“Your mother and I do not approve of drinking. Have you not heard of the Eighteenth Amendment?”
“Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.”
“Evangeline Mary O’Neill!” her mother snapped.
“Your mother is secretary of the Zenith Women’s Temperance Society. Did you think about that? Did you think about how it might look if her daughter were found carousing drunk in the streets?”
Evie slid her bruised eyeballs in her mother’s direction. Her mother sat stiff-backed and thin-lipped, her long hair coiled at the nape of her neck. A pair of spectacles—“cheaters,” the flappers called them—sat at the end of her nose. The Fitzgerald women were all petite, blue-eyed, blond, and hopelessly nearsighted.
“Well?” her father thundered. “Do you have something to say?”
“Gee, I hope I won’t need cheaters someday,” Evie muttered.
Evie’s mother responded with a weary sigh. She’d grown smaller and more worn since James’s death, as if that long-ago telegram from the war office had stolen her soul the moment she had opened it.
“You young people seem to treat everything like a joke, don’t you?” Her father was off and running—responsibility, civic duty, acting your age, thinking beyond tomorrow. She knew the refrain well. What Evie needed was a little hair of the dog, but her parents had confiscated her hip flask. It was a swell flask, too—silver, with the initials of Charles Warren etched into it. Good old Charlie, the dear. She’d promised to be his girl. That lasted a week. Charlie was a darling, but also a thudding bore. His idea of petting was to place a hand stiffly on a girl’s chest like a starched doily on some maiden aunt’s side table while pecking, birdlike, at her mouth. Quelle tragédie.
“Evie, are you listening to me?” Her father’s face was grim.
She managed a smile. “Always, Daddy.”
“Why did you say those terrible things about Harold Brodie?”
For the first time, Evie frowned. “He had it coming.”
“You accused him of… of…” Her father’s face colored as he stammered.
“Of knocking up that poor girl?”
“Evangeline!” Her mother gasped.
“Pardon me. ‘Of taking advantage of her and leaving her in the family way.’ ”
“Why couldn’t you be more like…” Her mother trailed off, but Evie could finish the sentence: Why couldn’t you be more like James?
“You mean, dead?” she shot back.