“What are you doing here, Evelyn?” Barbara had said. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a long time, either.
“I left New York,” Evelyn blurted. “I didn’t call. I was just—I’m sorry.”
“You left New York? Why on earth would you do that?”
“I left,” she repeated in a small voice.
Dale indicated that she should sit on the couch, which took up most of the living-dining room. “Is this because of the case?” he said. “I appreciate you coming down, but there’s no need to move here.”
“Yes. No.” Evelyn kept standing. “I was evicted from the apartment, or I think I would’ve been if I stayed. I lost my job. I lost my friends.”
Dale considered this as Barbara slumped down in a chair in the corner, facing away from both of them.
“Okay. That’s okay, Evelyn. People get into trouble,” Dale said.
“I was trying to fix it all. Too late, I was trying to fix it all, but I was trying. I was always trying,” Evelyn said. She looked at her father, who had balanced on the couch’s arm. “This way I can be here for the sentencing. That’s good. It wasn’t like I wanted it to come to this. I ran out of money, and did what I thought was best. Maybe it wasn’t. I was just trying to get through.”
“It’s all right,” he said, intertwining his fingers. “It’s all right.”
Her mother stayed in the chair, and her father finally gave her a kiss on the forehead and said that she was always welcome, which was unexpectedly kind. Evelyn walked to the small bedroom that Dale said was to be the guest-bed-office-and-Evelyn’s-room, where a framed Georgia O’Keeffe poster that Evelyn had bought at the Sheffield Shop her prep year, before she learned that all Georgia O’Keeffes were basically vaginas, hung a little askew. Evelyn wondered if her father or mother had hung it up.
The bedroom smelled of turpentine and Chinese plastic. Evelyn slept lightly and had been awake for an hour in the dark morning before she walked out to talk to her mother. Barbara still looked defeated, but at least she was speaking.
“You need help with the coffee machine?” Evelyn said.
Barbara swung the filter holder open and shut, and pressed a few buttons. “Your father always made the coffee.”
“When is he moving in here?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Once he’s wrapped things up at Sag Neck?”
“Is he wrapping things up at Sag Neck?” This was one of Barbara’s favorite repartee games, feigned confusion.
“I think so, Mom. I don’t know. I’m not really in the mood to deal with this. Is he waiting to move here until the sentencing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is he waiting to move here until the sentencing? Do we have to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Mom?”
“Yes?” Barbara replied distantly, as though Evelyn were inquiring about tennis-court availability at the Eastern.
“Is Dad not living here?”
“No.”
“Like, not planning on it?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“But you are? Here?”
“Evidently.”
“But Sag Neck is sold.”
“I am aware it is sold, Evelyn.”
“So I thought he would come here until he has to go to prison, if he has to go. I thought he was just temporarily at Sag Neck. There’s room for him here, right?”
“Can we all fit in this horrid apartment? Does the water go in this machine automatically?”
Evelyn ran her hand through her hair. “Can I have the car keys?”
“It’s six-fifteen in the morning.”
“Yeah. I’ll be back. Later. Can I have them?”
“By the door.”
Evelyn did not change her clothes, or brush her teeth; she just grabbed the keys and walked into the morning in her flip-flops and sweats. At Sag Neck, she heard her father crashing about upstairs.
“Hello?”
“Dad?”
“Evelyn. What are you doing back?”
“Just thought I’d make you breakfast. You need sustenance, right?” She held up the 7-Eleven bag she’d gotten en route, having found $5 cash in a junk drawer at the Marina Air, and put together cornflakes in week-old cream for him. She wondered how long he’d been here, alone, walking through what used to be fully furnished rooms, rooms where his family had lived. She couldn’t bring herself to say much, but patted him on the shoulder when he was finished with the meal.
*
To parse out time, Evelyn gave herself two tasks a day. Monday: organizing the Marina Air bathroom, then making English-muffin pizzas at Sag Neck for dinner for her and her father. Tuesday: helping her father pack up books, then moving boxes to the storage unit. Wednesday: Laundromat, then using the Internet at the Jeremiah Regis Library on Main Street. She logged on to People Like Us and saw it had been redesigned and was running a discount on sports tickets on the homepage; she looked for Camilla’s profile, but it had been deactivated. Her e-mail in-box held DailyCandy promotions, a sample sale at Theory, and an offer of tickets to the American Ballet Theater’s fall gala. Her salesman at Céline emailed her to inquire as to why they hadn’t seen her in a while. But, other than an e-mail from some Sheffield alumna asking her if she could help with an upcoming phonathon, there was not a single personal e-mail, not one from her former friends asking where she’d been or if she was all right. New York City was not only getting along fine without her, it didn’t even notice that she’d left.
She returned home to find her mother fixated on a show about brides selecting wedding dresses. It was only one o’clock, and the afternoon stretched before her like one long taffy pull. Her mother sat with her mouth partly agape, like she lacked the energy to close it, as a man onscreen told a short woman wearing a cupcake silhouette that she looked like a child bride. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Evelyn said to her mother, who did not look up.
She headed back to the Regis Library and found information on a temping firm in Baltimore. It might not be so bad, she told herself. Maybe a law or banking firm needed a temp, and she could have an office with a door and free pads of paper. At her appointment the next week, though, she was told she was not an appropriate candidate for temp work. The temp-agency interviewer had her sit at a greasy computer with the g and the h rubbed out for a skills test. The program looked to be from the 1980s, beeping like a Russian computer-chess game whenever Evelyn did something wrong. Beep, when she even clicked on the wrong cell in the Excel portion. Beep—beep—beep with each wrong formatting choice as she composed a business letter. When she backspaced, flustered, it would beep again, making her panicky. At the end, the interviewer, folding his arms, suggested she could be more competitive in the job market if she enrolled in a typing class at a secretarial school.
On the drive back, through the brown dust and the flat land, as the unrented billboards peeling at the edges got to be too many, she hit her hand on the steering wheel. Secretarial school? she wanted to shout. I went to Sheffield. I was the main photograph on Appointment Book. I am someone. I was someone.
By three days later, though, Barbara’s depression covered the apartment like a giant version of the eyeshades Barbara had started wearing, and Evelyn decided she had to get out, and she had to make some money. There was no secretarial school in Bibville, but there were stores. She mentally reviewed the shops along Main. The new wine shop? She still couldn’t figure out how to navigate cabernets, and they would probably reject her like the temp agency had. Bali High, but she couldn’t see herself selling batik skirts with any success. The Caffeiteria, down on the wharf, wasn’t the worst idea. Her summer friend Jane had worked there in high school and liked it well enough—the tips had been surprisingly good for a coffee shop whose food was little more than muffins and tuna salad on store-bought bread.
When she walked to the wharf, the Caffeiteria was in quiet early afternoon mode, with the windows shut and
a PLEASE SHUT DOOR IT’S HOT OUT THERE! sign on the red door, which was thick with several generations of paint. There was no HELP WANTED sign. Didn’t businesses like this put up HELP WANTED signs when they needed someone? She pushed open the door and a bell dingled, and from behind the counter, a man with a salt-and-pepper beard and rimless glasses and the bright concentration of a chipmunk looked up. He looked familiar; Evelyn remembered him being very strict about no free refills on iced coffee from her high-school summers.
“Hi?” she said.
“Hi, what can I get you?” he said, shaking out his newspaper, the Bibville Tattle.
“I’m actually—I wanted to see if you had any jobs available. Here, I mean. Working here.”
He folded the Tattle away from him and smoothed the crease.
“I just moved back from New York, so I’m used to busy crowds,” she offered. This sounded ridiculous. “Uh, and I can work any hours you need. I’m just up the street, so, really, anything last minute, or if someone doesn’t show up.”
He scratched his nose. “Who are you?”
She didn’t know what he wanted to hear, so she threw out a bunch of answers. “Well, I was born outside D.C. but grew up in Bibville, out on Meetinghouse Creek, and my family—my mother, really—just moved into town—we sold our house, it was sort of an involved thing, so now we’re at the top of Main, up by the park. By the Sunoco. I had been in New York until July, but I had some family stuff I had to deal with down here, and so I came down. My friend Jane worked here one summer, in ’ninety-six, I guess it was, back when you guys were the Early Roost, and liked it. So.”
“I meant your name.”
“Oh! Oh. Evelyn. Beegan.”
“Evelyn. I’m Rick. I’m not going to shake your hand. Health inspectors could be watching. Do you have any experience?”
“I worked at a coffee place back in…” She stopped herself. To have to pretend like she knew how a commercial espresso machine functioned would end up with her spraying steam and milk all over herself and a lost job. “No,” she said in a low voice. “But I can learn.”
Rick put his paper down in careful parallel alignment with the counter. He intertwined his hands and put them under his chin and watched Evelyn as though he were waiting for a divining rod to tell him its read on her. Then, message apparently transmitted, he clapped his hands once. “Well, Evelyn, we do have to hire someone for the fall, since one of our workers is starting at Chesapeake, but you’re not going to start at the top.”
“Right. No, I understand. That’s fine.”
“You’re not gonna get to touch this baby”—he pointed at the silver espresso machine—“until I say you can touch her. You can do drip and iced and the basic food service and the cleanup, and by cleanup I mean cleanup, okay, the mop and everything.”
“I can clean,” Evelyn offered, though it came out like she was asking herself the question.
“We pay a living wage here. So it’ll be nine dollars an hour to start, plus tips.”
How, Evelyn wondered, was $9 an hour a living wage?
“Come in Friday at six, and Mia’ll show you the ropes. You don’t show up, you get fired. You show up drunk, you get fired. Okay?”
“People show up drunk at six A.M.?”
“You’d be surprised.” Rick picked up the Tattle, licked his finger, and with a brisk shake made the sports pages materialize neatly before him. Evelyn waited, wondering if he would give her a letter or have her sign something, but Rick was absorbed in the newspaper. She cleared her throat, and he looked up.
“Sorry—so—I have a job?” she asked.
He nodded, and turned the page.
So as not to disturb him and make him change his mind, she opened the door with the gentlest of force so the bell barely moved. She turned to look at the Caffeiteria sign, in a loopy cursive with an exclamation point. $9 an hour. In New York, she had occasionally thrown away dollar bills that had gotten wet or overly wrinkled because they grossed her out, and now she was going to be working for $9 an hour. She trudged back to the Marina Air and up the exterior stairs.
The apartment was dark with the shades down when she returned and had a sour smell to it. Barbara’s door was closed. Evelyn walked to the living room window overlooking the alley and yanked the cord to pull the blinds up. She unlocked and shoved up the window, and moved into the kitchen to push open the tiny window there, to give the place some natural light and a little bit of air and outside sound. She cracked open the door to get a cross breeze going.
On Friday morning, after her alarm went off at the unbelievably early hour of 4:45 A.M., she was almost late because she kept swapping out outfits, having never noticed what people who worked at coffee shops wore. It felt good to shower and dress for work, and she chose a white tunic dress and sandals with kitten heels. By the time she got down Main Street, her feet were already hurting, and standing on those heels all morning made her feet scream.
Mia wore black pants, clogs, a nose ring, and a knit cap, and was clearly annoyed that Evelyn was such a novice that she didn’t even know to cover her hair. Mia gave her a choice of disposable hairnet or dish towel; Evelyn went with the latter and thought that, paired with the white tunic, she looked like a manic midcentury nurse. As Mia made Evelyn grind beans, and as Evelyn then spilled ground beans all over the white dress and found that dusting it off just smeared in the mess, she wanted to throw the beans at the wall and run home, but running home would just mean Barbara in the dark. Evelyn stuck it out through her shift, limping up Main Street when it was over. Her left foot was bleeding by the time she got back.
In her room, Evelyn pulled out her bottle of Perles de Lalique, running her thumb over the smooth glass and the jeweled stopper. She spritzed it on her wrists and the back of her neck, smelling the pepper and dried-rose notes it always gave off at first. A few hesitant drops of rain tapped at her window. She could almost be back in New York, far away from the Marina Air and from any of this. Her iPod was in her night table, and she pulled it out and put on Judy Holliday. “‘They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away,’” Evelyn mouthed as Judy sang. She shut her eyes and sniffed her wrists.
Someone at the Caffeiteria this morning had mentioned the stock market was moving higher and higher and New York was celebrating. She wondered if it was raining in New York, too. She could see what all her friends would be doing. In Greenwich Village, Nick would be walking down Barrow Street, thinking with some glee about his fund with Scot. When a car came by, Nick would leap up onto a town-house stoop with the precision of a ballet dancer, sensing the exact moment he would need to move, as a thigh-high spray of water would hit the woman walking behind him. The woman, dripping, would let go of her cheap black umbrella, its metal prongs sticking out like an injured robot arm, a device unable to make it through even a single New York rainstorm.
In her living room, Camilla, who’d have zipped home from her reflexology appointment at the first sign of rain, would sip from a cup of tea and look at the Central Park Zoo below as the seals flopped around in the rain. The Style channel playing fashion shows might mention the stock market, and if it did, Camilla would turn it off. What did the fluctuations of the stock market matter to Camilla?
Scot was easy: He would be working at his hedge fund, whatever a hedge-fund office looked like, doing whatever people at a hedge fund did. Making money. Doing research. Getting frustrated that Nick was never around. Done and done, as Preston used to say.
Charlotte was easy, too: She’d be in an interior conference room packed with lawyers and would never know it had rained. She wouldn’t leave work that night—she would barely sleep eight hours over the next three days—as her boss would’ve told her they couldn’t time the markets, and if they didn’t close this deal by the end of the week, it wouldn’t happen at all.
Preston, where was Preston? He had tried to be a loyal friend to her, to warn her about the dangers of the circle she was trying to crash, the people she was trying to bef
riend: Bridie Harley, Gemma Lavallee, and, yes, Camilla Rutherford. She had repaid him by ripping him open, by making him feel like he couldn’t rely on even his old friends.
She wanted to imagine Preston happy, so she placed him at the Greenwich Country Club on the eighth hole, carefully lining up his chip shot, wanting to finish the nine before the rain got up to Greenwich. A click, an arc, and his ball would drop cleanly onto the green. He would probably use the stock market high to buy more Florida condos or whatever it was he was doing for work. He would dart inside the clubhouse as soon as the rain really started, putting his spikes in his locker and changing back to his loafers, then sitting with his gin and picking pith off his lime slice as he watched the rain darken the course from the clubhouse’s window. Was he lonely? Was he happy? Would he even know the difference?
*
Her alarm went off the next morning again at 4:45. Evelyn got up and walked to work with stiff legs and blisters, this time wearing a dark shirt and flats. Mia promoted her to writing out receipts and stacking them on a spike a few hours in, and the café was so mercifully busy on Saturday that Evelyn didn’t have time to think about New York or the Marina Air. She was too busy shuttling muffins back and forth and handing out change and carrying over coffee orders. By Sunday, the job was fun in parts—since Mia didn’t like talking to customers, Evelyn picked it up in her place. There was a dog walker whose charge, Hootenanny, a terrier with a wise gray beard, had developed a gimpy leg, but her owners were in Hong Kong for two weeks, and the dog walker wasn’t sure whether he ought to take her to the vet. Another guy wore glasses that were literally rose colored and looked plucked from the Goodwill women’s department. He did some job for Maryland Upper Shore Transit that required him to stand at the bus stop on the corner of Bay and Main and write something in a pad every time the bus passed, then cross the street to the bus headed in the other direction and write something else there. He liked his coffee with three Sweet’N Lows and extra hot (which meant, Mia said, she should microwave it for fifteen seconds but not let the customer see that was the trick).
Everybody Rise Page 33