Feels like Trouble (Lake Fisher 4)

In no way is Evie little. She’s almost five-eleven. She towers over most women, a fact that used to disturb her. She didn’t start owning it until recently.

“I plan to eat every last one,” she says clearly and succinctly, as she shoots daggers at him.

“Can I have one?” Marcy asks, her tiny voice quiet.

“Of course you can, sweetheart,” Evie croons. “Come here and sit with me.”

Marcy climbs into her lap, and Evie lets her choose a biscuit from the box. She leans back against Evie, looking very content as she eats her biscuit. Evie lifts a hand to swipe crumbs from the front of Marcy’s shirt. The crumbs hit Junior in the face.

“Oh, I see how it is,” he says with a harrumph.

“Evie,” Barbara-Claire warns without turning her head away from the game, “if you don’t give him one of those damn biscuits, I’m going to hear about it all night long. So please do me a favor and just give him one. Good God,” she huffs.

“Fine,” Evie says. “You can have one.” She holds up one finger.

Junior grins and reaches into the container. He retrieves a salmon cake and a biscuit, and Evie slaps him away as he reaches for another.

“I need to pee,” Marcy says, her tiny little voice so quiet I can barely hear her. But Evie hears her.

“Hold these,” Evie says as she sets her two biscuits on my knee. “Let’s go,” she says to Marcy. She gets to her feet, scoops Marcy up in her arms, and runs with her toward the bathroom. You learn real fast that when a three-year-old says they have to pee, you had better get there quick.

“Thanks, Evie,” Barbara-Claire hollers, and Evie just tosses her a wave.

While she’s gone, Junior steals the box, grabs more food out of it, and shares a biscuit with Little Robbie, who is watching the game a few feet down on the same bench.

“Y’all are going to be in so much trouble,” Barbara-Claire croons.

Evie returns and stops short when she sees Little Robbie eating a biscuit too.

“You suck so bad, Grady Parker,” she says as she sits back down. She arranges Marcy in her lap, her little legs dangling off the sides of each of her thighs.

I hand one of her biscuits to her, and Evie mopes while she eats it. “See if I ever trust you with food again,” she mutters. She brushes Marcy’s hair back from her face and secures it with a tiny pink plastic barrette with a kitten on it that was hanging sideways from one strand of hair. She kisses Marcy on her forehead and then turns toward the field to watch the game.

And I watch her. Because Evie has never looked more perfect to me than she does right now. She’s in jeans and a t-shirt, and she has a hoodie lying on the bench beside her. I look closely and realize it’s my hoodie. I had forgotten she still had it. I gave it to her that cool Saturday morning.

But what’s most perfect about Evie right then, in that moment, is how comfortable she looks with a three-year-old in her lap, leaning trustingly against her. I stare at her so long that she finally notices. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say, trying to shake the thoughts away.

“Quit being a weirdo,” she says.

“You should ask him to stop breathing next,” Barbara-Claire tosses in.

“She’s been asking for that for years and he hasn’t listened yet,” Junior adds.

I palm the tops of both their heads and give them a rub. “You two are so funny.”

During the game break, I get up to go to the bathroom and return to find that Junior, Barbara-Claire, and Marcy are gone, but Evie is still sitting on the bench. Only she’s not alone. Next to her sits Little Robbie Gentry.

The funny thing about Little Robbie is that he’s not little at all. He’s a big guy, topping out at about six-six. He hit a growth spurt around age twelve that left all the other boys in the dust, and it didn’t really end until his early twenties. People started calling him Little Robbie as a kid because his dad is Big Robbie, but now they still call him Little Robbie partly as a joke because he’s not little at all and partly because it annoys the hell out of him.

What I want to know, though, is why he’s sitting next to Evie. I turn sideways to slide past both of them.

“So, Saturday?” I hear him ask.

“Umm…” Evie brushes a lock of hair back from her face.

“She’s busy Saturday,” I bluntly say.