Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,56

she was wearing the kind of stage makeup that makes children look garish up close.

“I’m going to put these up in the new—”

“God,” said Eva, staring at the photo, “I look like JonBenét Ramsey.”

She flinched at her own lack of social grace and continued, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean—What were you saying?”

But her father was saying nothing now. He looked at her, confused, and they let the awkward silence sit until the waiter came to rescue them.

“So,” her father asked, once they had ordered, “how are things? You look lovely, by the way. That’s a beautiful dress.”

It was unfair of him to ask how she was doing. William knew more than he let on. He knew, for example, that she could probably use extra money. Eva had put on one gallery show, in a deliberately spare gallery on a side street in Chelsea. The art paid infrequently; she worked other jobs to support herself. She did paperwork for an art museum. Weekends, she worked in a store that sold sex toys. When Debra told him this, he thought she was kidding, but it was true. It’s also a bookstore, Debra said, by way of consolation. He went to the store once, to see it for himself. The windows were papered in red and when he opened the door he was confronted with a table full of vibrators. He shut it quickly. Sometimes he thought her whole life was an elaborate series of barricades against him.

He knew about the girlfriend, though even Debra seemed uncertain about the current status of this relationship. They were not “roommates” anymore, but he was not sure what this meant, considering they were hardly roommates to begin with. He knew that Eva had been living in her own small studio for the past month, though a few years ago when he’d asked why she couldn’t just get a bigger place instead of paying rent in two places, neither especially nice, she’d insisted that she couldn’t sleep where she worked. She’d been living with her boyfriend at the time. When he’d brought this up with Debra, Debra said, She just didn’t want to tell you that Cheese isn’t making her pay rent. He had laughed at the absurdity of this deception. His daughter was dating a white boy with three earrings and a tattoo he said was symbolic of the Great Gatsby, a boy who insisted on going by his high school nickname of “Cheese” when his parents had given him the perfectly sensible name of Charles, and what Eva found most embarrassing was that she wasn’t paying any rent to live with him.

He wondered if Eva really thought he didn’t know these things, whether the charade was for his benefit or hers. Aside from being her father, he dealt with liars for a living, and Eva was no actress. He was not certain whether Eva had fully come to terms with her mother’s inability to keep secrets. Most likely, she just didn’t imagine that they still talked as often as they did. It made him sad sometimes to think that Eva maybe couldn’t understand this, the kind of bond you never lose. It was true, he had blamed Debra for things. He had plans, rules, which were disrupted in the first place by Debra leaving him, and in the second place by Eva herself. He’d had speeches and punishments prepared for the normal things: dating, drugs, slacking in school. Eva never seemed to get in trouble for the normal things. In high school she’d been arrested at a protest for standing too close to a group of kids throwing eggs at the cops. He didn’t have a speech for that. Only once had he gotten a call from the school. Debra was away at a conference and he had taken his vacation time to stay with Eva for the week. Could someone come get Eva? the secretary had said. She’d been suspended for biting another student.

“Biting?” he’d asked. Eva was a sophomore in high school. He hadn’t known fifteen-year-olds bit people.

“Biting,” the secretary had confirmed, so he’d gone to the school to sort things out. There wasn’t much sorting. Eva confessed to the biting and could offer no better reason than that the boy had been getting on her nerves.

“I value silence,” she’d said, “and he wouldn’t shut up.”

He’d had no choice but to take her back to the house and wait for Debra to get back that evening. Debra had gone to the school