Evvie Drake Starts Over

by Linda Holmes

Evvie’s Scandinavian grandmother had claimed that young women dream about the husbands they want, old women dream about the husbands they wanted, and only the luckiest women, for a moment in the middle, dream about the husbands they’ve got.

The amount of time people who have just met are supposed to look directly at each other, particularly without talking, is a unit that’s both very short and very precise. When you exceed it, you get suspicious, or you get threatened, or you get this flicker of accidental intimacy, like you’ve peeked at the person naked through a shower door.

“I think every plan I ever had involved everything happening later. You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It’s like a pool where you can’t touch the bottom. I knew there would be something else, but it was always after. After, after. It was like I was waiting for something to start, and I was actually in the middle of it the whole time.

‘Your head is the house you live in, so you have to do the maintenance.’

My therapist calls it grieving the first call.” “What does that mean?” “She says when something happens, good or bad, you can only call one person first. And if you’ve been somebody’s first call, it’s hard not to be their first call anymore. She says it’s one of the reasons why parents sometimes feel sad when their kids are getting married. It’s not just the empty nest. They’re not the first call anymore.