at her. “I guess I kept gettin’ out of bed. At first, I felt a little bit like how you feel. I know it’s different, Tim being really gone. But I got up and I went to work, and you went to school. I didn’t sit around and think about it. Might have been good I was busy, I suppose. And then I’d get home, and we’d eat. We couldn’t stop, so we kept going.”
“Did you know why she left? I mean, did it help at all?”
“Your mom was never happy up here. She wanted to be someplace bigger, I think. With more people. But she never told me she was thinking about anything like leaving on a Tuesday before we were awake, if that’s the question. The only thing I know is it was nothing about you. She loved you.”
This, Eveleth firmly believed, was his training kicking in. Somewhere, he’d read how important it was to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault, and he’d never stopped, and he never would. Nothing about you, nothing about you, nothing about you. But this, she had always feared, could not possibly be true. Her mother had decided that Calcasset with her daughter was not as good as Florida without her daughter. It meant something.
Eileen had left on a Tuesday, and when Eveleth had awakened that morning, she’d sat down at the breakfast table to find her father making eggs instead of her mother, when normally he’d be gone already. He’d been wildly excited the night before, because he’d finally bought the boat he always wanted. His very own boat that he could work himself. His own business. It had seemed like something was starting. But now, he looked gray and drawn.
She’d asked where Mom was, and he’d said, “She went for a walk.” It was years before he told her that on that day, when he woke up, there was a letter on the bedside table next to him, and that it started with the words Dear Frank, I’m sorry but, and that it had taken him hours to decide to read the rest.
That night, “she went for a walk” became “she went away for a while,” and after a week, Frank told his daughter that Eileen had decided that she should live in Florida, and they should stay in their house. Evvie only knew Florida as the place where Walt Disney World was. So to her, this meant her mother was going to be at Walt Disney World all the time, and who could argue with that?
At first, she asked often when they were going to see Mom in Florida, or when Mom was coming to see them. She thought of them as a family with two homes, as if Pompano Beach were her parents’ pied-à-terre. It took two months of not seeing her mother before she fully absorbed the idea that she now lived with her father the way Heidi, in a book Frank had begun reading to her at night, lived with her grandfather in the Alps.
The first time she’d heard that it wasn’t her fault that her mother had left was on her tenth birthday, when she first asked whether it was. After she’d blown out the candles on a cat-shaped birthday cake from Specialty Sweets and pulled the red paper and white ribbon off a box with a new winter coat from her father in it, she’d picked up the card that Eileen had sent. She almost never got mail, so she loved seeing her own name written above their address, and she knew the handwriting from reading and rereading a long letter her mother had sent her about her abandoned ambitions, which Evvie had barely understood. It said things like “I was a very talented dancer! But a lot of things can get in the way of that, and that made me sad. I knew that if I was an unhappy person, I couldn’t be a good mom!”
I am named after my mother’s unhappiness.
On the front of the card was a Scottie dog, and when Evvie opened it, on the inside it said, “Hope your birthday is through the woof.” Eileen had written, “Love, Mom.” Just “Love, Mom.” This card had been in the blue suitcase on the night of Tim’s accident, when Kell saw it in the back of Evvie’s car.
Evvie had shown the card to her dad and said, “She didn’t even write ‘Happy birthday.’ ”