the foil and dug out her corkscrew. It took a little wiggling, but she got it open and glugged a little into a glass. She was leaning on the sink, the glass to her mouth, when she heard the key in the side door. It swung open and he stepped in with a duffel on his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said with a grin. “You look cute. Ready to go?”
* * *
—
They drove about an hour and a half, until they pulled up in front of the Stafford Hotel, tucked into one of the high-end coastal pockets of wealth nestled in between the working marinas and former factory towns. Inside, the hotel restaurant was quiet and dark, but not stuffy, and they slid into a dark-leather booth. “This is nice,” Evvie said. “Who hooked you up with this place?”
“You know how I hate the Internet?”
Evvie nodded. “I know it well, yes.”
“It’s pretty good at restaurants.”
A waitress dropped off menus. “I have to ask you,” Evvie said, “whether it’s a coincidence that this restaurant is in a hotel.”
Dean squinted at her for a minute. “I have no idea what you’re implying.”
There was bread on the table, and some kind of acoustic indie music hanging in the cozy and mostly empty dining room. And as she dipped a hunk of bread in olive oil, he poured her a glass of red wine from the bottle he’d asked for. “So school’s almost over,” she said. “Are you sad it’s ending?”
“Very,” he said. “Did I tell you that Krista Cassidy is going to Purdue on a track scholarship? I ran into her the other day and asked her how she was, and she lays this on me. I never liked high school kids when I was one, but I’m going to miss these guys.”
“Well, they’ll get to tell everyone they know you, which I have a feeling is going to become a pretty good perk.”
Dean raised his glass. “Okay. To…all the great things we’re going to do.”
Her glass dinged against his and they drank. “And to the fact that if modern technology helped you find dinner, it can’t be all bad. Maybe you’ll invent a restaurant-finding app for people who don’t want to run into anyone they know.”
“God, please punch me if I ever tell you I want to build an app. Punch me if I tell you I want to give somebody else money for an app. Or a start-up of any kind. My dad made me promise I wouldn’t give any more money to anybody in a hoodie.”
“Why?”
“I used to be a real sucker for guys who were going to make the world better. No-carbon-footprint vegan chicken tenders, recycling plastic bottles into raincoats, just…you name a guy whose fuckin’ tech idea has a green logo or whose business plan says he can turn shit into not-shit, and I probably gave him money.”
“Why?”
“It beat buying cars. It was a different time, I guess.”
“You know, speaking of that, I have to tell you something,” Evvie said. “I googled your girlfriends.”
“Ah,” he said. “You have questions.”
“They were all very pretty.”
“That’s not a question.”
“No, it’s an observation.”
“So,” he said. “You saw Melanie Kopps, she’s the redhead. An actress. My mom mentioned her. She was a very nice girl.”
“Woman.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Very nice woman. That was my most recent relationship. I dated her for about two years, and we broke up right at the end of my career. Bad breakup, unfortunately.”
Evvie frowned. “Because of the career stuff?”
Dean shook his head. “Not directly. It wasn’t the best time in the world to be spending a lot of time with me. I was doing all these treatments, I was a grump all the time. Plus people blamed her, and I couldn’t do anything about it. But I liked her very much. Who else do you want to ask me about?”
“You dated a surfer.”
“Lindsay,” he said. “That was a while ago. She was an athlete, so she got some of the weird stuff about me that women sometimes didn’t. Liked her a lot, too. That one had a very normal ending, right when I went to the Yankees. She was religious; it was a huge thing with her. And I grew up, you know, as a Christmas and Easter Presbyterian, and we couldn’t pull it together. It was only going to get worse if we got more serious.”
“And you dated Bev Bo.”
“That was about a year, year and a half, but on and off. That was before Melanie. Bev was