Evvie Drake Starts Over(65)

“No,” he whispered back, smiling. “It doesn’t hurt.”





LATER, AS DEAN’S TRUCK BUMPED along Route 1, they passed a billboard for the Compass Café that had been there for ages, at least since Evvie was a teenager. “I wonder if the Compass is going broke now that you guys don’t sit around for six hours every weekend,” Dean said.

“It wasn’t six hours.” Evvie kept looking out the window. “Maybe two.”

“Are you ever going to tell me what that’s all about?” he asked.

Evvie looked over at him, the way his once-disobedient arm rested on the wheel. What was broken could be fixed, and she took a breath. “So, the night that my husband died…” She paused and took a deep breath. “I was leaving him. Like, I wasn’t thinking about leaving him. I was in the process of leaving him.”

Dean was still. “How close were you?”

Now she looked back out the window. “I was standing in the driveway when they called me. I’d packed one suitcase, and some money, and my birth certificate.”

“But you hadn’t told Tim?”

   “He would have argued. I wouldn’t have left. And the next day, he would have been sorry.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, Andy’s mom saw the suitcase in my car at the hospital. She mentioned it to Andy. He figured it out. He was upset.”

Dean frowned. “But he wasn’t upset that you were leaving.”

“No. I think he was upset that I was going to leave without telling him. Without telling anybody. Upset is the wrong word. Hurt, maybe.”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“Because I wouldn’t have left then, either.”

“You really know how to hold your cards close.”

“I promised Tim I wouldn’t talk about marriage things with Andy. Which seemed reasonable enough.”

“When did you decide to go?”

“Oh,” Evvie said. “Well, there was this night when he said he was going to bring pizza home for dinner, but when he got home, he didn’t have it. I say, ‘What happened to bringing pizza home?’ And he says, ‘I never said that.’ It was so…so bizarre, the idea that I would have imagined an entire exchange with him where he told me he was going to pick up pizza for dinner on the way home. I remembered specifically that he said he was going to get pepperoni and mushrooms, because I don’t like mushrooms, and I’d decided to pick them off. I remembered. And I told him, ‘Why are you trying to act like I’m crazy instead of saying you forgot to pick up dinner? Who even cares?’?”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I just spent ten hours taking care of sick people while you sat at home doing nothing. I’m not your delivery service.’ I walked away. Before you lived in your apartment, it was sort of where I went to get away from Tim. So, I go there, and I lie on the floor, and of course I’m starving, because I waited for him, and there’s no pizza. And I start thinking maybe I’ll run out and grab something to eat. And then I think maybe I’ll take a drive. And then I think maybe I’ll stay overnight at this nice place in Rockport. Just stay away for a night, watch TV, be by myself, call it a spa night, or maybe fib and tell him I had to go stay with my dad because his hip was acting up or something.”

   “Did you do it?”

“Nope. I went out and I got pizza, and I brought it back at ten thirty at night. Mushrooms and everything. Argument over. But practically every day after that, I’d go back in and I’d lie on the floor and I’d add something to this story I was writing in my head. I wasn’t going to do it. It was just this idea. What if I stayed away a weekend, where would I go? Did I have enough money to go to Boston for a week? What would I need? What would I take? How long could I go? And I don’t even know what he had said to me, but there was some night when I was lying in there listening to the ceiling fan rattling, and I thought, ‘What if I left and I never came back?’ And that’s when I started having these fantasies about where I would go, that I’d go live in the mountains. I’d have some little cabin, and I’d have a dog, and I’d have a job. I had these fantasies where I turned into a new person nothing had ever happened to.”

“Like the ‘I Married an Asshole’ division of the Witness Protection Program.”

“Yes! That’s exactly what it was. And every time I thought about what my dad would do if I left, or what Andy would do, I shoved it out of my mind. I thought about making dinner or doing my hair or painting a wall without anybody telling me I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“And then what?”

“I went on like that for months. But then one night when he was out, I took a pack of playing cards—I sometimes play real solitaire with real cards—and I put them into this backpack that I had. And that was it. That was the beginning of packing. It was real, and I was doing it.”

“And you didn’t talk to anybody.”

   “I still felt like I was rehearsing it, to see if I wanted to do it. I still felt like I’d choke at the end. I figured I wouldn’t go through with it.”

“But then you did.”

“Yeah.” She chuckled a little. “Well, I started packing the car, at least.” Evvie briefly put her hand over her eyes. “I sort of had a target date. And then a few days before he died, I told him it bugged me that—well, we’d made this trip to Bangor to have dinner with a couple doctors he knew. And when they asked what I did, he’d said, ‘She makes me happy.’ I told him, ‘They wanted to know what I do. You should have told them I work. You should have told them I work with journalists, I have a business,’ all that. And he said, ‘I was trying to protect your feelings. I didn’t know how you’d feel if I told a bunch of doctors you were a typist for somebody’s book about trees.’?”