Evvie Drake Starts Over(67)

Here was the front door she had opened, laughing, while being carried into the house on the day of the closing. Then the wood floor she’d once scratched with her suitcase wheel, for which he called her “so damn careless.” Here was the wide doorway into the kitchen, where on one occasion Tim had kissed her with unexpected urgency, pushing his hand under her shirt while she tried to scratch his shoulder enough to prove she, too, was trying. Here was the kitchen table where they’d agreed that they’d just have a baby if they had a baby, and they wouldn’t try one way or the other, which was a terrible lie since a doctor would know what it meant when, from time to time, she’d say, “Rain check?” Here was the sink where she had once put a rose down the garbage disposal—given too late for a birthday Tim forgot, which he’d made up for the next day by having six dozen fresh roses delivered to the house.

Here were the stairs where she had slipped two weeks before Tim died and put a big bruise on her hip. She fell; she wasn’t pushed. She wasn’t hit, she wasn’t punched. But she was hurrying down the stairs in her socks on the way to her hideout only because she was so tired of listening to him yell, so, as she said only to herself, you tell me.

And in the bedroom, here was the dresser that had carefully been coaxed through the door. It would later play a central role in the first of the fights she was sure would be their worst until another proved her wrong.

   Why am I upset? I’m upset because you pushed me into the dresser, Tim.

I absolutely did not.

You did this with your shoulder, like this, and you knocked me into the dresser. I’m going to have a bruise. You want to see it tomorrow?

I was leaving the room so you could calm down. What did you step in front of me for?

I didn’t.

Evvie, you don’t need to be so dramatic, okay? We need to get going. My parents are going to wonder why we’re late.

This had been six months after they moved into the house. She had indeed had a bruise on her back the next day, where she’d fallen—fallen?—against the edge of the dresser. She’d told nobody, and when Tim had noticed it on her back when she was undressing a couple of days later, he’d said, “Ouch, how’d you get that?” She wasn’t sure if he honestly didn’t know, but she’d said, “Playing freeze tag,” and even though she thought it sounded sarcastic enough not to miss, he just nodded and kept looking at his phone.

And here was the bed where they had sex, but not very often, and not very well, and not for very long. She’d hardly ever regretted that her best friend was a man, but part of her mourned the fact that she’d never felt comfortable disclosing to Andy how precisely she could clock sex with her husband at nine minutes. If it started at 9:51, she’d be able to watch Halls of Power, and she never missed the beginning.

And now, here was Dean, tall and broad and slow-moving as he lay next to her in his jeans and bare feet. He always smelled like freshly mowed grass, and she wasn’t sure whether it was because of something he wore or washed his hair with, or because he spent so much time on baseball fields, or because she was imagining it, the way she always expected a lobsterman to smell like the ocean, whether or not he actually did. But she could not inhale enough of it, and when she’d find a spot, a hollow under his jaw or a span along his side, where she especially noticed it, she’d linger there trying to memorize it for when it was inevitably gone.

   There was something about fooling around with clothes on that—no, it was not better than the sex, but the voluntary frustration of it thrilled her. It was like they were sneaking around in her own house, collapsing on her bed and tugging at each other, letting snaps and buckles slow them down. But finally, she cracked: she sat up and pulled her shirt over her head, and his fingers threw shadows on her skin in the sun through the bedroom window.

Later, as they were dozing between acknowledgments that they should go downstairs and eat something, she said in a shared waking moment, “I’m excited. Do you want me to come to Connecticut with you?”

“No, you can’t,” he said. “It’s a work thing. They’re going to test me out, try things, put me in situations and see what happens.”

“I’ll give you a lock of my hair for luck,” she said, pulling a strand away from her head with her fingers.

“I’ll settle for knowing you’ll be here when I get back,” he said, gathering her up with his arm and curling up against her.





DEAN AND EVVIE DECIDED ONE night while they were a little bourbon-drunk that before Dean went to Connecticut, they ought to have Andy and Monica—going strong after six months—over for dinner. Evvie and Monica had texted a few more times back and forth after the Great Lingerie Advisory: a conversation about what to get Rose for her birthday; a story Monica shared about Mama Kell calling her Eveleth and then, while apologizing, calling her Lori; and their discovery that someone had written some very elaborate fanfic where Dean fell in love with Jennifer Lopez. (They agreed that it wasn’t bad.)

So Dean texted Andy with the invitation for a Saturday, and Andy texted back that they’d be “stoked” to come—a word, Evvie noted, that he had to have picked up from Monica, as she’d never heard it from him before. When the day came, it was warm and dry, so Dean took a steel brush to the gas grill in the yard, which had been dormant for two years, and picked up a bottle of propane. Evvie spent more than she usually would have on steaks and fat sausages from the butcher, and she loaded a basket with bright green, unblemished farmers’ market lettuce she could build salads on. She fell to the temptation of some wild local mussels—much tougher to find than they’d once been—and bought a bag of those as well. In the afternoon, she baked brownies from scratch and let them cool while Dean made a run for beer and wine. Red with steaks, she figured, but white for summer, so she told him to grab some of both, and some beer, and she threw in a bottle of vodka, because, hey, you never know.