Evenfall (8 page)

The thought of anyone mistaking Neal, with his reddish blond hair and ruddy skin, for a native Italian makes Andie laugh out loud.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. It’s just, I remember you used to do this when I babysat. Ask me a million questions.”

“Yeah, and you never answered any of them then, either.”

“That’s because it’s none of your business.” She takes another swallow of the beer. “Now your turn. What are you doing these days?”

“Not much.” He traces the end of the switch along the instep of her foot. “Mostly helping dad on the farm while I figure out what to do with my life.”

“How’s that going?”

“What, helping dad, or figuring out what to do?” The switch is tickling her calf now, and Andie swats it away. “It’s okay. I got a degree in agricultural engineering—did I mention that? Not a PhD or anything, but pretty good for a country boy.”

“Congratulations,” Andie says.

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t seem to be doing me much good. What I’d really like to do is have my own place, but that takes money. So I’ll probably wind up working for the aggie extension or something, at least for a few years.” He lays back, lacing his fingers behind his head. The leafy canopy overhead shifts and sways, casting shadows on the water below. It’s quiet for so long that Andie starts to think Cort has, impossibly, drifted off to sleep. She’s on the verge of dozing again herself when he speaks.

“Was this place ever a working farm when you were here?”

“Evenfall? It depends on what you consider working.” She struggles awake. “Uncle Frank worked it, sure. But he probably never made much money. He was a security guard over at the GE plant most of the time I was growing up.”

“But my dad says it was always good land. I wonder why they stopped.”

Andie shrugs. “Who knows? Between Clara’s sewing and the job at GE, they did all right. Maybe he just didn’t want to farm.”

“Maybe,” Cort says. He sounds unconvinced.

“You know, it’s kind of weird to think of him growing up here,” Andie says. “He was always so quiet that Clara and Gert ran the show. I forget that this was his home first.”

“Yep,” Cort says. “Those strong-willed Murphy women will run you right over if they get the chance.”

Andie rolls to her side and pretends to frown. “Who says that? Aunt Clara was as meek as they come.”

“Maybe so,” he concedes. “But you take after Gert.”

She pummels him until he sits up, laughing, and grabs her wrists. “You do,” he says. “Except she probably hits harder. Her hands are a lot bigger—yours are delicate little things.”

It’s true. Andie’s always been secretly proud of her hands. “Another Murphy through and through, God help me,” Frank would say, shaking his head and looking at her. “Except for the hands—those came from your mother.”

Now she holds them up to the light. Her fingers are long and slender, but strong, with smooth oval nails. Cort places his right palm against hers, dwarfing it.

“You’ve got that Murphy jaw, though,” he says. He brings his hand up slowly and cups her face, tracing his thumb along her jaw. “And the eyes.”

Andie’s urge to push Cort away is lessened by just how good his touch feels, like water on a plant that’s been neglected for weeks. She makes no move to stop him from leaning closer. She can feel the heat of his skin, the soft cotton of his shirt against her arm. Her face is growing flushed, and her breath is coming faster. She closes her eyes. There’s a touch of warmth against her lips, and then an ungodly crashing noise.

Andie’s eyes pop open and she jerks away from Cort. A second later Nina comes tearing through the undergrowth. The dog dashes into the creek, paddles straight out, then turns and swims back. She claws her way up onto the bank and races in crazy circles around them, stopping just long enough to shake and spray them with water. Finally, she collapses panting at Cort’s feet and rolls over, legs waving in the air.

“Jesus.” Andie takes a deep breath. Her heart is pounding, and droplets of creek water dot her shirt and her hair. “That damn dog.”

“She’s something else.” He glances up at the sky. “Shit. It’s getting late—I need to head back and help dad feed.”

He stands and extends his hand, but Andie ignores it. She’s embarrassed enough by their almost-kiss that she prefers to scramble to her feet on her own. Cort doesn’t seem to mind. He picks up the four empty beer bottles, holds back a sapling at the beginning of the trail, and lets her go ahead of him. All the way home she can hear him whistling
behind her as she tells herself how crazy this is. He’s not a minor, exactly, but with ten years separating them, he might as well be.

By the time they reach the clearing, she’s decided their almost-kiss was a temporary lapse in judgment brought on by the beer, the heat, and possibly the fact that she’s miles away and on a different continent from the last man in her life. She’s calm enough to face Cort when he strides up beside her, and ready to let him down gently.

“Frank never kept cows, did he?”

“Cows?” She covers her confusion by pretending to rack her memory. “Nope, I don’t think so. He did have one old milk cow when I was a kid, but that’s it.”

“I bet this field would be great pastureland. Look at the stone walls.” He points, and behind the scrub trees that surround the clearing Andie can just make out the faint outlines of rock. “Somebody must have used it for that.”

“I know Uncle Frank’s father kept animals. I’ve seen pictures.”

He stops and looks around the field. “You ought to clear those wild roses. They can take over a pasture so quick that before you know it there’s no room for anything else.”

“I kind of like them,” Andie says. She doesn’t stop walking. “And besides, in a few months it won’t matter.”

They don’t speak again until they reach the house. Nina, who took her own path home from the creek, has re-appeared, and Cort bends down to scratch behind her ears. Immediately, she flops over on her side, pink tongue hanging out.

Andie, standing on the front steps, can’t help herself. “Do you always have that effect on females?”

“Only the four-legged ones.” He straightens up and walks over to her, leaning against the door frame. “Prove me wrong—have dinner with me Friday night.”

“Thanks, Cort, but I don’t think so.” Andie turns to go inside, but he puts a hand out to block her.

“Why not? You have to eat. And dinner with me can’t be worse than Gert’s cooking, can it?” He runs his fingers through his hair until it stands up in little spikes. He looks so woeful Andie can’t help but laugh.

“You used to make that face whenever it was time to go to bed,” she says, and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

Cort, to his credit, doesn’t go for the easy line, just arches an eyebrow. “You always let me stay up later, so it must have worked.”

Andie doesn’t tell him she simply didn’t want to stay up alone. She remembers sitting with Cort on his parents’ brown, scratchy sofa, watching late-night reruns of
The Rockford Files
and eating popcorn from the aluminum mixing bowl between them. No matter how hard he tried, Cort could never stay awake past eleven. He’d stop asking questions, his breathing would slow, and the next time she looked over, he’d be sleeping, his head propped up against the sofa’s high back. His favorite pajamas had green and blue trucks on them, and by age eight he’d worn them so often the cuffs were starting to unravel. His wrist bones showed above the threads, impossibly thin and fragile for a boy.

“You were just good company,” Andie says.

“I still am.”

When she hesitates, he touches her lightly on the shoulder. “Look, Andie, I promise to respect your status as former babysitter, okay? It’s just dinner—no strings.” His face clouds. “Unless you’re seeing someone. Is that it?”

“No.” The answer pops out before Andie has a chance to think. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”

“All right.” He grins. “Is eight okay? I could pick you up then.”

Against her better judgment, Andie nods. Cort’s grin gets wider, and he backs away, as if afraid she’ll change her mind. “Eight it is. See you then.”

“Right,” Andie says, but Cort has rounded the corner of the house. He’s forgotten the empty beer bottles, and Andie bends to pick them up. She’s still holding them in her hands when the truck drives past. Cort honks the horn, and she raises a bottle in mock salute. The brown glass catches the sun and glints like a light on dark water.

THE dress that clings to Gert’s calves is damp with creek water and heavy with the promise of coming rain. Of the three dresses she owns, this one—blue cotton sprigged with white flowers—is her favorite. Her mother hemmed it with tiny, precise stitches, her face tired under the glow of the kerosene lamp.

She walks along the creek bank, the muscles in her thighs bunching and releasing smoothly. When she glances down, there are no age spots on her hands, and the braid that trails past her shoulders is thick and lustrous. She knows she has been walking a long time, but she is not tired.

The air here is thick, a cross between water and glass, the type of air in which words or thoughts can hang, suspended, hidden, yet almost visible.

“I thought you might not come,” he says, stepping out from behind the oak tree that grows just where the bank curves away. His face is smooth and unlined. He’s thin, but with the leanness of a boy, not the wasting that came later with age. His eyes are unchanged; the same blue, open-hearted gaze that makes her catch her breath each time he looks at her. At first, she wondered how no one else noticed the intensity of that gaze. In time, she realized that he looks at everyone in the same penetrating way. This is part of his charm. His eyes are slanted at the corners, like a cat’s.

“It took a while to get away. I’ve been home such a little time, they’re still happy to see me,” she says. She does not apologize. There is no apology sufficient for what she is about to do. Even if there was, it would not belong to Frank.

He doesn’t answer, just takes her arm, and so they wander together, dizzy with touch. After a month of stealing glances, of letting their knees bump under the table and their shoulders brush as they walk along, Gert expected their first stolen time together would be purely for the ease of their bodies. So she’s surprised when he begins telling her about the book he’s reading, a leather-bound edition of Melville he found in an attic trunk. He talks about high school and his plans to enlist this summer when he graduates; he asks her what she’ll do when she finishes nursing school. At first, she thinks he’s nervous, but when he asks after her father, the old man she’s left rotting in the shack she calls home, she understands. He’s being kind, giving her a chance to change her mind before they do any real damage.

But Gert has walked the four miles to the creek knowing
where each step leads. If she were going to turn back, she would have done so before this. She stops walking, takes her arm away, and sees sadness and resignation in his face, but no relief. That’s when she kisses him. Just as their lips touch, he dissolves into mist, the drops cool and wet upon her face.

Gert wakes from the dream as hungry for that kiss as she’s been for any meal in her life. The loss follows her around all morning like a pesky fly, making her irritable and short-tempered. She’s late to the house again, and when she arrives Andie’s already started clearing out one of the spare bedrooms. The walls are papered with pink and yellow roses that climb from baseboard to ceiling, smothering the room in a riot of color. The air is hot and still, though Andie has wedged the window open with the old water-stained dictionary kept handy for that purpose.

Gert stands in the doorway. There’s a pink glow to her niece’s cheeks that, were she in a more charitable mood, Gert might credit to heat and exertion, as opposed to the red pickup truck she saw bumping down the driveway late yesterday afternoon. She knows her niece left Italy under unhappy circumstances, although she never talks about it. In Gert’s opinion, any man who is too busy to come to the funeral of his almost-fiance’s father—and never mind what she told Andrea about Richard, Frank raised the girl as if she were his own—is a man whose priorities need to be reordered, and quickly. On another day she might take that into account. Today, however, Gert is inclined to think the worst of everyone, including herself.

“Good morning!” Andie says. “I thought I’d get an early
start, and this room is small enough that we can finish it up today. It will make us feel like we’ve accomplished something.”

Like the other three bedrooms on this floor, the room is stuffed with everything from an extra chair to stacks of musty magazines. Gert fans herself with a sewing pattern book, one of a dozen Andie has stacked on the narrow single bed. From the colored sketches of clothes on its cover, Gert guesses the book to be from the 1960s. She sighs, not for the first time, at her sister’s inability to let go of anything.

“I suppose this is as good a place as any to get started,” she allows. “Do you have a plan, or are you just pulling things out of the closet willy-nilly?”

“That pile is for recycling—I’ve got some bags in the corner for trash and Goodwill,” says Andie.

“And just how did you plan on deciding where each item will go?” Gert asks.

“I was hoping you could help me with that,” Andie says cheerfully. “Maybe we could start by going through the dresses over there.”

The closet smells like dust and stale perfume and is jammed with old clothes, most of them Clara’s. Gert and Andie move in and out of the narrow opening, taking dresses off hangers, careful not to touch.

“What do you think about this one? Trash?” asks Andie, wrinkling her nose. She holds up a sleeveless lime green dress patterned with pink terriers. There’s a tiny splotch of barbecue sauce near the neck.

Gert remembers the dress. The stain came from a church picnic the summer before Clara was diagnosed. She’d joked
the dress was so ugly it would be chic by Hartman standards, and that the stain would blend right in. By the next summer, the dress no longer fit right. She’d lost too much weight, and the left side hung empty. Even when Gert brought home special padded bras, Clara wouldn’t wear them. She claimed they made her scar itch.