by Linda Holmes
“Oh, that should be something. Dean’s in the kitchen with the rest of the parents.”
Andy released her from his grip. “Dean, are you bothering my mother? Mom, is Dean bothering you?” he bellowed as he walked away.
Evvie had barely taken her coat off when Dean came back into the living room. “Evvie, these are my parents, Angie and Stuart Tenney; this is Evvie.”
Dean’s mom was slim and pink-cheeked, with curly gray hair and glasses; his father was tall—though not as tall as he was—and broad through the shoulders. Evvie shook hands with them, but the impulse to hug his mother, in particular, was palpable. “We’ve heard a lot about you,” Angie said.
Her husband stood with his hands on his hips. “Hopefully Dean’s not throwing too many wild parties where you have to call the cops.”
“Not at all,” Evvie told them. “He’s been a great tenant, I promise.”
Kell came in from the kitchen, nibbling on an apple slice, with Andy following behind her. “Everything’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing in the kitchen,” she said, “so why don’t you all sit down?”
“So,” Dean’s dad said as they all settled, “we heard from Tom this morning. He’s in Boulder with Nancy’s family. Brian and David are at David’s sister’s place, and Mark and Alison are on a cruise.”
“Those are all my brothers,” Dean said to Evvie. “My dad is sharing all their news. Did he mention they’re all married?”
“And Mark’s on a cruise,” Stuart repeated. “On Thanksgiving. Who eats pumpkin pie in a bathing suit on a boat in the middle of the ocean? With a little umbrella sticking out of your drink? Dumbest thing I ever heard.”
Angie laughed and elbowed him. “Be nice. They like the water.”
“I like the Runaway Mine Train at Six Flags Over Texas, but I’m not eating Thanksgiving dinner there.”
“Say, Stuart,” Evvie’s dad said, “you mentioned you grew up in Jersey. Did you ever go to Coney Island?”
“Sure did,” Stuart said. “Visited my mother’s aunt out that way and rode the Cyclone. Have you been to Dollywood?” Frank shook his head. “They’ve got one there called Thunderhead. Rode it a few summers ago. I got off it and rewrote my will.”
“I hope you left me something good,” Dean said.
“We’re leaving you the cat.”
“Don’t leave me that cat.”
“Oh, yeah. We’re going to leave you the cat,” Stuart repeated, “and a note that says you have to dress it up every Halloween and walk it down Fifth Avenue or you lose your inheritance.”
“We’ve got a lady in town walks her cat,” Frank said. “Tourists think it’s a local custom. It’s on the Internet that people in Maine walk their cats on leashes. All because one idiot sees Lois yanking Pookie down Main Street like a poodle.”
“Pumpkin, not Pookie,” Evvie corrected.
“Whatever.”
“All right, all right. Tell us about your work, Evvie,” Angie said pointedly.
Evvie laughed. “I do transcription. I work with journalists and people doing research, mostly. I listen to their interviews and I type them up and sometimes do a little indexing so they can find whatever they’re looking for. It’s interesting to me, anyway.”
“Dean knows lots of journalists,” Stuart said with a twinkle. “He loves interviews.”
Evvie turned to Dean. “Oh, really?”
“My dad is trying to start with me.”
“Well, now I want to know,” Evvie said.
“Tell her about Johnny Boo-Hoos!” Stuart grinned.
“Who’s Johnny Boo-Hoos?” Evvie asked.
Dean rolled his eyes. “It’s not a who. It’s a what. It’s a bar in Gowanus, in Brooklyn. My parents’ favorite magazine article about me starts out with me stuffing chicken fingers into my face at Johnny Boo-Hoos. Those things always start with the food. How Jennifer Lawrence is eating poached salmon or whatever, or how they’re at LeBron James’s favorite place for burritos, like anybody cares.”
“I’d love to try LeBron’s favorite burrito place,” Andy said, raising one hand.
“Not helpful,” Dean told him, pointing one finger. Andy smiled and sat back in his chair. “Anyway. It starts out like, ‘Dean Tenney is stuffing big fat pieces of industrial fried chicken into his maw while a sports reporter tries to get him to talk about how much he hates sports reporting.’ ”
“That’s what they asked you about?” Evvie asked.
“They didn’t have to,” Angie said. “The TV in the bar was showing his favorite commentator.”
“Pete Danziger,” Stuart said darkly.
Evvie’s father gave a dismissive snort. “Oh, that idiot.”
“Thank you, Frank,” Dean said. “See? Frank agrees with me. Danziger’s a cable sports anchor. And an asshole.”
“Dean!” his mother protested, but with a smile. “Kell, I apologize for my son.” Kell waved her hand and took another sip of wine.
Dean went on. “It was maybe three years ago, and they were talking about this whole thing where Domenico Garza, who plays for the Mets, hit a home run, and he celebrated by doing this chest-bump with Florido Marquez. All these old guys got all bent out of shape, they said he was trying to show up the pitcher or whatever. And Danziger was talking about how players should be respectful, and I told the reporter nobody would have freaked out about it if Garza and Marquez were white.”
“I’d believe that,” Evvie said.
Dean sat up a little, like his body remembered the annoyance of it. “If Domenico Garza is named James Leo Francis Patrick Houlihan, you can bet your ass nobody decides he’s being disrespectful. Then he just loves the game. That’s what I told the guy, and they printed it.”
“Danziger didn’t love it,” Dean’s dad said.
“Yeah, well.” Dean smiled thinly. “He got to report later that I threw four wild pitches in one game, so I think that made up for it.”
Silence whooshed in under the doors and through the cracks around the windows. “I was proud of you,” Angie finally said. “You were saying what you thought was right. That’s why people love interviewing you. You tell the truth.”
“Like about the environment,” Stuart said.
“Oh, the environment!” Dean’s mom put her hand over her heart.
Evvie leaned forward. “Really.”
Dean leaned back, groaning like he was nursing a hernia, but Angie nodded. “He was on the red carpet for a movie that Melanie was in—she was his girlfriend at the time, very nice. And they asked what he wanted to say to his fans. And he said, ‘Climate-change denial is flat-earth idiocy for people who want us all to drown.’ ”
“ ‘Hardheaded dolts,’ ” Stuart corrected. “ ‘For hardheaded dolts who want us all to drown.’ ”
“That’s right,” Dean’s mom said fondly. “Hardheaded dolts.”
“I didn’t know you’d gotten so political,” Kell said to Dean.
“Hell with politics. I just don’t want to die in a war over the last gallon of water in Mad Max’s kiddie pool.”
Evvie caught the eye of Dean’s mother, and they decided together not to laugh. “Dean is happy we’re all here to celebrate our considerable blessings,” Angie said, raising her glass in the general direction of her son.
“You’re all a bunch of jerks,” Dean said, smiling as they toasted him.
* * *
—
Frank eventually put the football game on TV, and conversations rose and fell in the living room and the kitchen. At one point, Frank got so riled up over a touchdown that he knocked a whole dish of guacamole onto the floor. Evvie swooped in from the kitchen with paper towels almost before he could ask.
In the kitchen, Evvie stood beside Kell and peeled potatoes. Kell was a feeder, a pourer, a hugger, and Evvie had watc
hed during the last several years as her chic short hair got grayer and her chowder got better. She’d lost her husband very young, when Andy was only a baby, and once Andy and Lori had Rose and Lilly, she’d decided it was worth giving up her friends in Colorado—Stuart and Angie among them—to be in Maine with family. And so she’d moved to Thomaston and bought this great little house. It had a permanent bedroom for her granddaughters, for whom fruit was mandatory at Grandma’s but vegetables were not.
Kell peppered Evvie with questions about Dean, no matter how many times she explained that it was purely a landlord-tenant relationship. This felt not exactly true now, but the last thing she needed was to pique the curiosity of a woman whom it had been so hard to convince that she and Andy were not getting married.
Evvie peeked through the oven door at the turkey now and then and watched as it crisped and browned, and then she helped with the potatoes and sliced her bread and put it into the basket. There were green beans and chestnut stuffing, and Kell made her own real cranberry sauce, thank you very much. “Taking something out of a can and putting it on your Thanksgiving table!” she would say at least once a year. “It’s like you’re eating in the lunchroom on an oil rig!” Sometimes she said “a college dormitory room,” and Evvie’s favorite had been “Well, you might as well eat it in your car over the gearshift.”
When everything was ready, they sat around the big table, squeezed in and almost touching elbows, with Lilly and Rose at the desk pulled in from their room. Wine splashed into glasses, and Frank sat with the carving knife in his hand, prepared to operate. “This looks beautiful, Kell, thank you.” And then he put the knife down. “I want to say something.”
Evvie felt a flush in her face that wasn’t the wine. She thought of her wedding, where her father had stood up and told a story she wished he’d kept to himself. It was about a time when she was twelve years old and they were going to the zoo, and he’d loaned her a pair of her mother’s sunglasses that he somehow still had. Sometime during the day, she’d thought she lost them, and she had what she still considered her only real anxiety attack, huddled on a bench, unable to breathe, sure she was dying. To her father, this was a story of what a loving, sensitive girl she was, to be so distraught over a lost thing—especially when the glasses later turned out to have simply slipped into a side pocket of her bag. But to her, it was a story about the hole that her mother had left, and how anything, including panic, tended to rush in to fill it.
And then her father had given his toast. He hadn’t said Tim was lucky to marry her, or even that she was lucky to marry him. Her father had said instead, very specifically, that she was lucky that Tim was marrying her. “My family is so lucky, and my Eveleth is so lucky, that Tim wants to be her husband.” She knew he meant it to be general, generous gratitude. Frank was raised by a mother who worked to defeat the ERA and a father who spoke ill of “women’s lib” at another memorable Thanksgiving dinner in 1997. He’d always wanted to make sure someone would take care of her, and as far as he was concerned, she’d gotten lucky.
She shook her head a little. “Pop, the girls are hungry. We should eat.”
“Eveleth, it’ll just be a minute,” he said. “I want to say I’m glad we’re all here. I’m glad we’ve got old friends and new friends together, and of course we have our Rose and Lilly. Seeing them grow up every year is a wonderful thing.”
“Amen,” Evvie said, gamely picking up her fork.
“Hey, not so fast there, don’t rush the blessing,” Frank said. “We’re so glad Stuart and Angie could join us; we’re grateful we’re getting to know them and know Dean. And we’re also happy to have my daughter here after the year she’s had. She’s got a lot of heart, as you all know.”
“Pop,” Evvie said.
Frank went on. “I think a lot of dads hope their girls marry doctors, even if not all of them would admit it. I didn’t want Eveleth to spend her life taking care of some man bringin’ a lobster boat back in every night, you can believe that. And she married a good man who saved my own life once. Eveleth could never do anything that would make me more proud of her than getting through this year on her own.”
Evvie felt seized by something. That’s how she would try to explain it later, and it was how it felt. She felt an ache melt through her body, felt it crawl down her arms and legs, felt pressure in her head like it might explode. And she put her fork down and looked at her father and said, “Really?”
He stopped. Everything stopped. Maybe even the earth.
It was Andy who spoke. “Ev” was all he said.
It wasn’t enough, because nothing was enough. “I have been lying on my couch for thirteen, going on fourteen months. I have barely gone out. I have fed myself and made ends meet. I hope that’s not the proudest of me you could be. I hope surviving not being married to a doctor anymore is not the greatest thing you can imagine for me. I went to school. I’m going to live another fifty years probably. I hope this isn’t the highlight.”
“That’s not what your father meant, honey,” offered Kell in her most soothing voice, sounding like the mother that Evvie would have given anything, anything to have right now. The way her body almost curled into itself wishing not for her mother in that moment, but for some mother, some other mother, like Andy and Dean had, was a thought so disloyal to her father that it might have been worse than anything she said out loud.
“Of course it’s not what I meant, sweetheart, don’t be silly,” Frank said. “I understand—”
“Stop,” she said. “You don’t understand.”
“We’re talking about what we’re thankful for,” Frank offered. “And I’m thankful you’re strong.”
Evvie felt eyes on her, two nervous girls wondering why the temperature in the room had changed, near-strangers unsure what to say. She looked at Dean, who was sitting next to her looking down at his hands folded on the table. She looked at her father, who seemed baffled, unsure whether he was supposed to carve the turkey, unsure what was going to happen next. She didn’t know either. It was like she’d smashed a glass in her own hand and had nowhere to put the pieces. She took a deep breath and the pressure in her head eased. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I understand,” her relieved father told her as he picked up the carving knife. “I know you didn’t mean it. Let’s eat.”
THE TRIP FROM THOMASTON TO Calcasset took about half an hour. They’d taken Dean’s truck, and on the way back, she closed her eyes and dropped her head back. “My dad talks about his feelings about once every five years,” she said. “But when he does, you get your money’s worth.”
“That was something,” Dean said.
“I can’t believe I yelled at him,” she said. Dean waited. There it was again, that semicolon. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You’re going to have to tell him sometime.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean. You’re going to keep being pissed off as long as you’re lying about everything. It’s not fair to him. Or to you either.”
She picked up her head and looked over at him in the dark. “What are you talking about? How am I lying?”
“Evvie, you can’t expect your dad to know you didn’t have a great marriage when you keep acting like you had a great marriage.”
“Everybody’s parents think they have a great marriage.”
“Try again.”
“ ‘Try again’?”
“Everybody’s parents do not think they have a great marriage, are you kidding? My dad took five years to get used to one of my brothers’ wives. He bet me they’d get divorced. On their wedding day. Try again.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.” Eveleth rubbed her eyes. “I don’t think anybody tells their parents everything about their relationships. My dad gets a version of my life that makes sense to him.”
“So it’s because he’s your dad.”
“Yeah.”
“Then why doesn’t Andy know anything? He’s supposed to be your best friend.”
“What does ‘supposed to be’ mean?”
“He doesn’t know shit. He thinks you’ve been miserable for a year because you miss your husband. He’s not your dad. He’s not some townie your husband took a fishhook out of who won’t hear that the doctor wasn’t perfect. You say he’s your best friend, he says he’s your best friend, half the people you know think you’re sleeping together, and he doesn’t know shit. You have to start telling somebody the truth.”
“This is against our deal,” she finally said. “We’re talking about my husband.”
“Let’s call it off,” he said.
“Call what off?”
“The deal.”
“The whole deal?” she asked.
“Whole deal. Let’s call it off. We’ll be friends instead.”
Her first thought, she realized with some alarm, was to let all her bones go soft and collapse on his shoulder. But her second, better thought was not to. “We can’t call off the deal. We shook.”
“I just did.”
“Okay, fine.” She sat up. “Why can’t you pitch?”
He flinched. She saw it, even in the dark. “Don’t know. Tried a lot of things to figure it out, but I couldn’t. That’s that, and it’s done. No point in crying about it. It sucked, but I’m over it.”
You knock yourself over smashing pinecones in the dark, she thought. Who are you kidding?
Evvie said, “Mm,” quietly but conspicuously, skeptically but compassionately. She always tried to do a lot of work with her noises.
“What did your dad mean about Tim saving his life?”
Evvie sighed. “Back when Tim was a medical student, we were all having dinner. My dad was complaining about this tight feeling in his back, and how he thought that he’d pulled something on the boat. Tim made him go to the emergency room, where it turned out he’d had a mild heart attack. He’s fine now; this was probably ten years ago. But Tim got it right. If it had been up to me, I’d probably have walked on his back and told him to go to bed early.”