game, and she fainted. Just, boom, like that. I felt so bad. From what I heard, she took one look at me and she slithered right down in her seat like in a Daffy Duck cartoon. Her friend revived her with a face full of ice and Diet Coke.”
“Oof, that’s a hard way to wake up.”
“Then they took me to the hospital and glued my face back together.”
“You didn’t have stitches?”
“No, glue. When I called home and told my mother I got taken to the ER and fixed up with glue, she hung up and called the hospital. My dad says it was all ‘You glued my child together,’ ‘This isn’t an arts and crafts project,’ stuff like that. But then they told her that it wasn’t glue, that it was called artificial skin. And she’s just ‘Oh, okay.’ ” He pantomimed hanging up the phone.
“Is it really called artificial skin?” she asked.
“No idea. She felt better, though. Have you ever had stitches?”
“Once in my knee, and then once a couple years ago when I stepped on a broken glass in the living room.”
“Ouch.”
“Bled all over the place. It was really gross.”
“I bet.”
Almost without realizing she was doing it, Evvie used her toe to feel the scar on her other foot where the ER had stitched her up. It had been Tim’s broken glass. He’d been angry. But she’d told the nurse she broke the glass in the kitchen. “Slipped right out of my hand,” she’d said.
She trailed her finger down from Dean’s temple to his jaw and jumped at a deep red mark above his collarbone. “Oh, damn, I think I got you right here. You have a bruise.”
He sat up in bed until he could see himself in the mirror over the dresser, and he tipped his head to the side. “That’s not a bruise,” he said, feeling it with his fingers. He turned to her and lowered his chin until he was looking at her through his impressive eyelashes. “You gave me a hickey.” He repeated it. “You gave me a hickey.”
She squinted at it. “Wait, when did I do that?” And then she remembered. “Ohhhh, I did do that.” She smiled and gritted her teeth. “Sorry?”
“Don’t be sorry. Shit, this is almost enough for me to get on Instagram. I’ll just write, ‘Having fun up here in Maine.’ Then put up the picture—ka-pow!” He reached for his phone. “I’m taking a selfie.”
“You are not.” Laughing, she reached for it, too, but she was hopelessly overmatched by his considerable wingspan, and she wound up lying on top of him, inches from his scruffy face, as he held the phone out of reach. “It doesn’t hurt,” she whispered, “does it?”
“No,” he whispered back, smiling. “It doesn’t hurt.”
LATER, AS DEAN’S TRUCK BUMPED along Route 1, they passed a billboard for the Compass Café that had been there for ages, at least since Evvie was a teenager. “I wonder if the Compass is going broke now that you guys don’t sit around for six hours every weekend,” Dean said.
“It wasn’t six hours.” Evvie kept looking out the window. “Maybe two.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what that’s all about?” he asked.
Evvie looked over at him, the way his once-disobedient arm rested on the wheel. What was broken could be fixed, and she took a breath. “So, the night that my husband died…” She paused and took a deep breath. “I was leaving him. Like, I wasn’t thinking about leaving him. I was in the process of leaving him.”
Dean was still. “How close were you?”
Now she looked back out the window. “I was standing in the driveway when they called me. I’d packed one suitcase, and some money, and my birth certificate.”
“But you hadn’t told Tim?”
“He would have argued. I wouldn’t have left. And the next day, he would have been sorry.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, Andy’s mom saw the suitcase in my car at the hospital. She mentioned it to Andy. He figured it out. He was upset.”
Dean frowned. “But he wasn’t upset that you were leaving.”
“No. I think he was upset that I was going to leave without telling him. Without telling anybody. Upset is the wrong word. Hurt, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Because I wouldn’t have left then, either.”
“You really know how to hold your cards close.”
“I promised Tim I wouldn’t talk about marriage things with Andy. Which seemed reasonable enough.”
“When did you decide to go?”
“Oh,” Evvie said. “Well, there was this night when he said he was going