What's Left of Her (2 page)

If only she and her mother had not planned the grand trip to Niagara on the Lake. If only Evelyn had not let the need to paint burn through her until all else was obliterated, sun, light, breath, even her mother. And if only Mabel Burnes had not been the head nurse on duty at Corville General Hospital that day.

If only.

Then.

Chapter 2

Rupert Burnes squints into the dust and swipes his forehead with the back of his hand. His shirt is rimmed with sweat, his boots covered in a perpetual film of Pennsylvania dirt. It’s damn hot, even for July. The ground is dry and caked, an excavator’s dream, but tough on farmers and homeowners who pride themselves on green lawns. He’s never cared much for grass. His family is in the dirt business: excavating is the fancier term for what they do, which is dig ditches for foundations, sidewalks, the school parking lot, and any other piece of earth that requires a hole deeper than two feet. The Burnes boys have the equipment and years of know-how passed down like old Gertie Mcgee’s recipe for apple strudel. Every Burnes male knows how to operate backhoes, Bobcats, tractors, and dump trucks. Even Quinn, barely fifteen, can maneuver with the best of them, and last winter when Rupe hooked up the snowplow to his F350, he let Quinn plow out St. Michael’s parking lot.

Excavating is the biggest piece of Burnes Construction and Rupe is in charge of that. Every Saturday morning his old man limps around the latest job site, stogie hanging from his lips, and surveys his son’s work. He usually grunts his approval and without fail, shells out two or three pieces of advice. It’s not Saturday if the old man doesn’t show up. Doc McPherson says work’s what helped him survive the heart attack four years ago.
More stubborn than a mule,
he said,
and damn proud of that business.
The old man’s damn proud of the other businesses, too: the lumber splitting, planing, and chipping that Tom and Les oversee. The town depends on them to handle anything that requires large equipment to haul snow, dirt, and trees.

Christ
, it’s hot. Rupe wipes his forehead again. He’s a big man with broad shoulders and a thatch of reddish-gold hair that shines in the summer sun like a new penny. His eyes are bright blue against the weathered darkness of his skin. He wears a ball cap most days, but even so, his cheeks and nose turn a perennial ruddy brown from sun, wind, and natural elements that cling to outdoorsmen. Most consider Rupe a handsome man in a rough, foreboding way, his size and strength still drawing the females, his inability or unwillingness to engage in casual, flirtatious conversation pulling them even closer, holding them without so much as a single exchange. Even now, a married man with eyes for no one but his wife, there’s a magnetism to the man that has more than one woman in Corville vying for his attention. It’s all playful these days, and futile, they know that, or if they don’t, they’re fools. Rupe Burnes has loved only one woman in his life and that’s his wife, Evie. It wasn’t easy for the females in Corville to watch a young girl from Philadelphia waltz into their town and steal the most eligible man from right under their very own hope chests. Rupe was their property, they told themselves as they watched him drive through town in his big green truck with Burnes Construction in bold print on the side, and though he couldn’t be sliced and pared like a summer tomato, he could be won over, wooed, tempted, even seduced if the opportunity presented itself. They all knew he went two towns over for female companionship, dating even, or as close to it as he’d ever come, and they accepted that grudgingly, telling themselves when it came time to settle down, he’d choose from the women in Corville. They knew him best, respected him, loved him. He was twenty-four, the waiting wouldn’t be much longer, surely he’d turn to one of them soon. Surely, he would.

And then she came.

They wanted to hate her, drive her out of town if they could, but once they laid eyes on the beautiful creature with the long black hair and sad eyes who’d just buried her mother and had no one,
no one
left in the world to call family, they saw what Rupe saw, and they couldn’t hate her. Evelyn, Evie as Rupe nicknamed her, was just eighteen, alone and scared with no family and nothing to call her own save a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia. Not even a real house to paint or a patch of grass to mow. Nothing. No mother anymore, no mention of a father, grandfather, sister or brother. Evie Arbogast was all alone in a huge world.

And Rupe Burnes was going to rescue her, protect her from loneliness, and put the light back into those silver-blue eyes. He could do it. He fixed things: engines on his tractors, screen doors that stuck, even washing machine motors. He could fix this, too, make Evie smile, take away the pain of loss and replace it with more love than she could hold in her heart. And once Rupe Burnes set his mind to something, he was like a bull in a ring: stubborn, determined, relentless. Evie never had a chance, not since the first time Rupe came home from work coated in dust and sweat and found her sitting at the kitchen table. She said nothing when he opened the screen door, just looked up and stared. He did his share of staring, too. Never in all of his days had he seen such a beautiful creature, or one so wounded. Pain rippled down her pale shoulders, fell around her in a great, invisible cloak. And from that very second, Rupe Burnes, the man who’d guarded his bachelorhood since he lost his virginity at sixteen, knew that the girl sitting in his kitchen, drinking from the same glass he’d drunk from hundreds of times, was going to be his wife.

Reverend Thurston married them six months later in the vestibule of St. Michael’s Church. Every now and then Rupe wondered if he hadn’t taken advantage of Evie’s grieving, pushed a bit too hard. But he made her happy; he could see it in the way those beautiful eyes misted with tears when he told her she was the best thing that ever happened to him. His only real regret was not giving her a big, fancy wedding, but what choice did he have with her being pregnant and all?
That
he didn’t regret. He wanted their baby so bad, to hold a piece of Evie, a child they created together. But she miscarried three weeks after the wedding and it took another five years for Quinn to come along. And then five years later, Annalise. There were two miscarriages after that, but no more babies, not for lack of trying, that was damn sure. Rupe always pictured himself surrounded by a brood of five or six, maybe if the good Lord willed, seven children. The boys would be big and strong like him, the girls soft and black-haired like their mother. But wishing didn’t make it so, and Evie’s pregnancies were difficult, laying her up for three or four months at a stretch. Doc McPherson even put her in the hospital when she was seven months along with Annalise; toxemia, he called it. He said some women were made for babies and some weren’t, and when the ones who weren’t kept trying, through their own will or their husbands’, eventually, nature played its part and stepped in. That’s when women miscarried, or had stillbirths, or sometimes worse. Sometimes, babies were born that only lived a few hours, just enough to imprint their tiny faces on their parents’ brains. And that’s when the real problems started, the ones in the head that required therapy, or pills, or both, with no guaranteed cure.

Best to be happy with two healthy children, Doc McPherson said. Don’t tempt fate or God. As much as he wanted more children, Rupe wasn’t going to risk hurting or good God, losing Evie. She was everything to him: his life, his breath, his heart. So, he settled for Quinn and Annalise and took the doctor’s name in Revere where he got snipped and protected Evie from any further pregnancies. It wasn’t ever something he thought he’d be doing. In fact, he often joined the other men in hoots of laughter when they discovered one of them had gone and gotten snipped.
Capon
, they called him.
Neuter.
But he risked the names and the jokes for Evie.

Anything for Evie.

There were times, christenings and one-year-old birthday parties for his nieces and nephews, when he caught Evie watching the babies, eyes misted, mouth parted, with awe and yearning, a deep, gut-splitting need that filled him with grief, made him wish for a half-second that they’d tried one more time. But that was a foolish notion, dangerous, too. He wouldn’t put Evie at risk. There’d never been much sense talking about it, especially after the last miscarriage that cost her two pints of blood and three weeks in bed. Some women just weren’t made to carry babies, and his wife was one of them.

There was a bounty of Burnes blood running around the town though; young and old in pick-up trucks and scooters or Fords, copper-haired, strong-armed and strong-willed, blue-eyed and sun-weathered. Rupe was the oldest of five, followed by Les, Tom, Pete, and Rita, all married but Pete, all having three, four, or five children, and all living less than five miles from one another, except for Pete who owned a spread outside of town. He didn’t have any children, at least none he claimed, though there was a girl several years back who tried to pin a paternity suit on him. Too bad the baby came out darker than a coal miner’s face.

It took Evie a while to get used to the Burnes family. They were a boisterous group who made it their business to know what was going on inside the family and who never hesitated to voice an opinion, solicited or not.

Hell, if you had a complaint on your mind, get it out and be done with it. If not, shut up and pass the potatoes. Evie kept it all inside, tighter than a drum, and though years with the Burnes brood had lightened her up a bit, she was still what he’d classify as reserved. Rupe figured part of it was due to growing up with no siblings to fight with, just her and her ma. It didn’t help that every word out of a Burnes mouth was a half-yell. Running a chipper and saws three feet from your ears for twenty-five years didn’t help either. The old man was part deaf by the time he reached forty, though he denied the hell out of it. Even Rupe had to turn and face a person if they were talking to him or he couldn’t make out the words.

It was a rough life, working outdoors, busting your bones in heat, snow, rain, creaking out of bed at 5:00
A.M
., ignoring the stiffness in your back, the arthritis in your knees. He blew out a knee ten years ago when a log fell on him, and three years before that, he caught two fingers in his chain saw and lost one up to the first joint. Only good thing, it was his middle finger and he never used it much anyway, less he was flicking Pete the bird. Evie bought him a pair of insulated gloves the first year they were married, said if he didn’t start wearing them in the dead of winter, he’d be losing all of his fingers. So, he started wearing them, not that a Burnes had ever given in to weakness but there was a certain common sense to what she said. Some days, he felt like a twenty-year-old, hauling logs, running Bobcats, crawling in ditches. And then there were others, the damp, cold ones, where his forty-four years seemed like sixty-four.

He didn’t want that kind of life for Quinn. As much as Rupe hated to see him leave Corville, Quinn needed to get educated, use his head so he wouldn’t have to bury himself with his own hands. The boy was smart; he’d make a good lawyer, or maybe a doctor, anything but driving tractors and backhoes, freezing or burning up, wearing overalls plastered with mud and spending half his life in a ditch. Not for his boy. He didn’t want him limping around on a bum knee or bad shoulder from the beating the earth would give him. Rupe wanted life to be easier for Quinn and by God, he’d do everything in his power to see that it was.

Chapter 3

Evie flours the rolling pin, then proceeds to flatten the dough. Apple pie is Rupe’s favorite and she’s got just enough time to get it in the oven before she starts dinner. She hadn’t planned on making a pie today but Eulis brought her a bag of Cortlands and despite the kind gesture, they are already soft and bruised. One more day and they’ll be good for nothing but applesauce.

Her mother hadn’t been much good in the kitchen; she’d been a heat and re-heat kind of cook, from a box mostly, and Evie had done the same until she married into the Burnes family. They make everything from scratch; the only box in the kitchen is the baking soda. Mabel Burnes taught Evie the names of every utensil in her kitchen drawer, showed her the difference between mincing and chopping, braising and broiling, and how a pinch of oregano and a clove of garlic could change a meal.

Rupe likes his mother’s cooking and Evie has spent long hours in front of the white gas stove trying to emulate her mother-in-law’s recipes. She’s done a pretty decent job, too; the gravy is dark, double-strained to remove even the tiniest lump, the London broil is pink, the mashed potatoes filled with butter. Even the iced tea is hand-brewed and steeped in the sun, just the way Mabel does, just the way Rupe likes it. In the early years, pleasing Rupe filled her hours, sucked out the loneliness of Amelia’s death and made Evie feel like she belonged. Once Quinn and Annalise came along, the doing for others tripled, then quadrupled, as she cooked Rupe’s favorite meals, boiled bottles, hand-washed diapers, scrubbed cabinets and floors so the children wouldn’t catch germs, read to them, sang to them, crocheted their first afghans, and still, still kneaded bread and baked apple pies.

On and on it goes, one year, two, five, then ten, the doing without conscious thought, the going and going, one continual motion, draining and pulling and finally collapsing to a dull fizzle. No one notices Evie needs a break, a day even, just to herself, to walk, to sit, to
think
. Burnes women never stop; they push on, the backbones behind their husbands, push hard until they fall over. Rupe’s father, Burt, puffs out proud when he tells the tale of how his own mother once beheaded and plucked three hens, drove his old man’s tractor in scorching July heat, and even hand-washed four loads of laundry, plus hung them out to dry. All this and she was eight and a half months pregnant!

It isn’t that the Burnes men are cruel or unfeeling, because they aren’t, though soft words don’t come easily to any of them, including the women. Mabel says she’ll take a side of beef and a cord of wood rather than some man’s fancy words that do nothing to keep her children’s belly full and their feet warm. Rupe has only said
I love you
a handful of times: right after the first time he and Evie made love; when Quinn and Annalise were born; on Evie’s thirtieth birthday; and two years ago, when Evie contracted a viral infection that laid her up for five days. She was weak and feverish, looking small and insignificant in their big four-poster bed with her dark hair matted against her cheeks, eyes sunken, lips parched. Rupe rushed her to Doc McPherson when her temperature reached 103.8, demanding the doctor give her something to make her better. But Doc McPherson sent Rupe and Evie home with instructions for rest, fluids, Tylenol, and patience to let the infection run its course. Rupe Burnes was not a patient man. He spent his days pacing the bedroom, watching Evie toss and turn, her skin layered in sweat. Nights weren’t much better with Rupe doing the tossing and turning as he lay next to her.
Don’t leave me, Evie, don’t leave me,
he whispered in the dark.
I love you, Evie girl, please don’t leave me.
There was raw grief and torment twisted in his words, more confession than profession of his love for her.