his truck. I want to get a job so I can get a car, but I don’t know if it’ll happen.”
“My parents got it for me for my birthday,” he said, like he hadn’t heard her. “It’s like what they drive.”
They talked a little about classes and the new house his family had recently moved into, a big Victorian that had been owned by a local land developer named Van McCrea. Evvie told him a story she’d heard from her dad about the time Van’s wife set the kitchen on fire deep-frying a turkey indoors on Thanksgiving, and he assured her that you couldn’t see a trace of the ashes now. And then he pulled up to Breezeway Books, a little house that had been converted into a bookstore, if by “converted” you meant “filled up with shelves that hold so many used books that there’s barely room to walk, so step carefully and keep your elbows tucked in.”
You could get up to a grocery bag full of paperbacks for ten cents each, so Evvie wandered around plucking romances and mysteries until her bag was half-full. She turned a corner where a sign handmade with cardboard and markers said SCIENCE, and she ran into Tim, who was holding a hardback copy of a book called Man and His Diseases. She opened her eyes wide.
“I’m going to be a doctor,” he said. “That’s…that’s why I’m holding this book.”
She laughed. The boy with the dry car and the heated seats who wanted to go to the bookstore was going to be a doctor. And he was funny. “Ah. For a minute there, I was a little bit worried. You know, for you.”
He grinned at her. “You have a cute smile.”
She never stood a chance.
* * *
—
A breeze brought Evvie back to the memorial. One of the nurses was reading a poem. Something with angels. Something that rhymed “heaven” with “ten or eleven,” and “sky” with “cry,” something familiar. Evvie tried to place where she knew it from, thinking maybe she’d heard it from her mother, who had a soft spot for simplistic sentimentality, or had seen it on a wall hanging. It took a minute, but she finally remembered: it had been read at a very important funeral on a very highly rated television drama series. Somebody asked you to say a few words, she thought at the nurse, and you googled “poem from season finale of Cole Point.” You did. What’s wrong with you?
Dr. Schramm’s assistant brought a bouquet to Evvie and pushed it into her hands, then took an identical one to Tim’s mom. Evvie looked down at the flowers, orange and red for autumn, tasteful for grieving, and to her great relief, she felt tears start to tense her throat. Andy’s hand, soft on her back, drew them the rest of the way out. Thank God, she thought.
The good thing about a ceremony packed with busy people is that they don’t linger. The tree was planted and the dirt was shoveled, people said things about how much they’d loved and admired Tim, and Evvie felt eyes on her the entire time. She tried to breathe right, sigh right, smile right, hold the flowers right.
It was at the very end, when a former patient of Tim’s asked to say a few words, that Evvie was most sharply reminded of how devoted to him they were and what they believed he had been. The man talked about how Tim had sat by his bed and helped him figure out how to break it to his daughters that he had cancer.
When Evvie was in college, she’d come down with a flu that filled her lungs with cement for two weeks. Between classes, Tim would come sit on the bed and read to her from his biology textbook in the voices of various cartoon characters. Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam and Pepé Le Pew told her about microbial diseases and molecular genetics. She had loved it; it hadn’t occurred to her to mind that even his close attention was a performance. In fact, it was too bad that “solid cartoon mimic” wasn’t something she’d thought to say at his funeral, because it would have sounded affectionate and been the truth, a combination she’d found hard to get right on that day.
Reminding herself that things like that had happened—that he could be sweet, and he could be fun, and he could be focused on her in a way that made her feel