Evvie Drake Starts Over(15)

   Tim adjusted his pack on his shoulder, shrugged, and said, “They probably had to give it to a girl.”

From time to time, late in her marriage, Evvie had fantasized about an alternate past in which she punched him in the gut and ran. But she didn’t. She nodded, she smiled, and she grabbed his hand. She said, “Probably.” And it quieted him. It ended the scene he was making, all the noise he was making. She felt older, and special, like she’d slipped through a door into the future. She knew how to settle him down; everyone noticed. She heard the next day that one of his friends had nicknamed her “TD,” and when they were having lunch outside, she asked Tim what it meant. She was afraid it would be something gross, and he hesitated to tell her, but after a while he grumbled that it stood for “Tranquilizer Dart.” Evvie blushed and took another bite of her apple.

She didn’t know then, as she would later, that he wouldn’t settle for reassurances that he’d been wronged. There would have to be justice. Tim’s father, Pete, went fishing four days later with Bill Zeist, the president of the Calcasset Small Business Association. And two days after that, the CSBA announced a new distinction: the Leadership Medal, to be given to the high school student who best demonstrated the potential for future contributions to the community. It also carried a $3,000 scholarship, and it would be given at the same banquet where they honored Zoe. The first recipient: Timothy Christopher Drake.

They’d given both medals every year since, meaning that every year, Tim’s bruised ego helped another student attend college. Every year, a room full of people gathered, without knowing it, to eat roasted chicken, honor Tim’s ego, and applaud the way his parents loved him so much that over and over, they had made him worse.

She had made him worse, too. She was the one, after all, who had graduated second in her class, right behind him, after tanking her math final because she knew how much it meant to him to be valedictorian. He first told her he loved her on the day he learned he’d edged her out.



* * *



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   Andy patted Evvie’s back, and she snapped back into her body. It was done. As people left, they gave Evvie a familiar and encouraging squeeze—some had graduated these moves from her elbow to her shoulder around the six-month mark, as a sign that it was time to buck up and stop bumming everyone out. She told everyone thank you, hugged Lila again, let Pete pat her hand again, told them all goodbye. She and Andy walked in silence to his car. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “Pretty painless, actually.”

“You sure?” he asked. “You’ll tell me, right? You’ll tell me if it’s too much for you? That’s our deal.”

“That’s our deal,” she said. It was their deal, and it was too much, but she couldn’t tell him why, and it was just one more thing she knew she was doing wrong.





SHE TOLD ANDY WHEN HE dropped her off that she had errands to run, then she spent the rest of the day in bed, with the quilt up to her chin, lying on her side, reading a romance novel on her Kindle. When the sun went down, she went to the kitchen for a bagel and a Diet Coke and brought them back up to her room. She ate in the dark by the light of her reader, listening to the winds that weren’t uncommon so near the water. After a while, she put the book down and lay on her back on the bed, listening. When it started to roar, she got out of bed and stretched out on the thick area rug. She waited for that feeling of floating, like she was dropping into the earth. But she couldn’t stop seeing herself from above. Couldn’t stop thinking about how silly she must look stretched out on the rug by her bed like a crazy person. What adult lies down on the floor? Tim had asked her this once when he caught her snoozing on the carpet in the apartment.

She went to the window and pulled back the curtain to see how windy it was. She was startled at the sight of someone moving in the semi-dark in the side yard, almost out of the porch light’s reach, until she realized it was Dean, heading for the trash barrels with a garbage bag. As she watched, he whipped the lid off—she could never get it off smoothly like that, how did he do it?—and dropped the bag in. He took a couple of steps back toward the house, into the light, and paused when he inadvertently kicked what she soon realized was a big pinecone.

   He picked it up off the ground and seemed to weigh it in his hand. She saw him look around the yard, over at the driveway, and even—she thought—up at her window. She instinctively stepped back. He tossed the pinecone into the air and caught it. He turned his body, those big shoulders, to face the house, then pivoted his head until he was staring across the wide backyard. It took her a minute to realize what he was doing, and then she saw his leg kick up, his shoulders rotate, his arm whip around, the pinecone fly across the yard and smack into the fence. He stared for a minute after it, at the spot where it had landed, and then he rubbed his right shoulder. He walked slowly over to examine the spot where it had hit, touching the wooden fence like he could read the splinters with his fingers.

He leaned down and picked up the pinecone, and he walked back to where he’d been standing. He repeated the motion: settled his body, stretched, rotated, let it fly, listened to it smack into the wood. Up by the window, Evvie moved the curtain aside a little more and leaned down.

He picked it up again. He walked in a couple of small circles, resting his hands on his hips. He tossed the pinecone in his hand, just a few inches, and caught it. Finally, he set himself again. This time, when his shoulders rotated, he uncoiled his body with such force that he almost knocked himself over. And this time, when it hit the fence, she saw the pinecone break apart and hit the ground in pieces. He stood for a minute with his hands on his hips, then bent down to rest his hands on his knees, like he was out of breath. Finally, he came toward the house.