Evvie Drake Starts Over(25)

“?‘Hardheaded dolts,’?” Stuart corrected. “?‘For hardheaded dolts who want us all to drown.’?”

“That’s right,” Dean’s mom said fondly. “Hardheaded dolts.”

“I didn’t know you’d gotten so political,” Kell said to Dean.

“Hell with politics. I just don’t want to die in a war over the last gallon of water in Mad Max’s kiddie pool.”

Evvie caught the eye of Dean’s mother, and they decided together not to laugh. “Dean is happy we’re all here to celebrate our considerable blessings,” Angie said, raising her glass in the general direction of her son.

“You’re all a bunch of jerks,” Dean said, smiling as they toasted him.



* * *



—

Frank eventually put the football game on TV, and conversations rose and fell in the living room and the kitchen. At one point, Frank got so riled up over a touchdown that he knocked a whole dish of guacamole onto the floor. Evvie swooped in from the kitchen with paper towels almost before he could ask.

   In the kitchen, Evvie stood beside Kell and peeled potatoes. Kell was a feeder, a pourer, a hugger, and Evvie had watched during the last several years as her chic short hair got grayer and her chowder got better. She’d lost her husband very young, when Andy was only a baby, and once Andy and Lori had Rose and Lilly, she’d decided it was worth giving up her friends in Colorado—Stuart and Angie among them—to be in Maine with family. And so she’d moved to Thomaston and bought this great little house. It had a permanent bedroom for her granddaughters, for whom fruit was mandatory at Grandma’s but vegetables were not.

Kell peppered Evvie with questions about Dean, no matter how many times she explained that it was purely a landlord-tenant relationship. This felt not exactly true now, but the last thing she needed was to pique the curiosity of a woman whom it had been so hard to convince that she and Andy were not getting married.

Evvie peeked through the oven door at the turkey now and then and watched as it crisped and browned, and then she helped with the potatoes and sliced her bread and put it into the basket. There were green beans and chestnut stuffing, and Kell made her own real cranberry sauce, thank you very much. “Taking something out of a can and putting it on your Thanksgiving table!” she would say at least once a year. “It’s like you’re eating in the lunchroom on an oil rig!” Sometimes she said “a college dormitory room,” and Evvie’s favorite had been “Well, you might as well eat it in your car over the gearshift.”

When everything was ready, they sat around the big table, squeezed in and almost touching elbows, with Lilly and Rose at the desk pulled in from their room. Wine splashed into glasses, and Frank sat with the carving knife in his hand, prepared to operate. “This looks beautiful, Kell, thank you.” And then he put the knife down. “I want to say something.”

Evvie felt a flush in her face that wasn’t the wine. She thought of her wedding, where her father had stood up and told a story she wished he’d kept to himself. It was about a time when she was twelve years old and they were going to the zoo, and he’d loaned her a pair of her mother’s sunglasses that he somehow still had. Sometime during the day, she’d thought she lost them, and she had what she still considered her only real anxiety attack, huddled on a bench, unable to breathe, sure she was dying. To her father, this was a story of what a loving, sensitive girl she was, to be so distraught over a lost thing—especially when the glasses later turned out to have simply slipped into a side pocket of her bag. But to her, it was a story about the hole that her mother had left, and how anything, including panic, tended to rush in to fill it.

   And then her father had given his toast. He hadn’t said Tim was lucky to marry her, or even that she was lucky to marry him. Her father had said instead, very specifically, that she was lucky that Tim was marrying her. “My family is so lucky, and my Eveleth is so lucky, that Tim wants to be her husband.” She knew he meant it to be general, generous gratitude. Frank was raised by a mother who worked to defeat the ERA and a father who spoke ill of “women’s lib” at another memorable Thanksgiving dinner in 1997. He’d always wanted to make sure someone would take care of her, and as far as he was concerned, she’d gotten lucky.

She shook her head a little. “Pop, the girls are hungry. We should eat.”

“Eveleth, it’ll just be a minute,” he said. “I want to say I’m glad we’re all here. I’m glad we’ve got old friends and new friends together, and of course we have our Rose and Lilly. Seeing them grow up every year is a wonderful thing.”

“Amen,” Evvie said, gamely picking up her fork.

“Hey, not so fast there, don’t rush the blessing,” Frank said. “We’re so glad Stuart and Angie could join us; we’re grateful we’re getting to know them and know Dean. And we’re also happy to have my daughter here after the year she’s had. She’s got a lot of heart, as you all know.”

   “Pop,” Evvie said.

Frank went on. “I think a lot of dads hope their girls marry doctors, even if not all of them would admit it. I didn’t want Eveleth to spend her life taking care of some man bringin’ a lobster boat back in every night, you can believe that. And she married a good man who saved my own life once. Eveleth could never do anything that would make me more proud of her than getting through this year on her own.”