Evvie Drake Starts Over(2)
Nice, she’d thought to herself when that thought first intruded. Welcome to Maine’s most ghoulish comedy club. Here is a little joke about how my husband’s ghost is kind of an asshole. And about how I am a monster.
It was a little after four in the morning. Flat on her back in her T-shirt and boxers, she took rhythmic breaths, trying to slow the pounding in her temples and belly and wrists. The house felt empty of air and was totally silent except for the clock that had ticked out pick-a-pick-a for thirty-five years, first in her parents’ kitchen and now in hers. In the dark apartment, she felt so little of anything, except the prickle of the carpet on her skin, that it was like not being anywhere at all. It was like lying directly on top of the earth.
Evvie thought from time to time about moving in here. Someone else could have the house, that big kitchen and the bedrooms upstairs, the carved banister and the slick staircase where she’d once slipped and gotten a deep purple bruise on her hip. She could live here, stretched out on her back in the dark, thinking all her worst thoughts, eating peanut butter sandwiches and listening to the radio like the power was out forever.
The kettle whistled from the kitchen, so she stood and went to turn it off. She took down one of the two public-radio fundraising mugs from the cabinet, leaving behind the one with the thin coat of dust on its upturned bottom. The tag on her chamomile teabag said, There is no trouble that a good cup of tea can’t solve. It sounded like what a gentleman on Downton Abbey would say right before his wife got an impacted tooth and elegantly perished in bed.
Blowing ripples in her tea, Evvie went into the living room where there was somewhere to sit and curled up on the deep-green love seat. There was a Sports Illustrated addressed to Tim sticking out of the pile of mail on the coffee table, and she paged through it by the wedge of light from the kitchen: the winding down of baseball season, the gearing up of football season, an update on a college gymnast who was quitting to be a doctor, and a profile of a Yankees pitcher who woke up one day and couldn’t pitch anymore. That last one was under a fat allcaps headline: “HOW TO BECOME A HEAD CASE.” “Way ahead of you,” she muttered, and stuck the magazine at the bottom of the pile.
By the clock on the cable box, it was 4:23 A.M. She closed her eyes. It had been almost a year since Tim died, and she still couldn’t do anything at all sometimes, because she was so consumed by not missing him. She could fill up whole rooms with how it felt to be the only person who knew that she barely loved him when she’d listened to him snoring lightly on the last night he was alive. Monster, monster, she thought. Monster, monster.
“LILLY CHUCKED HER MILK AT the floor.” Andy took a sip of coffee. “I’m in trouble with her teacher.”
Andy and Evvie’s Saturday breakfasts at the Compass Café had started four years ago when he got divorced, and they’d never stopped. Some husbands might have minded, but Tim hadn’t. “I have plenty of work to do, so as long as you’re not complaining to him about me, I don’t care,” he’d said.
Andy would have the ham and cheese omelet, and Evvie would have the blueberry pancakes, a side of bacon, and a large orange juice. They drank at least two pots of coffee and reviewed the weeks past and ahead. They stayed as the place filled and emptied and filled again. They eyeballed the tourists and tipped extravagantly, and locals they knew wandered by and said something about the weather or asked what Andy’s little girls were up to. And, for this last year or so, people would stretch their necks to peek, or happen to stand at a politely investigatory distance, to check on Evvie and satisfy themselves, just make sure, that the death of her husband hadn’t turned her into a shriveled little husk, sitting at home humming ballads to Tim’s favorite shirt as she rocked back and forth, clutching it to her chest.
“Why did Lilly chuck her milk at the floor?” Lilly was Andy’s younger daughter, who had recently started kindergarten.
“Good question. The teacher says she just threw it. No warning. Yelled, ‘Milk is melted yogurt!’?”
Evvie smiled. She could picture it, including the face full of fury Lilly had worn on and off since infancy. “I see how she got there, I guess.”
“So the teacher tells me she gave her a time out. I say, ‘That seems fine.’ And the teacher says, ‘I think it would also be good to follow up at home about respect.’ I say, ‘Respect for you?’ And she says, ‘Well, yes, but also for property.’ And I’m thinking, Are we talking about teaching my daughter respect for milk? Because I can’t figure out what else she wants me to teach her. What she means by ‘respect for property.’?”
“Capitalism?”
“Maybe. Anyway, I’m working on it. I’m working on teaching Lilly to have more respect for her teacher. And respect for milk.”
“Lacto…reverence? Lactoreverence? Is that something?”
“No.” Andy paused to push his coffee cup out to get a refill from Marnie, a young mom with a grown-out stripe of purple in her hair who had been their regular server for a couple of years. “I’ll tell you, she was a biter when she was little, but I don’t know what this is. Even when she’s loving all over me, she’s so mad. I went to pick her up the other day, and she goes, ‘Dad! Hug me!’ But she shrieks it, like a howler monkey. Very take-charge, if you want to think about it that way, like she’s…”