When they reached Farinia, Drum said, “Let’s wake Mom and tell her the news. Tell her we want a celebration.” He might have been speaking only to David; Evie wasn’t sure. The two of them bounded across the darkened service area while Evie followed at a distance, hanging back a little and looking around her and stopping to search in her pocketbook for nothing at all.
Mrs. Casey wore a pink chenille bathrobe, and her hair was set in spindly metal curlers all over her head. When she opened the door her hand flew to the curlers. “Bertram, my land, I thought you was alone,” she said.
“Now, Mom, did you wait up again?” Drum circled her with one arm, nearly pulling her off her feet. “Listen, Mom. We want us a celebration. A man came and hired us to play two weeks at the Parisian.”
“Is that right? Well, now,” she said. When she was pleased her cheeks grew round and shiny, and little tucks appeared at the corners of her mouth. “I was just mixing up hot chocolate. Will you all have some?”
“Nah. Beer.”
She talked even while she was out in the kitchen, freezing the three of them into silence. They sat in a row on the couch and looked toward the doorway. “I just know this is the break you been waiting for,” she called. “Once you’re in the city your name gets around more. Oh, I’ve half a mind to wake your daddy. Won’t he be surprised. ‘Now,’ I’ll say, ‘tell me again who’s wasting time when he should be pumping gas?’ The Parisian is a right famous place, you know. A lot of important people go there. Remember your cousin Emma, Drum? That’s where she had the rehearsal supper, before her wedding. I was there. Well, little did I dream, of course, at the time. Is Evie going too?”
Evie stared at the doorway until it blurred.
“What for?” Drum asked.
“Why, to sit at her little table.”
“Nah,” said Drum.
“Oh, go on, Evie.”
David cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, Evie’s been thinking of quitting,” he said. “Weren’t you, Evie?”
“That’s right.”
“She feels the point has been made, by now. No sense going on with it.”
“Well, no, I suppose not,” said Mrs. Casey.
She appeared in the doorway with three cans of beer on a pizza tin. “She might want to come with your daddy and me and just watch, though,” she said.
“She don’t,” said Drum.
“Will you let her speak for herself?”
Everybody looked at Evie. Evie stared down at her laced fingers and said, “I don’t know. If it was up to me, I mean — I might want to come just once and hear him play.”
“There now. You see?” Mrs. Casey told Drum.
Drum slammed his beer down on the coffee table. “Will you get her off my back?” he said.
“Bertram!”
“Now, I mean this. I have had it. How do you think it feels to look at that face night after night when I’m playing? Do you think I like it? Following me with those eyes, watching every move. It wasn’t my fault she cut those fool letters. Am I going to have to go on paying for it forever?”
“Bertram. No one’s asking you to pay for it. She just wants to come hear your music, that’s all.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” said Drum.
“Oh, you’re turning hard, son. Are you going to be one of those stars that forgets the little people?”
“Well, wait now,” said David. He stood up. “Seems to me we’re getting worked up over nothing. If Drum don’t want Evie in the audience she won’t come. Right, Evie?”
“Right,” said Evie. The word opened a door, letting through a flashing beam of anger that took her by surprise. “I won’t come now or ever. Ever again. Not if that’s the way he feels.”
“Praise the Lord,” said Drum.
“And another thing, Drum Casey. If I had known what a cold and self-centered person you are those letters wouldn’t be there, I can promise you that. And your music is boring, it tends to get repetitious, and I hope everybody at the Parisian notices that the very first night and sends you home again. I hope you cry every mile of the way.”
“Why, Evie,” Mrs. Casey said.
“Not only that, but you can’t even play the guitar. You just hammer out noise like any fool at a Coke party, and I hope they notice that too.”
“That’s a lie,” said Drum. “You’re talking crazy.”
“Oh, am I?” She stood, but her knees felt shaky and she sat down again. “I may not be musical but I know that much. Joseph Ballew can play better any day.”
“He can not. Joseph don’t know one end of the guitar from the other.”
“That’s more than you know.”
“You’re out of your head. I play a great guitar. Don’t I, David?”
“Why, surely you do,” Mrs. Casey said.
“All you’ve got going,” said Evie, “is the speaking out and me. Well, the speaking out does not make sense and I’m going to cut my hair in bangs. Then see how far you go.”
“I was working at the Unicorn before I ever heard your name. I didn’t notice anyone asking how come no girl had cut ‘Casey’ in her forehead. Did you, David?”
“It was a waste,” Evie said.
“Will you stop that talk?”
“It was all for nothing.”
“I play a great guitar,” Drum said.
On the way home, Evie cried into the hem of her skirt. David kept quiet. When they had reached her house he said, “That ties it, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” Evie said.
“No harm done.”
From what she could see in the dark, he seemed to be smiling. She smiled back and smoothed her skirt down. “Well, it looks like I won’t be seeing you again,” she said.
“No, I guess not. Been quite an experience knowing you, though.”
“Well. Good-bye.”
Before she shut the car door behind her she made certain she hadn’t forgotten anything. She wanted to leave no traces, not even a scrap of paper fluttering on the floor to make them remember her and laugh. Her father was downstairs reading, wearing his faded plaid bathrobe. “I was just about to call Violet,” he said. “Aren’t you a little late?”
“We ran into some friends.”
“Oh. There’s cocoa in the kitchen.”
“I don’t want any.”
She started toward her room, but halfway up the stairs she thought she heard his voice. “Did you say something?” she called.
“I said, are those the only clothes you’ve got? Remind me in the morning to give you some shopping money.”
“I don’t want any,” Evie said.
8
She cut herself a set of bangs, long enough to cover her eyebrows. Her eyes without eyebrows looked worried and surprised. And because her hair was puffy at the sides, she sometimes had the feeling she was living under a mushroom button. “There’s my girl,” her father said. “I’m going to find you a plastic surgeon, too. Would you go? I always knew you would come out of this, if I just let you be.” Then he went off to paint the back porch, whistling a tune she couldn’t recognize.
She threw away her black skirt and blouse, her snapshot of Drum at the Unicorn, Fay-Jean’s pencil drawing and the posed photograph his mother had given her. That was all that was left of him. She walked downtown under Clotelia’s huge umbrella and laid in a stack of school supplies for the coming year. On the way home she bought a Tar City newspaper. “Like everything else,” she read, “night-life seems to be suffering from the heat wave. The Manhattan Club has no entertainment at all this week, and the Parisian’s Drumstrings Casey is strictly amateur.” She refolded the newspaper and pushed it through the swinging door of a trashcan.