Evelyn had brought the bottle of T, and held it out to Chrissie with a sympathetic smile. “It’s strong,” she offered. “I can’t promise your problems will go away, but at least you’ll be drunk when you see everyone back at Shuh-shuh-gah.”
Chrissie considered this, then poured the T down her throat. When she handed the bottle back to Evelyn, Evelyn took a long drink, too.
CHAPTER SIX
Sag Neck
It was the long July Fourth weekend, and Camilla’s profile, created by Evelyn, had gone live on PLU two days prior. Evelyn had chosen a fabulous profile picture of Camilla and, via the overpaid PR consultant the site had hired, had parlayed that into a Page Six mention: “WE HEAR … that saucy socialite Camilla Rutherford has joined People Like Us, and other people like her are clamoring for the site’s coveted invites.” She had put up a page for Nick, too, and Bing, and had even managed to start a lively discussion about Adirondack real estate so that Camilla would have a harder time figuring out that she had been bluffing about Camp Piemacum. Evelyn was starting to get unsolicited bids for profiles and, in approving members one by one, she approved many but turned down a few without explanation, as the random rejections would make the acceptances all the more appealing.
Barbara had made it clear that she didn’t want Evelyn coming home over the summer at all, really—it was the season to be hopping between summer spots and meeting a future husband. Their conversations had been stilted lately. Evelyn had called after Lake James, brimming with excitement over how well things had gone there and wanting to describe the parties and the dinners that she thought her mother would love hearing about. Her mother had instead responded that she had never been very interested in sales. Her father was no better, asking if she was still hanging around with socialites. “In my day, you didn’t get paid for that,” he said.
Evelyn hadn’t called back since and was surprised to get a message from her mother summoning her home for the Fourth of July. It was Sally Channing’s annual blowout for patriotism—Tommy Channing was a partner at her father’s law firm, Leiberg Channing—and the family wanted Evelyn home for it. Evelyn briefly thought about disobeying and heading to Nick’s house in the Hamptons instead. Yet this new world required a lot more money than Evelyn had; she needed a loan from her parents, and if she needed a loan she’d have to submit to their rules, at least briefly.
She got off the Amtrak at New Carrollton, Maryland, where the summer air hung heavy around her, and she felt like she was breathing cotton. She had called her father en route, both on his cell phone and at his office, but he hadn’t responded. As the heat evaporated the train’s air-conditioning sheen from her skin, she began to sweat. Lifting her bag to her shoulder, she circumnavigated the parking lot. When she passed a vaguely familiar tan Datsun, and saw a broad-shouldered woman standing next to it, Evelyn recognized the woman as Valeriya, the disapproving Russian woman who had taken over as Sag Neck housekeeper a few years ago.
“Hello! Eveline!” Valeriya called, raising her hand lethargically.
“Hi. Valeriya. My parents aren’t here?”
“Please, put your bag in trunk, not in backseat. I think in backseat it will have too much dirt and I will have to clean again.”
Evelyn complied and arranged her bag so it didn’t quite touch the pair of Chinese slippers and grocery bag of vinyl gloves in the trunk. She hopped in the back and saw the outline of a man’s head in the passenger seat.
“My husband, Alexei, he is here, too. He does not like me to drive alone in the night. There was a, what do you say, robbing of car with the lady in it on the highway last week.”
Alexei, with short blond hair cut Hitler Youth–style and a leather jacket folded in his lap, raised a hand in a wordless greeting.
“Valeriya, thanks for driving me, but my father was supposed to pick me up. Is he working?”
Valeriya took a fast, screeching right turn out of the parking lot. “Your father, pffft. He comes home and they are having fight.”
“Tonight? They were having a fight tonight?”
“Tonight, last night, every night. I tell Alexei that the American wives are very difficult with their husbands. In Russia, the women are not difficult like this. It makes for the fighting.”
“Wait, it was last night? Or tonight? Wasn’t he supposed to be in Wilmington until this afternoon?” Her father usually spent weekdays at his apartment in Wilmington, where his law firm was based.
“My first husband, in Russia, he always say that Russian women are most strong-headed of women. But I think this is not true. My first husband, he is easy at the house, and clean, clean like a woman, but he drinks. Vodka. What can you do? So I leave, and I am here.” She lay a fist on the horn, startling a pedestrian who looked up in alarm and sprinted across the street.
“But, Valeriya, you said my dad came home already?” Evelyn asked.
“Your father, yes, he come already. Thursday. Wednesday.”
“He’s been there for two days? What has he been doing there?”
“I tell you that it is difficult. Your mother, she close the door to her room and she tell me, from side of door, she would not let me clean inside, which is difficult because she need help. She say, Valeriya, was a mistake to marry this man. This is what she say.”
“What? Valeriya.” Evelyn believed her mother had said that; she just didn’t believe she’d said that to the housekeeper. Her mother observed distinct caste lines, and with “the help”—she actually called them “the help”—spoke slowly and with an exaggerated smile. “Sorry, so, my father has been home since Wednesday?”
“I tell you only what she say. I say to her, Mrs. Barbara, it is hard on the woman always. They argue over the charges. The charges this, the charges that,” Valeriya said.
“Wait, the charges? That’s what they’ve been arguing about?” Evelyn drummed her fingers against the window, then stopped when she saw Valeriya was glaring at the fingerprints she left. Her parents helped her out with money here and there, but the only charges she’d made on her parents’ credit card in the last couple of weeks were ones she’d specifically cleared with them. She’d bought a ticket to a benefit for underprivileged kids on their card expecting she could expense it, but Ann, the HR and administration person at PLU, had rejected her expense report, saying that Evelyn would have to pay for benefit tickets herself as they weren’t a direct business expense. She’d had to buy a dress for the benefit, too, as her dowdy black dresses wouldn’t work for a summer party, and had spent another $200 at Bloomingdale’s on that. Her father had said that he didn’t think they should cover these kinds of things, so she had promised to pay him back but couldn’t quite afford to at the moment, as her PLU salary was so low. Valeriya’s comments weren’t a promising start given that she needed to extract even more money from her parents this weekend. “They’re fighting about the charges, Valeriya? On their MasterCard?”
“The MasterCard? No, it was not this.” Valeriya switched to rapid Russian, and Alexei was making soothing sounds of assent. Evelyn nestled up against the side of the Datsun. As words like “MasterCard” and “Bloomingdale’s” and “benefit” softly started bumping into each other in her head, she closed her eyes and fell into a fitful, clammy car nap.
She was jostled awake as the car passed onto the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and her droopy eyelids opened to see the tall pyres that marked the decreasing distance between herself and her hometown of Bibville. She drifted off again, and when she opened her eyes, Valeriya was rattling up the gravel drive to Sag Neck, Evelyn’s house. Valeriya did not turn off her engine, and Evelyn had evidently made some faux pas, because Valeriya was curt when Evelyn said good-bye; Alexei, however, wished her a thick, “Good luck to you.”
Sag Neck was a mansion, Evelyn had said when they moved there when she was in elementary school, until her mother told her not to use the word “mansion.” It was a grand wooden house with lines of trees protecting it from its neighbors, with a gentle slope in the ba
ck down to Meetinghouse Creek. Downstairs was an imposing central hallway two stories high, marked by a chandelier and a thick wooden staircase. To the left was the living room, an underused library, and a formal dining room overlooking the grass and then the creek. To the right was the large piano room—Barbara called it a ballroom, but no ball had taken place there under their reign—that ran the length of the house. The kitchen was tucked into the back. It had been a massive upgrade from the house Evelyn had been born in, a split-level in the D.C. suburb of Silver Spring with brown walls and brown cabinets and brown grass, which they’d all happily left behind after her father started winning his big cases.
The door to Sag Neck was unlocked, and swollen with moisture, as it always was in summer. When Evelyn yanked the door open, the house was silent inside.
“Hello? Mom? Dad?”
“Evelyn, is that you?” Her mother’s voice came from upstairs somewhere.
“What’s going on? Why didn’t Dad pick me up? I had the strangest ride with Valeriya and her husband.”
“Yes, why didn’t your father pick you up?”
Evelyn was tired and not in the mood to play her mother’s word games. “Do you know where he is?”
“I don’t know anything your father does, apparently.” She heard a door shut, and a lock slide, and that was it for Evelyn’s welcome home.
“Mom?” she tried once more, but there was no answer. Evelyn flipped on a row of light switches and headed back to the kitchen. Her head was inside a lower cupboard, where snacks could sometimes be found, when the sudden clatter of the back door sent Evelyn’s head smashing against the cupboard’s top. Dale Beegan burst through the door, sweating, panting, in alarmingly tight bike shorts, and almost tripped over his crouched-down daughter.
“Jesus H. Christ, Evie, what are you doing hiding out in the kitchen like a scurrying rat? Stand up and be seen!”
“Ow. I would have, if I’d known you were going to startle me like that,” Evelyn said, touching the back of her head. “I think I have a lump.”
Dale headed to the sink and gulped down a glass of water. He still had great hair, brown and thick and glossy, and the plump cheeks of a happy baby. His teeth were very white, as he put on his Crest Whitestrips every evening after dinner and wore them for the recommended thirty minutes without embarrassment. He was starting to look more like Barbara’s son than her husband, a change Evelyn knew better than to ever hint at.
“What’re you doing, scaring an old man like that?”
“I didn’t expect you to be home, since you didn’t pick me up and everything.”
He filled the glass with more water. “I’m sure you’ll be A-OK.”
“Let’s hope so. So Valeriya said you’ve been home for a few days?”
Dale plopped his used glass down on the counter. “How is that fine city of yours, Evie? The fancy people you work for giving you an easy time?”
“Actually, the work is somewhat challenging,” she said sharply.
“Dealing with rich folks always is,” he said. “I’ve always found it more satisfying to work with people who are struggling, myself.”
But you fly first-class to do it, Evelyn thought, ripping open the cardboard top to a box of saltines. Her father had been born in North Carolina, in a textile-mill town, and both of his parents worked at the mill. His family’s house was on the other side of the creek from the solid brick houses of the richer management families. Dale said he saw how the mill owners came down on people’s lives, and that made him want to become an advocate for the people who couldn’t get heard on their own, people like his parents. In his town, the stores downtown closed early, because they wanted to cater to the brick-house wives, who didn’t work, rather than the mill-worker wives, who did. Though Dale went to school and church with the brick-house boys, in summers he was the one behind the ice-cream counter, and they were the ones in front of it. Dale determined he’d become a college graduate, and that he’d go into law, and that he’d show those stiff-collared rich boys that everyone deserved a shot.
He’d been in solo practice when Evelyn was younger, when they’d lived in Silver Spring, and became known for consumer lawsuits against big pharmaceutical companies. Leiberg Channing, a large plaintiffs’ law firm out of Wilmington, soon offered him a job handling its pharmaceutical lawsuits.
She’d seen her father at various trials, and he was captivating. He didn’t use notes, yet took down his opponents with one subtle point after another. He knew what to say to jurors, how to play to their emotions and get them to feel for him as well as his clients. He seemed to know exactly what to say to people everywhere except for the ones at home.
Though her father had made a lot of money on pharmaceutical lawsuits, he couldn’t seem to decide whether he was now a big shot, or he still hated big shots the way he had as a mill-town kid. He was into gifts, flashy and meant to make onlookers ooh and ahh. At Sheffield, the monthly box of fruit galettes from Harry & David that he sent were the envy of her dorm, while the giant gold Rolex he’d given her for her Sheffield graduation was embarrassingly expensive and she’d buried it in a box with old yearbooks, then bought herself small pearl studs with saved-up allowance money as her own graduation gift. When and if he spent money, it was always on his terms; he was the moral arbiter, the one who decided what was worthy and what was not, the only one who understood the value of money.
In her postcollege life, her father expected her to support herself, to work in a field he considered worthy, and also to serve the greater good. Evelyn, well aware that social-services jobs would not cover her rent or be prestigious enough to meet with either parent’s approval, instead tried, in her first months in New York, to volunteer for a girls’ mentoring group. The group had told her that there was a yearlong waiting list for mentors, she would need three professional references, and they’d really prefer someone with more career experience.
She resisted saying any of this aloud; if her father was upset about the credit-card charges, and she needed more money still, she couldn’t afford an argument. “So why are you home? Leiberg Channing is allowing teleconferenced trials?” she asked.
“You must be tired from the travel. Let’s have a talk in the morning, all right?” he said. He started to leave the kitchen, his used glass still on the counter for someone else to put in the dishwasher.
“If it’s the charges, Dad, we might as well talk now.” She frowned at the saltines label, as they were the salt-free kind. “You specifically said it was okay to put certain things on your card. And that’s a fraction of what New York costs. Honestly, lunch costs eleven dollars, and that’s for, like, a salad in a plastic container. I’ll pay you back. It’s just, with the job and everything, things are a little intense right now.”
“I think we’ll save it all until the morning,” he said. “Good night, honey. Is that a new shirt? It’s a nice color on you.” It was a new shirt, and as he left the kitchen and walked upstairs, Evelyn, nibbling around the perimeter of a saltless saltine, thought about how her father always managed to throw in something charming that made him impossible to hate.
*
The next morning, Evelyn decided to get a coffee in town to fortify herself for the argument with her parents. When she hopped off the final stair and onto the ground floor, she saw two figures to her right in the living room, her mother perusing the driveway from the front window, her father shuffling through a stack of papers.
“Evelyn.” Her mother turned a few degrees from the window and uncrossed her arms, holding them out like Evita on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, which was her signal to Evelyn to approach for a hug. Evelyn obeyed, and mother and daughter embraced by touching forearms and bobbing heads.
“Hi, Mom. You look pretty,” Evelyn said. Her mother, in a gray sweater that was far too heavy for July and a pair of white pants, in fact looked like she had put on weight, and Evelyn was still frustrated with her over the People Like Us slights. After the meandering conversation last nig
ht with her father, though, Evelyn figured she would need an ally.
Evelyn waited for instructions, but both her parents were silent. She looked from one to the other. “Well, I was just going to head into town,” she began.
“No, Evelyn, your father”—her mother made the noun heavy with sarcasm—“has something to tell you. Sit down.”
Her father was in one of his preternaturally relaxed poses, draped across a scratchy wool-upholstered armchair, his right ankle balanced on his left thigh. Evelyn tried to get a glimpse of the papers he was looking at so she could be prepared, but her father stacked them and turned them over, setting them on the coffee table. Evelyn sat on a hard wooden chair near the door.
“Well, glad to see you, Evie,” he said, stretching his lips wide. “There’s something we need to discuss.”
“Something?” Barbara spat from her post at the window.
“You know about my work, and you know that I care about that work, as do my fellow lawyers.” He pronounced the first syllable of “lawyer” to rhyme with “raw.”
“Our job is to fight on behalf”—and Evelyn could finish the sentence in her head, from the countless times she’d heard her father say it at awards dinners, at parties, to people he had just met—“of people who are too poor or disempowered to have a voice. We’ve been doing that the best way we know how.”
“Is this about my job?” Evelyn said. “Listen, I know—these people do have a voice, I’m not saying they don’t. They’re really not as bad as you think. They’re—well, Mom knows. They can be really nice. It’s not sales, anyway. It’s membership, which is a different thing. Membership is more coming in at their level. And it was just four hundred and fifty dollars, which, I know it’s not great, but it’s—”
“Honey, honey,” Dale interrupted. He looked at Barbara, but Barbara didn’t turn. “It’s not about your job. It’s about my job. When you fight for people, you make life harder for the people in charge, and guess what, the people in charge then try to go after you. The Republicans are out to show plaintiffs’ lawyers how much power they have, and the government found someone who’s telling them that we’ve done some illegal things, that we’ve made some illegal, ah, illegal offers.
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