“Make peace with him, then,” Evie said.
“I don’t much feel like it.”
“Well, I didn’t say apologize. Just get on speaking terms. We’ll have them to dinner with my father, settle all this family business at one sitting.”
“Nah, it’d never work out,” Drum said.
“We could give it a try, though.”
She set the dinner for the second Sunday in November. That Friday in school she invited her father, choosing one of those moments when they met in the hall and stood awkwardly searching for something to say. Then she telephoned Drum’s mother from the drugstore. “Thank you, but we’ll not trouble you by coming,” Mrs. Casey said, and hung up. Evie dialed again. The receiver was lifted on the first ring. “Mrs. Casey, we were expecting you,” Evie said. That was the only argument she could think of, but it seemed to be enough. “Oh, well, then,” Mrs. Casey said, “I reckon we can fit it in. I don’t believe in letting people down.”
Evie fixed a casserole a full day ahead: tuna fish and canned peas. Early Sunday morning she washed all the ash trays and filmed them with floor wax, the way Good Housekeeping had told her to. She refused to let Drum use them after that; he had to carry around a Mason jar lid. “This is getting on my nerves,” he said. “Can’t you just relax?”
But she couldn’t. She worried that her father might be dismayed by the house, or that Mrs. Casey would start a fight. All these weeks she had been half expecting an annulment to come through (a scroll of parchment, she pictured it, stamped with the state seal and “Esse quam videri,” arriving in a mailing tube to prove that she was nobody’s wife after all) and now she wondered if Mrs. Casey planned to bring it in person. “Here. A little housewarming gift.” She remembered exactly the flowing tone of Mrs. Casey’s voice, soft but pushing steadily forward, and the rhythm it set up with the other voices trying to survive beside it. What if an argument started somehow between Mrs. Casey and Evie’s father? Her father would be beaten to the ground. She straightened the table settings nervously, stood back to squint at them, and then straightened them again.
Her father arrived first. When she opened the door to him he stood folded into his thin overcoat with his hands in his pockets. He entered stooping, as if he were coming to inspect a child’s playhouse. “Well,” he said. “So this is where you live.” Then he smiled and kissed her, looking at the floor.
“Do you like it?” Evie asked him.
“It’s a little cold, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s very comfortable.”
“What do you use for heat?”
“We have a very good oil stove. There, see? Over there.”
“Oh, yes,” said her father. But he still didn’t look.
Then Drum’s parents came, and Drum appeared from the bedroom buttoning his shirt cuffs. He stood still while his mother kissed him on one cheek. Mrs. Casey wore a feathered hat and a rayon dress with a draped bosom; Mr. Casey was in a blue suit and white spectator shoes. He was sharp-boned and whiskery, with very round bright eyes. Nothing like Drum. Evie had never seen him before, but instead of introducing them Mrs. Casey just tipped her head toward him and he nodded gravely. “We like to got lost,” Mrs. Casey said. “Well. I was wondering what kind of house you all had. My, it surely is — I understand you teach, Mr. Decker.” The neckline of her dress pouched outward, framing a V of skin reddened by the constant pinching motion of her fingers. Gardenia perfume powdered the air around her. She carried no documents.
At dinner they all outdid each other in compliments and small courtesies. They circulated serving dishes, spoon side outward; they leapt to pass the butter to whoever asked for it and they filled silences with hopeful questions. Like salesmen, they over-used each other’s names. “Mr. Decker, have you lived in Farinia all your life?” “Evie tells me you run a service station, Mr. Casey.” “Do you bowl, Mr. Decker?” Meanwhile Evie watched anxiously as her food disappeared into people’s mouths, and Drum ate in silence with his face calm and distant.
The only tension was over the contest to be best-behaved. Evie’s father won. He said, “Evie, Drum, I’m giving you a late wedding present. Well, nothing very fancy, but I’m buying myself a new car. Would you like the VW?”
“Boy. Sure would,” said Drum. “We got the devil’s own time getting anywhere.”
“That’s what I thought. I know that Evie isn’t, doesn’t keep a perfect attendance record these days. Not that it’s any of my business, but I figured a car might help.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” Evie said. The afternoon was too perilous to bother arguing about her attendance record. Her father sat with his fingers together, the tip of his nose whitening as it always did under strain. Mrs. Casey was pleating the V of skin again.
“Lord knows we don’t have extra cars to hand out,” she said, “or anything like that; we’re only simple folk. But your daddy here was thinking you might want your old job back, Bertram. Plenty would give their right arms for that job.”
“Well, I could use it, I reckon,” Drum said. “Sure.”
The three parents sat side by side, keeping their backs very straight, as if the couch were something breakable.
At three o’clock they left. Mrs. Casey said, “Well, I surely did — Obed, where is my purse? Now, don’t be a stranger, Bertram. You come by whenever you like — even if you just get lonesome, or hungry for a snack. Thank you for the sweet lunch, Evie.”
“Joyed it,” said Mr. Casey.
Evie’s father carefully buttoned all the buttons of his coat. He kissed Evie on the cheek and shook Drum’s hand. “My car will be coming next Wednesday,” he said. “Thursday I’ll give you the keys to the VW. Won’t you come by and see me sometime?”
“Oh, of course,” said Evie. “It’s just that these last few weeks have been so busy. Getting settled and all.”
“You could come for supper some night. Will you do that?”
“Of course,” Evie said.
She stood beside Drum in the doorway, shivering slightly, watching the two cars grow smaller. “Now,” Drum said. “It’s over and done with.”
She nodded.
“And hot dog, we got us a car. Ain’t that something? I always did like stick-shifts.”
“I believe that’s all you can think about,” Evie said.
“Huh?”
“Well, you could at least have said thank you. Or talked to him more. Oh, I know that car, it smells woolly like his school suit and I will think about that every time I get in it. Couldn’t you just tell him you appreciated it?”
“Nothing wrong with a woolly smell,” said Drum.
“No,” Evie said, giving up. So when he suddenly tightened his arms around her, pulling her close, it came as a surprise.
“Don’t fret, I’m here,” he said.
Beneath his shirt she felt his rib cage, thin and warm, and she heard the steady beating of his heart.
12
Then one Saturday at the Unicorn, Drum got into an argument. Not a fist fight, this time; just a shouting quarrel. It was almost midnight. Evie was splitting a burnt-out match into tiny slivers of paper while she waited for the evening to end, and the crowd had thinned enough so that she heard clearly when Drum’s voice rose in the back room. “The hell you say. What you trying to pull, Zack?” She looked up, first toward the back room and then at the people sharing her table — three couples, talking softly over empty beer mugs, separated from other couples by a jungle of vacant chairs. None of them paid any attention. “Ah, don’t give me that,” Drum said. Evie rose and pushed through the chairs and behind the band platform. When she reached the back room she squinted in through layers of smoke. There was Drum, facing the proprietor and holding his guitar by the neck. David stood beside him. “… to be sensible about this, Drum,” he was saying. Nearest Evie were Joseph Ballew and Joseph’s bass player. “I don’t see Joseph getting treated so light,” Drum said.