Monday night for the residents of Rushing Waters Elderly Care Center, population sixty-six or so, depending on who died overnight.
The commercial break ends, bringing listeners home to the bottom of the ninth. “What do you think, Keys fans?” Teddy from Freddy asks. “We gonna pull this one out?”
“Of course we’re not,” Sam says. “We’ve won exactly fifty-eight games in three years. You know that, Dad.” Teddy from Freddy, a name that makes zero sense—nobody refers to the city of Frederick, Maryland, as Freddy—but it’s stuck. Twelve years now his father, Theodore Samuel Statler, has been sitting in the booth at Harry Grove Stadium, calling home games for the Frederick Keys, the worst farm team in baseball history.
Of course, before Theodore Statler was known as Teddy from Freddy, he was known as Mr. S, the charming and handsome math teacher at Brookside High School who left his wife for the hot model on page twenty-four of the June 1982 Talbots catalog. Her name was Phaedra, the only name dumber than Teddy from Freddy. Someone on the baseball team got a hold of the catalog, where Sam’s father’s new girlfriend could be seen sitting on a beach in a bikini, her thighs covered with sand. It got passed around the locker room for weeks, everyone admitting that while the girls inside weren’t Sports Illustrated-level hot, they still did the trick.
Ted met her at Camden Yards on September 6, 1995, the day Cal Ripken Jr. surpassed Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played. Sam’s grandfather grew up in Baltimore, and like every Statler man since 1954, Sam was a die-hard Orioles fan. He idolized Cal Ripken, and the tickets to the game were an early birthday present from Sam’s mother, Margaret—his dream gift, in fact—paid for with the money Margaret had been setting aside for months from her paltry secretary’s paycheck.
Phaedra had the seat directly in front of Sam, and she kept banging into his knees, turning around to laugh at his father’s jokes, her ugly hat with the orange-and-black pom-pom blocking his view. Sam hated that his dad was barely paying attention to the game, and hated it even more when he suggested Sam and Phaedra change seats.
Turns out that on top of the white teeth and long legs, she was also a Tupperware heiress with whom Ted Statler had a truly uncanny connection, something he chose to share with Sam and Margaret two weeks later, on Sam’s actual birthday. He stood up as Margaret cut into a Pepperidge Farm coconut cake, acting like he was about to make a speech at a wedding. Said he had no choice but to be honest with himself. He’d met his soul mate and could no longer live without her.
It was 1995, the year of the first flip phone, the year before the minimum wage was raised to $4.25, which is what his mother earned after Ted Statler packed his bags and left for Baltimore. To a harbor penthouse built out of Tupperware, a little time to figure out what he wanted to do next, until landing his ideal job: sitting up high in a glass booth, providing the color for the Keys, managing to stay upbeat despite a three-year losing streak, including this game, which ends 9 to 3 with an out in right field as Ted invites his listeners to join him tomorrow night, when the team takes on the Salem Red Sox. Sam clicks off the radio and picks up his phone.
Hello dear wife, he writes back to Annie.
Typing bubbles appear right away, and Sam imagines her at home, flour-faced, the ties of the floral apron pinching her waist as she studies the Rachael Ray recipe she printed out last night. You at your mom’s? she writes.
He glimpses the entrance to the nursing home. A woman is leading a man with a walker through the sliding doors. He can imagine the scene inside. A crowd of old people sitting on couches in the lobby, no purpose whatsoever, the furniture marinating in the scent of urine. He pictures his mom, the same place she was the last time he saw her: sitting at the small dining table in the corner of her private room, looking nothing like herself.
Yes, I’m at my mom’s, Sam writes to Annie. (Technically.)
How is she?
Good.
Much longer?
Sam checks the stopwatch. Fifty-nine minutes. Not too much.
Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.
Tomorrow, Annie’s day to visit. They take turns. Every month Annie clips a calendar into the back of his appointment book, one she draws herself at the kitchen table, guiding a black Sharpie along the edge of an envelope, a grid of shaded boxes. The blue ones are her days, the pink ones Sam’s. (Annie likes to subvert gender norms. It’s a thing.)
“You think we need to go every day?” Sam asked when she showed him the first schedule.
“Visiting your mother is the main reason we moved here,” she said. “Of course we need to go every day. She needs us, Sam. She’s got dementia.”
Behavior variant frontotemporal dementia, or bvFTD, if you’d like to get technical, which Sam often does. The condition is characterized by prominent changes in behavioral disinhibition (trying to lick the waiter) and interpersonal relationships and conduct (repeatedly telling the cashier she’s an asshole), and is “an important cause of younger onset dementia” (in her case, sixty-four). That’s how the doctor explained it to Sam last year, as he sat beside his mother in a cold office on the fifth floor of St. Luke’s Hospital, an ache in his chest.
It came on quickly. Spells of confusion, and then outbursts at work. They were minor at first, but the day came when she marched into the office of Principal Wadwhack (the sad sack) and told him that if he didn’t immediately adopt a dog with her, she was going to burn the school down. That was the day that his mom, Mrs. S, the sweetest secretary Brookside High had ever known—way too good for that loser of a math teacher who left her for a model (Talbots, but still)—lost her job, and Sam began the research, eventually landing on this place. Rushing Waters Elderly Care Center: Insured. Trusted. Sixty-six private rooms on eight shaded acres up a windy mountain road outside Chestnut Hill, his middling hometown in the middle of the state, the major employer a so-so private university with five thousand students. “Chestnut Hill: Keep It in Mind.” That’s the town slogan, printed on a signpost at the city limits. Keep It in Mind. That’s the best they could do.