Evvie Drake Starts Over(14)

   “Oh, they’re heated seats,” he told her. “Great, right?”

Cute boy, dry car, bookstore trip, and now a warm ass. It was like the universe had forgotten her first fifteen birthdays and was rolling them into one big gift. “Yeah. Is this your car? It’s great.”

“It’s my car,” he said. “It’s new. Sometime when it’s not raining out, I’ll open the sunroof for you.” Sometime. He’d blinked a future into existence. It was sorcery.

“I just got my permit,” she said. “I live with my dad, and we only have his truck. I want to get a job so I can get a car, but I don’t know if it’ll happen.”

“My parents got it for me for my birthday,” he said, like he hadn’t heard her. “It’s like what they drive.”

They talked a little about classes and the new house his family had recently moved into, a big Victorian that had been owned by a local land developer named Van McCrea. Evvie told him a story she’d heard from her dad about the time Van’s wife set the kitchen on fire deep-frying a turkey indoors on Thanksgiving, and he assured her that you couldn’t see a trace of the ashes now. And then he pulled up to Breezeway Books, a little house that had been converted into a bookstore, if by “converted” you meant “filled up with shelves that hold so many used books that there’s barely room to walk, so step carefully and keep your elbows tucked in.”

You could get up to a grocery bag full of paperbacks for ten cents each, so Evvie wandered around plucking romances and mysteries until her bag was half-full. She turned a corner where a sign handmade with cardboard and markers said SCIENCE, and she ran into Tim, who was holding a hardback copy of a book called Man and His Diseases. She opened her eyes wide.

“I’m going to be a doctor,” he said. “That’s…that’s why I’m holding this book.”

She laughed. The boy with the dry car and the heated seats who wanted to go to the bookstore was going to be a doctor. And he was funny. “Ah. For a minute there, I was a little bit worried. You know, for you.”

   He grinned at her. “You have a cute smile.”

She never stood a chance.



* * *



—

A breeze brought Evvie back to the memorial. One of the nurses was reading a poem. Something with angels. Something that rhymed “heaven” with “ten or eleven,” and “sky” with “cry,” something familiar. Evvie tried to place where she knew it from, thinking maybe she’d heard it from her mother, who had a soft spot for simplistic sentimentality, or had seen it on a wall hanging. It took a minute, but she finally remembered: it had been read at a very important funeral on a very highly rated television drama series. Somebody asked you to say a few words, she thought at the nurse, and you googled “poem from season finale of Cole Point.” You did. What’s wrong with you?

Dr. Schramm’s assistant brought a bouquet to Evvie and pushed it into her hands, then took an identical one to Tim’s mom. Evvie looked down at the flowers, orange and red for autumn, tasteful for grieving, and to her great relief, she felt tears start to tense her throat. Andy’s hand, soft on her back, drew them the rest of the way out. Thank God, she thought.

The good thing about a ceremony packed with busy people is that they don’t linger. The tree was planted and the dirt was shoveled, people said things about how much they’d loved and admired Tim, and Evvie felt eyes on her the entire time. She tried to breathe right, sigh right, smile right, hold the flowers right.

It was at the very end, when a former patient of Tim’s asked to say a few words, that Evvie was most sharply reminded of how devoted to him they were and what they believed he had been. The man talked about how Tim had sat by his bed and helped him figure out how to break it to his daughters that he had cancer.

When Evvie was in college, she’d come down with a flu that filled her lungs with cement for two weeks. Between classes, Tim would come sit on the bed and read to her from his biology textbook in the voices of various cartoon characters. Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam and Pepé Le Pew told her about microbial diseases and molecular genetics. She had loved it; it hadn’t occurred to her to mind that even his close attention was a performance. In fact, it was too bad that “solid cartoon mimic” wasn’t something she’d thought to say at his funeral, because it would have sounded affectionate and been the truth, a combination she’d found hard to get right on that day.

   Reminding herself that things like that had happened—that he could be sweet, and he could be fun, and he could be focused on her in a way that made her feel almost high—had kept her in the house, married to him. They were the tethers. And the rarer those moments got and the unhappier she got, the more often she picked through every bit of evidence of every day when she had ever been happy. She kept ticket stubs, dried flowers, receipts; she kept the flash cards he’d made in medical school. She kept whatever made her good memories occupy space. She threw away everything from her bad days, especially after they were married. The day after Tim lost his temper and dented the drywall throwing his phone, she donated the clothes she’d been wearing when he did it.

It wasn’t as if she’d had no early warnings, no chances to extricate herself. In the spring of Evvie and Tim’s senior year of high school, the Calcasset Small Business Association gave its Young Scholar’s Medal, and the associated $3,000 scholarship, to Zoe Crispin. She was a straight-A student who worked in the school’s tutoring program and edited the yearbook. But Tim had expected to get it himself—so much so that he’d drawn an X over the banquet date on the calendar he kept in his backpack. They were at school when he found out Zoe had won. He didn’t talk, he just bang-bang-banged his books into the locker, then he slammed the door so hard that everyone in the hall turned to look. Evvie tried to get him to meet her eyes. “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry it didn’t turn out how you wanted.”