She remembered the last time Jake was up in her rooms, fourteen months before, and how she’d told him off. You don’t understand, she’d said. I worked for them too. It was embarrassing how stupid the two of them were those days.
Evie went up to the bathroom and locked the door. She was crying and didn’t want Jake to see. She didn’t know what he was here for or what she could give him to make him go away. Through her tears she looked down and saw her hands and really cried. Gouges where she’d slipped with a needle. Her nails unpainted. Calluses spread over her fingers like glaciers. She’d moved on, hadn’t she? She was freer to live how she wanted to without worrying what trouble Jake might drag her into. She was doing well. She was making it. Except that she was locked in the bathroom again, and Jake was there outside the door.
He asked her to let him in after a while but she wouldn’t.
“Did you miss me?” she asked through the door. “Is that why you came back?” Her voice was soft and halting, her syllables muted because it felt like she was choking.
“Let me in,” Jake begged. He slipped his fingers under the door. “What did you do with the money? You could of bailed me out. They would of let me stay. I could of kept my job.” He was such a fool. “What did you do with the thousand-dollar bill?”
He didn’t leave, but he didn’t say more about the money, and that was wise. He was better when he kept his mouth shut.
She’d quit crying a long time before. She calmed down, all that shameful grief out of the way, and she began to think—if he wasn’t leaving—what it was she wanted from Jake, if anything.
“Didn’t you wonder about that girl Doreen before? How long did you say? Two years since you saw her last. What did you think happened to a girl without a way to take care of herself?”
Jake said he wanted Evie to open the door. He wanted to see her face. To end the waiting.
“Anything you could say would be useless now,” she said. “Don’t you know I take care of myself? I have my business.” Jake said he had no idea. “I make garments for the girls around here. Quite a lot of them too. The girls don’t have to go down to the muck anymore and can have nice things to wear. Didn’t you wonder how I’d manage to keep up the rent? Didn’t you worry if I’d be long gone when you came to knock? Or if some new dick would answer? Or if I’d be out on the street?”
“That’s great” was all he could muster. “What you’re doing.”
Evie didn’t need him. She’d figured it out on her own and didn’t need some poor yokel to take care of her.
She opened the door and was in the kitchen by the time he realized she’d gone by. She checked the icebox, pulled out some milk and poured a glass for Jake. She poured another for herself and took a bite from a plum.
“Look,” she said. “You can’t stay here. You’re imposing. I don’t like it.”
He drank the milk in three gulps and set his glass next to the bottle.
“I’m not asking to stay.”
“I’m not offering either. Yet you’re still here.”
Evie shouldn’t have answered his letter. She shouldn’t have let him in, but it was too late to go back on that. He washed the glass in her sink and dried it with a towel. “Look at all this stuff you did around here,” he said. “Must have kept a carpenter busy most of a month. New tables. Doors!” He looked so much older now. With a beard, the way his hair was cut short up the sides. How his shoulders were bent and his arms hung lower. He was tan too, his skin dark and cracked where it bowed around his eyes. His nose sunburned.
“I’ll be around a few days,” he said. “I want to go to the carnival. On Sunday there’s supper at Maria’s.”
“I’m not going to Sunday supper,” Evie said.
He pulled out a near-empty billfold to count his money. He couldn’t stay long.
The Ak-Sar-Ben carnival was in full swing, its midway congested and loud. Traffic was slowed by meandering farmers on vacation, kids in truck beds, hair full of nits and dust. They wanted to see clowns and have their stomachs drop on a whirl-a-whirl ride, to catch a vaudeville routine and eat caramel apples and laugh at tiki men in grass skirts. They wanted merry-go-rounds, dancing bears, a Ferris wheel. There would be a big parade, theater shows put on nonstop, a coronation ball to crown the new King Ak and his queen. It was a great honor among the hoity-toity to be crowned or have a teenage daughter subjected to the king during the festivities.