She's Up to No Good(17)

Not this time. She flopped onto her stomach toward the foot of the brass-posted double bed that had once been shared by her two eldest sisters. Vivie did this to herself. She could tough it out one night to help the ruse along.

It was going to be a long, dull night, though, without any company. She played idly with her hair, finding another stray pear blossom and smiling to herself as she thought of Tony and the first time she saw him. It hadn’t been quite as sudden as she led her sister and Ruthie to believe.

She had been in Joseph’s store two months earlier when she heard a commotion. Peeking around a shelf, she saw a young man dragging a boy to the counter by the ear, the boy yelling in protest.

The older one shoved the younger toward the counter, where Joseph stood, watching warily with crossed arms. “Give it to him,” the young man said gruffly. “Now.”

The boy looked up in defiance, saw the expression on his brother’s face, and then pulled something out of his pocket and placed it on the counter. The older one prodded him sharply in the back. “I’m sorry,” the boy mumbled.

“For?” Another jab.

“I took this.”

“Stole.”

“I stole this.”

“And?”

“I won’t do it again.”

The older one put a bill on the counter. “I want to pay for what my brother took. You can’t sell it now.”

Thievery was fairly common among the children in town, and while Joseph was gruff if he caught them blatantly, he also was too kind to make a fuss if a child took a piece of candy. The Depression may have ended with the war, but it wasn’t a wealthy town. And there was no softer touch with children than Evelyn’s father.

She watched a small struggle play across his face. The young man was right. He couldn’t sell the candy cigarettes in their current state. Taking them back meant throwing them away, which was a waste. But they had been returned.

Finally, he took the box of candy, leaving the dollar where it sat. “I won’t take your money. He brought it back.”

The young man started to protest, but Joseph silenced him. “Put it toward his education instead. The boy learned a lesson today. Let him learn another in the future.”

The boy squirmed out of his brother’s grip and skipped away, happy to be free of trouble, and the two men stared at each other for a moment before the younger took the bill back and placed it in his pocket. They nodded at each other, a sign of mutual understanding, before the young man turned to walk away and Evelyn saw his face.

He looked vaguely Mediterranean, tanned from the sun even in winter, with strong, even features and thick dark hair. But his eyes, the warm brown of mahogany, were full of a fire that Evelyn recognized as the match for that in her own.

As she walked home from the store that afternoon, she mused over the young man’s actions. Her father didn’t care about a piece of candy. But to return it and try to pay. Evelyn may have had a Machiavellian streak a mile wide when it came to self-preservation, but she also respected those whose moral compasses pointed due north—perhaps because her own didn’t.

And it was that, as much as his eyes, that returned to her over and over as she tried to sleep. So when she saw him leaning against the side of the drugstore to light a cigarette that blustery February afternoon, she realized she wanted something sweet. And she took it.





Evelyn heard the chairs push back from the table and the sounds of her mother and sister clearing the dishes, then the lumbering tread of her father on the stairs. She quickly hid the remnants of her sandwich, listening as he paused outside her bedroom door. This was most unusual.

He cleared his throat to announce his presence before knocking softly. “Evelyn? It’s your father.”

She fought the urge to laugh. Who else could it possibly have been? But she had to play her part. She composed her face and opened the door a crack. “What is it, Papa?”

“May I come in?”

Evelyn opened the door and gestured for him to enter. He stood awkwardly as Evelyn sat on the bed, then went to the small secretary desk and sat in the straight-backed chair where she did her homework and wrote letters to her sisters. He cleared his throat again and opened his mouth but did not speak.

“Yes, Papa?”

“You need to eat,” he said. Evelyn slid her foot along the floorboard, making sure no trace of sandwich wrapper was visible.

“I’m not hungry.”

He wrung his hands in his lap. “What about a compromise?”

Evelyn felt her eyebrows rising. This was quite out of the ordinary. “What kind of compromise?”

Joseph sighed. “You can go on dates. But only with Jewish boys.”

She eyed him with the look of a prizefighter circling her opponent and seeing a weak spot. “But I want to date this boy.”

“No.”

“Honestly, Papa, what’s the difference? I’m going to college in the fall. If you’re going to let me date people in town, why not this person?”

“You can’t date someone who works the docks.”

“He doesn’t. He’s in school.”

“And when he’s not?”

“He helps his family. Just like both Bernie and Sam did in the store when they were in high school. He’s a good boy.”