Deadly Beloved(106)

“They’ll be back,” Joey said confidently. “They own that house. They own all that stuff.”

“The house is mortgaged to the hilt. The stuff was probably bought on credit cards. They don’t own anything, Joey. They’re just as fly-by-night as any wino down in central Philadelphia.”

“I know what happened to Stephen Willis,” Joey said. “Patsy just couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s what happened to him. He was just like you.”

Joey hadn’t even known Stephen Willis. Stephen Willis wasn’t home enough for anyone at Fox Run Hill to know him really well. And Patsy was Patsy.

Joey slammed out of the house. Molly listened to the sound of his car starting up in the drive. When she heard the car roll off the drive onto the street, she went to the back and began to look out at Evelyn Adder, lumbering away among the garbage cans. The day was starting out nasty. The sky was dark and full of clouds. The air was full of a rain that wouldn’t quite start to fall. The joggers on the winding road had plastic jackets on over their T-shirts in spite of the fact that it must be hot.

Nylon, Molly thought absently. Those jackets are nylon, not plastic. I shouldn’t be so stupid.

She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt herself. The T-shirt was a funny kind of blue called pool and had cost twenty-four dollars from the J. Crew catalogue. Molly went out to her mudroom, slipped on a pair of flip-flops in the same color, and went out through the garage and around to the back.

“Evelyn?” she said. “Evelyn, what are you doing?”

Evelyn looked up from her work around the garbage cans. Molly had never noticed it before, but Evelyn had a really striking face. It wasn’t pretty, the way fat women’s faces were supposed to be pretty. It was unusual. And her eyes were a very dark and metallic green.

“I,” Evelyn said, “am trying to see how far I can make him go.”

“You mean Henry,” Molly said.

“That’s right. I want to see what I’d have to do to make him leave me.”

“Well, this should do it,” Molly said. “I’d be furious if Joey did something like this.”

“But Joey wouldn’t do something like this. Joey doesn’t have any money. I don’t have any money,” Evelyn said. “That’s always been the point. Henry has the diet books.”

“Diet books sell very well,” Molly said. “I see them whenever I go into the bookstore. They sell very, very well.”

“I know,” Evelyn said. “But I’m beginning to think they don’t sell well enough. I came from a steel town, you know.”

“No,” Molly said.

Evelyn looked up into the clouds. “This was the point of it all, in the town I came from. Getting married. Getting a house. The boys I knew always talked about winning the lottery, but the girls I knew always talked about getting married. Meeting a rich boy. Moving out onto the Main Line. Henry wasn’t rich when I met him, but I thought he was. He was my professor.”

“Professors don’t make any money,” Molly said. “My father says so.”

“Next to steel workers these days, they make a lot of money.” Evelyn was matter-of-fact. “I couldn’t go home now. Henry knows that. I’ve been thinking I’d move down to College Station.”

“You mean you want to live next to Penn State? Why?”

“I thought I’d get another degree. In something practical. Of course, I’d have to lose the weight too. There’s that. I’d have to join one of those diet programs or something. People don’t like the idea of hiring women like me, and eventually I would have to get hired.”

“I think you ought to take Henry to divorce court and really rip him apart,” Molly said virtuously. “That’s the least you should get out of being married to a man.”

“I’d probably have to lose weight for that too,” Evelyn said. “I can just see Henry and the judge right now. ‘Just look at her, your honor. It was all her fault.’”

Molly cocked her head. “Were you always like this? Fat, I mean. Is it something hereditary?”

“I was skinny as a rail the day Henry and I got married. It was Henry who was fat.”

“Then what happened? Did you just eat and eat? Were you hungry?”

“I have no idea if I was hungry. I’m not hungry now. The funny thing is, I haven’t been hungry for a couple of days. Henry bought some land from Sarah and Kevin Lockwood.”

“He did?” Molly straightened up.

“I’ve been trying to decide ever since he did it if the land is real and awful or if it just doesn’t exist at all. I tend to think it’s real and awful. That at least gives them a leg to stand on in case there are lawsuits, which there probably will be. Henry likes lawsuits. They give him something to occupy his time.”