Deliver Us from Evie Read Free Page B

started.
    Mr. Atlee had a deal with my father that made it seem like all our dreams were coming true.
    We’d get a hundred of his acres for a song (the rest was going full price to the neighbor on his other side) if we’d run everything for him for five years on a fifty-fifty split of profits. There were all sorts of other conditions, things they’d work out with lawyers, but it was better than a good deal. Even I was excited.
    So maybe new dreams cost old ones.
    Atlee land in exchange for Atlee daughter.
    Everyone in the house was celebrating. My father had opened a bottle of Seven Crowns they were pouring into Seven-Up. Even Evie was having a drink. Evie was giving up something for what we were getting. With the Atlee acres to work, there was no way she’d get to college that next fall.
    Evie and my mother stayed in the kitchen having a nightcap after my father went to bed. I was right around the corner, watching TV.
    “I’d rather be here, anyway,” Evie said. “I think I was just saying all that because that’s Patty’s world: boarding school, college—she’ll probably pledge a sorority like Anna Banana.”
    “I was a sorority girl too, don’t forget. And my sorority was one of the big three, unlike Bella Hanna’s.” My mother was slurring a little. She wasn’t used to drinking liquor. She said, “If you’d gone to Missouri, you’d automatically be a Pi Phi, Evie. You’d be a legacy.”
    “Yeah, well, they’d be tickled to see me clumping up their front sidewalk, wouldn’t they?” said Evie.
    “Evie, honey, you could be every bit as pretty as any one of those Pi Phis … if you’d just let me help you with your clothes, if you’d just change your hair, style it—you could still wear it short. You could—”
    Evie cut her off. “I’m the way I am.”
    “Honey, you look so tough when you smoke that way. If you have to smoke, hold the cigarette between your fingers.”
    There was probably a Camel cigarette dangling from her lips. Evie usually smoked no hands. No one else in our family smoked.
    “Some people like me the way I am,” Evie said.
    “But you don’t like him ,” said Mom.
    “I’m not talking about Cord Whittle!”
    After Mom went up to bed, I asked Evie why she called Patsy Duff “Patty.”
    “I like Patty better,” she said. Then she said she’d written something new, and did I want to hear it?
    It was called “Asian Journey.”
    So what if we’ve never traveled together ,
    Your blond hair blown by some runway wind ,
    My hand under your arm as another excuse to touch you in public ,
    To touch you anywhere.
    Your eyes reflecting my smile , my dead serious expression , our amazement at everything in China.
    So what if we’ve never been anywhere together ,
    Just seen each other once or twice ,
    Just talked together on the telephone.
    “What’s it mean?” I said. “You’ve never been to China.”
    “That’s the point. It’s all in the imagination.”
    “Is it supposed to be about Patsy Duff?”
    “It’s all in the imagination,” said Evie. “It’s not about anyone.”
    I figured she was bombed or she wouldn’t have read it to me.
    But maybe something was going on with her that was just bursting to come out.

6
    N EAR CHRISTMAS WE ALWAYS got a bunch of calendars sent to us. They came from the bank, the mortician, real estate firms, feed companies—I found about five of them in the mailbox one December afternoon after I got off the school bus.
    I flipped through the mail going up our driveway; the calendars were most of it, a few bills, and a postcard I thought might be from Doug.
    It said:
Here for the weekend with Margaret Leighton , whose father owns this place.
    Wish you were her.
    P.
    P.S. See you soon !
    It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t from my brother. It was addressed to Evie. On the front was a picture of a Mississippi steamboat that was really a restaurant called Leighton’s, in St. Louis.
    It also took me a while to register the