“All passengers for Lake James,” he repeated. Evelyn sat fixed in her seat, wondering what would happen if she stayed on the train north into Canada. But the conductor picked the punch card from her seat as the train slowed to a stop. “Your destination,” he said, and cheerfully tugged her duffel to the aisle.
As Evelyn walked into the station house, she felt her phone buzz, and her heart shot up and then down. Of course everything was fine, and she was just being insane. She had handled things perfectly with Scot. She just needed some sleep, that was all. Just a little sleep. With a smile and a shake of her head, for the benefit of the station attendant reading Buckmasters magazine, she pulled the phone out of her bag, but there was no text, no new voice mail. She must have just jostled it.
She placed her duffel on a clean spot of floor and carefully sat on it. She waited for ten minutes, twenty, and then got up to pretend to examine a stack of brochures about various train destinations.
“Boston?” the man said abruptly.
“Excuse me?”
“The brochure you’re looking at. Good city.”
Evelyn looked down, and, indeed, she was holding a bent brochure, Boston—the City on a Hill, with a picture of a quiet-looking city at night, gentle yellow lights illuminating a brick church. It reminded her of her senior year at Sheffield, when she and Charlotte would visit Preston at Tufts, eating in Back Bay restaurants and getting served wine because Preston brought cigars to dinners and thus looked like he was about forty when he was nineteen and never got carded. She, they, were happy then. “It is a good city,” she said.
The attendant ran his finger around the brim of his USS Kearsarge cap as he looked at Evelyn. “Sometimes it’s good just to take a train somewhere else,” he said.
There was a screech from the parking lot, and Evelyn looked out to see the navy Jaguar with the BIGDEAL license plate. She stuffed the brochure back into the display, and the attendant said something in response, but Evelyn was already out the door, not wanting to make Camilla wait. Evelyn opened the back door to place the bags of party supplies there when Camilla vaulted out of the driver’s seat and put a hand out to stop Evelyn, like she was a little kid who needed to be prevented from wandering into the street.
“Evelyn, there’s a problem,” said Camilla. “Look, this is sort of awkward. I wish you had called or something before you got here. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
Evelyn stood up. “What’s not going to work? I did call.”
“You, here, this weekend.”
Evelyn gave a half laugh, hoping this was one of Camilla’s jokes, but Camilla was standing steady, her sunglasses on.
“I’m already here,” Evelyn said, dimly.
“Well, you should have double-checked before you got on the train.”
“I texted you.”
“Did you? I didn’t get it, I guess.” Camilla flipped the car-door handle a few times, letting it thunk against the glossy navy of the car. “Look, Evelyn, maybe you should watch what you do, okay? Prancing around the ball and Jaime de Cardenas, but I guess you already know his last name. It’s probably in your file on him or something.”
Evelyn pulled on her earlobe so hard she almost dislodged her earring. “Jaime,” she said faintly. “How is he?”
At this Camilla took off the sunglasses and looked directly at Evelyn. “Yeah, I didn’t really think you two had kept in touch after your whatever it was. Jaime’s girlfriend is a great girl. A great girl. She was captain of the field-hockey team at Andover and played at Yale and has a Fulbright.”
Evelyn stayed very still. An Andover-Yale field-hockey player? Jaime must have thought—she was just a joke all along—
“And, I have to say, Nick isn’t exactly thrilled that you were throwing yourself at poor Jaime while you were dating Scot,” Camilla said.
“How does Nick … Oh, God.”
“What about you promising that your father would support my event basically just so you could embarrass me? You were never going to get him to give that check, were you? Your father’s going to prison, so, um, I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t know why you wanted to do that to someone who has never been anything but nice to you, and who gave you a hand and lifted you into this world. I’ve been working with my therapist on being direct, and he thought this would be a good experience for me to come here and tell you this myself. It’s not easy for me.” Camilla swished the sole of her flip-flop against a speck of gum ground into the parking lot. Evelyn looked down to the grimy gum, now almost as flat and gray as the asphalt with all the dirt and shoe mud it had absorbed. Back, forth, back, forth went Camilla’s toe, unpainted and rather gnarly.
Back, forth. Jaime had a girlfriend. Camilla and Nick knew, and therefore they knew that Jaime had wanted nothing to do with her after their hookup, and the stuff with her father was coming out at last, too late for her to do anything, and her class was stamped on her as obviously as a tattoo. Maybe Scot; maybe she could still get to Scot before everyone else did.
“Nothing really happened with Jaime,” she said finally.