The Leftovers

where you didn’t have to watch your language or think twice about barreling into the catcher to break up a close play at the plate. But it was starting to look like finding enough players for a serious league was going to be a heavy lift, and he thought a fun coed league might be an alternative worth considering, the greatest good for the greatest many.
    *   *   *
    KEVIN LITERALLY bumped into Melissa Hulbert on his way out of the restroom. She was leaning against the wall in the dim alcove, waiting her turn for the ladies’ room, which could accommodate only one person at a time. Later on, he realized that their meeting probably wasn’t a coincidence, but it felt like one. Melissa acted surprised and seemed happier to see him than he might have expected.
    “Kevin.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Wow. Where’ve you been hiding?”
    “Melissa.” He made an effort to match the warmth of her greeting. “It’s been a while, huh?”
    “Three months,” she informed him. “At least.”
    “That long?” He pretended to do the math in his head, then expelled a grunt of fake wonderment. “So how’ve you been?”
    “Good.” She shrugged to let him know that good was a bit of an overstatement, then studied him for an anxious moment or two. “Is this okay?”
    “What?”
    “Me being here.”
    “Sure. Why not?”
    “I don’t know.” Her smile didn’t quite cancel out the edge in her voice. “I just assumed—”
    “No, no,” he assured her. “It’s not like that.”
    An older woman Kevin didn’t know emerged from the ladies’ room, mumbling an apology as she slipped by, trailing a vapor cloud of sweet perfume.
    “I’m at the bar,” Melissa said, touching him lightly on the arm. “If you feel like buying me a drink.”
    Kevin groaned an apology. “I’m here with some friends.”
    “Just one drink,” she told him. “I think you owe me that much.”
    He owed her a lot more than that, and they both knew it.
    “Okay,” he said. “Fair enough.”
    *   *   *
    MELISSA WAS one of three women Kevin had attempted to sleep with since his wife had left, and the only one close to his own age. They’d known each other since they were kids—Kevin was a year ahead of her in school—and they’d even had a little teenage fling the summer before his senior year, a heavy makeout session at the end of a keg party. It was one of those free-pass things—he had a girlfriend, she had a boyfriend, but the girlfriend and the boyfriend both happened to be on vacation—that hadn’t gone nearly as far as he would’ve liked. She was a hottie back then, a wholesome, freckle-faced redhead, with what were widely considered to be the nicest tits in all of Mapleton High. Kevin managed to put his hand on the left one, but only for a tantalizing second or two before she removed it.
    Some other time, she told him, with a sadness in her voice that sounded sincere. I promised Bob I’d be good.
    But there was no other time, not that summer, and not for the next quarter century. Bob and Melissa went steady all the way through high school and college and ended up getting married. They bounced around a bit before coming home to Mapleton, right around the time Kevin moved back with his own family. Tom was just two at the time, the same age as Melissa’s younger daughter.
    They saw each other a lot when the kids were small, at playgrounds and school events and spaghetti dinners. They were never close—never socialized or exchanged more than the usual parental small talk—but there was always that little secret between them, the memory of a summer night, the awareness of a road not taken.
    *   *   *
    HE ENDED up buying her three drinks, the first to discharge his debt, the second because he’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to her, and the third because it felt good to have her leg pressing against his while he sipped his bourbon, which was exactly how he’d gotten into trouble the last time.
    “Any word from Tom?” she asked.
    “Just an e-mail a few months ago. He didn’t say much.”
    “Where is he?”
    “I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere on the West Coast, I think.”
    “But he’s okay?”
    “Seemed like it.”
    “I heard about Holy Wayne,” she said. “What a creep.”
    Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell my son was thinking.”
    Melissa’s face clouded over with maternal concern.
    “It’s hard being young now. It was different for us, you know? It was like a