“Hey,” I say. “Hey, come on.”
Genius, right? I should be a professional comforter. Surely I have a couple more platitudes in the barrel.
“It’s okay, Evelyn. I’m here now.”
These pathetic überclichés make her cry all the more. Evelyn is bleating now, like a goat, digging her nails into her own legs. I do not know what to do. I am seriously stumped. Should I pull over and give hugs or something?
So I do nothing. I ride it out, waiting for my aunt to run out of steam. Eventually she calms down, drawing the folds of her worn shirt tight as though hiding nakedness.
“Dan,” she says, voice thin from wailing. “Daniel. Danny. I’m hurting, nephew. Could we stop at a liquor store? All I need is a hit. One belt.”
Hit, belt, slug.
All terms of violence. Why is that? Seems like something I should contemplate moodily at some maudlin moment in the future. Might be important but I’d have to be loaded to get it.
Loaded. There it is again.
“No, Evelyn. We need to get where we’re going. It’s not safe to be with me right now. You picked a bad time to make contact.”
“Sorry,” says Evelyn, scratching her forearm. “I was coming last week but something happened in Queens. I met this guy and he rolled me. Can you believe that? A guy rolled me. Once upon a time, I was doing the rolling. You know, before the goods went south.”
“You’re good. You look good. All you need is a weekend in one of those spas. Maybe a few shots of thiamine. You’ll be fine.”
It’s true, Evelyn does look good. She’s a skinny drunk without a single strand of gray in her dark hair. I can see how she would work that face to roll guys. Zeb and me have this people-watching thing, where we try and figure out if a girl is actually beautiful or simply young. I figure it’s okay for us to play this game seeing as we’re so goddamn perfect our own selves. But the point is that some faces have a beauty that lasts. Others hit thirty and get plain overnight. Evelyn’s beauty has longevity. She has fine features and the kind of clean neckline that people take photos of and show to their cosmetic surgeon. And it pains me to think of my mother’s baby sister using her features to turn occasional tricks for beer money.
Evelyn flaps her lips. “Vitamin shots? Spare me, Dan, okay. I been down that road a dozen times. All I need is a fifth. Maybe a coupla Percodan for this goddamn headache.”
I find myself losing patience faster than I normally would. Christ, I’ve been a bouncer half of my adult life. I deal with drunks on a daily basis. But this is Evelyn. Sweet, plucky Evelyn who’s the image of my mother. So I slap the steering wheel with a palm and blurt: “Pull yourself together, Aunt Evelyn. For Christ’s sake you’re my mom’s baby sister. You’re the last of her.”
Evelyn laughs. No doubt she meets meaner characters than me in the gutter.
“Okay, nephew. Wow. I’m the last of her. That’s deep or some shit. And here I was thinking I’m my own person.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Relax, Danny. You could use a drink. What say we pull over and knock a couple back. Talk about the old days. You remember that thing with the ice pick?”
She has ruined that memory for me. Polluted it with her slovenly alcoholic self. Fecking alcoholics.
Selfish.
Disease, my arse.
“Please, Evelyn, just sit there, okay?” I am pleading now, funny how quickly it comes back. Please, Dad. Just sit there. Let me make you a cup of tea.
Evelyn tugs on her belt. “I don’t have much choice, do I, Dan? You kidnapping me?”
“Hey, you came to me, remember?”
“I thought we could hang out. Party a little, like we used to.”
Evelyn gave me my first sip of alcohol. Cooking sherry, it was. Revolting stuff, but there was something glamorous about stealing it from the cupboard. The shine has worn off at this point. Nothing glamorous about a middle-aged woman with stains on her pants.
“You’ve partied enough. How did you find me?”
“Kept your postcards, Dan. Last one was from Cloisters.”
Ask a silly question. I bet my postcard pep-talks really helped Ev through withdrawal.
“So that’s it? You’re just working your way down the list?”
Evelyn finger combs her matted hair in the visor mirror. “Kid, you are the list.”
“So, you don’t need help?”
“Yeah, I need help, look at me. And I’ll get it too, maybe in a couple of years. I still have some partying to do first.”
Evelyn rubs at some dry skin under one eye, then seems to notice that we’re going somewhere. “Dan, where are you taking me?”
“Home,” I say, hanging a right onto Central Park south.
I expect Evelyn to freak out, to scream and thrash in her seat, to curse her father’s memory and swear that she’s rather be dead than set foot in that blasted apartment where her life was a cold hell on earth. But all Evelyn does is shiver like she just swallowed her first oyster, and say:
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You don’t mind going back?”
“Nah, it’s time. Edit is okay. And they have good booze up there. I heard stories, Dan. Stories about rich drunks who get their blood changed once a year. They can function, Danny. Run banks and all that stuff.”
I think maybe some of those functioning bankers were drinking meths these past few years.
“So why did you leave?”
Evelyn coughs for half a minute or so before answering. “Leave? I was stupid, I guess. Poor little rich girl, right? I thought I knew about life, well I didn’t know.”
I nod along to this. I have seen this sad story play out a dozen times: rich kid thinks she has it tough, so lives on the credit card for a few years, then ends up with grazed limbs and blackouts. If she survives the cheap hooch, she runs back to the penthouse faster than you can say delirium tremens, which is also comically known as the Irish jig.
You know a country is in bad shape when they start naming alcohol-related illnesses after its inhabitants.
“To be honest, Dan,” says Evelyn, rubbing her nose with a sleeve. “I don’t remember why I left. Not specifically. I was always angry with Dad about something. Seemed important.”
We are stuck behind a horse and carriage loaded with tourists heading into the park. It always amazes me that people can do normal stuff when life-or-death stuff is happening not ten feet away. I remember seeing kids in the Lebanon playing mortar attack with shrapnel from actual mortar grenades, in a minefield, using blood from real corpses as fake blood.
Okay. Maybe not that last bit.
“Edit will look after you,” I promise Evelyn. “It’s time you got straight.”
“Tomorrow,” says Evelyn and her eyes are flickering. “I need a couple of shots of the good stuff first. Maybe a few hours’ sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the clinic.”
This is good enough for me. “Okay. Tomorrow.”
Evelyn chuckles and the decades of whiskey and smoke make her sound like an emphysemic octogenarian. “Did you know Edit is more than five years younger than me? My own stepmom. I wish she was a bitch. I really do; then, you know, I’d have someone to blame besides myself. But Edit was cool. We never did too much group hugging in our family, but she was okay. Bailed me out a couple of times.”
The ultimate good deed in the eyes of a lush: bailout from the drunk tank.
Suddenly my eyes are watery and my laser focus is diffused by sentiment. This is happening to me more and more lately; a childhood memory bobs to the surface and gets me all mushy. I remember, back in Dublin, hiding out with Evelyn on the garage roof. She was teaching me how to roll a cigarette, which is a skill every kid should have in his arsenal, and I was thinking how she looked like my mom and I always wanted to marry my mom, but maybe I could marry Evelyn instead. So I said that to her, how we should get married and she replied; Sure, Danny. We can get married, but you gotta take it easy on my boobs, okay?