With Dale working, Evelyn’s youth had been mostly her and Barbara, a table for two at the Eastern Tennis Club. As a kid, on Monday mornings, Evelyn would wait until she heard the crunch of her father’s shoes on the gravel, then would slip out to the piano room and sit under the itchy navy blanket on the couch. She tried to keep her eyes open until her mother joined her minutes later, but was often dozing when she felt the cool hand stroke her hair, and then Evelyn would open her eyes, and her mother would open the piano and begin to play. Barbara started with scales, light and fluid, and then moved to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” or “Bill.” Sometimes she’d ask Evelyn what she wanted to hear. Evelyn, who’d always been thinking about this question for several days, would tell her. If her mother and father had been angry with each other, Evelyn would ask for “Waitin’ for My Dearie” or “If I Loved You,” thinking that no one could play those songs and not be in love. If her mother had been having a moody few days, Evelyn would ask for a funny song, like “Sister Suffragette.” Sometimes, when her mother had been happy for a day or two, and was making plans with friends or for Evelyn, Evelyn knew she could ask for what she really wanted: “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There’s a place for us, she’d sing to her stuffed animals at night.
Evelyn started to play when she was five, and her large-note Clementi and Mozart workbooks were still stacked in the built-in cupboards on the side of the Sag Neck piano room, along with Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Frank Loesser from when she improved. She was surprised by how much better her pieces sounded when they moved in—the piano room was almost like a concert hall. No one bothered her in there when she was playing, but sometimes Evelyn could crane her neck over the piano and see her mother sitting outside on the patio, listening. Those were the best times, her mother there but facing away from her and watching Meetinghouse Creek list by, a window offering a firm divide between them, Evelyn’s fingers creating songs.
Evelyn used to wait up on Fridays for her father to come home from Wilmington for the weekend. That had changed after the Peg Oney case. After opening arguments, her family went out to dinner with the plaintiffs at an Italian place with plastic menus on the side of the highway, and everyone in town had come up to her father to thank him for the work he was doing. “Your father’s such a special man…” “He’s been real good to us…” “You’re so lucky…” Her father was so busy taking in adulation that he barely spoke to her and her mother, even after their long trip.
Barbara hauled Dale away from the adoring crowd, and Evelyn wanted to hide under the table when she saw her mother pull from her purse a handmade pink-paper valentine that Evelyn had brought home from school the week before which said “Dad” in her scrapey handwriting on the front, and shove it at Dale’s chest. It felt like that was her own pink heart beating on that rough paper as her father stared at it and then his mouth turned into a line and neither he nor her mother said anything to her about it and she couldn’t sleep well that night, imagining the valentine on top of a pile of old linguine in the restaurant’s Dumpster. Barbara and Evelyn left Cresheim three days ahead of schedule.
That was when Barbara began making Evelyn her confidante and coconspirator, which was thrilling sometimes and sometimes hugely uncomfortable. Barbara explained that Dale was free with his own purchases when he felt like it, but stingy with Barbara. So she would send Evelyn into his study to ask him if they could please have new tennis rackets or a landscaper, and he would sometimes acquiesce. As Evelyn grew older, she started to feel wringing inside when she did this, seeing his eyes lift from the page once again to see his daughter, now taller in the study’s door frame, now asking for things she wanted: money so she could travel around Europe during her term in Sarennes, the additional fee for a single room at Davidson.
As Barbara drove Evelyn to school, or the Eastern Tennis Club, Evelyn heard a steady sound track. Your father’s never here. Your father’s canceled again. Your father’s the reason I didn’t get on that committee. Your father’s a social liability. If your father hadn’t been a plaintiffs’ lawyer. If your father hadn’t been a lawyer. Then, Evelyn, then we really could have made it.
*
The affenpinscher was now springing around with a sparrow-sized bird in his mouth. Evelyn wondered if he had killed it first or if the poor bird was dying of fright as she watched. The idea that a grand jury was investigating her father was massive, pulsing, scary. It was so careless of him to put himself in this position. Her father gave her a hard time for her People Like Us job, but he had done something questionable enough to have federal investigators looking at it? She had to come begging for $450, but investigators thought he had bribed experts to get multimillion-dollar verdicts?
“Evelyn!” she heard her mother shout from down the hall, then footsteps.
“Evelyn?” Her mother opened the door without knocking. “You’re not changed.”
“Changed?”
“For the party. We’re leaving in thirty minutes.”
“You’re still going to the Channings’ party?”
“We are still going, yes. I have no interest in not going and letting that be the talk of the party. Get dressed,” Barbara said.
Evelyn continued looking out the window.
“Evelyn, I mean it. Get dressed. You have five minutes.”
Evelyn shifted around on the window seat and looked at her mother. Barbara had clearly put effort into her outfit. She had a scarf wrapped around her neck and wore her largest pearl necklace, a navy linen shift, and beige Ferragamo pumps. She was also wearing her upgraded diamond ring that she’d selected for her and Dale’s twentieth anniversary.