A Slipping-Down Life

7

She was hired for life, David said, meaning for as long as she could cause any kind of stir, make a ripple cross a room and bounce off the wall to cross back. But how long would that be? She had felt, the first night, a buzz and a whispering at the back of her neck. On the following Saturday it was quieter. “Maybe I shouldn’t be riding with you,” she told David, although she would have fought against giving the rides up. “Won’t it look funny? You and Drum bringing me here just to sit admiring you?”

“They don’t care,” said David. “It’s like watching a magician. They would like to believe his cards really come from thin air.”

David had other plans in mind. Now that Evie’s had worked he had grown jittery, impatient to improve on it. He was nervous about the sheer understatement of a single dumpy girl sitting there with a beer. Shouldn’t she drink too much? Cry? Send notes? But Evie said no. She walked a narrow line; it was all right to take money for lifting a scarred face toward a rock player every Saturday night but only if what she did was real, without a single piece of playacting. Her sitting still was real, and so was pinning her eyes on Drum. So were her scars, which turned white in time, raised and shiny, gleaming clean even if the rest of her face became smudged in the heat. “How about a new costume?” David asked. “Blacker and shinier. With a rhinestone necklace.” “No,” said Evie. It was as clear a no as Drum’s when he refused to stop his speaking out. David never brought the subject up again.

She offered to come to the Unicorn free. It wasn’t as if she needed the money. David said, “Fine,” but Drum, when he heard about it, said, “What is she trying to do to me? She gets paid. Then she can burn it, for all I care. But she gets paid, anyhow.”

“Sometimes I feel like I am dealing with porcupines,” David said.

School had ended. Evie spent the last few weeks of it feeling blurred and out of focus, with classmates looking carefully to the right and left of her and speaking to the middle button on her blouse. Even Fay-Jean Lindsay seemed to have trouble finding things to say to her. On the final day, they autographed annuals out on the school lawn. They had overlooked Evie other years — reaching across her to pass their annuals to someone else, sending her home with only a few scattered signatures in her own. But this year, everyone wanted her autograph. They shoved their books at her silently, with lowered eyes. “Best wishes, Evie Decker,” she wrote. She felt awkward about trying the clever rhymes that other people used. Then, after signing for the twentieth or thirtieth time, she began marking the forehead of her photograph with and nothing more. When the bell rang, she cleared out her locker and left the building without a backward glance.

“What do you do with yourself these days?” her father asked.

“Nothing much.”

“Are you bored? Have you got a lot of time on your hands?”

“Oh, no.”

Time hung in huge, blank sheets, split by Saturday nights. She spent her days bickering with Clotelia or carrying on listless, circular conversations with Violet. In the evenings she sat at her window slapping mosquitoes, gazing into darkness so heavy and still that it seemed something was about to happen, but nothing ever did. She awoke in the mornings feeling faded, with clammy bedclothes twisted around her legs.

On Saturday nights she took hours to dress. Her hair would be limp from constant re-arranging, her black skirt and blouse shiny at the seams from too much ironing. She held up and threw down endless pieces of costume jewelry. She brushed her black suede pumps until little rubber spots appeared. “Oh,” her father would say, meeting her on the stairs. “Are you going out?”

“Just to Violet’s.”

“Have a nice time.”

Why hadn’t anyone told him where she went? He continued up the stairs, pulling keys and loose change and postage stamps from his pockets and stepping over the turned-up place in the carpet without even seeming to notice it.

She waited on the corner for the Jeep. Her arms were folded across her chest, as if, in this heat, she were cold. Sometimes her teeth chattered. What held her mind was not the time spent in the Unicorn but the rides there and back, the two half-hour periods in the Jeep. She thought of them as a gift. Someone might have said, “Do you want Drum Casey? Here is a half hour. Here is another. See what you can do.” For while she was at the Unicorn, she never exchanged a word with Drum. He was either performing or off in the back room. Bearing that in mind, she talked non-stop all the way over and all the way back. She went against her own nature, even. She shoved down all her reserve and from her place in the front seat she drilled him with words.

“Can you read music? Do you believe in drugs? What was it got you started playing?”

“Course I read music, what do you think I am,” said Drum, following a passing car with his eyes. “Marijuana gives me headaches. I won a talent show, that’s how I started.”

Oh, questions were the only way to grab his attention. She had tried, at first, declarative sentences: laying her life before him neatly and in chronological order, setting out minute facts about herself as if it were important he should know. Drum seemed not to hear. But she had only to say, “Is all your family musical?” for him to wade up from his silence and start framing an answer. “None of them’s musical, they just admire it a whole lot. My mama said she would give every cent she had into seeing me be a singer.”

“Doesn’t she come to hear you play?”

“At the rock show she did. All my family did.”

“Did I see them? What do they look like?”

“Nothing extra. Just a parcel of brothers and her and him.”

“Him? Oh, your father. What does your father do?”

“What have you got up there,” Drum said, “a questionnaire?” David, taking him literally for a second, glanced sideways into Evie’s lap. But then Drum said, “He works in a filling station. I help him out some.”

“I bet he’s proud of you. Isn’t he?”

“Oh, well.”

“He would have to be,” said Evie. “Anybody that plays like you, his family must just die of pride.”

His eyes would flick over to her, as sudden and as startling as the appearance of someone in a vacant win dow. If she spoke about his music he would listen all day, but what would he answer?

“Oh, well, I don’t know.”

She entered the Unicorn alone and went to her table, keeping her head erect, holding her stomach in. Eyes lit on her back. Whispers flitted across tables. “Oh, it’s you,” the proprietor said. “Budweiser?”

“Yes, please, Zack. Have you got a match for my candle?”

She thought of herself as a bait-and-switch ad. People came out of curiosity, bored by the long summer days. They figured they might as well go stare at the girl who had ruined her face. But after two minutes of that, there was nothing left to do but concentrate on the singer who had caused it all. Even Drum had to see that. People who returned came for the music alone; Evie was only a fixed character to be pointed out knowingly to new customers. “Will you be waiting?” Drum called. “Where will you be waiting?” Customers who were used to his speaking out began answering. “Yeah, man! Here!” A reviewer commented on him in the Avalice and Farinia Weekly. “Rock music of his own making, leaning toward a country sound, original at first although he tends to get repetitious.” Evie was not mentioned, any more than the color of his clothes or the brand of his guitar.

Evie always had to hang around for awhile before the ride back. The wait was nerve-wracking. It sometimes stretched on till after one o’clock in the morning, while at home her father might be telephoning Violet at any moment. She watched the customers gather their belongings and leave. The proprietor washed his glass mugs. The dance platform was dark and empty, and all she heard of Drum was fits of music in the back room. “David,” she would say, catching his sleeve as he hurried by, “are we going now? What’s taking so long?”

“Be just a moment,” David always said. But he would be carrying in a new pitcher of beer and a fistful of mugs. Eventually Evie gave up. She tucked her purse under her arm and left, sidling between vacant chairs and crossing the dim-lit, hollow-sounding floor to the door. Outside, the darkness would be cool and transparent. She took several deep breaths before she curled up in the back seat of the Jeep.

The slick surface of Drum’s guitar would jog her awake. “Move over,” he would say. “Here we are.”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Until she looked at her watch she always had a lost, sinking feeling. Her sleep had been troubled and filled with muddled dreams; it might have lasted for minutes or for hours. Had her father called the police yet? She pressed forward in her seat, as if that would help them get home faster. Every pickup truck dawdling in front of them made her angry. Then she remembered Drum. On the rides home he sat beside her, with only the guitar between them. “Did you think it went well?” she asked him.

“Mmm.”

“They liked the Carolina Trailways song.”

No answer. David took over for him. “I thought so too. Why always that one? The walking song is a hell of a lot harder to do.”

He was kind-hearted, David was. Or maybe he just wanted to keep Evie’s good will. During Drum’s silences he picked up the tail of the conversation and moved smoothly on with it, rescuing her. For a while they would shoot sentences back and forth—”Oh, well, the walking song takes getting used to.” “Not if they had ears it wouldn’t”—but there was always the consciousness of Drum’s silence, which they played to like actors on a stage. Questions, that was the only way. Questions.

“What is your favorite song, Drum? Drum?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Don’t you have a favorite?”

“Not for all time I don’t. The one about the blue jeans, maybe.”

“Why don’t you have regular titles?”

“Never had no need for them.”

“You will when you make a record,” Evie said.

His eyes flicked over to her again; she felt them in the dark. She moved his guitar slightly so as to speak straight at him. “Someone is going to make a record of you that will sell a million copies,” she told him. “What will they put on that little center label? You’ve got to think up some titles.”

“She’s right,” David said.

“What’s so hard about that?” said Drum. “I’ll name them what I call them—’The Walking Song.’ ‘The Blue Jeans Song,’ nothing to it. Wait till they ask me, first.”

“You think they won’t ask you?”

“They haven’t yet, have they? I been sitting in that dump for seven months now. Haven’t got nowhere.”

“You will,” Evie said.

“How? When? You seen any talent scouts around?”

After a show he was always like that. She had seen girls clustering around him three deep at the end of a set, paying him compliments and brushing bits of nothing off his shoulder while Evie frowned fiercely into her beer and thought, “Now he’ll find out; they’ll show him he’s too good for Pulqua and the Unicorn and me”—although she had always counted on his becoming famous. But when the girls left he would only seem more uncertain. His proud cold envelope of air temporarily left him. “You sound better than anyone I hear on the radio,” Evie would tell him, and he would stun her by turning on her suddenly and saying, “You think so? Is that what you think? Ah, but what do you know?”

“I know if it sounds good.”

“I don’t know that. How do you know?”

Those were the only times they met face to face. They were the only times Evie lost the feeling that she was tugging at Drum’s sleeve while he stood with his back to her, gazing outwards toward something she couldn’t see.

Early in July, the Unicorn began hiring Drum for Fridays as well. People were asking for him, the proprietor said. Joseph Ballew was no longer enough. But Fridays Drum worked late in the A & P, bagging groceries. “The only solution,” said David, sitting in the Jeep with one of his lists on the steering wheel, “is for me to pick you up first, Evie. Then we’ll get Drum at the very last minute. Even then it’ll be close. Does that suit you?”

“Of course,” Evie said.

“Or you could keep coming just on Saturdays, if you wanted.”

“Why? Do you think I’m not working out any more?”

“No, Lord, you’re working out fine. But if your father starts worrying, you being gone two evenings and all—”

“No, I’ll come,” Evie said. Although it did seem that her father might begin to wonder. She frowned down at her skirt, gathering it in folds between her knees, while David made more lists on more scraps of paper.

The next Friday they drove to Farinia to pick up Drum. Evie had been through Farinia often, but without really noticing. She stared out her window now at the town’s one paved street, with its double row of un-painted stores covered in rusty soft-drink signs. On a corner next to a shoe repair shop, a service station sat under a tent of flapping pennants, its lights already shining. David drove in and honked his horn.

“You haven’t run over the bell thing yet,” Evie told him.

“Bell thing? Oh. No, I don’t want gas, this is where Drum lives.”

“Here?”

Then she saw that the service station was an unpainted Victorian house, its bottom story tiled with shiny white squares. Above, lace curtains wavered in narrow windows. “What the hell,” David said. “I’ll run up and get him.”

“Can I come too?”

“If you want.”

She followed him across the service area and up a flight of rickety outside steps. The door had a card thumbtacked to it saying “ObeD E. CAseY” in pencil. David knocked. “Who is it?” a woman called.

“It’s me, David. I’ve come for Bertram, tell him.”

The door opened. After the rickety steps and the penciled card, Drum’s mother was a relief — a plump, cheerful woman in a bibbed apron, smile lines working outward from Drum’s brown eyes. “Evening, David,” she said. Then she saw Evie, and she raised her fingers to her lips. “Oh, my Lord,” she said. “Why, you must be — my Lord. Come in, honey. I hate to say it but I’ve forgotten what they called you.”

“This is Evie Decker, Mrs. Casey,” David said.

The name on Evie’s face, of course, was Mrs. Casey’s own — something Evie hadn’t thought of before. But Mrs. Casey didn’t seem to mind. She only looked worried; she shepherded Evie to a chair and hovered over her while Evie sat down. “Here, honey, put a cushion at your back. It’s much more comfortable. My!” she said, staring openly at Evie’s forehead. “I never thought it would be so, so large!”

David, still beside the door, shifted his weight uneasily. “Where is Bertram?” he asked. “We’re running late.”

“Oh, he’s just now changing. I’ll hurry him along.”

She disappeared, looking backward one last time, and David sank down in a flowered armchair. The room was dim but clean, with a line of vinyl plants on the window sill and stiff plastic antimacassars on every piece of furniture. Over the mantel was a picture of a cross with a radiant gilt sunset just behind it. The glass-faced bookcase contained three books and dozens of photographs in white paper folders, which Evie rose to look at more closely. Towheaded boys scowled out at her, three or four to a picture. One was Drum, his hair turning darker and longer as he grew. In the most recent picture he was posed all alone with his guitar held vertically on one knee. “Would you believe that he was ever blond?” Mrs. Casey said behind her. “Then one day it seemed it all turned black, surprised the life out of me. The others, now, they’re turning too. Bertram’s daddy says his did the same.”

“It’s a good picture of him,” Evie said.

“Would you like it?”

“Oh, no, I—”

“Go on, take it, we have more. It’s the least I can do. Honey, I feel I owe you something. ‘Bertram,’ I said (I never call him Drum), ‘that little girl has put your name in the paper and started you on your way. Now don’t you forget that,’ I said, and sure enough, here they are having him work Fridays too and I just know you had a part in it. Oh, how can you sit up at your little table that way? I heard all about it. ‘She is doing you just a magnificent service, Bertram,’ I said—”

“I’m sure they’d have started him on Fridays anyway,” Evie told her. “He’s the best singer I know of.”

“Now aren’t you sweet? Well, I can’t say it myself, of course, being his mother, but deep down I know he has a wonderful career in front of him. He is what I am pinning my hopes on. ‘You remember,’ I tell him, ‘that wherever you go, you are carrying my hopes around with you.’ And it’s on account of me that he’s not just a filling-station attendant like his daddy. ‘Boy’s lazy,’ his daddy says. ‘Nineteen years old,’ he says, ‘and spinning out his days plucking music, only pumping gas when it suits him.’ I tell him I won’t stand for that kind of talk. ‘You just remember,’ I tell him, ‘that Bertram is going to be famous one day. He’s carrying all my hopes,’ I say. There’s a spark in Bertram, you know? He gets it from my side. My father played the banjo. Not just being musical but a sort of, I don’t know—”

Evie nodded, over and over. Agreement welled up inside her like tears, but even saying yes meant breaking into Mrs. Casey’s web of words. “There was always something special about him,” said Mrs. Casey. “Right from when he was born. I felt it. Would you like to see the album?”

“We got to go, Mom,” Drum said. He was standing in the living room doorway, buckling his belt. “Don’t wait up for me.”

“Oh, why do you rush off like this? Bertram, honey, I want you to bring Evie back again, you hear? We just get along like a house afire. I hope you will never be so famous you forget the people who did you a good turn.”

“A good turn, what’s she been telling you? I’m paying her, ain’t I?”

“Not to do all that cutting you didn’t. Can’t any money pay for that. Evie, honey, what do the doctors say?”

“I don’t know,” said Evie.

“Well, you might just inquire. When Bertram leaves this area I expect they could fix you up just like new.”

“Mom, for Lord’s sake,” Drum said.

“Well, she don’t want it all her life, now does she?”

“We better be going,” David said. He stood up and ran his fingers through his hair. “Nice seeing you, Mrs. Casey.”

“Well, hurry back.” And at the door, as she handed Evie the picture in its paper folder, she said, “Don’t be a stranger, Evie, we’ll welcome you just as often as you want to come. Next visit I’ll let you see Bertram in the photo album, you hear?”

“Thank you,” said Evie. She was surprised to feel David’s hand suddenly clasp her elbow as she started down the steps.

She went back often. Drum usually had to be called for on Fridays, and it was Evie who ran up to knock on the door while David waited in the Jeep. “I don’t see how you stand that woman,” he said.

“Why? I think she’s sweet.”

“How can you listen to all that talk? And going on about your forehead and all, how can you put up with that?”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” said Evie.

She thought that David might even like her now, in an absent-minded way. They had had so many long rides together, with the filling of the silence resting on the two of them — Drum being absent or as good as absent, twanging that one guitar string. Once when they were alone David said, “I’ve been thinking about your forehead. I mean, they’re only white now, the letters. Have you ever thought of wearing bangs?”

“Then no one in the Unicorn would see them,” Evie said.

“Well, no.”

“Don’t you want me to come to the Unicorn any more?”

“No, I was thinking about the rest of the time. People must stare at you a lot. Your friends and them.”

“I don’t have any friends,” said Evie.

“Oh.”

“Only Violet, and she doesn’t stare. And besides, by now I don’t notice. I don’t even see the letters in the mirror, half the time. Sometimes I wonder: Does anybody see them? Or have I just gotten adjusted? Do they come as a shock to strangers still?”

“They do stand out some,” David said.

“A lot?”

“Well, I don’t know—”

“You can tell me, I don’t care. Are they bad?”

“Well, not with bangs they wouldn’t be.”

“I see,” said Evie.

But she still didn’t get around to cutting bangs.

At the end of July a heat wave struck. Crops shriveled, lawn sprinklers ran all day and all night, Clotelia carried a black umbrella to fend off the sun and Violet stopped wearing underwear. “Seems like this summer will just go on forever,” people said. But Evie thought of the heat wave as the peak of the season, a dividing point after which summer would slide rapidly downhill toward fall. And how could she go back to school? She had never planned past August. She had cleaned out her locker with the feeling that she was leaving for good, and the thought of going back to the rigid life of winter smothered her.

Lately her rapid-fire questions to Drum had slackened off, grown easygoing. “I suppose you’ll be playing at a party tomorrow,” she would say, too hot and lazy even to add a question mark. All Drum had to answer was, “Mmm” and lapse into silence again. But the thought of summer’s ending came to her one Friday night at the Unicorn. Drum was speaking out: “Was it you I heard crying?” “Yes!” someone shouted. But Evie hadn’t been listening. She didn’t even know what song he was on. Then she was riding home in the Jeep, picking absently at a seam in his guitar. Drum jerked it away from her. His face was turned to the window, only the smooth line of one cheek showing. What had happened to all her spring plans? Things were no different from the very first night.

She changed her tempo. She concentrated on Drum alone, running a race with time, which she pictured as a hot, dark wind. “Why do you speak out in songs? Oh, you’re going to say you don’t know, but you could tell me what started it. Was it by accident? Did you just want to give a friend a message or something?”

“I forget,” Drum said.

“Think. When was the first time you did it?”

“Oh, well, the picnic song, I reckon. That’s right. It was too short. I tossed in extra lines, speaking out, like, just the pictures in my mind. Then a girl told me it was a good gimmick.”

“What girl? Do I know her?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Nothing you speak out is connected,” Evie said. “How can so many pictures come to your mind at once?”

“I don’t know.”

She noticed that people in the Unicorn had stopped staring at her. No one whispered about her; no one stood up to get a better look. They craned their necks around her in order to see the musicians. Sooner or later David would notice too. She dreaded his firing her. As if she could change anything by beating him to the draw, she came right out with the news herself one evening when they were alone. “People are not whispering when I walk in nowadays,” she told him.

“I saw.”

“Does that mean I should stop coming?”

“Well, let me see what Drum says.”

She knew what Drum would say.

Then next Friday night when David picked her up, she told him the entire plot of a movie without giving him time for a single word. When the plot was finished she analyzed it, and when that was finished she told him Clotelia’s life story. By then they had picked up Drum and arrived at the Unicorn. Neither Drum nor David had had a chance to say she was fired. It will be afterwards, she thought, when we are riding home. All during the show she sat memorizing the cold smell of beer, the texture of her netted candle-vase and the sight of Drum Casey tossing his hair above her as he sang. After that night it would all be lost, a summer wasted.

But on the ride home they had other things to talk about. “You hear the news?” Drum asked her. Evie only stared. Drum never began conversations.

“We’re going to a night club in Tar City. A man came looking for me, all the way to the Unicorn, hired me for a two-week run. I thought it would never happen.”

“This is the beginning, now,” David said. “Didn’t I tell you? A genuine night club where they serve setups. From here on out we’ll be heading straight up.”

“But what about the Unicorn?” Evie asked.

“Oh, we’ll take two weeks off. It’s all set.”

“And may not be back,” said Drum. “I tell you, after this I’m going to buy me some new singing clothes. Spangly.”

“Well, congratulations,” said Evie, but no one heard her. They were discussing lights and money and transportation.

When they reached Farinia, Drum said, “Let’s wake Mom and tell her the news. Tell her we want a celebration.” He might have been speaking only to David; Evie wasn’t sure. The two of them bounded across the darkened service area while Evie followed at a distance, hanging back a little and looking around her and stopping to search in her pocketbook for nothing at all.

Mrs. Casey wore a pink chenille bathrobe, and her hair was set in spindly metal curlers all over her head. When she opened the door her hand flew to the curlers. “Bertram, my land, I thought you was alone,” she said.

“Now, Mom, did you wait up again?” Drum circled her with one arm, nearly pulling her off her feet. “Listen, Mom. We want us a celebration. A man came and hired us to play two weeks at the Parisian.”

“Is that right? Well, now,” she said. When she was pleased her cheeks grew round and shiny, and little tucks appeared at the corners of her mouth. “I was just mixing up hot chocolate. Will you all have some?”

“Nah. Beer.”

She talked even while she was out in the kitchen, freezing the three of them into silence. They sat in a row on the couch and looked toward the doorway. “I just know this is the break you been waiting for,” she called. “Once you’re in the city your name gets around more. Oh, I’ve half a mind to wake your daddy. Won’t he be surprised. ‘Now,’ I’ll say, ‘tell me again who’s wasting time when he should be pumping gas?’ The Parisian is a right famous place, you know. A lot of important people go there. Remember your cousin Emma, Drum? That’s where she had the rehearsal supper, before her wedding. I was there. Well, little did I dream, of course, at the time. Is Evie going too?”

Evie stared at the doorway until it blurred.

“What for?” Drum asked.

“Why, to sit at her little table.”

“Nah,” said Drum.

“Oh, go on, Evie.”

David cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, Evie’s been thinking of quitting,” he said. “Weren’t you, Evie?”

“That’s right.”

“She feels the point has been made, by now. No sense going on with it.”

“Well, no, I suppose not,” said Mrs. Casey.

She appeared in the doorway with three cans of beer on a pizza tin. “She might want to come with your daddy and me and just watch, though,” she said.

“She don’t,” said Drum.

“Will you let her speak for herself?”

Everybody looked at Evie. Evie stared down at her laced fingers and said, “I don’t know. If it was up to me, I mean — I might want to come just once and hear him play.”

“There now. You see?” Mrs. Casey told Drum.

Drum slammed his beer down on the coffee table. “Will you get her off my back?” he said.

“Bertram!”

“Now, I mean this. I have had it. How do you think it feels to look at that face night after night when I’m playing? Do you think I like it? Following me with those eyes, watching every move. It wasn’t my fault she cut those fool letters. Am I going to have to go on paying for it forever?”

“Bertram. No one’s asking you to pay for it. She just wants to come hear your music, that’s all.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” said Drum.

“Oh, you’re turning hard, son. Are you going to be one of those stars that forgets the little people?”

“Well, wait now,” said David. He stood up. “Seems to me we’re getting worked up over nothing. If Drum don’t want Evie in the audience she won’t come. Right, Evie?”

“Right,” said Evie. The word opened a door, letting through a flashing beam of anger that took her by surprise. “I won’t come now or ever. Ever again. Not if that’s the way he feels.”

“Praise the Lord,” said Drum.

“And another thing, Drum Casey. If I had known what a cold and self-centered person you are those letters wouldn’t be there, I can promise you that. And your music is boring, it tends to get repetitious, and I hope everybody at the Parisian notices that the very first night and sends you home again. I hope you cry every mile of the way.”

“Why, Evie,” Mrs. Casey said.

“Not only that, but you can’t even play the guitar. You just hammer out noise like any fool at a Coke party, and I hope they notice that too.”

“That’s a lie,” said Drum. “You’re talking crazy.”

“Oh, am I?” She stood, but her knees felt shaky and she sat down again. “I may not be musical but I know that much. Joseph Ballew can play better any day.”

“He can not. Joseph don’t know one end of the guitar from the other.”

“That’s more than you know.”

“You’re out of your head. I play a great guitar. Don’t I, David?”

“Why, surely you do,” Mrs. Casey said.

“All you’ve got going,” said Evie, “is the speaking out and me. Well, the speaking out does not make sense and I’m going to cut my hair in bangs. Then see how far you go.”

“I was working at the Unicorn before I ever heard your name. I didn’t notice anyone asking how come no girl had cut ‘Casey’ in her forehead. Did you, David?”

“It was a waste,” Evie said.

“Will you stop that talk?”

“It was all for nothing.”

“I play a great guitar,” Drum said.

On the way home, Evie cried into the hem of her skirt. David kept quiet. When they had reached her house he said, “That ties it, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” Evie said.

“No harm done.”

From what she could see in the dark, he seemed to be smiling. She smiled back and smoothed her skirt down. “Well, it looks like I won’t be seeing you again,” she said.

“No, I guess not. Been quite an experience knowing you, though.”

“Well. Good-bye.”

Before she shut the car door behind her she made certain she hadn’t forgotten anything. She wanted to leave no traces, not even a scrap of paper fluttering on the floor to make them remember her and laugh. Her father was downstairs reading, wearing his faded plaid bathrobe. “I was just about to call Violet,” he said. “Aren’t you a little late?”

“We ran into some friends.”

“Oh. There’s cocoa in the kitchen.”

“I don’t want any.”

She started toward her room, but halfway up the stairs she thought she heard his voice. “Did you say something?” she called.

“I said, are those the only clothes you’ve got? Remind me in the morning to give you some shopping money.”

“I don’t want any,” Evie said.