Chapter 21: Dave

Our bus ride from Myrtle Beach straight back to Frederick was a hot-and-dusty 500-mile trial-by-hemorroid, and it was accomplished in the middle of the night, starting less than an hour after we'd played our final (night) game of the season in the Land of the Grand Strand.

The Pelicans were in last place in the Southern Division, so we wouldn't be back. That was the good news. The bad news was, we'd likely be back in Kinston, North Carolina -- itself a butt-busting 400 miles from home -- because Kinston was in first place in the Southern Division, and cruising.

As were we. We'd likely meet them in the playoffs, assuming we got past the second-place team in the Northern Division -- Wilmington.

I was actually a little bit hyped about the playoffs, because last year in Delmarva, our club hadn't gotten anywhere at all in post-season play. UAB's success in the NCAA regionals had been the nearest thing I'd seen to a power showdown between top-notch teams.

The fact that I'd continued to hit a ton, of course, made getting up for still-more baseball games a little bit easier. With only six games left in the regular season, I was hitting .314, and my second-half renaissance had given me a very respectable OBP, lots and lots of happy ribbies, and (would you believe?) thirteen homers -- with nine of them having been post-Dempsey (or should I say, post-Emmy?) dingers!

In honor of that insane bus ride, the schedule-makers had afforded us a rare day off back in Frederick. Eddie and I slept from 8:30 a.m. (when we got home) until 2:30 p.m., at which point we roused ourselves and drove down to Arlington to see Emily. I had yet to commit to her house-purchase plan, but I was dutifully coming down to see the house she'd focused in on. We had a late-in-the-day appointment with the real estate agent to take another look at the place.

Emily was making lots and lots of eye contact when we got to her apartment, no doubt trying to read me. Had I decided to say "yes" to her Master Plan? Would seeing the house be the actual deciding factor? She didn't push me. She didn't ask me any questions, but I could tell she was on pins and needles, anyway.

If I couldn't get over my little masculine crisis, here, and consent to the (obviously excellent) plan she had to make my life -- and Eddie's life -- infinitely easier, she was going to be terribly disappointed. I wondered if she'd be so disappointed that it would spell the end of us as a couple?

Maybe not -- but it might be the beginning of the end.

And what, exactly, was my own brilliant Plan for coping with Next Season, sans Emily? I guess it would involve an apartment search in Bowie. An easier commute for me, certainly. Living in Arlington and facing the entire District of Columbia every afternoon as a barrier between me and Bowie, Maryland didn't promise to be real fun and games.

Maybe I should have talked to Ms. Washington about whether she was interested in moving to the Bowie area. I had no idea how important her personal ties to Frederick were. Maybe she'd tag along as our child care and housekeeping maven. But, so far, I hadn't discussed it with her. Anyway, what would happen to her after that? After, perhaps, I got sent up the following year to Ottawa? Would we then just abandon her?

Life gets tedious, don't it?

We had late-afternoon coffee at the apartment with Emmy and Patsy. Both of them had knocked off work early to accompany Eddie and me on the visit to The House. Obviously, Patsy had already been enlisted in the cause and, probably, was as eager as Emmy was for me to say the word -- to give the Big OK to the master plan.

Pressure.

Well, hell, I wanted to say yes. I'm not a fool. I knew this was an incredibly helpful and beneficial idea. Eddie and I would not only live better than we'd been living, we'd live better than we'd ever lived -- even before our folks died. Eddie would have stability, someone to watch over him while I was God-knows-where, playing baseball, and an end to mid-term interstate and intrastate school transfers.

So where was the negative side?

Nowhere. Except that I wasn't in a position to carry my share of the load, economically, and I likely wouldn't be, any time soon. I was going to be a kept man. Just a gigolo. I knew damned well that Emmy wasn't thinking in those terms. It was insulting to her for me, even, to be thinking in those terms.

But I was. I guess I was still a charter member of the "You Gotta Have a Dick" school. If you're going to buy the house, and the groceries, and pay the electric bill for a whole family of people, well, then, you gotta have a dick.

Stupid? You bet! You think I didn't realize it was stupid? But it was preying on my mind, all the same. You can know damned well something that you believe is stupid, but that doesn't necessarily prevent you from believing it!

Well. I better damned well be making up my mind. If I was going to get a job during the off-season, it might help, just a little, to know what state I was going to be living in, after mid-September. If I was going to enroll Eddie in a high school -- same deal.

I wasn't only going to look at a house today. I was going to make some major-league decisions about the next year or two -- or three -- of my life.

Maybe about my whole life.

The prospect of spending the next two -- or three -- or fifty -- years of my life with Emmy was a totally pleasurable and positive one. There were problems, of course. Would we wear all that well, over the long haul? Would Emmy, six months from now, or a year from now, come to me, embarrassed, and say something like, "Gee, Dave, sorry, but we both know this really isn't working out..."

It could happen. People's lives get fucked up every day. Just because we are both totally gaa-gaa over each other at the moment doesn't guarantee that it'll hold up over the long haul. Love can be a fleeting thing.

But, hey, maybe my say-so isn't all that important. Maybe Emmy will buy herself a house, no matter what I say about becoming a resident of it. She can afford it. She could still improve herself, and meet her own needs -- and maybe Patsy's -- whether I buy into this deal or not.

Maybe I, David Marshall Hooks, might believe that you "gotta have a dick," but Emmy can demonstrate to me, with a snap of her fingers, that the You Gotta Have a Dick Rule is total bullshit.

Come to think of it, Emmy had said she'd gotten her nest egg from Grandma.

Grandma probably hadn't had a dick, either.

Well, the house was kind of a surprise. It was a boxy, square, Federal-style house on a small elevated lot. The yard wasn't large. There were almost-identical boxy, square, red-brick Federal-style houses on either side. There was a narrow, paved-but-pocked driveway alongside a brick reinforcing wall separating the elevated front "yard" from the driveway. At the end of the driveway, a wooden garage, separated from the house and making up the border of one side of the smallish back yard, was more-or-less standing. It looked as if a good push would collapse it. One would park a car inside it at his peril, and it had better be a small car. This garage pre-dated the SUV era by several decades.