by Linda Holmes
And right over his ribs, there were words inked in black, in simple type: THE DAY YOU QUIT, YOU START TO DIE. She opened her mouth, and what came out was—and one day much later, they’d both agree this was what it sounded like—“Buuuuuuuh.”
He laughed and pulled his shirt back down, almost apologetically, like she was reacting to the sentiment. “I was into longevity. I didn’t expect to set records or get rich. I just wanted to play a long time.”
“Oh. That sucks.” Surely, she thought, this could not possibly be the best she could do. But as the moment stretched on, it seemed that it was.
“Don’t get tragic,” he said. “Or I won’t show you the one on my ass that says: I HATE LOBSTER.”
“I’m not getting tragic!” she protested. “I’m listening to the story!”
“Hey,” he said with a nod in an ambiguous direction, “can you grab the address out of that pocket and put it in your phone so we can get some directions when we get closer?”
“You…want me to get the address out of your pocket?”
There was a pause, and then he frowned. “Hey. You. Mind in the gutter. The pocket in the visor up there.” He shook his head. “Out of my pocket.”
“I didn’t understand!” She laughed and pulled down the visor, which did indeed have a pocket strapped to it, and in that pocket, she found an address in Somerville, which she typed into her phone with her thumbs. “You’re the one taking your shirt off,” she muttered as the GPS located them and popped up a prediction that they had about an hour and fifteen minutes to go. “Do we know anything about this guy whose house we’re driving to?” she asked. “Do we know that he’s not going to skin us and make us into lamps?”
“My friend Corey, who I played with at Cornell, works with him at the coffin factory.”
“The coffin factory?”
“It’s not a euphemism for anything, Eveleth, it’s a coffin factory. A place where coffins are made. Apparently, Corey does handles and trim and this guy Bill does linings. And his dad, Bill’s dad, had the pinball machine that we’re going to pick up. It’s got race cars on it, you know.”
“Yes, you said.”
“I’m hoping it has a horn and a siren. You’ve got to admit, that would be pretty fucking fantastic.”
“Why would a pinball machine have a siren?” she asked.
“Probably doesn’t, but wouldn’t it be great if it did? Keep you up all night long with that,” he said. “I just like the sound of it.”
“If you’re that eager to hear a siren, I can call the police and have them pull you over.”
“Oh, big talk, Minnesota.”
“You know,” she said, “I might not know you well enough to be your navigator yet. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around Boston, but the streets are designed to prevent anyone from successfully figuring out where they’re trying to go.”
“We’ll take our chances.” She kept her eye on the phone until it was time to wiggle the truck through the baffling, jammed, often diagonal and one-way streets of Somerville. They found the tall, slate-blue house, and Dean parked in the driveway beside it. They climbed out, and Evvie bent over and hugged the backs of her knees to stretch out her back. She followed Dean up onto the porch, where he rang the bell. The door opened, and a man with half-gray hair and a UMass sweatshirt pushed the screen open.
“Morning, sir, I’m Dean, and this is Eveleth.”
“Oh, hello, yes, I’m Bill, come on in.” Bill shook both their hands and moved aside, and they found themselves in a mostly empty living room with cardboard boxes stacked in one corner labeled GARAGE SALE 1 and GARAGE SALE 2. “Pardon the mess, we’re still working through my father’s things.”
“Not at all,” Dean said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Dean. It’s a pleasure to meet you, I enjoyed watching you play. If that’s all right to tell you.”
“Of course, thank you.”
“My father did, too, even if he’d sit in front of the TV and call you something not so flattering. He’d have gotten a charge out of you buying the machine.” Bill put his hands on his hips and heaved a sigh.
“Well, hopefully he got to see my last few appearances and it brought him some joy.”
Bill looked up and gave Dean what Evvie could only characterize as a full-on twinkle. “I think he saw some of it, yeah.”
“Happy to help,” Dean said, spreading his arms wide.
“I’m gonna overlook that jersey you’re wearing,” Bill said with feigned sternness. “Was the drive down okay?”
“It was. I still owe Evvie a cruller, but I think we’ll make it back home.”
“I get paid in pastries,” she added.
Bill smiled. “I’m glad you could come down. I’ve been trying for a couple months to find a good home for this. I wanted somebody to have it who’d enjoy it.”
“Dean will really enjoy it,” Eveleth said. “I think you can safely assume you could not have found a more loving parent for it.”
Bill laughed. “All right, perfect.” He led them into a game room at the back of the house, where everything else had been cleaned out, but the pinball machine was against one wall. It didn’t look new or anything, but someone had dusted it, and, when Bill turned it on, it obligingly buzzed and rang its bells, like an eager shelter dog ready to be rescued. While there was no siren, brightly colored cars decorated both the sides of the cabinet and the backbox—hot cars, in someone’s mind, with fins and stripes, being leaned on by girls in full skirts and boys in cuffed jeans.
Dean helped Bill take the machine apart (he has such nice arms, don’t look, don’t look), marking the connections Dean would have to make again later, and Dean and Evvie carried it out to the truck in pieces they’d meticulously encased in bubble wrap and crisscrossed with tape. Back inside Bill’s house, she looked away politely as Dean counted out a wad of cash that he handed to Bill with a handshake, and they started back to the truck.
“Not every lady would go for a pinball machine in the house,” Bill called out. “You got a good girl there.”
“Oh, I know I do.” Dean nodded over his shoulder.
Evvie opened the door of the truck and climbed inside, and when he’d gotten in, too, and pulled his door shut, she looked at him, and he shrugged one shoulder at her. “He’s not wrong.”
She shook her head. “Okay. You owe me a cruller. Let’s get to it.”
They got donuts instead of lunch, because it was that kind of day, and Dean guided the truck back onto the highway. This time, they mostly listened—to a variety show on the radio and to a true-crime podcast she liked (he kept interrupting and saying “the husband did it,” and it turned out the sister did it, but he said he still liked it in the end)—until they were back in Calcasset in the afternoon. When they pulled into her driveway, it was starting to get dark. “I’m starving,” she said as he opened up the back of his truck. “I should have demanded you buy me a peanut butter sandwich.”
“All right, Muscles,” he said. “Grab the other side of this.”
They took the cabinet inside, and the legs, and the backbox, and Dean neatly lined them up on the carpet in the apartment. “I am going to put all this together later,” he said, walking toward the kitchenette. “I love my race car pinball machine, but I also have to eat.” He leaned on the countertop. “Grilled cheese? I want a grilled cheese. You want a grilled cheese?”
“Sure.” She dropped down in her usual spot. “Is being a pinball machine owner everything you dreamed of so far?”
“Honestly,” he said as he rattled and opened and closed things, “I’ve thought about this for so long that I’m afraid to put it together. Like the anticipation might be better than the reality. Also, I’m not very good at pinball, and it seems like once I have this set up and working, that’s going to be more obvious than it is
right now with the thing on the floor.”
“I feel like Bill’s father is somewhere watching, and he’s very excited that you’re excited, but he’s still upset that a Yankee has his precious.”
“At least he probably has a great coffin.”
“Whoa, you’ve gotten dark since you got a pinball machine.”
She heard the bread start to sizzle in the pan as he came over and flopped down in the chair next to her. “Can I tell you something?” he asked, running his hand over his short hair.
“Sure.”
He pushed his right shoe off with his left foot, then his left shoe off with his right foot. He studied her face for a second.
“What?” she said, reflexively touching her cheek like she might find powdered sugar on it.
“I thought about kissing you a couple times today.”
She felt her brows go up, then down. Her mouth tightened, then loosened. Quick, quick, quick, what does a neutral expression look like again? “You did.” She was shocked. No, satisfied. Maybe gleeful. No, wait, she was just toe-curlingly eager. Also panicked.
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve thought about it a few other times, but I thought about it a little bit more today. In the truck, and right when we got back and we were going to unload stuff out of, you know, the back.” He motioned vaguely with one hand toward the driveway. “I didn’t know what you would think, though, and it seemed like it might not be a good thing to surprise you. I mean, surprising you is what I’d normally do. I don’t usually hold talks or anything. But it seems like a special case.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, her brain laboring furiously, like duck feet underwater, while she held her face as still as she could. “Because of the widow thing? Or the landlady thing? Or because we’re friends now? Or because you’re tight with Andy? Or…?”
He nodded slowly. “Right. All those things. Special case.”
“So now you’re holding talks.”
“I guess I’m offering to hold talks.”
She felt like her head was fizzing inside, and she thought maybe, for once, she should just start talking. Open her mouth, see what happened. She was surprised to feel a smile surfacing. “Listen.”
He immediately stood up. “Got it.”
“Hey, sit down!” she told him, and he came back and dropped into his chair. “It wasn’t that kind of ‘listen.’ ”
He held up both hands. “Go ahead. But if you say ‘great guy,’ there’s no sandwich, I’m telling you.”
She bit her lip. “I get it,” she said. “Right? I mean, I get it. I’ve been here. You know, I’ve been here.” She waved her hand in the space between them. “I haven’t missed it. I have…I get it.”
He grinned at her. “Okay, good.”
For a minute, she wished that she had thrown herself into a meaningless fling or two in the time she’d been alone. She wished she’d fed the part of her that wanted someone else’s hands and skin and pulse under her fingers. It was too disorienting, too delectable and scary, thinking about this suggestion. Her husband was not the only person she’d kissed, but he was the only person she’d had sex with, and it was like the grown-adult yes, please and the high school crush and the hard-won wariness were all trying to squeeze through a door at the same time, and it was chaos.
“I’m not ready,” she said. “And I don’t want to get into this when I’m not ready, because…I’d regret it, and I’d regret…regretting it. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sure,” he said. “It sounds a little bit like ‘maybe later.’ ”
“I know,” she said, cringing with her whole face. “And I would never do that if it weren’t a—”
“Special case, no, I get it. Totally fine. But I’m going to assume this is the answer, so if it is ‘maybe later,’ then later, you’re going to have to give me some kind of a go sign if you change your mind.”
“A go sign? I have to give you a go sign?”
“Yeah. That’ll be up to you, to give the go sign.”
She took this in for a beat. “All right, what do you think it should be?”
“The go sign?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it should be ‘go.’ ”
“That’s the go sign? The go sign is ‘go’?”
“That’s the go sign.”
“All right. Got it. Hey, don’t burn my sandwich.”
As he stood at the stove, she mouthed it to herself, just to see what it would feel like.
Go.
A COUPLE OF THURSDAYS LATER, EVVIE was watching Halls of Power when there was a knock at her door. Who would be knocking after ten at night? But she looked out the window and saw Andy’s car in the driveway, so she went over to the door and swung it open. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, everybody’s fine,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call. I was at my mom’s, and I came straight here. I need to talk. Is that okay?” His hands were stuffed into his pockets, but she could see a little girl’s hair tie around his wrist, meaning someone had taken her braid out over at Grandma’s.
“Of course, sure. Come in. Do you need a beer? Or a cup of tea or something? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“No, I’m okay, thanks.” He sat on her couch, but he sat forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced together. “I need to talk to you about something, and I tried to think of a good buildup, but I don’t think I have one.”
“You’re scaring me,” Evvie said, sitting next to him. “What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was over at my mom’s, and we got talking about you and how you’re doing.” Eveleth found this kind of confession mortifying, but Andy kept going. “And we got talking about the night that Tim had the accident.”
“Okay,” she said, and she started to pick at one fingernail with another.
“My mom told me that one of the things that made her sad was that she realized that you had thought, when you came to the emergency room, that Tim was hurt. And that you’d expected to spend a long time at the hospital with him, which she thought was touching. She talked about how much you had to have loved him to have gotten ready to stay as long as it took. ‘That girl packed her bags for the long haul,’ is what she said.”
“Okay,” she said, feeling her mouth dry out. “What made her say that?”
“Do you remember that you couldn’t drive yourself home that night? And so I drove you back here? And my mom had somebody drive her to the hospital the next day to pick up your car?”
Eveleth stared helplessly at the carpet. “I don’t think I remembered who got the car, it’s all sort of a blur. But that makes sense.”
“That’s how she knew you’d planned to stay. She told me she saw that you’d brought a suitcase to the hospital. To sit by the bed. To wait with him. She told me she looked in the back of your car when she was picking it up, and she saw it. She talked about how sad she always thought it was that you turned out not to need it because he was gone before you ever got there.”
Blood started to roar in her ears. She could feel her face flushing, all the way up to her hairline. She was hot, or maybe cold.
“She described to me how she was walking up to your car, and she saw this old blue suitcase with stickers on it.” He was trying to look Evvie in the eye, but she fixated on a spot a couple of feet in front of her toes. “She thought you packed it for the hospital. Because my mom doesn’t know that that suitcase was your mother’s. But I do.”
Andy knew this because one night, when they were having beers in her living room and Tim was working late, she’d told him all about Eileen Ashton, who had longed for Eveleth the city but not for Eveleth the daughter. Evvie had opened the hall closet and taken down the beat-up blue suitcase with the stickers that said PARIS and LONDON, stickers that her mother had bought in bookstores. She’d shown him t
hat inside, she kept everything she had that Eileen had sent or left behind: her sunglasses, a cashmere scarf, some letters, a silver bracelet, three faded paperback novels. She’d tried to explain how much she’d missed her mom growing up, and how she sort of dreaded hearing from her now. Dreaded it, but couldn’t throw any of her things away.
He went on. “So she doesn’t know that there’s not a chance that when you got that call from the ER, you took it down, and you emptied it out, and you packed it. My mom doesn’t know that there’s only one reason you would ever take that bag down out of the closet and put it in your car.” He paused. “But I do.”
“Andy.” Finally, she looked over at him.
“Were you leaving?” He waited. “Were you leaving him?” Again. “Were you leaving him that night? Evvie?”
Eveleth had spent the last seventeen months with a squib of dread strapped to her ribs, and now she knew what it felt like to have it explode inside her chest. She thought she might faint, might throw up, might cry, might even burst out laughing. But instead, she said, “I was leaving that night.”
“So you were packing the car,” he said.
“I had barely started,” she said, feeling like her own voice was coming from a recording, or like he’d pulled a string coming out of her back and the words weren’t hers, they were playing from a recorded loop. “But I wasn’t going to take very much.”
“And they called you.”
She nodded. And she told him. The car, the suitcase, the phone call, and the doctor with white hair who told her when she got there that her husband was already dead.
Andy had brought her home in his car that night—the same one that was parked in the driveway now with Rose’s sweater balled up on the backseat. Evvie had been shaking so hard that when they got to the house, he held her to his side to help her into the house, opening the door she hadn’t bothered to lock, taking her all the way up the narrow stairs, and laying her down on her bed, where she turned away from him onto her side and pulled her knees into her chest. Andy had turned on the little lamp on her bedside table, then went into her bathroom and ran cold water onto a washcloth. He had come out and sat next to her on the bed. “Okay,” he’d told her. “Here.” She’d turned and let him cool her down, like he did with the girls when they were sick. He had dug clothes out of a drawer and waited while she got dressed in the bathroom, and then they lay on her bed on top of the blankets, sleeping for a half-hour or an hour at a time, until it got light outside.