When she raised her eyes to Annie, they were wide with fear.
Annie slowly placed her cup on the table beside Eve’s and said gently, “Where do you want to go?”
Eve shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. “It’s not that I haven’t thought about it. Bronte and Finney are happy here. Their friends are here. I can’t pull them away from what they know, not after all they’ve been through.”
“Hon,” Annie said with her husky voice low and well modulated. “I’m not sure you can afford to stay in Riverton.”
“There are some small houses….”
“You can’t afford a small house here.”
Eve sucked in her breath and brought her fist to her lips.
“My God, what am I going to do?”
“Again, you have to answer that question for yourself.”
“I can’t. I can’t…”
“Of course you can,” Annie hurried to answer, moving closer to place her long hands over Eve’s small ones. “And you’re not alone. I’m here with you. Helping women in your situation is what I do for a living, remember? There’s nothing to fear. You just have to see yourself in transition. Step by step, you’ll get through this.”
Eve nodded halfheartedly, knowing this was what was expected, accustomed to doing what was expected of her. She drew back. Annie sighed, released Eve’s hand and did the same.
Eve chewed her lip and fingered the afghan. Annie’s patience with her was wearing thin. She looked at Annie’s long, slim body wrapped in cashmere and wool with diamond studs in her ears, short but polished nails and her blond hair loosely tied back with a clasp. Annie’s self-confidence crackled in the air around her. She’d practically raised herself after running away at thirteen from her poor, “weird” hippie-commune home in Oregon to live with her grandparents in Chicago. There was nothing Annie felt she couldn’t do if she tried hard enough. It was this sense of empowerment that led so many divorced, widowed, lost single women to her law firm, seeking her out, hoping a bit of her confidence would sprinkle on them, like fairy dust.
On the other end of the sofa, Eve felt all the more a thin, opaque shadow of women like Annie Blake, who faced the outside world on a daily basis, chin out, fists in the ready, making their own living. It wasn’t envy she felt, but confusion. Who was this pitiful creature curled up on the sofa, cowering under a blanket? Where was the secure, attractive, competent woman she remembered Eve Porter to be? That woman seemed to have died with Tom.
“How did I let this happen to me, Annie?” she cried.
“I’m not stupid or naive. I’ve always prided myself on my intellect. But for twenty-three years I let Tom make all the decisions about money. He liked to do it, and I…” She paused. “I didn’t care. Sure, I handled the checkbooks, paid the bills, arranged for the lawn to be cut, the maid to clean twice a week and the shirts to be laundered. I mean, I’m not a moron. I raised my children. I supported my husband. I managed my family. I was good at my job.”
She heard the defensiveness in her own voice and felt an overwhelming sadness that somehow, that job didn’t matter much anymore. That her home was unimportant. She felt somehow less than Annie and other professional women working outside the home. And she resented it, deeply.
“Of course you were,” Annie said, resting a hand over hers. “No one’s saying you weren’t, Eve.”
“Don’t use that tone with me,” she snapped.
“What tone?”
“That placating ‘Poor little Eve, poor helpless, mindless housewife’ tone that working women like you are so good at dishing out.”
“I see.”
Eve looked up to see Annie draw her knees in tight. Guilt washed over her and she reached out to grab Annie’s hand back. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”
Annie snorted and said, “I did sound kinda patronizing. I hate when people do that to me, too. To any woman. Hit me if I ever do it again.”
“Ditto.”
Both women laughed and squeezed hands. The tension eased.
“You know I’m on your side, pal.”
“I know.”
“I’m only telling you that you can’t afford your old life-style any longer. I’m sorry, Eve, I wish it were different for you. But Tom…Well, you know.”
Eve knew. Tom had stretched everything to the limit, and like most baby boomers, expected to live to a ripe old age. He was a surgeon, raking in a healthy income and at the prime of his life. He’d thought he had plenty of time to start saving for the future. He didn’t expect to die at fifty. But he did, leaving his family unprepared. They didn’t have outstanding debts, but their life-style, as Annie put it, was titanic. His life insurance had carried them through the past six months but it was disappearing fast. In fact, they were broke, and at no time of the year was that fact more rudely apparent than at Christmas.
“Look at that,” Eve said, indicating with a wave of her hand the sparse showing of gifts under the tree. “The kids are going to be so disappointed this year. I couldn’t afford to get them much of anything. They’re used to mountains of gifts. It used to take us all day just to open them.”
“Yeah, well, I never had that many Christmas gifts so excuse me if I don’t feel sorry for them. Well, I do, but not because of the number of gifts. Don’t they have a clue what it took for you to keep them in this house through Christmas?”
“No, and I don’t want them to know. Children shouldn’t worry about money.”
“Bull cakes. I knew more about handling my money—what there was of it—at thirteen than my druggie parents did. Not making children worry about it and discussing it honestly with them are two different things entirely. What’s wrong with letting them know money’s tight? They’re not stupid. They’ve probably figured it out already. You’re going to have to tell them something. And soon.” She craned her neck to peer through the arched entry. “By the way, where are the little darlings?”
Eve didn’t think Annie knew what she was talking about when it came to children. At forty-three, Annie had only married a few years earlier. Her big tribute to turning forty, and to a man three years her junior. She’d never opted to have children and often saw them in the same light one would see a mosquito at a picnic.
“They’re at their friends’ houses. They’re always out these days. I don’t think they like being here.” She plucked at the afghan and remembered the years before when the house overflowed with their many friends. Now the house seemed like a mausoleum. “Perhaps too many memories.”
Annie offered a bittersweet smile. “Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to move on after all.”
Eve looked up sharply into Annie’s eyes and saw flash in the pale-blue the icy truth about so many things. Annie was right. The children weren’t that happy here anymore. Neither was she. Their life here was over and staying was like living in limbo. She’d been hanging on to this big house in the hope that somehow she’d get her old life back. The one where Tom carved out most of the decisions and she buffed and polished off the rough edges.
She’d been hanging on, when she ought to have been thinking, carefully planning her next step. She ought to have considered what job she could get, what schools her children could transfer to, where she could afford to move. Instead of dwelling in the past, she should have focused on the future. She ought to have dealt with her emotional upswings about having to leave her home, about having Tom leave her. Instead, she’d wasted months thinking…. No, that was the problem, she realized with sudden clarity. She didn’t think. She’d merely wandered through the rooms of her house and stared blankly at her lovely things. Somehow she’d felt if she just held on a little longer…
What?