“One of them?”
“Yes. Would you like me to tell you what they all are?”
I shook my head. I already knew my flaws much better than she did. And I didn’t feel like having them listed by someone who pulled no punches.
“What were you being all quiet about, then?”
“The screens.” She gestured around us. “They’re the one good change. The mosquitos are something fierce otherwise. If you sat outside when we were young, you’d be up all night scratching.” She smiled at some memory. “Of course, we did it anyway.”
“Did Grandpa come here with you?”
Her expression changed. She was thinking about the before time, when it was her parents and siblings, not her own children and family.
“He used to come up for his two weeks of vacation. And every other weekend or so. But I drove up myself with Anna, Joan, and Richie in June, and we stayed through August every summer.”
It never occurred to me that the summers they spent in Hereford meant being away from my grandfather for the better part of three months. And I wondered again if there had been something fishy going on.
Wasn’t he suspicious of you and Tony? was on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back with a sip of the screwdriver. Even before I knew about Taylor, I would have been suspicious at that much time apart had it been Brad—especially if it was in his hometown with his first love. But despite knowing she was an inveterate liar, I believed that she didn’t cheat on my grandfather. Maybe I just wanted to believe it and not tarnish my memory of them as happy. But moreover, there was something playful when she lied, and she had been serious about that.
She met my grandfather in college. I knew that much. But I didn’t know how she went from planning to marry Tony to marrying Grandpa. She was telling me stories in a painfully linear fashion. I was never one to skip ahead in a book, but had this been one, I would have.
“You and Joe,” she said, changing the subject as if she could hear my thoughts. “You sound like you two clicked this afternoon.”
“He seems nice.” I hesitated. “Why isn’t he married?”
She grinned over her drink. “Who says he’s not? Besides, you’re not interested.”
I threw my hands up and quit, letting her lead the conversation back to the stories she was willing to tell, getting up to fix us a second drink at her behest, though I made them significantly weaker than the first ones on purpose. I didn’t want hers to clash with her medications, and I wanted a clear head the following day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
November 1950
Hereford, Massachusetts
Evelyn’s entire body hummed with excitement as the train rumbled along the track toward Hereford Station. In the nearly three months since she had left for school, she had seen Tony only four times, when he could both take the car and have enough time to see her, factoring in a two-and-a-half-hour round trip. And while it was heavenly to go out in public with him, to a restaurant and a movie, and then walk through town arm in arm after a summer of sneaking around, time was always far too short. Especially because he was working nights at the docks while he trained with the police department, and he was tired.
But now, at Thanksgiving, which was one of the only holidays they celebrated in common, his training was finally finished. And as of two weeks earlier, he was officially on the payroll of the Hereford Police Department—which, having been founded in the late 1600s, had a long and storied history. Or so he said in his letters. Evelyn’s interest in town history prior to her own arrival was scant at best.
Which meant that Saturday night, once the sun set, he was hers.
The intervening days of knowing they were only a mile apart yet she couldn’t see him were torturous, but Evelyn still savored being home with her family. The house was crowded, and she was forced out of her room and into a bed shared with Margaret （poor Vivie consigned to a pallet on the floor of her own room） because Gertie and her husband slept in her room, their baby in a dresser drawer. But there was a sense of normalcy in the chaos. Sam was back in his room that he shared through childhood with Bernie, who now lived in town with his wife and children, where he put up Helen, her husband, and her rowdy brood of children for the holiday, as the Main Street house had finally reached its limit and could not contain another fully formed family.
Sam picked Evelyn up at the station, lifting her in a large bear hug and swinging her around as she squealed to be put down. He had returned the day before and was charged with ferrying people from the train station as they arrived.