She was jostled awake as the car passed onto the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and her droopy eyelids opened to see the tall pyres that marked the decreasing distance between herself and her hometown of Bibville. She drifted off again, and when she opened her eyes, Valeriya was rattling up the gravel drive to Sag Neck, Evelyn’s house. Valeriya did not turn off her engine, and Evelyn had evidently made some faux pas, because Valeriya was curt when Evelyn said good-bye; Alexei, however, wished her a thick, “Good luck to you.”
Sag Neck was a mansion, Evelyn had said when they moved there when she was in elementary school, until her mother told her not to use the word “mansion.” It was a grand wooden house with lines of trees protecting it from its neighbors, with a gentle slope in the back down to Meetinghouse Creek. Downstairs was an imposing central hallway two stories high, marked by a chandelier and a thick wooden staircase. To the left was the living room, an underused library, and a formal dining room overlooking the grass and then the creek. To the right was the large piano room—Barbara called it a ballroom, but no ball had taken place there under their reign—that ran the length of the house. The kitchen was tucked into the back. It had been a massive upgrade from the house Evelyn had been born in, a split-level in the D.C. suburb of Silver Spring with brown walls and brown cabinets and brown grass, which they’d all happily left behind after her father started winning his big cases.
The door to Sag Neck was unlocked, and swollen with moisture, as it always was in summer. When Evelyn yanked the door open, the house was silent inside.
“Hello? Mom? Dad?”
“Evelyn, is that you?” Her mother’s voice came from upstairs somewhere.
“What’s going on? Why didn’t Dad pick me up? I had the strangest ride with Valeriya and her husband.”
“Yes, why didn’t your father pick you up?”
Evelyn was tired and not in the mood to play her mother’s word games. “Do you know where he is?”
“I don’t know anything your father does, apparently.” She heard a door shut, and a lock slide, and that was it for Evelyn’s welcome home.
“Mom?” she tried once more, but there was no answer. Evelyn flipped on a row of light switches and headed back to the kitchen. Her head was inside a lower cupboard, where snacks could sometimes be found, when the sudden clatter of the back door sent Evelyn’s head smashing against the cupboard’s top. Dale Beegan burst through the door, sweating, panting, in alarmingly tight bike shorts, and almost tripped over his crouched-down daughter.
“Jesus H. Christ, Evie, what are you doing hiding out in the kitchen like a scurrying rat? Stand up and be seen!”
“Ow. I would have, if I’d known you were going to startle me like that,” Evelyn said, touching the back of her head. “I think I have a lump.”
Dale headed to the sink and gulped down a glass of water. He still had great hair, brown and thick and glossy, and the plump cheeks of a happy baby. His teeth were very white, as he put on his Crest Whitestrips every evening after dinner and wore them for the recommended thirty minutes without embarrassment. He was starting to look more like Barbara’s son than her husband, a change Evelyn knew better than to ever hint at.
“What’re you doing, scaring an old man like that?”
“I didn’t expect you to be home, since you didn’t pick me up and everything.”
He filled the glass with more water. “I’m sure you’ll be A-OK.”
“Let’s hope so. So Valeriya said you’ve been home for a few days?”
Dale plopped his used glass down on the counter. “How is that fine city of yours, Evie? The fancy people you work for giving you an easy time?”
“Actually, the work is somewhat challenging,” she said sharply.
“Dealing with rich folks always is,” he said. “I’ve always found it more satisfying to work with people who are struggling, myself.”
But you fly first-class to do it, Evelyn thought, ripping open the cardboard top to a box of saltines. Her father had been born in North Carolina, in a textile-mill town, and both of his parents worked at the mill. His family’s house was on the other side of the creek from the solid brick houses of the richer management families. Dale said he saw how the mill owners came down on people’s lives, and that made him want to become an advocate for the people who couldn’t get heard on their own, people like his parents. In his town, the stores downtown closed early, because they wanted to cater to the brick-house wives, who didn’t work, rather than the mill-worker wives, who did. Though Dale went to school and church with the brick-house boys, in summers he was the one behind the ice-cream counter, and they were the ones in front of it. Dale determined he’d become a college graduate, and that he’d go into law, and that he’d show those stiff-collared rich boys that everyone deserved a shot.