At noon, Evangeline entered the kitchen. The man, hunched at the table, jerked at the sight of her as if he’d forgotten he’d found a girl under his tree in the middle of the night.
“Hey,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. She was wearing an oversize tee and the pair of torn khakis from the box. “Hope it’s okay. My stuff was so gross.”
He scooted his chair back and stood, tall and formal, as if she were a lady and he a knight or maybe a poorly groomed maître d’. “Of course. Take whatever works. Fit all right?”
“A little big, but it’s better that way.” She laughed, knowing he wouldn’t get the joke.
They stood awhile, looking at each other. She kept thinking he’d say something, but he seemed okay not talking to this random girl in his kitchen. Maybe he didn’t have the energy. There was a hollowness to him, some great deserted need that made Evangeline want to run. Instead she wandered to a corner nook and picked up a framed photo of Daniel, surprised when it made her feel nothing at all.
“This your son?” she asked. She didn’t know why she did that, went straight in at the hardest part. Maybe she wanted to knock him off-kilter or cover her own dirty tracks. Or maybe, and this was most likely, she was just screwing up.
His mouth hung open a little. He closed it and said, “Yes.”
She set the picture down and turned to him. His skin had gone ashen, and she saw now that his clothes hung in great folds as if there were nothing underneath. She had no idea it would be like this, facing a man so far gone, pictures of his dead son littering the counter. She’d been so certain, so very certain of her plan, but seeing this man in the daylight, his suffering thickening the air, she doubted she had the strength.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should go. This was a mistake.”
“No. It’s fine. Really.” Though he tried to hide it, she felt his urgency. He took a moment to collect himself, then said, “At least let me make you some eggs.”
“Okay,” she said. She could use another meal before she took off. “That’d be nice.”
He shoved the books to the side and indicated for her to sit. She hesitated. “Would you mind if I started a load of laundry? I’ll clear out after that. I promise.”
Isaac said he wasn’t worried about her clearing out and showed her where everything was. By the time she returned to the kitchen, a plate of warm, cheesy eggs and thick-cut buttered toast was waiting. As she ate, he sat across from her. He pretended to work, but his eyes kept flicking her way, and when she licked the raspberry jam that slid down her wrist, he dropped his head to hide a smile.
After she’d washed down the last of the eggs with orange juice, after he’d cleared her plate and wiped the table underneath, he sat opposite her again.
“Evangeline,” he said. She’d told him her first name the night before, but he hadn’t used it till now. It seemed a heavy door he had to press open.
When he didn’t say more, she thought he might need confirmation. “Yup,” she said. “That’s me.”
He took a while to gather his words. She could see him mining for each one. Finally he said, “If it’s all right with you, Evangeline”—trying her name out again—“I’d like to contact your family, let them know you’re safe.”
Hadn’t they gone over this last night? She explained again how there was no one. Yet he persisted, and as more questions arrived, she decided to come clean with a new version of her life, one thoroughly, completely, absolutely true even if a few details were altered.
The way she saw it, people got all caught up in the minutiae of who did what when and missed core emotional truths. If a few so-called facts needed a tweak here or there to help those people understand—or to distract them from investigating her prior life in Port Furlong—she’d be happy to supply them.
In this version, she was an only child. She liked starting out with something true. She said she’d never known her father—also true—and that her beloved mother had died of thyroid cancer in Ohio a year and a half before. Not true, but emotionally somewhat accurate. As it turned out, the Ohio tweak was ill considered, since her geography was poor, and Isaac, who had cousins there, seemed puzzled when she couldn’t place herself relative to Columbus or Cincinnati.
She plowed on, explaining she’d bounced around with distant family for months, each growing tired of having their den or living room taken over by a girl they hardly knew. In March, she was sent packing to Seattle to live with an aunt she had never met, only to come home one July evening to find the aunt’s apartment cleared out. She loaded the aunt up with lots of boyfriends, a drug habit, and a cruel mouth—someone he wouldn’t be tempted to track down. Wouldn’t he want better for his newly found orphan girl? She said she lived on the streets in the U District after that. There were other kids, and it was summer and warm, so it wasn’t that bad.
“How’d you get here?”
In August, she said, a boy took her on a ferry to Bainbridge Island for the day. But he got high and was a total jerk, and she refused to go back with him. Besides, she liked being away from the city. It felt safer. When she heard of jobs at the fast-food places in Poulsbo, she hitched there and slept in the park until a co-worker offered her sofa. Evangeline stopped, satisfied with this variant of her life.
“Poulsbo is forty-five minutes from here,” Isaac said gently. “How’d you end up in Port Furlong?”
“I heard it was pretty, so I hopped a bus a couple days ago.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, shook her head. “It had to do with a boy.”
Unfortunately, this story line confused rather than clarified, provoked more questions and more dubious answers. “I have no idea where my aunt went. She could be anywhere. Mexico, maybe. She talked a lot about Mexico. . . . Her name? Babs Phatbut . . . Yes, Phatbut is an unusual name. German, I think.”
She wasn’t always good under pressure. He didn’t seem to believe her on the Phatbut part, but she did actually know a girl by that name once—though, on reflection, that might have been a nickname. “My last name? McKensey.” He did believe that, or at least was willing to go with it.
Overall, she worried that despite her attempts to provide easy-to-understand details, he was getting distracted by what he perceived as factual peculiarities. She wondered if a less imaginative rendering would have gotten him further along in the core-truth department.
“That’s it,” she said, aiming for an air of breezy triumph. “That’s my whole story.” She told herself it didn’t matter what he believed. She wouldn’t even have bothered to answer his questions if her clothes hadn’t been in the wash.
He bent his head forward and rubbed his neck, as if listening to her had kinked it all up. His hands were a little off, the tips of his fingers not quite lined up. After a minute, he took a slow, deep breath and lifted his head to study her. The way his eyes landed on her, like those of an animal just wondering what she was, unnerved her. How did you play to eyes like that?
“I’ll go put my clothes in the dryer and get out of your hair,” she said.
Yet, with his eyes still on her, she was unable to move.
The man took another slow breath. “Seems like you don’t have anyplace to go.”
And what could she say? She tried to launch into a tale about friends of friends in a nearby town, but she was certain he would see through her.
“I’ve got that guest room no one’s using,” he said. “Why don’t you stay here? For now.”
She thought of the rain she’d barely escaped the night before, the cold descending. She thought of the trailer and how afraid she’d been. She thought of the baby and being alone. She hadn’t let herself know how bad it’d been these last three months. But to have it lifted off her, if only for that one night, to lie in a clean, warm bed not wondering if she would eat the next day . . . well, it crushed her knowing what she had endured.
“Okay,” she said, “maybe for a little while.” She would stay for the baby. The baby needed her to stay warm, to eat decent food. She just had to remember that the man’s generosity wouldn’t last. Nothing ever does. He’d said it straight out. Whatever he was offering, he was offering it only “for now.”