of the office latch behind her. When she got into her car, she immediately took out her phone. This was a moment to text someone and tell them about the doctor who wouldn’t listen, who turned a professional inquiry into some Barbara Walters interview intended to make Evvie cry, as if she needed another person who was obsessed with asking her about widowhood. She sat with her phone in her hand, and she listened to the beginning of a slightly crispy, sleeting rain fall on the windshield. After a few minutes, she put her phone back into her bag and started the car.
ABOUT A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS, tucked inside, away from an icy wind that now and then made the window frame rattle, Dean and Evvie were stretched out in his club chairs drinking straight bourbon. They were a couple of glasses in. He was slumped down, with his long legs on the coffee table, and she was sitting sideways, her knees bent over the fat arm of the chair, feeling decidedly fuzzy-headed. “Why do they have Christmas every single year?” she asked.
“Oh, boy,” he said with a smile. “Where’s this going?”
“I think it’s a very fair question,” she said, tipping the rest of her drink into her mouth and making the little kuh! noise she always did when she swallowed liquor. “Nobody has enough time for it. Nobody wants to go through the whole…” She waved the hand without a glass in it. “I don’t think they need to have it every year.”
“How often do you think?”
“Every four years, like the Olympics.”
“The Olympics are every two years now.”
“Okay, every four years like the Winter Olympics, you lawyer.”
“So that’s your Christmas plan. If you’re a four-year-old kid, no more Christmases until third grade.”
“It’ll be good for them. Some children are horrible. These are the simple truths of Eveleth World.”
He nodded slowly. “Seventy-five percent cut to Christmas, zero percent mercy for horrible children.”
“Yes,” she said. “Zero percent.”
“Where does the name ‘Eveleth’ come from?” he asked, wrinkling his forehead. “Is it a family name? Is it the Viking goddess of lobsters or something?”
She shook her head. “Eveleth is in Minnesota. Way up north, cold as fu-huh-huck. It’s maybe forty miles from Canada. It’s where my mom was born. Her dad worked in an iron mine.”
“They have iron mining in Minnesota?”
“They used to.”
“They don’t now?”
“Not like they used to.”
“How in the hell did she wind up married to a lobsterman from Maine?” Dean asked. He finished his drink, took her glass from her, and poured them both a little more.
“She went to college in Boston, and one summer, she came up here to be a counselor at an arts camp that’s not around anymore. He was working as a sternman for a buddy of his, and they met at a bar. It was some kind of…infatuation, I guess, and she moved up here and they had me. I’m sure it seemed very romantic to her. Very adventurous. But she missed home, so she called me Eveleth. I am named after my mother’s unhappiness.” She raised her glass toward him, then took a sip. Normally, she’d hear what she was going to say in her head before it came out of her mouth. Right now, it was the other way around.
Dean looked hard at her, like he might pull on this thread, but he didn’t. “My oldest brother, Tom, is an engineer. Mark works for a tech startup that does something with touch screens or some shit. Brian is an accountant. And I, my parents’ youngest boy, now have a wrestling move informally named after me. Do you want to know what it is?”
“Probably not.”
“Guess what it is.”
She scrunched up her face. “I don’t want to guess what it is.”
“It’s choking.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I was afraid that was what it was.”
Just then, the wind kicked up and the window rattled again. “It’s serious out there,” he said.
“It’s terrible out there.” She drank, and she sighed. “I want to be in Fiji or something.”
“You have a lot of wishes for a lady who wants to give away all her money.” He arched an eyebrow. “You could go to Fiji.”
“I told you, I don’t want the money.”
He held up one hand. “No, you told me you do want it, but you won’t take it. Which I think is crazy. Although you may have read in a few places that I’m also crazy, so take that for whatever it’s worth.”