Eve was thinking about Amanda as she left work on a rainy Wednesday evening in early March, curious to know how she was doing at the library. She wondered if it would be okay to reach out to her with a brief, friendly email, just to say hi and let her know that she hadn’t been forgotten. It was probably a bad idea, but the silence between them felt wrong and unfinished, like a phone left off the hook.
Amanda had been on her mind a lot in the past few days because Eve needed to find her replacement ASAP—in an era of tight municipal budgets, you had to fill a job opening quickly or risk having the position eliminated—and the hiring process was in full swing. More than fifty applicants had submitted their résumés, many of them seriously overqualified for the low-paid, entry-level post. At least a dozen had master’s degrees—mostly in Social Work or Nonprofit Administration—and two had completed law school, only to realize that there were already too many lawyers in the world.
Eve had drawn up a short list of five candidates, and had interviewed three so far. They were all perfectly fine—competent, professional, appropriately dressed. They had relevant experience and impressive letters of recommendation. Hannah Gleezen, the young woman she’d spoken to that afternoon, was fresh out of Lesley College, and had spent the past six months doing an unpaid internship at an assisted living facility in Dedham, where she’d called out Bingo numbers, organized a hugely successful Scrabble tournament, and led a holiday sing-along that had been a real morale booster for the residents. She was earnest and bubbly, and Eve had no reason to doubt her sincerity when she said that she really liked old people and believed that her generation had a lot to learn from their elders.
“I don’t see it as me helping them,” she’d said. “It’s more of a two-way-street type of thing.”
Eve could have just hired her on the spot. The seniors would love her, and so would the staff. She was the complete antithesis of Amanda, who’d confessed in her interview that old people freaked her out, not only because of their casual racism and homophobia and their love of Bill O’Reilly—though all that was bad enough—but also because of their broken-down bodies, and the terrible clothes they wore, and even the way some of them smelled, which she knew was unfair, but still.
It had been a gamble to hire her—Eve knew that from Day One—and it hadn’t paid off in the end, but that didn’t mean it had been a mistake. She was proud of Amanda for trying to shake things up at the Senior Center, and proud of herself for taking a chance on such a wild card. She didn’t want to settle for a replacement who didn’t have that same spark, a bland, safe choice that would look like an apology—or worse, a betrayal of everything Amanda had stood for—so Eve had shaken Hannah’s hand and said she’d get back to her in a week or so, after she’d met with the remaining candidates.
The rain was cold and insidious—she could feel it snaking under her collar and rolling down her back as she made her way across the parking lot—but she thought she detected a faint undercurrent of spring in the air, the faraway promise of something better. It was late, almost six thirty, and the lot was deserted except for her minivan and a car she didn’t recognize—a newish Volvo sedan—parked right beside it, so close to the white divider line that it felt like a violation of her personal space.
The Volvo’s lights and wipers were on, which seemed a little ominous, and made it hard for Eve to see through the windshield. Squinting into the glare, she squeezed into the narrow space between the two vehicles. As she clicked her key fob—the van’s dome light flashed on to greet her—the passenger window of the Volvo slid down.
“Eve.” Julian was leaning across the interior console, wearing a green army coat with button-down epaulettes, his head and shoulders torqued at an awkward angle. “What’s up?”
As she turned to face him, her shoulder bumped into the van’s side-view mirror.
“Jeez,” she said. “Did you have to park so close?”
“Sorry.” Julian looked embarrassed. “I’m out of practice. I don’t drive very much.”
It was true, she realized. She’d never seen him behind the wheel before.
“Can I . . . help you with something?” Her tone was frostier than she’d intended. It was disorienting to see him here, at her place of work, without any advance warning. Not a practice she wanted to encourage.
“Not really,” he said. “I was just hoping we could talk.”
A car drove by on Thornton Street, and Eve felt suddenly exposed, as if she’d been caught in the middle of an illicit transaction. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned in closer.
“It’s raining out.”
“Come in.” He nodded at the passenger seat. “The heater’s on.”
Eve knew this was her own fault. She never should have sent Julian that picture the other night. It was a stupid, reckless thing to do. And now she had to deal with this. With him. And talking to him—clearing up his understandable confusion, apologizing for the mixed messages she’d sent—was the least she could do.
“Just for a minute,” she said. “I need to get home and make dinner.”
The door didn’t open all the way, on account of his terrible parking job, so it took some doing for Eve to slip into the Volvo. She felt calmer once she was inside, no longer visible from the street.
“I missed you,” he said.
Eve nodded, acknowledging the sentiment, but not quite returning it. They examined each other for a little too long, reacquainting themselves after the winter-long separation. He’d grown out some stubble on his cheeks and chin, a scruffy hipster look that added a couple of years to his face.
“I like your hair,” he said. “It’s really pretty that way.”
“Thank you.”
“I liked it before,” he added quickly, in case she’d taken his compliment the wrong way. “But this is better. You look really hot.”
Eve let out a cautionary sigh that was directed more to herself than to Julian, a reminder not to drift off course, to wander into a conversation that would be a lot more enjoyable (and dangerous) than the one they needed to have.
“Julian,” she said. “That’s really kind of you. But I’m old enough to—”
“I don’t care,” he told her.
“Look.” She shook her head in weary self-reproach. “I know I’ve done some things that have muddied the waters between us, and I’m really sorry about that. But we’re not a couple. We can never be a couple. I think you know that as well as I do.”
He conceded the point without a fight.
“I totally get that.”
“Okay, good.” Eve smiled with relief. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”
Julian stared through the windshield—the wipers were still arcing back and forth—with a brooding intensity that reminded Eve of her high school boyfriend, Jack Ramos, a sad-eyed baseball player with an explosive temper. Jack had burst into tears when she broke up with him, and then ordered her to get the fuck out of his car, a yellow VW bug that smelled like dirty socks. There were no cellphones back then, and it had taken her an hour to walk home in the dark. But that had seemed like a reasonable price to pay, because the breakup had been her choice, and she was relieved to be done with him.