Evvie Drake Starts Over(71)

   Dean nodded. From the front seat, Andy declared that he wanted to go home, so Dean put his hand on Monica’s shoulder, and she smiled, and Dean returned to the backyard, where Evvie had now put her head down on the table. While she slept, or cried, or whatever was happening in there, he took the bottles and the glasses inside. He pulled her up gently, scooting the heavy metal chair, which screeched across the stone. “Okay, come on. I’ve got you, come on.” They walked a few steps before he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of trying to get her to walk, and he picked her up and carried her up the back steps and into the house, through the kitchen, up the stairs, and into her bedroom. He brought her a glass of water. “Hey. Drink this, okay? Evvie? Drink this and then you can go to sleep.”

He took off her shoes, got her to wriggle out of her dress, and coaxed her into a T-shirt. He put the plastic trash can from the bathroom right next to the bed. “Evvie, if you feel sick, this is right here, okay?” She gave him a noncommittal “mm,” but figuring it was about the best he was going to do, he maneuvered her under the covers, made sure she was lying on her side, and pulled the sheet and the blanket up over her.

Dean stripped to his boxers and folded up the rest of his clothes on the chair by the closet door, then he slid into bed next to her. There was an imposing mess waiting in the kitchen downstairs for the morning. Food that would be bad, wine that would be stale, dishes with everything dried onto them, and everything smelling like garlic and drenched in leftover booze, none of which was going to be good for Evvie if she woke up feeling the way he suspected she would.

Just as he shut off the light next to the bed on his side and adjusted the pillow under his head, he heard her voice, still slurred but easy to make out. She chuckled sort of lazily, slowly, and then she said, “I knew I should never have tried to be happy.”



* * *



—

When Evvie woke up in the morning, she could hear Dean downstairs cleaning up in the kitchen. It took a minute for her to reconstruct her evening. There was this great dinner, there was this friendly chat, then they went out onto the patio and, and, and…it would have been one thing if she didn’t remember it. But she remembered pieces of it. She remembered Andy looking shocked, like she’d punched him in the eye. She knew she’d said “Go fuck yourself,” and when she’d been awake for about five minutes, her mouth sour and dry and her head swimming every time she moved even a little, she remembered Andy sticking his finger out at her and saying, “You’re crazy.” She couldn’t remember how it started. She was pretty sure she’d announced to him that he was secretly in love with her. In front of his girlfriend. As hard as she searched her memory for a full-length video, she could find only a little stack of photos and a few snippets of sound.

   Evvie sat up in bed as slowly as she could, and it took a minute for everything to stabilize, and for her stomach to make the first of several unsettling writhes. Realizing Dean couldn’t have known he was putting her in an old shirt of Tim’s (a perfect capping-off of that particular evening, she thought), she stripped it off in the bathroom and stepped into the shower with toothpaste and a toothbrush in one hand. Under the hot water, she brushed her teeth and set the brush in a cup, then she stood and let the water hammer her. Nothing felt good; she just wanted something to feel different.

When she started to cry, the upside was as it always was: the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with—it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry, Evvie had always thought. It was between you and the tile walls, and everything that hurt turned into water, and the water went away.





FOUR DAYS LATER, DEAN PUT his duffel bag into the truck and came back into the living room, where Evvie was curled up on the couch, flipping through The New York Times on her tablet. “Okay, I’m taking off,” he said.

She went over to him and put her arms around his waist. “Text me when you get there?”

“I will. Like I said, I think I’ll be back Monday night. They might keep me pretty busy, so don’t worry if you don’t hear much for a couple days.”

“You worry about showing all those guys your stuff, don’t worry about me.”

He looked down at her and hesitated a little, then he said, “I still think you should call him.”

She dropped her arms to her sides but stayed where she was and groaned. “I know.”

“Somebody has to pick up the phone.”

“Maybe it can be him.”

“Maybe it can be you.”

   She sighed. “I told you, you can call him yourself. Have lunch, play Madden, do whatever. I promise, I don’t mind at all. I’m not ready to get into it.”

“Okay. Up to you. Either way, I have to get going, so I’ll talk to you soon.” He kissed her and whispered, “But call him.”

She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Goodbye,” she said as he pulled back and turned to go.



* * *



—

Evvie finished her reading with her feet tucked up under her on the couch, sipping iced tea and listening to what sounded like a very spirited argument between two birds outside the living room window. One bird, she fantasized, had taken a prized fluff of cotton that the other one really wanted for her nest. She made herself laugh squawking their dialogue into her empty house: “?‘You take everything, Florence! You got the stick, you got the yarn…’ ‘Fuck you, Maurice, I already told you that Horace has that yarn!’?”