Evenfall

by Liz Michalski

  She locates the lipstick and swipes it across her mouth, where it immediately starts to melt. She thinks longingly of the house’s dirt basement, its dark, windowless walls cool no matter what the weather. She’d love to bring a beach towel and a book down there and hide until this heat breaks.

  Instead, she’s going out to dinner. At least a restaurant will be air-conditioned. She lifts her ponytail higher with one hand and fans the back of her neck with the other. She’s about to honk the horn again when Neal comes out the front door.

  “Sorry,” he says. When he’s close enough, Andie gets out of the car and walks around to the passenger seat. Neal rushes to get there first and open the door for her. He’s wearing a charcoal T-shirt, stretched tight across his chest, a pair of olive green shorts, and leather moccasins Andie’s never seen before. He looks like he just stepped out of a catalog for country living. But there are drawbacks to living with a man who cares more about his appearance than you do, as Andie’s discovered. One of which is that he’s never ready on time.

  “So,” he says, accelerating as they pull out of the driveway, “where do you want to go? I know you’re the tour guide, but I got a couple of recommendations from the guys at the feed store.”

  I’ll bet you did, Andie thinks. In Italy, Neal’s gift for blending into the local scene, for discovering the best trattorias and the coolest bars, was both enviable and irritating. It’s a bit disconcerting to watch the same skill at work on her home turf.

  “What’d they say?” she asks.

  “Well, there’s a new place one town over that’s getting good reviews. Apparently the chef’s some kind of fanatic who will only cook with native ingredients. If it’s not from around here, he won’t serve it.”

  Oh god. She sinks lower in her seat. “I don’t know, it sounds kind of trendy. I thought you wanted some local color.”

  “Right you are.” He turns the wheel, heading the car toward the center of town. “Well, we’ve got Lena’s Pizza or Johnny’s Bar and Grill. Your pick?”

  Andie thinks fast. Lena’s has edible food, but on a Friday night half of Hartman—including Cort or his parents—will be there. Johnny’s is a case of food poisoning waiting to happen, but most of the locals only go there to drink. With luck, she can get Neal in and out before the bar gets busy.

  “Well, if it’s atmosphere you want, Johnny’s is the place to be,” she tells him. She leaves out the part about food poisoning.

  “Johnny’s it is,” he says. She has to admit, he’s been endearingly agreeable since he’s been here. She knows the country isn’t his thing, but he spent last week walking the property with her, listening to her stories of growing up here and scouting the boundaries as if he really cared. He’s taken on the task of getting the assessor out to the house, too, a job Gert’s been avoiding for far too long.

  He’s even helping with the cleanup, a bit. Neal has a knack for beauty, for finding the dross in overlooked objects and spinning them into gold. Some days, she’s felt he views her the same way. She’d been sorting objects in the sitting room, starting a pile for the Salvation Army and another for the trash, and he’d all but had a heart attack when he saw what she was letting go.

  “You’ve no idea of the value of things, do you?” he’d said, rescuing an old, water-stained globe with misnamed countries and an obscene ashtray made from an elephant’s foot. “My little starving artist still. Why don’t you let me sort it out for you? You’ve got a great opportunity to make some easy money here.”

  “Knock yourself out,” she’d said, stung by the starving artist comment. If Neal wanted to paw through two centuries’ worth of junk, fine with her.

  Unlike the old days, though, he’d sensed she was hurt. That night, he’d surprised her with a wicker hamper filled with the things she’d missed since leaving Italy: biscotti, green olives stuffed with herbs, sun-dried tomatoes, cheese and good bread, even fig cookies. They’d picnicked out in the pasture, complete with a bottle of Prosecco and real glass flutes, and Andie had tried hard to keep any comparisons of a different picnic out of her mind.

  She owes it to him to try, so on the drive over, she points out local landmarks—the barn with beams dating from the seventeen hundreds, the church built over an Indian tribe’s graveyard, the field behind the library where all the kids used to party. She lets the McCallister farm roll past without a mention.

  The parking lot at Johnny’s isn’t close to full, and when Neal pulls in, the Saab is the only foreign car. Cort’s pickup isn’t there, though, and Andie offers a quick prayer of gratitude. She’d searched for him for a good half hour the day before, her temper rising with every mosquito bite, until she finally gave up and stomped back to the house.

  Thinking about it now, she gives the mosquito bite on her elbow a quick scratch. She’s still wondering where Cort could have been when Neal opens the door to the lounge for her. The blast of spilled beer, stale smoke, and staler air almost makes her take a step back. But the room is comfortably dark and the air-conditioning is cranked, so she leads the way to a red vinyl booth, Neal following, and they slide in. Neal’s looking around with a dubious expression, and Andie gets the feeling it’s not the kind of atmosphere he was expecting.

  She can’t really blame him. There’s a large strip of silvery duct-tape running along the back of his seat, gray stuffing oozing from around the edges. When the room’s sole waitress drops off their menus, the plastic covers are smudged and sticky.

  “So what’s good?” Neal says. The waitress, an older blonde, looks at him as if he’s joking.

  “The beer,” she says.

  Neal smiles at her. “Oh, come on now,” he says, and Andie can see her relent.

  “Anything fried is probably safe,” she says and walks away. Andie can tell Neal thinks she’s kidding, until he looks at the menu and his eyebrows go up.

  When the waitress comes back, Andie orders a platter of buffalo wings and a pitcher of beer. Neal gets a house salad, a cheeseburger, and fries.

  The television above the bar is showing the game, and a cheer goes up when a Red Sox player rounds second base, dreadlocks bouncing above his shoulders. The bartender stops wiping glasses and turns to watch, and the waitress pauses on her trip back to the kitchen.

  “Slow night,” Neal says. Andie just nods. It’s hard to talk over the noise at the bar, so they watch the game until the waitress comes back, carrying Neal’s salad in one hand and the beer and glasses in the other. She pours them each a drink, tilting the glasses expertly so there’s only a slight head of foam atop each one.

  Neal waits until the waitress leaves before clinking his glass with Andie’s.

  He leans forward, puts his hand on Andie’s, and gives her his best full-watt smile, then tucks a damp strand of hair behind her ear with his other hand. “You are so lovely,” he says softly.

  For just a moment, the noise of the bar recedes. She shifts in her seat. A buzz starts in her middle, spreads up, making it hard to concentrate. Neal knows the value of a thing, can judge its worth with a fingertip, and it’s clear, the way he’s looking at her now, that he’s rediscovered her appeal. There’s not a woman in this room who wouldn’t change spots with her right now, and so long as Neal’s looking at her this way, Andie’s not giving her seat up.

  The guys at the bar groan and shout, and they both look up, startled. The Sox have struck out and the game is over. The bartender snaps off the television, shaking his head.

  “Lazy bums,” the waitress mutters. She slides their food onto the table. “For a million bucks even I could hit better than that guy. You two want anything else?”

  “No, I think we’re good,” Neal says, and she walks away, still muttering under her breath.

  “Well, it’s not Cafe Mondo, but it’ll do,” Neal says. He releases her hand.

  Cafe Mondo was just a block from their apartment. The last time Andie ate there, she had antipasto and braised lamb, with baby potatoes and a carafe of the house red wine. Neal was
twenty minutes late meeting her, and when he came in he was wearing a shirt she’d never seen before. Now, it occurs to her that his affair had probably already begun. She takes a swig of her beer. The glow she’s been feeling recedes. She decides not to warn him about eating the salad.

  She looks at her food. The wings are glistening with fat, and there’s a pool of blue cheese in the center of the plate. What the hell, she decides. She picks up a wing, dunks it in the sauce, takes a huge bite, and swallows. The hot sauce burns her tongue, so she washes the rest of the wing down with a gulp of beer.

  “Not eating?” she asks Neal, who’s stabbing a piece of lettuce with his fork.

  “I’m just not a fan of iceberg, I guess. Maybe we could still make it to that other restaurant, get a late table. What do you think?”

  “On a Friday night? It would never happen,” she says. “Besides, it’s been a long time since I’ve had fried food and beer, and I’m not planning on depriving myself now.”

  “To calories, then,” he says, and clinks her glass with his again.

  The room is beginning to fill up, but Andie’s had enough beer to take the edge off, and she no longer checks the door every time it opens. There’s a jukebox on the far side of the room, and now that the game is over, somebody’s put a quarter in. John Prine’s froggy voice fills the room, paired with Bonnie Raitt’s melancholy alto.

  “Good tune,” Neal says. The jukebox sits in the corner of the room, and Andie can tell when he spots it by the way his eyes widen. It’s a Wurlitzer 1015, with the rounded top and bubble tubes. It still plays on quarters, and on nights when the bar is too rowdy, the owner shuts it down and throws a cover over it.

  “It’s all that’s left of the original Johnny,” Andie says. “It’s been here since I was a little girl.”

  “You actually came in here as a little girl?”

  “Not with my aunt or uncle. My dad sometimes brought me down,” she says. “It was Richard’s idea of a bonding experience.”

  Bonnie’s singing about dreams being thunder and lightning desire, but Andie can tell Neal’s no longer listening. She’s seen the signs before.

  “Jesus, that thing’s gotta be worth a fortune,” he says. “What do you think the chances are they’d sell it? I know a couple of people who would pay big money for it. That guy over at the antique depot, for one.”

  “No chance,” Andie says. Johnny was a fat man who died young of a heart attack, but she can still remember how light he was on his feet, grooving in the late afternoon gloom of the bar to an old blues song on the jukebox. There’s a handful of classic rock records in the stack, but most of the music is blues, pure and simple.

  “I gotta ask anyhow—I’d kill myself if somebody else bought it. Do you know the owner?”

  When Johnny died, the bar passed to his son Jake, a close-clipped, ex-Marine who frowned on his dad’s habit of passing out free beers to his old buddies. Cynical teenager that she was, she remembers feeling vaguely amused by her father’s outrage when he’d had to pay for his own drinks on his annual trip to the farm.

  “Mark my words, the place won’t last a year,” he’d said.

  She’d long since lost the habit of paying attention to anything Richard said, but she made it a point to update him on how Johnny’s was faring in the summer missives Clara insisted she write. And over the years, it had fared rather well. About the only change—besides the wide-screen television above the bar and the repaved parking lot outside—was the large sign on the wall behind the jukebox. She’d heard Jake added it after a drunken pool player busted a stick over the machine’s top. The sign read: “Management not responsible for damage.” The pool player went to the hospital that night with two broken ribs and stitches to his lip, and the jukebox has remained untouched ever since.

  A couple of guys are cueing up at the table now, and Andie can see Jake standing behind them, framed in the doorway of the back room. It’s been a while since she’s seen him, and his crew-cut is going gray, but the muscles in his arms look as tight as ever from here. She nods and points him out with her chin to Neal.

  “That’s the owner, over there.”

  He swivels to take a look. “The guy in the black T-shirt? Think he’d remember you?”

  Between her father and the time he busted her trying to use a fake ID, Andie’s pretty sure Jake remembers her. And since he’s the kind of guy who keeps pretty close tabs on his customers, it’s likely he’ll realize she’s here soon enough. So there’s no good reason to say no, yet she finds herself shaking her head.

  “I doubt it. It was all a long time ago.”

  “Too bad. Still, a guy’s got to try, right? Want to come over with me?”

  “I’m not so good with the sales thing, you know that.”

  “I keep telling you, you’re looking at it wrong. It’s not sales, it’s opportunity,” he says. He leans across the table and kisses the top of her head before sliding out of the booth. “Back in a bit.”

  She watches him go. She can’t help but observe that the shorts stretch nicely across his ass. There’s a sudden flurry of activity in the booth of women across from her, and she knows she’s not the only one to have noticed. One of them elbows her seat mate and whispers something, and they all giggle. She feels a quick flare of the old jealousy, and she looks away from them.

  Across the room, Neal’s all hearty smiles and handshakes, just one of the guys. Jake sends a flicker of a glance her way, enough to tell her that Neal’s dropped her name. The guy closest to Neal says something, he answers, and the crowd laughs, a few of the men nodding appreciatively. She can tell Neal’s just warming them up. Already, he fits in here in a way she never has. If she wanted to, she could walk through the crowd, past the women who admired his ass, and stand next to him. He’d place an arm around her, draw her to his side without even thinking about it, and just like that it would be clear that they were together, that whatever mantle of charm he had extended to cover her as well. In Italy, the slipstream of his allure had carried her all the way to belonging. She’s tempted, for a moment. Then some guy in a Springsteen shirt stops to listen, blocking her view.

  She drains the last of her glass, stands and threads her way carefully through the crowd to what her father used to call “the ladies.” It’s a tiny room, cornered off at the far end of the bar, with an alcove that hides it from view. The air-conditioning isn’t on as high in here, and the room smells strongly of disinfectant. She takes her time, reading the graffiti scrawls as she washes her hands. She doesn’t recognize any of the names, although there’s no reason she should. “Joleen is a skanky whore,” one reads, and she wonders who Joleen pissed off.

  She reapplies her lipstick, brushes back a few stray wisps of hair that have escaped her ponytail. When Neal comes back to the table, they’ll go. Heat outside be damned.

  Outside the bathroom’s alcove, she stands for a moment to get her bearings. She’s pleasantly lightheaded, and she sees from the way the bar floor is filling up that she’s not the only one. A few couples are swaying in place to the music, arms wrapped around each other, as the jukebox pumps out another tale of true love gone wrong. She looks toward the booth but doesn’t see Neal.

  “Searching for your boyfriend?” a voice asks, and the buzz she’s been cultivating vanishes. Cort’s leaning up against the alcove wall, arms folded against his white T-shirt. He’s got a few days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks, and his hair’s standing on end, as if he rolled out of bed this morning and hasn’t given it another thought. She’d like to smooth it down for him, and finds herself tucking wisps of her own hair behind her ears instead.

  “What?” he says, pushing off from against the wall. “No quick answer? No snappy comeback? I’m disappointed.”

  It’s the way he slurs the last word that tips her off. Even with her own brain cells doing happy little high dives to their deaths, she can tell he’s had a few—a good many few—more beers tonight than she has. She scrutinizes him. True, he’s standi
ng straight, but he’s also not moving much, and as if to prove her point he uses her silence as an excuse to collapse back against the wall.

  “What?” he says again, but this time the words are defensive.

  “How drunk are you?”

  “Drunk enough to dance,” he says. “Or is that not what you’re looking for tonight?”

  “What I’m not looking for is a fight. Okay?” She tries to move past him, but he sticks an arm out and blocks her way.

  “That’s it? That’s all you got for me?”

  “I never, ever, meant to hurt you, Cort,” she says, and wishes he knew how much that were true. “When I came here, I thought Neal and I were through. I didn’t know he’d show up.”

  “And when he did, you told him it was over, right? That you were with somebody else? Because from where I stand, it looks like he didn’t get that message.”

  “Look,” she says. She’s so, so tired suddenly. “What Neal and I have, what we had…We’ve been together for a long time. There are things between us. That doesn’t just go away overnight.”

  “You’re telling me? Christ, Andie, I’ve been chasing after you with my heart in my hand since I was six years old, and you act like I’m the one who’s in the way here. Like I’m the newcomer.” He pushes off the wall and stands closer, so that he’s towering over her. “But there’s always going to be some guy, isn’t there? Some other guy who’s older or richer, with a nicer car or a bigger house or a trust fund. It doesn’t matter, just so long as it’s some other guy who’s not me. You don’t even see what’s in front of you, not until it’s walking away.”

  He sways a little bit, so that his hip brushes hers and for a second in her drunken haze she thinks he really means for them to dance, but then he straightens up.