Evvie Drake Starts Over

by Linda Holmes

Dean came into her kitchen in a New York Giants jersey. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. “What?” he asked. “We’re driving almost four hours down there and four hours back, and in the middle, we have to pick up a pinball machine. You’re going to make time for a bar fight?” “I’m not going to get in a bar fight. Be glad it’s not the Yankees.”

she followed it with a moisturizer that promoted itself as “revitalizing.” She hadn’t yet turned to “anti-aging,” but she figured “revitalizing” was for over thirty and under forty, “anti-aging” was for over forty and under seventy, and then when you were seventy, you just told everybody to fuck off.

had these fantasies where I turned into a new person nothing had ever happened to.” “Like the ‘I Married an Asshole’ division of the Witness Protection Program.” “Yes! That’s exactly what it was.

When she started to cry, the upside was as it always was: the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with—it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry, Evvie had always thought. It was between you and the tile walls, and everything that hurt turned into water, and the water went away.

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

“I mean, Ev, if you wait long enough, something terrible is always going to happen. But I don’t think that’s because you try to be happy, you know? I think it just is. You…you wake up one day and you need a whole new plan. Not to brag, but that’s my area of expertise.” He squeezed her hand tighter.