“What are you doing here?” he asked her finally.
“This is where I live.”
“Well, where you been? You think you can just stay away all night and then pop back in again?”
“I’ve been home. My father died.”
“Oh. Oh, Lord.” He looked for help to Fay-Jean, but Fay-Jean sat among the blankets groping her way upward through her black dress. Nothing showed but two limp arms raised toward the ceiling. When her face had poked through she said, “Well, excuse me for being here but you were away, after all. Will you zip me up?”
“Certainly,” Evie said. Now, too late, she hit upon the polite tone of voice she had needed for the grown-ups. She zipped the dress while Fay-Jean held her hair off her neck; she waited patiently while Fay-Jean trailed long toes beneath the bed feeling for her spike-heeled shoes. Meanwhile Drum had risen and was shaking out his dungarees. He wore yellowed underpants and an undershirt with a hole in the chest, its neckband frayed. He hopped one-footed into the dungarees, clenching his muscles against the cold. “Look,” he kept saying. “Wait. Listen.” But nothing more. Evie handed Fay-Jean her coat and saw her to the door. “How do I get out of here?” Fay-Jean asked.
“Walk to the highway and catch a bus.”
“Walk? In these shoes? Couldn’t you just drive me?”
“I don’t have the time,” Evie said, and shut the door.
She went to the kitchen and began making coffee, still in her coat. The coat gave her a brisk, competent feeling. While she was waiting for butter to melt in the frying pan Drum came out, dressed in his dungarees and a khaki shirt, and stood behind her. “Well, I don’t know what to say,” he said.
Evie tilted the frying pan, evening the butter.
“And then about your father. Well. He was a right nice guy.”
She rapped an egg and broke it, neatly.
“I don’t know what got into me,” Drum said. “It was that kidnapping. How could you do me that way? And then it looked like you had decided not to come back again. Either that or forgot all about it. We waited and waited, those three girls just tapping around the tool shed. Violet trying to start up campfire songs. Evie, say something. What are you thinking?”
“I am thinking that we have to get organized,” Evie said. “Have you ever looked at this place? It’s a mess. And I’m freezing to death, it’s much too cold.”
“Well, is that what you want to talk about? Housekeeping?”
“Not housekeeping, just things in general. You’ve got to pull yourself together, Drum. I keep meaning to tell you this: I’m expecting a baby. It’s coming in six months or so.”
She scrambled the eggs around rapidly, not looking at him. Drum said nothing. Finally she let out her breath and said, “Did you hear me?”
“I heard.”
“Well, you don’t act like it.”
“It just took me by surprise, like,” Drum said. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“I was waiting for the right time.”
“Is this the right time?”
Then she did look at him, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He leaned against the wall with his boots crossed, his eyes fixed on the swirling eggs, so that all she could see were the straight dark lines of his lashes. “Right time or not,” she said after a minute, “we are going to have to make some arrangements. Now, my father has left me his house. We can move in this afternoon — just pack up and leave this place. Start a new life. Give some shape to things.”
“You mean live there? Live in his house?”
“It’s our house now.”
“It’s your house.”
“Well, what’s the difference?”
“I like it where we are,” Drum said.
“We can’t stay here, Drum.”
“I don’t know why not.”
“We just can’t.”
“Well, I can’t go there,” said Drum.
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. I can’t do it.”
He sat down at the kitchen table, bracing himself with his hands as if he had a headache. Evie stared at him, but he wouldn’t say any more. He folded his arms on the table and waited. She poured his coffee, dished out his eggs, and found him a fork. Then she said, “All right. I’ll go there alone.”
“You mean leave me?”
“If I have to.”
“You don’t have to,” said Drum. “Evie, I don’t know why you are talking this way. Is it Fay-Jean? Fay-Jean don’t mean nothing. I swear it. Oh, how am I going to convince you?”
“Fay-Jean. Don’t make me laugh,” said Evie. “All I’m asking is for you to pick yourself up and move to a decent house with me. If you don’t do it, then it’s you leaving me. I did give you the choice.”
“That’s no choice,” Drum said. “Evie, I would do almost anything for you but not this. Not get organized and follow after you this way. You used to like it here. Can’t you just stay and wait till my luck is changed?”
He laid one hand on her arm. His wrist was marked with a chafed red line. Evie felt something pulled out of her that he had drawn, like a hard deep string, but she squared her corners as if she were a stack of library cards.
“I have the baby now,” she said.
“I don’t see how that changes anything.”
“No, I know you don’t. That’s why I’m leaving.”
“Can’t we talk about this?”
But he had to say that to her back. She was already leaving the room. She went to the bedroom and pulled out a suitcase, which she opened on the bed. Then she began folding the blouses that hung in her closet. Hundreds of times, in movies and on television, she had watched this scene being rehearsed for her. Wives had laid blouses neatly in overnight bags and had given them a brisk little pat, then crossed on clicking heels to collect an armload of dresses still on their hangers. There was no way she could make a mistake. Her motions were prescribed for her, right down to the tucking of rolled stockings into empty corners and the thoughtful look she gave the empty closet.
Drum came to be her audience, leaning awkwardly in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “You are moving in too much of a rush,” he told her.
“What?” said Evie, and she stared down at her hands, overflowing with scarves and headbands.
“People don’t just take off like this. They think things through. They talk a lot. Like: How will you support that baby, all alone?”
“I’ll get along.”
“Yes, well,” Drum said. “That’s for sure.” He picked up a barrette from the floor and studied it, turning it over and over in his hands. Then he said, “How will you explain to strangers, having ‘Casey’ wrote across your face?”
“I’ll tell them it’s my name,” Evie said. Then she paused, in the middle of rolling up a belt. “It is my name.”
Drum frowned at the barrette. “Now that you have done all that cutting,” he said, “and endured through bleeding and police cars and stitches, are you going to say it was just for purposes of identification?”
He tossed the barrette into the open suitcase. Evie dragged an airline bag from under the bed, and filled it with underwear and stray bottles from the medicine cabinet. In the bathroom, holding a tube of toothpaste and watching her smudged face in the mirror, she said, “I didn’t do it.”