The Leftovers

Mike’s wife was among the missing, and he still hadn’t recovered from his loss. He and his sons had painted a crude, almost unrecognizable portrait of Nancy on the back wall of their house, and Mike spent most of his nights alone with the mural, communing with her memory.
    “I talked to him a few weeks ago,” Kevin said. “But I don’t think he’s gonna play this year. He says his heart’s just not in the game.”
    “Keep working on him,” Steve said. “The middle of our lineup’s pretty weak.”
    The waitress came by with a new pitcher and refilled everyone’s glasses. They toasted to fresh blood and a winning season.
    “It’ll be good to get back on the field,” Kevin said.
    “No kidding,” agreed Steve. “Spring’s not spring without softball.”
    Pete put down his glass and looked at Kevin.
    “So there’s one other thing we wanted to run by you. You remember Judy Dolan? I think she was in your son’s class.”
    “Sure. She was a catcher, right? All-county or something?”
    “All-state,” Pete corrected him. “She played varsity in college. She’s graduating in June, moving back home for the summer.”
    “She’d be quite an asset,” Steve pointed out. “She could take over for me behind the plate, and I could move to first. It would solve a lot of our problems.”
    “Wait a second,” Kevin said. “You want the league to go coed?”
    “No,” Pete said, exchanging a wary glance with Steve. “That’s exactly what we don’t want.”
    “But it’s the Men’s Softball League. If you have women playing, then it’s coed.”
    “We don’t want women, ” Steve explained. “We just want Judy.”
    “You can’t discriminate,” Kevin reminded them. “If you admit one woman, you gotta admit them all.”
    “It’s not discrimination,” Pete insisted. “It’s an exception. Besides, Judy’s bigger than I am. If you didn’t look too close, you wouldn’t even know she was a girl.”
    “You ever play coed softball?” Steve asked. “It’s about as much fun as all-male Twister.”
    “They do it with soccer,” Kevin said. “Everybody seems fine with that.”
    “That’s soccer,” Steve said. “They’re all pussies to begin with.”
    “Sorry,” Kevin told them. “You can have Judy Dolan or you can have a men’s league. But you can’t have both.”
    *   *   *
    THE MEN’S room was a tight squeeze—a dank, windowless space outfitted with a sink, a hand dryer, a trash can, two side-by-side urinals, and a toilet stall—in which it was theoretically possible to have five individuals rubbing shoulders at the same time. Usually this only happened late at night, when guys had drunk so much beer that waiting politely was no longer an option, and by then, everybody was cheerful enough that the obstacle-course aspect of it just seemed like part of the fun.
    Right now, though, Kevin had the whole place to himself, or at least he would have if he hadn’t been so aware of Ernie Costello’s friendly face gazing down at him from a framed photograph hanging above and between the two urinals. Ernie was the Midway’s former bartender, a big-bellied guy with a walrus mustache. The wall around his portrait was full of heartfelt graffiti scrawled by his friends and former customers.
We miss you buddy.
You were the best!!!
It’s not the same without you
You’re in our hearts.…
Better make it a double!
    Kevin kept his head down, doing his best to ignore the bartender’s beseeching gaze. He’d never been a fan of the memorials that had sprung up all over town in the wake of the Sudden Departure. It didn’t matter if they were discreet—a roadside flower arrangement, a name soaped on the rear window of a car—or big and flashy, like the mountain of teddy bears in a little girl’s front yard, or the question WHERE’S DONNIE? burned into the grass along the entire length of the high school football field. He just didn’t think it was healthy, being reminded all the time of the terrible and incomprehensible thing that had happened. That was why he’d pushed so hard for the Heroes’ Day Parade—it was better to channel the grief into an annual observance, relieve some of the day-to-day pressure on the survivors.
    He washed his hands and rubbed them under the useless dryer, wondering if Pete and Steve had inadvertently stumbled onto something with their idea of inviting Judy Dolan onto the team. Like those guys, Kevin preferred to play in a competitive all-male league,