Evvie Drake Starts Over(27)

He flinched. She saw it, even in the dark. “Don’t know. Tried a lot of things to figure it out, but I couldn’t. That’s that, and it’s done. No point in crying about it. It sucked, but I’m over it.”

   You knock yourself over smashing pinecones in the dark, she thought. Who are you kidding?

Evvie said, “Mm,” quietly but conspicuously, skeptically but compassionately. She always tried to do a lot of work with her noises.

“What did your dad mean about Tim saving his life?”

Evvie sighed. “Back when Tim was a medical student, we were all having dinner. My dad was complaining about this tight feeling in his back, and how he thought that he’d pulled something on the boat. Tim made him go to the emergency room, where it turned out he’d had a mild heart attack. He’s fine now; this was probably ten years ago. But Tim got it right. If it had been up to me, I’d probably have walked on his back and told him to go to bed early.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Tim held it over me, if you can believe that. We were fighting one time, years later, and he said, ‘You’re so ungrateful, Eveleth. I might have kept you from losing the one parent you still have.’ He said that to me. Right out loud, to my face.”

“I believe you.”

“I know.” She paused, tapping the door with her fingers. She thought he might say something, but he didn’t. “Another time, he was mad at me when I was a half-hour late to a dinner that was at seven, because he’d told me to meet him at seven thirty. I tell him, ‘You said seven thirty.’ He says, ‘Evvie, I told you seven. You were reading.’ It was like that with everything. He breaks his own phone throwing it down while he’s watching hockey? Must be defective, because he put it down totally normally, even though I watched him hurl it at the floor. He even did it with stupid things. Just stupid, stupid things. If he left the door unlocked, it was because I told him I’d locked it. If I didn’t get a phone message back when there were phone messages, it wasn’t because he forgot to give it to me, it was because I didn’t pay attention.”

She figured Dean was sneaking a look over at her from the driver’s seat, and she stared hard out the window. When they were near home, they drove by Dacey Park, where the Claws played, where the Calcasset Braves had played before that, and she pointed it out to him. “What happens to it in the winter?” he asked.

   “Nothing,” she said. “It sits empty. The team hibernates, the park hibernates. We all do, I guess.” She stared out at the white lawns and the mostly bare trees. “Have you ever played baseball in the snow?”

“Not a lot,” he said. “You try not to. Pitching especially, when it’s cold, your fingers don’t work very well. But sometimes, in fall games, it happens.”

He pulled into the driveway, and she reluctantly slid out of the passenger seat into what was now officially the cold of late November. They left their shoes by the door to let the last bits of snow melt onto the mat and she flopped down onto the couch. “You want to hang out? Should we see whether there’s something on TV?” she asked.

“No, I’m going to sit here for a minute and see if I can digest the second piece of pie I definitely shouldn’t have had.” He sat next to her and they both leaned back, stuffed with dinner and reluctant to move. Finally, he turned his head. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.” She turned her face toward his.

“You told your dad you’re making ends meet.”

“Yeah. You pay me, I pay my bills.”

“Not to be morbid, but…you were married to a doctor. Why didn’t he have life insurance?”

“He had life insurance.”

“Andy said he didn’t.”

“Ah. Well, yeah. I told Andy he didn’t.” Dean looked at her. “Yes. I lied.”

“Why would you lie about life insurance?”

“So he wouldn’t ask me about it.”

“Did you…get the money?” He raised one eyebrow.

She blinked twice and thought for a minute, then she took a breath. “If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone. Not even Andy.”

“Okay.”

She looked back up at the ceiling. “I have it, but it’s not mine.”

“You gave it away?”

   Evvie closed her eyes. “I’m going to. Everything got done, everything got cleared, they sent me a check. I went to a lawyer, I put it far away from my own money. It’s…sitting.”

“You don’t want it?” he asked.

She turned back to him and chose this moment to notice how long his eyelashes were. Not the point. “Well, Dean, it’s money. I have bills. Of course I want it.”

“But you’re not using it.”

She turned away again so she was looking at the ceiling. “Nope.”

“You want to tell me why?”

She breathed evenly, still gazing upward. “Not really. Not right now.”

He looked up there, too. “Little weird,” he finally said.

She laughed. “So are you.”

They lit up the gas fireplace and sat there resting their hands on their full bellies and doubling back to the evening’s better pieces of local gossip until he finally admitted he was beat and he was going to get some sleep. She sat up, and he hauled himself off the couch with considerable and noisy effort, then stood stretching out his back and shoulders and rubbing the back of his neck. “All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.”