Evvie Drake Starts Over(34)

“She went to college in Boston, and one summer, she came up here to be a counselor at an arts camp that’s not around anymore. He was working as a sternman for a buddy of his, and they met at a bar. It was some kind of…infatuation, I guess, and she moved up here and they had me. I’m sure it seemed very romantic to her. Very adventurous. But she missed home, so she called me Eveleth. I am named after my mother’s unhappiness.” She raised her glass toward him, then took a sip. Normally, she’d hear what she was going to say in her head before it came out of her mouth. Right now, it was the other way around.

Dean looked hard at her, like he might pull on this thread, but he didn’t. “My oldest brother, Tom, is an engineer. Mark works for a tech startup that does something with touch screens or some shit. Brian is an accountant. And I, my parents’ youngest boy, now have a wrestling move informally named after me. Do you want to know what it is?”

   “Probably not.”

“Guess what it is.”

She scrunched up her face. “I don’t want to guess what it is.”

“It’s choking.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I was afraid that was what it was.”

Just then, the wind kicked up and the window rattled again. “It’s serious out there,” he said.

“It’s terrible out there.” She drank, and she sighed. “I want to be in Fiji or something.”

“You have a lot of wishes for a lady who wants to give away all her money.” He arched an eyebrow. “You could go to Fiji.”

“I told you, I don’t want the money.”

He held up one hand. “No, you told me you do want it, but you won’t take it. Which I think is crazy. Although you may have read in a few places that I’m also crazy, so take that for whatever it’s worth.”

“You know what’s crazy?” she said. “I can’t take it, but I can’t give it back. That’s why I lied. I can’t figure out where to put it. How’s that for crazy? I mean, what should have happened is it should have gone to his parents. This whole thing is such a freak show that giving his already rich parents a giant wad of money would be the right thing to do. But I can’t give it to them.”

“Why not?”

Her smile was thin. “How would I explain it? It’s his life insurance. I was his wife. They’d want me to have it. They’d never take it unless I explained why I wouldn’t keep it. I’m not going to snap them in half after everything they’ve been through by telling them I didn’t love him anymore. I’m not going to tell them that as long as I don’t take the money, it’s like I left him. And that I want to believe I would have left him.”

“Can you give it to your dad?”

Evvie snorted. “There is zero chance my father would take money from me, or that would obviously be the first thing I would do with it.”

   “I’m still not sure I know why you don’t keep it. It came from an insurance company, and you need it more than those assholes. What am I missing?”

She looked down into her glass. “It’s just…I can’t. I can’t. It’s bad enough I lived off him when he was alive.”

“It’s how life insurance works, Evvie. People need money. It’s for this. It’s for this exactly. They’re not paying for how sad you are; they’re paying for the money he was making that you don’t have now.”

“So he dies, and I keep the money, and that’s how I stay alive, and I drift in and out of all these rooms in this great big house and I get old and I’m just nothing—”

Dean sat up and put his glass on the table. “All right, first of all, missy—”

“?‘Missy’?” She was a little drunk. They were both a little drunk.

“First of all, missy, you’re not nothing. You wouldn’t be nothing if you put that fucking school-band shirt on and that hairball sweater and moped on your couch until you were eighty, so I don’t want to hear that.” He took a drink and then said to the bottom of his glass, “Jesus, who was this fucker?”

“I should give you the money,” she said. “You can have it as long as you don’t tell anyone I gave it to you.”

“I don’t need it. I made good money right up until I stopped making any money. And even though I blew a lot of it on startups making engines running on turkey shit or whatever, I have some left.”

“What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“Not being able to pitch.”

He squinted at her. “What was it like being married to him?”

“I asked you first.” She bobbed one dangling foot up and down.

“It was a lot like being able to pitch,” he said, “but if you sucked.”

She just kept it up with that foot.

   “Okay. If I asked you to get up and walk across the room, what would you do first?” he asked.

“I guess I’d…get up?”

“Right. And it would happen without you thinking about it, because you know how to get up out of a chair. I mean, what would happen, what would really happen, is you’d put your hand down next to you and you’d lift yourself up a little. You’d scoot back and you’d lift your legs up, and you’d turn and put your feet on the ground. Then you’d shift your weight onto them and straighten your legs, and…are you getting what I’m talking about?” She tipped her head a bit in response. “You’d get out of the fucking chair. You tell your body to get up? It gets up. It knows how. If you pitched for twenty years, same thing. You’re not explaining to yourself how to pitch every time. You’re trying to hit a spot that’s sixty feet away an inch to the left, inch to the right. That’s where your work is. And then you wake up one day and it’s…to you, you’re doing the same thing. But all of a sudden, it’s like you’re trying to bend a fucking spoon with your mind.” He took a drink. “It was like trying to pitch with somebody else’s arm. That’s what it was like.”