Chapter Nineteen · Evelyn
Chapter Nineteen
EVELYN
She woke up because he was awake.
It was ten past five and still black outside and Diesel Harrow was lying on his back with one arm behind his head doing the thing he did instead of sleeping, and Evelyn lay there in the warm and listened to him not sleep.
Then she put her hand flat on his stomach.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what.”
“You know exactly what.”
“I’m going to need you to be more specific,” Evelyn said, and moved her hand.
He caught her wrist. Not hard. He caught it the way a man catches something he has already decided to let go of, and he held it there against his ribs for about two seconds, and she felt his whole body change under her palm.
“Grace is picking us up at eight,” he said.
“It’s five.”
“Evelyn.”
“It’s five, Diesel, and you have been lying here for an hour with your jaw set doing arithmetic about a fabricator in Daleville, and I am telling you that there is a better available use of the next forty minutes.
” She got her wrist loose. “And I would like you to argue with me about it, because you’re good at that, and then I would like you to lose. ”
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her.
“You’ve got a mouth on you first thing,” he said.
“I have a mouth on me at all times. You’ve only recently been in a position to notice.”
He came up over her.
It was nothing like the first time. The first time had been a man who had made up his mind in a kitchen with the light on, deliberate all the way through, asking three times.
This was five in the morning with no light at all and neither of them entirely awake, and he got a hand under the back of her thigh and hauled her down the bed and she made a noise she would have been embarrassed about in any other room in the world.
“Still yes?” he said, against her throat.
“Ask me a harder one.”
“That’s the only one I ask.”
The question got her every time now, and he knew it, and she was fairly sure he knew exactly what he was doing.
She got her hands in his hair. He took his time in a way that was frankly unfair at five in the morning, and when he finally stopped asking questions with his mouth and asked one out loud instead, she said yes so fast that he laughed against her collarbone, low, and she felt it go all the way down her spine.
Afterward she lay across him with her cheek on his sternum and the sky just starting to go grey in the window and his hand moving slow through her hair.
She had spent nine years in a profession that ran on the assumption that everything reduces to a number, and had been extremely good at it, and had never once been able to account for this.
There was no line item for the fact that a man twice her size went slow.
There was no entry for being asked. She had come down a mountain road in February with four hundred dollars and had expected, if she was honest with herself, to trade something for shelter, because that was the arithmetic she had grown up with and it had never once failed to be true.
Nobody in this house had asked her to trade anything.
For three weeks she had been unable to put down what that meant. The sex was its own conversation. She had been in a man’s home for six weeks and had never one time paid for a night of it.
“I’ve got something to say and I want you awake for it,” he said.
“I’m awake.”
“Tonight at church I’m going to say something about you in front of everybody.”
Evelyn lifted her head.
“Say what.”
“You’ll hear it.” His hand kept moving. “But I ain’t going to spring it on you, because a man springing a thing on a woman in front of sixteen people is exactly the kind of thing Grace Walsh warned you about. So I’m telling you now, and if you want me not to, I won’t, and it won’t come up again.”
She put her chin on his chest and looked at him.
“That’s the most careful sentence you’ve ever said to me.”
“I’ve been practicing since about two.”
“That’s why you were awake.”
“That’s why I was awake.”
Evelyn put her forehead down on his chest and laughed, and then she was not entirely laughing, and he let her have it and did not comment, which was the other thing he did that she had no framework for.
“Diesel.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever it is you’re going to say tonight,” she said, “say it out loud where they can hear it. Not to me after. To them.”
His hand stopped in her hair.
“That’s the whole point of it,” he said.
“I know. I’m telling you anyway, because I have spent my entire adult life being the person things get explained to afterward.” She lifted her head. “One time I would like to be the thing that gets said in the room.”
Grace picked them up at eight and looked at the two of them across the roof of the Subaru for slightly too long.
“What,” Diesel said.
“Nothing.”
“Grace.”
“I have known you since I was four years old,” Grace Walsh said, opening her door, “and I have never one time seen you get in a vehicle in a good mood, and I intend to enjoy it silently for about six miles.”
Cecil Ammen lived in a brick ranch on a half acre in Daleville with a shop building out back that was bigger than the house and a Ford Ranger from about 1996 in the carport.
He was seventy-six years old, thin as a rail, in a flannel shirt buttoned to the throat, and he had the forearms of a man who had spent fifty years holding a torch and had not entirely given them up.
Grace went first. She said her aunt’s name in the first eight words, and Evelyn watched the door go from four inches open to all the way.
They sat in a front room with a woodstove and a recliner and a television on mute, and Grace put a certified copy of the lien on the coffee table, and Cecil Ammen put on his glasses and read it and made a sound in his chest.
“Well,” he said. “There’s a thing I ain’t thought about in a while.”
“Mr. Ammen, do you remember the job?”
“I remember every job I had to file paper over. That was two of them in forty years.” He set the copy down. “They stiffed me on the change order. Forty-one thousand six. Cost me twelve hundred dollars in lawyer money to get it and the lawyer said take it and I took it.”
“Do you remember what you built?”
Cecil Ammen looked at her over his glasses.
“Ma’am, I built four hundred and some feet of stair rail that year and a cattle chute and a whole mess of gates,” he said. “I remember them plates.”
Nobody in the room moved.
“Tell me about them,” Grace said.
“Twenty-four of ’em, quarter inch, continuous hinge welded full length, cam latch on the top edge, and a gasket channel that didn’t make one bit of sense to me.
” He held his hands about four feet apart.
“Bout that wide, bout so tall. Radiused corners. And they wanted every one of ’em within an eighth on the diagonal, which for a plate that big out of a shop like mine is a real job of work. ”
“Did you know what they were for?”
“I asked.” He said it flat. “You always ask. Man told me it was for reefer bulkhead retrofits and I said all right, because that’s a thing that exists, and I built ’em.”
“And later?”
Cecil Ammen went quiet. The stove ticked.
“Later I got to thinking about the gasket channel,” he said. “You don’t gasket a bulkhead retrofit. You gasket something you don’t want a dog to smell.”
Evelyn heard her own breath go.
“When did you think that,” Grace said.
“Bout three years ago. Man on the radio talking about them pills coming up the interstate.” He took his glasses off and folded them.
“I’ve had it in my mind since. I ain’t done nothing about it and I ain’t proud of that, and I’m seventy-six, and I figured wasn’t nobody going to come ask an old man about a lien from 2019. ”
“We came,” Grace said.
“You come.”
Diesel had not said a word since good morning. He said one now.
“Mr. Ammen, do you still have the drawing?”
The old man looked at him. He looked at the vest, and the beard, and the crest on the left breast, and at nothing about him that ought to have made a seventy-six-year-old man in Daleville comfortable.
“You’re Ray Harrow’s boy.”
“I am.”
“Your daddy hauled a load of I-beam for me in about 1989 and wouldn’t take money for it.
” Cecil Ammen stood up out of the recliner in stages.
“Course I got the drawing. I got every drawing I ever cut to. They’re in tubes in the shop and they’re in order and my wife wanted ’em gone for twenty years and now she’s gone and they ain’t. ”
Evelyn pressed her knuckles against her lips.
“There’s one more thing I’d ask,” Grace said, “and then we’ll leave you be. The man who brought you the drawing.”
“City fella.”
“Do you remember him?”
“No.” Cecil Ammen stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. “I remember there was two of ’em. Fella in a good coat done the talking and the paperwork, and there was another one come out twice to check the fit.”
Evelyn felt the room change and did not know why yet.
“The second man,” Grace said. “Do you remember anything about him?”
“Not his face. He never come inside.” The old man scratched his jaw. “Wore a ball cap and a canvas coat and he never got out of the truck the first time. Second time he walked the length of the rack and put his hand on ever one of them plates like he was counting ’em, which he was.”
“But you’d know him.”
“I’d know how he moved.” Cecil Ammen frowned at the floor. “He was a working fella. Knowed what he was looking at, and he checked the diagonal on two of ’em with a tape without asking me could he, which I’d have thrown most men out for.” A shrug. “And he had a hitch in him.”
“A hitch.”
“In his walk.” Cecil Ammen tapped his own hip twice. “Right side. Old break, I’d say. My brother walked like that after Korea.”
Nobody said one word.
Evelyn turned to look at Diesel because that was what you did when something landed, and Diesel Harrow was standing in a stranger’s front room with his hands at his sides and his face doing absolutely nothing at all.
It was the nothing that stayed with her.
Church ran at seven, and Evelyn had never been in that room during one.
They put her in a chair against the wall by Grace and nobody explained anything, and the meeting went an hour: the drawing, which Cecil Ammen was bringing to Grace’s office Wednesday in the original tube; the court reporter, booked; four counties of shops still to canvass; two more carriers on the list.
Then Diesel said, “One more thing,” and the room settled the way a room does when it knows.
“Six weeks ago a woman came down that road with a hard drive in her coat,” he said. “Every one of you knows what she’s done since. Ain’t a man in here that don’t.”
Somebody said, “Amen,” and somebody else laughed.
“So I’m going to say it plain, one time, and then we’ll never have to have this conversation again.
” Diesel put his hand flat on the oak. “Evelyn Chase ain’t a witness we’re keeping.
She ain’t a guest at my house. She’s mine, and I’m hers, and what that means in this club is that she gets what any old lady gets, which is that if she’s ever standing somewhere she don’t want to be standing, every man in this room goes and gets her, and nobody waits to hear it from me first.”
The room made a sound.
“And it means the other side of it,” Diesel said. “She votes on nothing, she carries nothing, and she don’t answer to this table for one thing in her life. She’s not property. There’s clubs that word it that way and I’ve sat at their tables and I ain’t ever going to.”
He looked down the room at her.
“That’s what I’ve got,” he said. “It’s hers to take or not.”
Evelyn stood up.
She had not planned to stand. She was aware of every face in that room and of Grace’s pen having stopped and of the woodstove and of a plaque on the wall with a snake burned into it, and of the fact that six weeks ago she had sat in a hallway outside this door on a folding chair while a woman in a black coat told her not to make herself small.
“I want to answer the second part first,” she said, “because it’s the part nobody in this room expected to hear and I’d like it to stand.”
Nobody spoke.
“I have been in rooms where men decided what a woman was to them and then told her.” Her voice was steadier than she had any right to expect.
“This is the first one where a man said it and then handed it back to me. So before I answer, I’d like everybody here to understand that I know exactly what he just did, and that it was harder than it looked, and that it is the reason my answer is what it is. ”
She turned to him.
“I’ll take it,” she said. “All of it.”
Dutch Voyles started the noise and the rest of them finished it, and Scout put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and Rook actually smiled, and Grace pretended to be writing.
And across the room, Cinder Sullivan clapped four times with his hands up, and grinned at her with his whole face, and it did not reach his eyes at all.