“The house?”
“We’re going to have to sell it, Evie. The lawyer is working out some pittance for us to live on. It’s beyond the legal fees we’re dealing with. If your father does go to prison, that’s months without income, and of course he can’t practice law again, so what we’re left with we have to make last until death.” She gave a bitter laugh. “You asked about rent money? Well, I’ve been looking at condos. Do you know what it feels like, having Jude Carea show me around a rental condo? How happy that trollop is that I’ve fallen so far?”
Evelyn’s hand flew to her shoulder, where she began massaging it, pressing, pushing against the knots. This couldn’t all be vanishing. She could do something. It wasn’t too late yet. Any shot that her family had at survival, both social and financial, was now up to her. She was almost out of time.
The light was changing in the foyer, becoming cold and gray, when Evelyn turned to her mother with a clear, hard look in her eye. Her breathing was loud; she could hear it huffing out of her nose. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “I have to get home. There are some things I need to do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Trophy Hall
Camilla’s erratic driving had gotten the foursome of Camilla, Nick, Scot, and Evelyn to Lake James with just one speeding ticket outside of Saratoga on the Northway; Camilla had been going ninety-three, she negotiated with the trooper to knock it down to eighty-seven, and Camilla said that by the time her family’s upstate vehicular attorney contested it in traffic court, she could get it dropped to a $200 fine and no points on her license.
Evelyn had called Camilla the moment she left Sag Neck to say that she’d love to come up for the weekend and sorry for being so flaky. She wondered whether Camilla would put both her and Jaime in rooms along the main hallway, which would make things easier. What did not make things easier was Scot being invited. When she’d met Camilla the previous night for drinks to float the idea of breaking up with Scot and see what the reaction would be, Nick had shown up at the bar with Scot at his side. The assumed inclusion annoyed Evelyn, and her digs at Scot that night got no cheering on from Camilla or Nick, which annoyed her further. Here, in the car, Scot was jabbing away at his BlackBerry and not partaking in the conversation at all. Barnacle Scot. Ubiquitous Scot.
In Bibville, after the cold thud she’d felt seeing the missing piano, she had identified Scot as being at the center of her problems. If she hadn’t spent all this time dating him, she would be in a solid position. She would be engaged to someone more prominent, blithe about her family issues, confident and settled, with money to spare. She closed off her memories of the parts of Scot she liked and made the case to herself that Scot’s sole function, the reason she’d put up with the wet kisses and the giant hands pawing at her, was to be supportive, to be the one person she could talk to about all her family problems, and he couldn’t even get that right. Her father would be sent to prison, her mother would move into a condo, and she would be out of money and tethered to this oafish midtier banker who was unable to do anything about her situation.
Unless.
Camilla pulled the car up to the marina, and the four of them headed to the waiting motorboat. At Sachem, Evelyn was relieved, for once, that she hadn’t gotten one of the best guest rooms; she and Scot had a twin-bed room, which meant she could get out of sex tonight easily.
While Evelyn read Vogue on one of the beds, Scot had gone out to do his “regimen,” as he referred to his calisthenics that he had evidently lifted from a 1910 athletic-training booklet. He returned with sweat rolling down his face forty minutes later, and Evelyn hoped he’d had the sense to exercise where no one could see him. When he bounded over to her to peck her on the cheek, Evelyn drew back and wiped his lip sweat off.
“Did anyone call?” he said, picking up the BlackBerry, which he’d left on his bed.
“Not a one,” she said, flipping the page of her Vogue. She was still in the thicket of advertisements before the masthead, as she’d spent the time he’d been working out trying to catalogue his faults and theorizing when and how Jaime might arrive. But nice memories of Scot kept creeping in, and she’d think of how he brought her warm milk in a grainy homemade mug one night when she was unable to sleep, then she’d push herself to counter that with the Greenwich Country Club golf game where every shot of his went sideways, and she, Nick, and Preston had to spend about four hours over nine holes looking for his lost balls. “Workout good?” she asked.