guess it would be dumb to ask if you’re ever down in New York at all.”
“Not very often,” Evvie said as she nibbled on a piece of toast. “But I’ll call you if I am. And I’ll call you anyway. I mean, I’m not dying. You’re not dying.”
“I hope I’m not dying,” he said.
After breakfast, they cleaned up the dishes, they cleaned off the counters, they divided up an electric bill, and they checked the traffic on the route he was driving. They wound up leaning on opposite sides of the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “I think I’m out of stalls,” she finally said. “You should get on the road if you want to be ahead of the rush.”
“Okay,” he said. He stepped toward her and opened his arms wide, like she was a classmate at a high school reunion. She stepped close to him and let him hold her, and they stood that way for a long minute. “Thank you so much, Ev,” he said. “I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Me, neither,” she muttered into his shoulder. “I mean…you know what I mean.”
He stepped back. “I’m going to miss you a lot.”
“I’m going to miss you a lot, too. I’m sorry things didn’t work out how you hoped.”
Dean looked all around the kitchen, then back at her. “I don’t know that they didn’t.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “Walk me out?”
She nodded. Out by his truck, he turned back and kissed her, and her knees tried to buckle again, and her breath tried to leave her again, but when she stepped away from him, she steadied herself on her own feet. “Drive safe. Let me know when you get there?”
He nodded and slid into the driver’s seat. He started the truck, and it pulled out of the driveway, and he was gone. She stood in the yard for a minute, looking at the fence, at the house, at the way that her own car needed to be washed, and then she pulled herself up the steps, hanging on to the banister, and went back into her kitchen.
Just as she started to ease herself down onto the living room couch, her phone buzzed. It was a text from Dean, who would be sitting at the light right about now.
Look under sink in apt bathroom. Take care. Call Andy.
She went into the apartment, now totally empty again, and ducked into the little bathroom. She opened the cabinet, and she took out a black baseball glove with pink laces. A sticky note was in the palm.
Go be great, champ.
IT WAS SEPTEMBER. THE LEAVES would start to turn in the next couple of weeks. It would start cooling off at night, but for now, Evvie would still get sweaty, throwing off the covers most of the time and waking up tangled in her top sheet.
Dean had texted when he got to New York, and again two days later to tell her he was looking for coaching jobs in the city. She said she was glad both times, and she sent him a blue heart both times. The blue heart was I have a hundred things to say. But, of course, only to her. He lived there, and she lived here. That was all. It was fine. It would be fine, and saying all the other things would only make it harder.
Instead, she told herself to do one thing at a time. In fact, she stuck a note to the mirror that said, DO ONE THING. So on the hot Wednesday night after he left, she decided to replace the burned-out light bulb in the fixture over the kitchen table. She dragged the stepstool up from the basement, but when she climbed up and poked away the cobwebs, she realized she had to take the cover off of the fixture with a screwdriver to get to the bulbs. “That’s stupid,” she muttered.
Evvie glanced around her kitchen and remembered that her screwdriver was sticking up out of a coffee can filled with screws and nails. The can sat on the end of a high shelf over the stove that she could reach if she went up on her toes. She went over to the shelf, but as she reached for the can, she accidentally tipped it off the shelf. It hit the edge of the stove on the way down, and screws and nails skittered across the slippery kitchen floor. At the same time, a