The world always said to just be yourself, but it turned out when Evelyn was herself, no guys were at all interested, so she was left with games of make-believe, expressing enthusiasm for whatever the men wanted to do, be it rock climbing or going to a cheese-beer pairing or a Knicks game.
As she walked west on Seventy-fourth, trying to keep thoughts of her father’s case out of her head, she managed until a woman in a gray suit who had the sharp angles of a prosecutor gave her an unsettling second glance. Evelyn turned south. At Seventy-second, she started to wonder what papers the case had been covered in. By Seventieth, she worried that her father would go to jail. By Sixty-ninth, when she turned west, she thought that all her friends and her bosses at PLU might know already and were just snickering behind her back about it. When she finally stopped outside Le Charlot, her whole life was careening away.
She thought she had composed herself when she walked inside and saw Scot at a table sipping water. She walked over, and meant to open her mouth and say something light and happy, and instead she found that she was standing with an open mouth and with no sound coming out, and then she was crying.
Scot wriggled out of his seat and, to Evelyn’s surprise, didn’t hesitate, just pulled her into an enveloping hug. His chest was hard and warm, and his arms long enough to wrap her right up, and his cotton sweater was soft, and he smelled like Christmas, and for once he said the right thing by saying nothing.
“Do you want to walk?” he said, after a few minutes during which she soaked his shirt with tears. She nodded, and tried to dab at the dark spot she’d left on his sky-blue cotton, but he just said, “Shhh,” and guided her through the blurry restaurant. As he turned her onto Sixty-ninth Street, Evelyn started blurting out one-word attempts at explaining herself. Scot didn’t force anything, just left his big, warm hand on her back and walked slowly with her down the block, across the street, down another block, across another street, occasionally circling his hand around her back, but otherwise just letting her cry. Finally, she sank onto a bench outside an optometrist’s office and tried to subtly wipe away what must be pooling mascara from under her eyes as Scot sat down beside her.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just family stuff.”
“Okay,” he said. She couldn’t remember being so relieved at a word. No questions. No prying. Just okay.
“Okay?” she repeated.
“Okay.” He stroked her hair, and she felt that delicious soothing tingle she’d felt the few times she was invited to middle-school sleepovers and the girls braided one another’s hair. “Do you still feel like eating?” he asked softly.
She shook her head.
“Do you want me to take you home?”
She shook it again.
“Should we just sit here for a while?”
She looked up and saw, through her tears, someone across the street who looked like a Sheffield classmate. It wasn’t, but it was close enough that she just wanted to leave the area. “Why don’t we go to your neighborhood?” she said.
“Wall Street on a Sunday? It’s going to be quiet.”
“Quiet sounds good,” said Evelyn, sniffling. “Quiet sounds very good.”
Scot squeezed her closer to him, then rose and hailed a cab.
His apartment was in a giant tower on Gold Street, where all the buildings loomed over narrow colonial-era streets, making them feel dark and dank even on this early summer night. He guided her past the clanging and drilling from construction, the profiteers selling tacky postcards promising we would never forget, the tourists trying to figure out which one was Fulton. The building itself was typical Wall Street bachelor, with a pool in the basement and a giant lobby of black-and-white tiles and couches that no one ever sat in.
Scot’s apartment, number 5G, was similarly huge and bare. The living room contained an enormous and hard-looking gray couch, a flat-screen TV, a sound system with giant silver speakers, and two stools lined up at a pass-through window to the small kitchen.