“But you are? Here?”
“Evidently.”
“But Sag Neck is sold.”
“I am aware it is sold, Evelyn.”
“So I thought he would come here until he has to go to prison, if he has to go. I thought he was just temporarily at Sag Neck. There’s room for him here, right?”
“Can we all fit in this horrid apartment? Does the water go in this machine automatically?”
Evelyn ran her hand through her hair. “Can I have the car keys?”
“It’s six-fifteen in the morning.”
“Yeah. I’ll be back. Later. Can I have them?”
“By the door.”
Evelyn did not change her clothes, or brush her teeth; she just grabbed the keys and walked into the morning in her flip-flops and sweats. At Sag Neck, she heard her father crashing about upstairs.
“Hello?”
“Dad?”
“Evelyn. What are you doing back?”
“Just thought I’d make you breakfast. You need sustenance, right?” She held up the 7-Eleven bag she’d gotten en route, having found $5 cash in a junk drawer at the Marina Air, and put together cornflakes in week-old cream for him. She wondered how long he’d been here, alone, walking through what used to be fully furnished rooms, rooms where his family had lived. She couldn’t bring herself to say much, but patted him on the shoulder when he was finished with the meal.
*
To parse out time, Evelyn gave herself two tasks a day. Monday: organizing the Marina Air bathroom, then making English-muffin pizzas at Sag Neck for dinner for her and her father. Tuesday: helping her father pack up books, then moving boxes to the storage unit. Wednesday: Laundromat, then using the Internet at the Jeremiah Regis Library on Main Street. She logged on to People Like Us and saw it had been redesigned and was running a discount on sports tickets on the homepage; she looked for Camilla’s profile, but it had been deactivated. Her e-mail in-box held DailyCandy promotions, a sample sale at Theory, and an offer of tickets to the American Ballet Theater’s fall gala. Her salesman at Céline e-mailed her to inquire as to why they hadn’t seen her in a while. But, other than an e-mail from some Sheffield alumna asking her if she could help with an upcoming phonathon, there was not a single personal e-mail, not one from her former friends asking where she’d been or if she was all right. New York City was not only getting along fine without her, it didn’t even notice that she’d left.
She returned home to find her mother fixated on a show about brides selecting wedding dresses. It was only one o’clock, and the afternoon stretched before her like one long taffy pull. Her mother sat with her mouth partly agape, like she lacked the energy to close it, as a man onscreen told a short woman wearing a cupcake silhouette that she looked like a child bride. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Evelyn said to her mother, who did not look up.
She headed back to the Regis Library and found information on a temping firm in Baltimore. It might not be so bad, she told herself. Maybe a law or banking firm needed a temp, and she could have an office with a door and free pads of paper. At her appointment the next week, though, she was told she was not an appropriate candidate for temp work. The temp-agency interviewer had her sit at a greasy computer with the g and the h rubbed out for a skills test. The program looked to be from the 1980s, beeping like a Russian computer-chess game whenever Evelyn did something wrong. Beep, when she even clicked on the wrong cell in the Excel portion. Beep—beep—beep with each wrong formatting choice as she composed a business letter. When she backspaced, flustered, it would beep again, making her panicky. At the end, the interviewer, folding his arms, suggested she could be more competitive in the job market if she enrolled in a typing class at a secretarial school.
On the drive back, through the brown dust and the flat land, as the unrented billboards peeling at the edges got to be too many, she hit her hand on the steering wheel. Secretarial school? she wanted to shout. I went to Sheffield. I was the main photograph on Appointment Book. I am someone. I was someone.