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“She needed too much room to run,” he explains. “Oh, I loved the woman,” he rushes to explain. “I loved her since the first time I saw her. But you know…sometimes love’s not enough. Sometimes it just isn’t enough to make the feelings last for a lifetime.” He looks off into the distance. “Now that she’s gone, I wish I’d done it all differently.”
He walks off, carrying a stack of chairs with him, and I finish the job while I stand there thinking.
Evie walks around the side of the house. “Did they leave you working all by yourself?”
“It’s fine,” I reply absently.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
She stares at me. “Did somebody say something to you?”
“About what?”
She punches her fists into her hips. “I have no idea. You tell me.”
I release the sprayer to stop the water, and I look at her. “Do you know why your Aunt Cathy and her first husband Bobby didn’t work out?”
She rolls her eyes. “He bored her to death.”
“Huh,” I reply.
“Why do you ask?” She watches me closely. Almost too closely.
“Just curious. He was back here helping me, talking about your aunt and how they couldn’t make it work.”
“Oh.” Evie shrugs and walks off, carrying two chairs with her. I roll the garden hose back up and pick up the rest of the chairs and deliver them to the front yard, where people are sitting to escape the heat inside the house.
I see Evie’s dad walk over and hug her. He says something quietly by her ear, and she looks in my direction. She stares at me as he talks to her, her brow furrowing and that little dent over her nose growing deeper.
Doubt suddenly plagues me, doubt that wasn’t there before. Evie has so much life in her. So much fire. What if I douse it? What if my loving her the way I do changes her? What if I bore her to death like she says Bobby did with Cathy? What if she ends up hating me for all of eternity because I can’t be what she needs me to be?
I’m still thinking about it when we leave to go home. I’m still thinking about it when we get on the plane. And I’m still thinking about it when I leave Evie at Ms. Markie’s house all alone.
I’m still thinking about it when I go to Mr. Jacobson’s big white barn, open the doors in the middle of the night, grab the supplies I stashed there before, and paint over the words Evie wrote on the barn. I’m still thinking about it as I cover up the evidence of how much she wanted me to kiss her. I’m still thinking about it as Mr. Jacobson walks up on me and scares the shit out of me, standing there next to the road in the middle of the night.
“This couldn’t wait until tomorrow?” he snaps.
I continue to swipe the roller over the words she wrote. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Well, at least there wasn’t anybody naked in the back of your Jeep this time.” He lets out a laugh, and only then do I remember the surveillance cameras. “Why’d you decide to do this in the middle of the night? And why isn’t Evie with you?” He stares at me as he picks a toothpick out of his shirt pocket and pops it into his mouth. “If I remember correctly, she made this mess.”
“It’s not a mess—” I shake my head. I can’t even explain it to him.
“Then what was it?”
He takes a big bucket that I’d had my supplies in, flips it over, and sits down on it. It’s nearly pitch-black out here, and I can only see him because I left the lights on my Jeep pointed toward the building to work by.
“What was it?” I repeat, and I stop to think. “It was perfect,” I finally say.
He gnaws on that toothpick. “Uh-huh,” he mutters.
“I’ve been in love with Evie Allen since we were kids,” I admit. “But the only way I could get her to pay me any mind at all was if I pissed her off. So I got really good at pissing her off. She hated me.” I pull in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Then, that night, she didn’t hate me. And since I’ve always loved her, I desperately wanted her to love me back.”
“Did it work?” he asks.
“I’m pretty sure it did.”
