Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

He spent five days moving between her house and David’s, where he was allowed to visit but was not asked for meals. He shaved in the restroom of an Esso station, borrowed a change of clothes from David, and kept his guitar in David’s tool shed. At Evie’s house he saw only Evie and Clotelia. Once Violet came, pink-cheeked with curiosity after what Evie had told her on the phone, but Drum left immediately. “I believe he doesn’t like me,” Violet said.

“No, that’s not it. It’s some mood he’s in,” Evie told her. When Violet was there, she could draw back from things and see how strange they were: Evie Decker making excuses for a rock guitarist, protecting a fugitive sitting boldly in her kitchen chair. She said goodbye to Violet as soon as she could and went out back to signal toward the tall grass behind the house.

On Friday afternoon Drum’s mother called. “This is Mrs. Ora Casey,” she said stiffly. “Is that you, Evie?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Evie.

“I am trying to get ahold of Bertram. He’s wandered off somewhere. Has he been by your house?”

“No, ma’am.”

“If you see him, will you say I’m looking for him?”

“All right.”

There was a pause.

“I’ve called David too,” Mrs. Casey said. “He’s not seen him. Now, where would a boy go off to like that?”

“Well, I ‘ll certainly tell him you were looking for him.”

“Evie, I’ll be honest with you. I been looking for him all week now. Since Sunday. We had a little falling-out. Oh, it was all over nothing — a misunderstanding at the Parisian — but you know how sensitive he is. I told him he had let me down — well, I had my reasons. We may not be college-educated in our family but we are law-abiding, we don’t give no one cause to complain about us. I did speak sharp to him, but only because I was disappointed, nothing permanent. What call did he have to take it to heart so?”

“Well, if I see him—” Evie said.

“Yes, yes. All right. Good-bye.”

Evie hung up and went back to the living room, where Drum and Clotelia were watching soap operas. Drum had grown bolder now. When the television was on he sat watching it as if he were an invited guest, talking back to all the actors. “This here doctor,” Clotelia was telling him, “think he’s the center of the universe. Selfish? Watch.” Drum nodded, probably not listening, concentrating on the screen so hard his eyes had turned to slits. He and Clotelia shared the couch. Clotelia had grown used to him, although she still said he was trash. “Now, here is what I want to know,” she told him. “When that doctor mince in such a stuck-up way, is it his way? Or do he just act like that for the play? Which? Pull your gut in, Evie. Who was that on the phone?”

“No one,” said Evie.

“If I don’t get on her tail,” Clotelia told Drum, “she would go around looking like a old bedsheet. What am I going to do? I tell my boyfriend, ‘Brewster,’ I say, ‘you ain’t going to believe it, but I know a white girl seventeen years old need a full-time nursemaid. Maid ain’t enough,’ I say. ‘She need a nursemaid.’ ”

Drum rolled his head back on the couch and watched Clotelia. During commercials he would listen to anyone. It didn’t have to be Evie.

“ ‘Why won’t you quit then?’ he say. I tell him I will. Nothing more disgraceful, he say, than me spending my lifetime picking up over Evie Decker.”

“I wish you would quit,” Evie said.

“Oh, I will, miss, I will.” She made a face and twisted her watch around sharply. “Week to week I say I will. Only if I could find me something else to do. Factory job. Do you know how long I wasted on her? Four years. Now I got to say it was all for nothing and quit. My land.”

“Go to some city, why don’t you,” Drum said.

“Sure. Be glad to.”

“I would too, if I had the money.”

Evie stood above him, folding her hands on the back of the couch and looking down at the top of his head. There was no part in his hair, just a dense sheet of black separating into thick strings. Sometimes, watching him sprawled in her house, she felt an unpleasant sense of surprise hit her. There were things about him that kept startling her each time she noticed them: the bony, scraped look of his wrists, the nicotine stain on his middle finger, the straggling hairs that edged his sideburns. He was sunk into the couch cushions as if he were permanent. If her father walked in right now, what would Drum do? Raise his hand no more than an inch, probably, say “Hey” and let the hand drop again.

“Drum Casey, what do you want from me?” she asked him.

“Huh?”

“What do you want, I said. Why are you hanging around here?”

“Evie, well, I never,” Clotelia said.

Drum had turned to face her, with his mouth slightly open. “Well, if that’s the way you feel,” he said.

“I didn’t say one word about the way I feel. I asked you a question.”

“Some question.”

“Well, have you ever been known to answer one? Have you ever had a real conversation, one that goes back and forth like it’s supposed to? I asked you something. I want to know. What do you want out of me?”

“Watch now,” Clotelia said loudly. “The lady in black going to cry; she’s cried every show. How do you reckon she makes tears spurt that way?”

“It’s fake, it’s only water,” said Drum. He stood up. “Talk like this just gets me down. If you don’t like me sleeping on your porch, come out and say so. None of this roundaboutness.”

“Porch! Who said porch? I asked you—”

“I got ears, I can hear.”

“I wonder more about that every day,” Evie said.

But Drum was already leaving, stuffing his cigarettes into his shirt pocket as he crossed the hallway. “So long,” he said.

“Well, wait a minute—”

She saw his back as he loped down the front steps. Anyone could have seen him. Her father could have run into him on the sidewalk. When he reached the street he paused for a minute and then turned to the right, where he was half hidden by the hedge that bordered the yard. “I don’t see you running after him,” Clotelia told the television.

“I don’t know if I wanted to,” Evie said.

She lay awake most of the night, listening for the creak of the swing. It never came. In the morning when she got up she seemed to have returned to the way she was a week ago, brisk and cheerful, willingly sitting on a board while her father sawed it and then humming while she washed the dishes, since it was Clotelia’s day off. But toward noon she grew restless. She followed her father aimlessly while he built shelves in the kitchen. Once she pointed to his work pants and said, “Are you going to wear those all day?”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Well, if you’re going out, I mean. Aren’t you going downtown?”

“No, I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, you know.”

“Was there something you needed?”

“Oh, no,” Evie said.

She went out into the back yard and sat on the steps, looking toward the field of grass where Drum used to wait. Nothing moved. She sat there for hours, for an entire afternoon, without so much as a book in her lap. Her eyes began to sting from staring at one place so steadily.

After supper she went outside again, this time to the front porch. Neighbors’ televisions blared up and down the street. From the window behind her she heard her father’s shortwave radio flicking rapidly across continents. “Evie, come here, I’ve got Moscow,” he called once. And then, a little later, “There is too much Spanish in this world.” Evie picked up a cushion and set it in her lap. It smelled musty, like the inside of an old summer cottage. If every evening lasted this long, how much time would it take to get her whole life lived? Centuries. She pictured herself growing older and fatter in this airless dark house, turning into a spinster with a pouched face and a zipper of lines across her upper lip, caring for her father until he died and she had no one left but cats or parakeets.