know each other too well. Not that I’ve convinced my mom.”
“Oh, Mama Kell. Did she lose it when you got divorced?”
“She was worried that the girls might end up leaving with their mom. But when she found out they were mostly going to stay up here while Lori kinda did Lori for a while, I think she got that it was for the best.”
Dean took a drink, then tipped his head back until it rested against the chair again. “How are things with Lori anyway?” he asked in a low voice.
“They’re okay. We’re friends. Or at least friendly. She gets bored all the way up here, so she comes as far as Portland, I bring the girls down, she sees them. And she calls. She loves them.”
“She just started over, huh?”
Andy nodded. “I couldn’t have left without them, if it were me, but it’s her life. And as Evvie pointed out to me once, guys have done it forever. Nobody even blinks. And the kids like Charleston all right. They visit Lori’s family for a couple of days, they drink sweet tea until their teeth fall out, they come back saying ‘Y’all gonna eat that lawb-stah?’ ”
“Always good to speak a second language.”
“Right. Big picture, it could be much worse.”
“I guess I’d say the same thing.”
Dean had spent a lot of nights in Andy’s living room when they were kids in exactly this way, biding his time. He waited for elementary school and then high school to be over so he could move on to what was next. But that was when he had known what was next. Now his only plans were dinner and bringing his duffel in from the truck. The part of the future that was in focus had shortened; the part that was just a wall of fog went on forever. He still woke up some days and believed for fifteen seconds or so that he had something to do, until he remembered he didn’t.
The sixteenth second was a killer.
CALCASSET WAS IN THE PART of Maine well-suited to the name MidCoast because it resolutely doesn’t mean anything, and a description that resolutely doesn’t mean anything is a powerful indicator of communally owned modesty. Even the weather changed politely: every year, as fall began to take over from summer, there would be crisp mornings that would warn that one day soon, it would truly be cold.
As soon as Evvie woke up and put her feet on the cool wood floor, she knew this was one of the days when fall would poke its head out. She made tea, ate a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and maple syrup, and threw her favorite gray cardigan over her Calcasset High School Band T-shirt—still hanging in after fifteen years—and jeans. The sweater left a trail of fuzzy puffs everywhere, but she’d had it since college. When she wore it and drank something hot, she liked to imagine it gave her autumnal superpowers and a certain cozy appeal.
She could work. She should work. There was a little voice getting louder and louder, saying, Do something, do something. She had emails to answer, including one from Nona Powell Brown, a professor at Howard, with the subject line, “Your attentive ear.”
Evvie sometimes called herself a professional eavesdropper, but she was a transcriber. She worked mostly with interview tapes from researchers and journalists, though she also had what she called “cha-ching clients” who wanted documentation of board meetings or presentations. She knew it sounded boring to people who figured she could be cheaply replaced by decent software. Tim had once cracked that she should get business cards that said, “For when technology barely won’t do.” And she did have automation breathing—or buzzing, or whatever—down her neck, not that everyone she worked with didn’t, too.
But she’d always thought it was sort of fabulous. It meant slipping on headphones and listening for hours to people’s stories, imitating their accents, being surprised by their voices cracking or tumbling into laughs. Often, she’d develop elaborate ideas of what they looked like or what they wore, and she’d image-search them at midnight, sitting in bed with her face lit up by her laptop screen to see if she was right. She was good; she could type almost as fast as she could listen, and a reporter for The Boston Globe called her “the only woman who can reliably translate mumble into English.” He was the one who’d connected her with Nona, her favorite client, a labor economist who