Evelyn smiled and flopped across her bed, then reached into the nightstand drawer for the chocolates Tony had given her the night before. They would tide her over.
Like clockwork, there was a soft knock on her door after she heard the chairs scraping at the table downstairs. Miriam would have tried the doorknob first. Joseph wouldn’t have entered his daughter’s room without making gratuitous noise to make sure she was decent, if he ventured to her room at all.
Evelyn opened the door and yanked Vivie in, then turned the lock, took the pillow off her bed, and wedged it over the floor grate. Miriam undoubtedly knew where that grate led as well.
“I’m so sorry—” Vivie started, standing before her sister, wringing her hands miserably.
Evelyn pulled her to sit on the bed, then offered her a chocolate. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine for telling you in the first place. You know Mama can read you like a book.”
“But I just ruined everything.”
Evelyn’s lips started to curl into a smile, but she suppressed it. Under normal circumstances, she would tell her sister; nothing was over with Tony until she decided it was. But Miriam was out for blood, and it was better for everyone if Vivie thought it was done. She’d have to find a new alibi among the girls in her class, someone whose mother Miriam didn’t know. Ruthie had been a risky choice anyway—their family was Orthodox, which meant that Ruthie’s parents were much more restrictive about what she could do than Evelyn’s were. But that was a problem for another day.
“Boys are like buses. Another one will come along in an hour.” She elbowed her baby sister. “Just don’t tell Mama the next time I take the bus.”
Evelyn planned to stay in her room until supper, but by one, her stomach was rumbling. Had she been one of her sisters, her mother would have placed a plate outside the door and knocked quietly so she would have something to eat. But Miriam wasn’t going to aid and abet when it came to Evelyn. If Evelyn wanted to eat, she’d come downstairs.
She chewed her bottom lip, looking at the alarm clock on her nightstand. Papa napped on Sunday afternoons. Mama would be washing laundry in the copper tub in the kitchen. She glanced toward the window. As children, they had all climbed the pear tree that grew outside her bedroom window—it just hadn’t been her bedroom then. After opening the window and leaning out, she tested the branch that she could reach. It was thick and sturdy. She looked down. It was difficult to see through the early blooms of spring, which would give way to some of the best fruit in Essex County come the end of summer, but there was a path of branches she could climb down. And more importantly, back up again.
She grabbed a couple of dollars from her drawer and shoved them into the pocket of her skirt, then climbed over the sill and grabbed at the close branch, swinging her feet down to the limb below it. She picked her way down carefully, testing each branch before she put her weight on it, and the old tree held her, guiding her down. She touched a hand to its trunk in thanks as she reached the bottom, patting it twice. Then, making sure she circled the house to the side that would avoid the kitchen window and side yard should her mother be hanging laundry on the line, she went to the street and walked briskly down the hill toward the drugstore, where she could pick up a few sandwiches at the counter.
Armed with two for later in a bag slung over her arm and eating one sandwich as she walked, Evelyn figured she could make it through to the following morning, then slide silently into her seat at the breakfast table and not speak to them until supper that night. That should make it look believable.
But she didn’t go home.
Instead, she headed toward the docks.
Evelyn spotted him working with Felipe and their father to unload cargo from one of his uncle’s boats, which she only knew because she had made him point out which boats were theirs one day. She couldn’t tell the difference between a fishing boat and a trawler, despite growing up in a fishing town, because her father was so adamant they stay away from the wharves. The dock boys had a reputation, after all.
Finding an empty post near the base of the dock, Evelyn sat down and continued eating her sandwich, enjoying the action unfolding in front of her. She knew her existence was sheltered, but she had no idea so many people worked on Sundays. Of course, work looked different to different people. Joseph had bought Miriam a newfangled washing machine several years earlier so she could rest on weekends. But she stubbornly still washed the laundry herself, running it through the mangle before hanging it to dry, eyeing the machine as if it meant to replace her.