Evvie Drake Starts Over(56)

“Sure, yeah.” She was trying not to smile too much. And not in too telling a way, not that her father was especially likely to notice.

“Well, he’s lucky he’s got you rootin’ for him. And I’m glad you’ve got company in that big house. I don’t like you being by yourself so much.”

She blew on a spoonful of thick, salty chowder and popped it into her mouth. Sophie’s had opened only a few years ago, but it was already in all the magazines that wrote up the region for summer tourists. “Well, you know, I don’t like you being by yourself so much either,” she said.

“I’m an old man,” he said, opening a plastic packet of oyster crackers and dumping them into his bowl. “You’re a beautiful girl. I don’t want you rattling around that place forever. And if you pardon me saying so, Tim wouldn’t want that for you either.”

She stopped with her spoon in her hand and looked at her father’s freckled hands, decorated all over with little scars. Over his shoulder, on the counter, she could see a tray with his bottles of pills for back pain, for blood pressure, for high cholesterol. Her own hand was soft and pale. “Pop, did you ever think about getting married again? After?”

   “Married? No. I met people, of course.”

She remembered no one. “You did?”

He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Your mother left when I was thirty-three years old. What’d you think I did? Talk to the lobsters for twenty-five years?”

“But nobody special?”

“I didn’t say nobody special. I said nobody I thought about getting married to. You gotta remember, sweetheart, I was working on a boat every day. We didn’t have a lot, and it didn’t leave a lot of time for dates.”

Eveleth smiled, but then her mind flashed on a picture of herself and her dad that had been taken when she was about nine. She was holding a fish, her hair in pigtails, while he crouched with his arm around her waist. “And you had a daughter.”

“Sure,” he said. But then he looked up at her expression. “You listen, though, that had nothin’ to do with it. You were my best part. You still are. Don’t get any ideas.”

“Still,” she said, “it would have been a lot for anybody to take on, probably.”

“You’re talking crazy,” he said. “What kind of a nut would want to live with me and not you? It’s more likely my fault you never got a stepmother.” He took a bite. “I’ve been happy. Lucky and happy my whole life. That’s how I want it for you.”

“I know, Pop. I’m trying.” She put down her spoon. “Can I ask you a question? It’s a little personal.”

“All right.”

“How did you know what to do after she was gone?”

He got quiet. Eventually, he folded his hands in front of him and looked at her. “I guess I kept gettin’ out of bed. At first, I felt a little bit like how you feel. I know it’s different, Tim being really gone. But I got up and I went to work, and you went to school. I didn’t sit around and think about it. Might have been good I was busy, I suppose. And then I’d get home, and we’d eat. We couldn’t stop, so we kept going.”

   “Did you know why she left? I mean, did it help at all?”

“Your mom was never happy up here. She wanted to be someplace bigger, I think. With more people. But she never told me she was thinking about anything like leaving on a Tuesday before we were awake, if that’s the question. The only thing I know is it was nothing about you. She loved you.”

This, Eveleth firmly believed, was his training kicking in. Somewhere, he’d read how important it was to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault, and he’d never stopped, and he never would. Nothing about you, nothing about you, nothing about you. But this, she had always feared, could not possibly be true. Her mother had decided that Calcasset with her daughter was not as good as Florida without her daughter. It meant something.

Eileen had left on a Tuesday, and when Eveleth had awakened that morning, she’d sat down at the breakfast table to find her father making eggs instead of her mother, when normally he’d be gone already. He’d been wildly excited the night before, because he’d finally bought the boat he always wanted. His very own boat that he could work himself. His own business. It had seemed like something was starting. But now, he looked gray and drawn.

She’d asked where Mom was, and he’d said, “She went for a walk.” It was years before he told her that on that day, when he woke up, there was a letter on the bedside table next to him, and that it started with the words Dear Frank, I’m sorry but, and that it had taken him hours to decide to read the rest.

That night, “she went for a walk” became “she went away for a while,” and after a week, Frank told his daughter that Eileen had decided that she should live in Florida, and they should stay in their house. Evvie only knew Florida as the place where Walt Disney World was. So to her, this meant her mother was going to be at Walt Disney World all the time, and who could argue with that?

At first, she asked often when they were going to see Mom in Florida, or when Mom was coming to see them. She thought of them as a family with two homes, as if Pompano Beach were her parents’ pied-à-terre. It took two months of not seeing her mother before she fully absorbed the idea that she now lived with her father the way Heidi, in a book Frank had begun reading to her at night, lived with her grandfather in the Alps.