Ten minutes later, she left the store armed with a bag full of traps and had just started up the hill when a police officer stepped out of a car in front of her.
They made eye contact and froze.
Then Tony turned down the side street and walked away.
Evelyn followed him. “Hey!” Tony turned to look at her. “You’re not even going to say hello to me?”
For a moment he said nothing. “Hello.”
Evelyn shook her head, emotions reaching a boiling point. “That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say, Evelyn?”
She didn’t know the answer. But she knew she wanted to feel that it was all right. That there was no bad blood between them. In the end, all she could say was his name.
“You can’t do this to me. Not now.” He reached for her left hand and held it up to her eye level. “Go back to your fiancé. The real one.” He released her hand and turned to walk away, but she dropped the bag of traps and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“You have some nerve! You were the one who ended things! You were the one who left me crying on your front porch! You were the one who said that Fred should matter! And now—”
“I didn’t mean marry him out of spite!”
“Spite? Not everything is about you.”
“No, that much is obvious. There isn’t room for anything to be about me when you’re around.”
Evelyn’s breathing was shallow, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “I was willing to give up everything for you,” she hissed. “Everything. And you turned me away.”
“Because I loved you. Not because I didn’t. Which was the right choice if you could marry someone else so quickly.”
“You don’t want me to marry him? Fine. Leave with me. Now.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Her eyes were blazing. “Try me.”
They stared at each other, both suddenly aware that the distance between them had shrunk. And for a moment, they each almost lost their internal struggle.
And then the moment passed.
Evelyn shook her head. “Goodbye, Tony.” She picked up the traps, turned, and walked as measuredly as she could up the street, rounding the corner to return to the car, where she sat in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles turned white. What did I almost just do? She asked herself. What would I have done if he had said yes?
She didn’t know the answer.
She peeled shaking hands off the wheel and fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, which took several attempts to light, before pulling away from the curb and trying to compose herself to return to her mother and sister at the cottages.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
I pretended to sleep late the following morning, hoping to avoid my grandmother’s questions. It was going to be obvious that things hadn’t gone the way she expected, and I knew what she would say about my reasoning; I was saying the same things to myself already.
But when I finally crept downstairs to make a cup of coffee, she barely noticed I was there.
“Everything okay?” I asked her eventually, cringing at the onslaught that was sure to follow.
She looked up distractedly from the photo album a cousin had brought her, which lay open on the kitchen table. The people in the images were in black and white, and I couldn’t tell who they were from where I was standing.
“Of course, darling.” She put a finger on one of the pictures. “Can you believe I was ever this young?”
I came behind her to see, mug in hand. The picture she was pointing to was taken on the beach, her sisters with her. “How old were you there?”
“Fifteen. Almost sixteen.” She pointed to the rest of the women in the picture. “Vivie would have been fourteen. Margaret eighteen. Gertie twenty-two, Helen twenty-five.” She touched the image of Vivie. “It was before everything. Before I met Tony. Before Vivie—” She didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, she turned the page and showed me her parents, her brothers, the house on Main Street.
I wanted to look. To put faces to the names she had spent the week talking about. But not right then. I needed time alone to clear my head.
I took another sip of my coffee, then set the mug down. “I think I’m going to go for a walk.”
She continued turning pages. “Enjoy.”
“What are you going to do today?”
“I have lunch plans. Then we’ll see.”
I kissed her cheek and went out to the porch to put on my flip-flops, then began the half-mile walk to the beach.