For One More Day
Mitch Albom
NEW YORK
Content
I. Midnight
Chick’s Story
Chick Tries to End It All
II. Morning
Chick’s Mom
How Mother Met Father
Chick Returns to His Old House
The Melody Changes
The Encounter Inside the House
A Fresh start
A Meal Together
Chick’s Family After the Divorce
Walking
Rose
Embarrassed Children
Rose Says Good-Bye
III. Noon
Chick and College
The Middle of the Day
When Ghosts Return
Miss Thelma
Chick Makes His Choice
The Work You Have to Do
Reaching the Top
The Second Visit Ends
IV. Night
The Sunlight Fades
The Day He Wanted Back
The Game
Chick Finds Out His Mom Is Gone
A Third and Final Visit
Everything Explained
Chick Finishes His Story
Chick’s Final Thoughts
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Copyright
ALSO BY MITCH ALBOM
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Tuesdays with Morrie
Fab Five
Bo
“Let me guess. You want to know why I tried to kill myself.”
—Chick Benetto’s first words to me
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY and, as there is a ghost involved, you might call it a ghost story. But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.
THIS PARTICULAR STORY belongs to Charles “Chick” Benetto. He was not the ghost. He was very real. I found him on a Saturday morning, in the bleachers of a Little League field, wearing a navy windbreaker and chewing peppermint gum. Maybe you remember him from his baseball days. I have spent part of my career as a sportswriter, so the name was familiar to me on several levels.
Looking back, it was fate that I found him. I had come to Pepperville Beach to close on a small house that had been in our family for years. On my way back to the airport, I stopped for coffee. There was a field across the street where kids in purple t-shirts were pitching and hitting. I had time. I wandered over.
As I stood at the backstop, my fingers curled in the chain-link fence, an old man maneuvered a lawn mower over the grass. He was tanned and wrinkled, with half a cigar in his mouth. He shut the mower when he saw me and asked if I had a kid out there. I said no. He asked what I was doing here. I told him about the house. He asked what I did for a living and I made the mistake of telling him that, too.
“A writer, huh?” he said, chewing his cigar. He pointed to a figure sitting alone in the seats with his back to us. “You oughta check out that guy. Now there’s a story.”
I hear this all the time.
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
“He played pro ball once.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I think he made a World Series.”
“Mmm.”
“And he tried to kill himself.”
“What?”
“Yeah.” The man sniffed. “From what I heard, he’s damn lucky to be alive. Chick Benetto, his name is. His mother used to live around here. Posey Benetto.” He chuckled. “She was wild.”
He dropped his cigar and stomped on it. “Go on up and ask him if you don’t believe me.”
He returned to his mower. I let go of the fence. It was rusty, and some of the rust came off on my fingers.
Every family is a ghost story.
I approached the bleachers.
WHAT I HAVE written here is what Charles “Chick” Benetto told me in our conversation that morning—which stretched out much longer than that—as well as personal notes and pages from his journal that I found later, on my own. I have assembled them into the following narrative, in his voice, because I’m not sure you would believe this story if you didn’t hear it in his voice.
You may not believe it anyhow.
But ask yourself this: Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
What if you got it back?
May 2006
I. Midnight
Chick’s Story
LET ME GUESS. You want to know why I tried to kill myself.
You want to know how I survived. Why I disappeared. Where I’ve been all this time. But first, why I tried to kill myself, right?
It’s OK. People do. They measure themselves against me. It’s like this line is drawn somewhere in the world and if you never cross it, you’ll never consider throwing yourself off a building or swallowing a bottle of pills—but if you do, you might. People figure I crossed the line. They ask themselves, “Could I ever get as close as he did?”
The truth is, there is no line. There’s only your life, how you mess it up, and who is there to save you.
Or who isn’t.
LOOKING BACK, I began to unravel the day my mother died, around ten years ago. I wasn’t there when it happened, and I should have been. So I lied. That was a bad idea. A funeral is no place for secrets. I stood by her gravesite trying to believe it wasn’t my fault, and then my fourteen-year-old daughter took my hand and whispered, “I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to say good-bye, Dad,” and that was it. I broke down. I fell to my knees, crying, the wet grass staining my pants.
After the funeral, I got so drunk I passed out on our couch. And something changed. One day can bend your life, and that day seemed to bend mine inexorably downward. My mother had been all over me as a kid—advice, criticism, the whole smothering mothering thing. There were times I wished she would leave me alone.
But then she did. She died. No more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river. Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea.
The truth is, I didn’t like who I was at all. In my mind, I still pictured myself a promising, young athlete. But I was no longer young and I was no longer an athlete. I was a middle-aged salesman. My promise had long since passed.
A year after my mother died, I did the dumbest thing I’ve ever done financially. I let a saleswoman talk me into an investment scheme. She was young and good-looking in that confident, breezy, two-buttons-undone fashion that makes an older man feel bitter when she walks past him—unless, of course, she speaks to him. Then he gets stupid. We met three times to discuss the proposal: twice at her office, once in a Greek restaurant, nothing improper, but by the time her perfume cleared my head, I’d put most of my savings in a now-worthless stock fund. She quickly got “transferred” to the West Coast. I had to explain to my wife, Catherine, where the money went.
After that, I drank more—ballplayers in my time always drank—but it became a problem which, in time, got me fired from two sales jobs. And getting fired made me keep on drinking. I slept badly. I ate badly. I seemed to be aging while standing still. When I did find work, I hid mouthwash and eyedrops in my pockets, darting into bathrooms before meeting clients. Money became a problem; Catherine and I fought constantly about it. And, over time, our marriage collapsed. She grew tired of my misery and I can’t say I blame her. When you’re rotten abo
ut yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love. One night she found me passed out on the basement floor with my lip cut, cradling a baseball glove.
I left my family shortly thereafter—or they left me.
I am more ashamed of that than I can say.
I moved to an apartment. I grew ornery and distant. I avoided anyone who wouldn’t drink with me. My mother, had she been alive, might have found a way through to me because she was always good at that, taking my arm and saying, “Come on, Charley, what’s the story?” But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going into every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.
And one night, in early October, I decided to kill myself.
Maybe you’re surprised. Maybe you figure men like me, men who play in a World Series, can never sink as low as suicide because they always have, at the very least, that “dream came true” thing. But you’d be wrong. All that happens when your dream comes true is a slow, melting realization that it wasn’t what you thought.
And it won’t save you.
WHAT FINISHED ME, what pushed me over the edge, strange as it sounds, was my daughter’s wedding. She was twenty-two now, with long, straight hair, chestnut-colored, like her mother’s, and the same full lips. She married a “wonderful guy” in an afternoon ceremony.
And that’s all I know because that’s all she wrote, in a brief letter which arrived at my apartment a few weeks after the event.
Apparently, through my drinking, depression, and generally bad behavior, I had become too great an embarrassment to risk at a family function. Instead, I received that letter and two photographs, one of my daughter and her new husband, hands clasped, standing under a tree; the other of the happy couple toasting with champagne.
It was the second photo that broke me. One of those candid snapshots that catches a moment never to be repeated, the two of them laughing in midsentence, tipping their glasses. It was so innocent and so young and so...past tense. It seemed to taunt my absence. And you weren’t there. I didn’t even know this guy. My ex-wife did. Our old friends did. And you weren’t there. Once again, I had been absent from a critical family moment. This time, my little girl would not take my hand and comfort me; she belonged to someone else. I was not being asked. I was being notified.
I looked at the envelope, which carried her new last name (Maria Lang, not Maria Benetto) and no return address (Why? Were they afraid I might visit them?), and something sunk so low inside me I couldn’t find it anymore. You get shut out of your only child’s life, you feel like a steel door has been locked; you’re banging, but they just can’t hear you. And being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in.
So I tried to.
It’s not so much, what’s the point? It’s more like what’s the difference?
When he went blundering back to God,
His songs half written, his work half done,
Who knows what paths his bruised feet trod,
What hills of peace or pain he won?
I hope God smiled and took his hand,
And said, “Poor truant, passionate fool!
Life’s book is hard to understand:
Why couldst thou not remain at school?”
(a poem, by Charles Hanson Towne, found inside a notebook amongst Chick Benetto’s belongings)
Chick Tries to End It All
THAT LETTER FROM MY DAUGHTER arrived on a Friday, which conveniently allowed for a weekend bender, not much of which I remember. Monday morning, despite a long, cold shower, I was two hours late for work. When I got to the office, I lasted less than forty-five minutes. My head was throbbing. The place felt like a tomb. I slid into the Xerox room, then the bathroom, then the elevator, without a coat or a briefcase, so that, if someone were charting my movements, they would seem normal and not an orchestrated exit.
That was stupid. No one cared. This was a big company with lots of salespeople and it could survive just fine without me, as we now know, since that walk from the elevator to the parking lot was my last act as an employee.
NEXT, I CALLED my ex-wife. I called from a pay phone. She was at work.
“Why?” I said when she answered.
“Chick?”
“Why?” I repeated. I’d had three days to lather up my anger, and that was all that came out. One word. “Why?”
“Chick.” Her tone softened.
“I wasn’t even invited?”
“It was their idea. They thought it was...”
“What? Safer? I was going to do something?”
“I don’t know—”
“I’m a monster now? Is that it?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m a monster?”
“Stop.”
“I’m leaving.”
“Look, Chick, she’s not a kid anymore, and if—”
“You couldn’t stand up for me?”
I heard her exhale.
“Leaving where?” she said.
“You couldn’t stand up for me?”
“I’m sorry. It’s complicated. There’s his family, too. And they—”
“Did you go with someone?”
“Oh, Chick ...I’m at work, OK?”
At that moment, I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt before, and that loneliness seemed to squat in my lungs and crush all but my most minimal breathing. There was nothing left to say. Not about this. Not about anything.
“It’s all right,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
There was a pause.
“Leaving where?” she said.
I hung up.
AND THEN, FOR the last time, I got drunk. First at a place called Mr. Ted’s Pub, where the bartender was a skinny, round-faced kid, probably no older than the guy my daughter married. Later I went back to my apartment and drank some more. I knocked over furniture. I wrote on the walls. I think I actually stuffed the wedding photos down the garbage disposal. Somewhere in the middle of the night I decided to go home, meaning Pepperville Beach, the town where I grew up. It was two hours away by car, but I hadn’t been there in years. I moved around my apartment, walking in circles as if preparing for the journey. You don’t need much for a good-bye trip. I went to the bedroom and took a gun out of the drawer.
I stumbled down to the garage, found my car, put the gun in the glove compartment, threw a jacket in the backseat, maybe the front seat, or maybe the jacket was already there, I don’t know, and I screeched into the street. The city was quiet, the lights were blinking yellow, and I was going to end my life where I began it.
Blundering back to God. Simple as that.
We are proud to announce the birth of Charles Alexander 8 pounds, 11 ounces November 21, 1949 Leonard and Pauline Benetto
(from Chick Benetto’s papers)
IT WAS COLD AND RAINING LIGHTLY, but the highway was empty, and I used every one of its four lanes, weaving back and forth. You would think, you would hope, that someone as lit as I was would be stopped by the police, but I wasn’t. At one point I even rolled into one of those all-night convenience stores, and I bought a six-pack of beer from an Asian guy with a thin mustache.
“Lottery ticket?” he asked.
I had, over the years, perfected a functional appearance when I was smashed—the alcoholic as walking man—and I pretended to give the question some thought.
“Not this time,” I said.
He put the beer in a bag. I caught his gaze, two dull, dark eyes, and I thought to myself, This is the last face I will see on earth.
He pushed my change across the counter.
BY THE TIME I saw the sign for my hometown—PEPPERVILLE BEACH, EXIT 1 MILE—two of the beers were gone, and one had spilled all over the passenger seat. The wipers were thumping. I was fighting to stay awake. I must have tranced out thinking, “Exit 1 Mile,” because after a while I saw a sign for another town and realized I had missed my turnoff altogether. I
banged on the dashboard. Then I spun the car around, right there, in the middle of the highway, and drove back in the wrong direction. There was no traffic and I wouldn’t have cared anyhow. I was getting to that exit. I slammed the accelerator. Quickly enough, a ramp came into view—the on-ramp, not the exit ramp—and I screeched toward it. It was one of those long twisting things, and I held the wheel in a locked turn, going fast, around and down.
Suddenly, two huge lights blinded me, like two giant suns. Then a truck horn blasted, then a jolting smash, then my car flew over an embankment and landed hard, thumping downhill. There was glass everywhere and beer cans bouncing around and I grabbed wildly at the steering wheel and the car jerked backward, flipping me onto my stomach. I somehow found the door handle and yanked it hard, and I remember flashes of black sky and green weeds and a sound like thunder and something high and solid crashing down.
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, I was lying in wet grass. My car was half-buried under a now-destroyed billboard for a local Chevrolet dealership, into which it had apparently plowed. In one of those freak moments of physics, I must have been thrown from the vehicle before its final impact. I can’t explain it. When you want to die, you are spared. Who can explain that?
I slowly, painfully, got to my feet. My back was soaked. I ached all over. It was still raining lightly, but it was quiet, save for the sound of crickets. Normally, at this point, you’d say, “I was just happy to be alive,” but I can’t say that, because I wasn’t. I looked up at the highway. In the mist, I could make out the truck, like a big, hulking shipwreck, the front cab bent as if its neck had been snapped. Steam rose from the hood. One headlamp was still working, casting a lonely beam down the muddy hill that made twinkling diamonds out of the shattered glass.
Where was the driver? Was he alive? Hurt? Bleeding? Breathing? The courageous thing, of course, would have been to climb up and check, but courage was not my strong suit at that moment.
So I didn’t.
Instead, I put my hands down flat by my sides and I turned south, walking back toward my old town. I am not proud of this. But I was not in any way rational. I was a zombie, a robot, devoid of concern for anyone, myself included—myself, actually, at the top of the list. I forgot about the car, the truck, the gun; I left it all behind. My shoes crunched on the gravel, and I heard the crickets laughing.