He caught himself, stopped himself from even thinking the words. Caitlin. Everything went back to Caitlin. Everything bad.
“Morning,” he greeted perfunctorily.
Evelyn nodded, eyes lifting and lowering like window shades.
He poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, a glass of juice, and a cup of coffee and sat down across from her at the table. He attacked the cereal with single-minded intensity, devouring it in huge gulps, his head lowered to the bowl, stewing in wordless solitude. Evelyn sipped at her vodka and orange juice and took long drags on her cigarette. The length of the silence between them implied accurately the vastness of the gulf that separated their lives.
Finally Evelyn looked up, frowning in reproof. “What’s bothering you, Robert?”
Old Bob looked at her. She had always called him Robert, not Old Bob, not even just Bob, as if some semblance of formality were requked in their relationship. She was a small, intense woman with sharp eyes, soft features, gray hair, and a no-nonsense attitude. She had been beautiful once, but she was only old now. Time and life’s vicissitudes and her own stubborn refusal to look after herself had done her in. She smoked and drank all the time, and when he called her on it, she told him it was her life and she could lead it any way she wanted and besides, she didn’t really give a damn.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I got up during the night and looked in on Nest,” he told her. “She wasn’t there. She’d tucked some pillows under the covers to make me think she was, but she wasn’t.” He paused. “She was out in the park again, wasn’t she?”
Evelyn looked back at her magazine. “You leave the girl alone. She’s doing what she has to do.”
He shook his head stubbornly, even though he knew what was coming. “There’s nothing she has to be doing out there at two in the morning.”
Evelyn stubbed out her cigarette and promptly lit another one. “There’s everything, and you know it.”
“You know it, Evelyn. I don’t.”
“You want me to say it for you, Robert? You seem to be having trouble finding the right words. Nest was out minding the feeders. You can accept it or not-it doesn’t change the fact of it.”
“Out minding the feeders …”
“The ones you can’t see, Robert, because your belief in things doesn’t extend beyond the tip of your nose. Nest and I aren’t like that, thank the good Lord.”
He shoved back his cereal bowl and glared at her. “Neither was Caitlin.”
Her sharp eyes fixed on him through a haze of cigarette smoke. “Don’t start, Robert.”
He hesitated, then shook his head hopelessly. “I’m going to have a talk with Nest about this, Evelyn,” he declared softly. “I don’t want her out there at night. I don’t care what the reason is.”
His wife stared at him a moment longer, as if measuring the strength of his words. Then her eyes returned to the magazine. “You leave Nest alone.”
He looked out the window into the backyard and the park beyond. The day was bright and sunny, the skies clear, the temperature in the eighties, and the heat rising off the grass in a damp shimmer. It was only the first of July, and already they were seeing record temperatures. There’d been good rain in the spring, so the crops were doing all right, especially the early corn and soybeans, but if the heat continued there would be problems. The farmers were complaining already that they would have to irrigate and even that wouldn’t be enough without some rain. Old Bob stared into the park and thought about the hardships of farming, remembering his father’s struggle when he’d owned the farm up at Yorktbwn years ago. Old Bob didn’t understand farming; he didn’t understand why anyone would want to do it. Of course, that was the way farmers felt about fellows who worked in a steel mill.
“Is Nest still in bed?” he asked after a moment.
Evelyn got up to pour herself another drink. Bob watched the measure of vodka she added to the orange juice. Way too much. “Why don’t you lighten up on that stuff, Evelyn? It’s not even nine o’clock in the morning.”