Evvie Drake Starts Over(7)
“She just started over, huh?”
Andy nodded. “I couldn’t have left without them, if it were me, but it’s her life. And as Evvie pointed out to me once, guys have done it forever. Nobody even blinks. And the kids like Charleston all right. They visit Lori’s family for a couple of days, they drink sweet tea until their teeth fall out, they come back saying ‘Y’all gonna eat that lawb-stah?’?”
“Always good to speak a second language.”
“Right. Big picture, it could be much worse.”
“I guess I’d say the same thing.”
Dean had spent a lot of nights in Andy’s living room when they were kids in exactly this way, biding his time. He waited for elementary school and then high school to be over so he could move on to what was next. But that was when he had known what was next. Now his only plans were dinner and bringing his duffel in from the truck. The part of the future that was in focus had shortened; the part that was just a wall of fog went on forever. He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t.
The sixteenth second was a killer.
CALCASSET WAS IN THE PART of Maine well-suited to the name MidCoast because it resolutely doesn’t mean anything, and a description that resolutely doesn’t mean anything is a powerful indicator of communally owned modesty. Even the weather changed politely: every year, as fall began to take over from summer, there would be crisp mornings that would warn that one day soon, it would truly be cold.
As soon as Evvie woke up and put her feet on the cool wood floor, she knew this was one of the days when fall would poke its head out. She made tea, ate a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and maple syrup, and threw her favorite gray cardigan over her Calcasset High School Band T-shirt—still hanging in after fifteen years—and jeans. The sweater left a trail of fuzzy puffs everywhere, but she’d had it since college. When she wore it and drank something hot, she liked to imagine it gave her autumnal superpowers and a certain cozy appeal.
She could work. She should work. There was a little voice getting louder and louder, saying, Do something, do something. She had emails to answer, including one from Nona Powell Brown, a professor at Howard, with the subject line, “Your attentive ear.”
Evvie sometimes called herself a professional eavesdropper, but she was a transcriber. She worked mostly with interview tapes from researchers and journalists, though she also had what she called “cha-ching clients” who wanted documentation of board meetings or presentations. She knew it sounded boring to people who figured she could be cheaply replaced by decent software. Tim had once cracked that she should get business cards that said, “For when technology barely won’t do.” And she did have automation breathing—or buzzing, or whatever—down her neck, not that everyone she worked with didn’t, too.
But she’d always thought it was sort of fabulous. It meant slipping on headphones and listening for hours to people’s stories, imitating their accents, being surprised by their voices cracking or tumbling into laughs. Often, she’d develop elaborate ideas of what they looked like or what they wore, and she’d image-search them at midnight, sitting in bed with her face lit up by her laptop screen to see if she was right. She was good; she could type almost as fast as she could listen, and a reporter for The Boston Globe called her “the only woman who can reliably translate mumble into English.” He was the one who’d connected her with Nona, her favorite client, a labor economist who wrote what she called “occupational biographies.” The last one had been about logging, and Evvie had transcribed almost two hundred hours of tape for it. She could tell you what a whistle punk was. She knew logging had the highest per capita death rate of any U.S. occupation. This did not come in handy at parties—or, it would not, if she went to parties.
Nona’s email said that she was planning a book on Maine lobstermen, and she wouldn’t be starting the work for at least a year, but she wondered if Evvie was interested in helping with the research. Not just transcription, but the interviewing, too, and helping Nona navigate. This would be a promotion of sorts. “I always try to team up with a local,” she’d written, “and I naturally thought of you right away. I don’t know what your schedule is like these days, and it’s still a long way off, but let me know when you have time to talk.”
Right now, though, Evvie’s attentive ear was mostly on hiatus—and she hadn’t yet answered Nona. She did little jobs here and there so she wouldn’t be broke, but the very thought of going out into the towns up and down the coast, having her work interrupted by condolences that would make her circle back into her marriage was too much to even think about. Most things were too much to think about.
So instead of returning emails to clients, she devoured books that moved with her from table to table, chair to chair, as she read and stopped and read more, sticking a scrap of paper between the pages to mark her place. On this occasion, she was a third of the way through a fat Southern novel she’d been wanting to read ever since she heard the author on Fresh Air, talking about how he grew up living above a beauty parlor with his family and their illegal pet monkey.
She was stretched out on the sofa, trying to ignore the Do something, do something voice, when she heard a knock that had to be Andy and the potential tenant. She hopped up and started for the front door, but along the way, she stopped. Her eyes settled on the fireplace mantel, which held two marbled scented candles and a driftwood sculpture she didn’t like from somewhere salty where she and Tim had once had a lobster roll. She yanked open the drawer of the writing desk in the corner and pulled out her silver-framed wedding portrait. She’d loved the gazebo; she’d hated her dress. But propped up between the candles, the photo would perhaps testify on her behalf that she was properly grieving and was not a monster, monster. She walked to the door.