Afternoons, she visited Violet. All summer she had stayed home and let Violet come to her, and now she felt as if she had returned from some long hard trip that no one else knew about. The off-hand clutter of Violet’s room and her smiling fat family had a clear and distant look. New china horses had joined the parade across Violet’s bureau. On the closet door was a life-size poster of a movie star she had never even heard of. “What have you been doing all summer?” she asked Violet.
“What do you mean? You’ve seen me every day, haven’t you?”
“Well, yes.” She sat forward on the bed, cupping her chin in her hand. “Seems like I had two summers,” she said. “Two different ones. Sometimes I think, was that me, riding large as life between two boys to a road-house? Why, I never was on a date, even, except with that peculiar Buddy Howland whose voice never changed. I can’t believe I did it all.”
“Oh, remembering things is always that way,” Violet said.
“Not for me. Nothing to bother remembering, before. And I would rather not remember this. Why was I such a fool? You should have stopped me.”
“The best thing now is just to drop the subject from your mind,” Violet said.
“You’re right. I will. Let’s talk about something else. Did you know my father is taking over Miss Cone’s class? He said that she—”
“You told me that.”
“I did?”
“Last month.”
“Oh. I forgot.” She rose sharply from the bed, causing Violet to grab for her bottle of nail polish. “You see what I mean. I don’t remember telling you a thing about it. Oh, how am I going to get over all this? I wish I had spent the summer swimming or being a camp counselor. Or just snug in my house reading books, even. I wish someone would give me back all the time I’ve known Drum Casey, and I would change everything I did.”
“You were going to drop the subject,” Violet said.
But she couldn’t. She spent her mornings skating a slick surface, keeping busy, but afternoons she sprawled across Violet’s unmade bed and said the same things again and again, and Violet listened with a sort of cheerful tolerance that made it seem safe to say them.
On Monday morning, over a week since her fight with Drum, Evie settled down to cleaning out her desk. It helped to do things with bustle in them. Just as she started on the second drawer she heard Clotelia call, “Evie? You wanted down here.”
“Coming,” said Evie. She came out and looked down the stair well to the front hall. Clotelia stood waiting there with her arms folded and her feet apart. “You got a guest,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“Come on down, I told you.”
“Oh, all right.”
“Your father be home any minute, now.”
“Well, what about it?”
But Clotelia only jerked a thumb toward the living room. Downstairs, Drum Casey was sitting on the couch with his boots on the coffee table. His head lolled to one side, as if he were asleep. Evie stopped short in the doorway and stared at him. She felt separated from him by a wall of glass, protected by the thick new bangs on her forehead and the days she had spent removing him from her mind in bits and crumbs. His eyes were closed; she could look at his face without feeling he might blind her by looking back. His mouth was relaxed, almost open. He needed a shave. His hands, with their nails cut short for the guitar strings, lay loosely curled on his legs. When she saw his hands she made a small movement, only enough to smooth her bangs down, but Drum rolled his head toward her and looked from beneath lowered lids. “Hey,” he said.
“Hello,” said Evie.
He sat up and moved his feet off the coffee table. The silence grew to the point where it would be hard to break. “I didn’t know it was you,” Evie said finally. “Clotelia didn’t say. Do you want a lemonade? You’re hot, I bet—”
Behind her, Clotelia said, “Your father be home any minute, Evie.”
“Oh. Yes, my father’s coming,” Evie said.
But that didn’t seem to mean anything to Drum. He sat forward and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I ain’t slept since Saturday,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I got fired.”
“What?”
“Fired, I said.”
“Oh, well, they don’t know,” said Evie, thinking of the reviews. “It’s the weather. In this heat they can’t tell good music from bad.”
“Music, hell. That was just an excuse. I was getting on good with the manager’s daughter and he didn’t like it, that’s all. Said I hadn’t worked out well. ‘Goddam man that hires these people—’ he said. I said, ‘Nobody does that to me.’ End of it all was a fight.”
“A fight? With fists?”
“What else. Fists and the police station and the works. He was just peeved over his daughter is all.”
Evie blinked, cutting off the daughter forever with a single movement. “That’s illegal,” she said. “You can hold him to his contract.”
“Contract, what do you think I am? A movie star?”
“Well, he can’t just fire you.”
“Guess again.” Drum took a comb from his shirt pocket. “Now they got my name on the books, down at the police station. Just what I needed. You ever seen those movies where the mother tells the cops, ‘He’s a good boy?’ That’s what my mother did. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she says. Then she paid the damages and yanked me outdoors and said she might’ve known this would happen. Said I had disgraced them all, what would my daddy say, if she had had any sense she would have put me to work like everyone told her to. Now, I ask you. Won’t my own family even stand by me? When I got home my daddy wouldn’t let me in the house. ‘I am just too pissed off to look at you right now,’ he says. ‘Sleep down in the car. I’ll talk with you in the morning.’ ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel,’ I said, and walked right off. I don’t care if I never see the place again.”
“Where is David?” Evie asked.
“David. Home, I reckon. He didn’t get in no fight, not him. I would’ve gone and spent the night at his house but you know his mother, she hates my guts.”
“What for?”
“No reason I know of. I never did a thing to her.”
Out in the hallway, Clotelia gave a sudden sharp sigh. “Go fix some lemonade,” Evie told her.
“Evie, your father going to hit the roof if he find him here.”
“Never mind, fix some lemonade.”
Clotelia pivoted on one heel and left. Drum seemed not to have noticed her. He combed his hair, ran one hand across it, and put the comb back in his pocket. “I spent the night on someone’s porch,” he said, “but didn’t sleep none. Now my eyelids feel scratchy. I don’t know what my daddy has against me, but he never will listen to reason, not for one second. Never asks my side of nothing. Oh, well, him I’m used to. But Mom? ‘Bertram, you have just killed my soul,’ she told me. ‘I ain’t got no more faith in you.’ Mom! What would you say to that? I went by home this morning after I saw his service truck pull out and, ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘could I just have some biscuits and a little side meat for my breakfast?’ She said, ‘Yes, here, I done saved you some, but you better not come by no more, Bertram, until you set it right. Meaning make up the money and apologize and get you a steady job.’ Well, I never thought I would live to hear her talk that way. ‘Now you know it wunt my fault,’ I told her. ‘That man is just real possessive over his daughter and for no good reason either, since she is right wild and always has been. But he just won’t see it,’ I said, ‘and up and fired me on some manufactured cause.’ Mom says, ‘Oh, Bertram, where are you going to end up? Sometimes I feel you won’t even amount to a hill of beans,’ she says, and then she pushed a little brown bag of food on me. Well, it was like I had just heard something crack, the final floorboard I was resting on. I won’t be going back now.”