Evie exhaled hard, a plume of silver air heading up to the sky. ‘We were arguing about you.’
‘Me?’
‘He didn’t accuse me of quite the same thing as his friend, but he doesn’t think my intentions are honourable, put it that way. He thinks I’m using you, taking your money, your hospitality. It’s them and us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘People like Jack, or Jackson, or whatever his name is, they see people like me as “different”. There’s no middle ground. To them it’s clear-cut. They’re probably not too dissimilar to the signatories on the petition … do-gooders, as long as it’s from a distance.’
‘You may be right.’ She hesitated. ‘I was thinking I might go to see Kent. Perhaps I should’ve made the effort to stay in touch with the family, at least with Jackson.’
‘What? No! You’re too nice, Nicole! One fired you and the other stood by and let him do it.’ Evie’s voice softened as she picked up the bags again. ‘If I were you, I’d stay well away from that family. Come on, let’s get home and warm up. Never mind slipping on ice, I think I’m about to lose one of my extremities if we’re out in the cold much longer.’
As they walked on against the cold, Nicole wondered what Jackson’s part had been in all of this. She wanted to believe he wasn’t of the same ilk as this other man who’d accused Evie in the worst possible way, but it’d been years since she’d last seen him and there was every possibility he could’ve changed. Maybe Evie was right. Perhaps she should leave it alone, but when she’d been fired she hadn’t only lost a job, she’d lost a family and had been heartbroken. And she’d never stopped missing them. So many times she’d been tempted to go and see them, talk about what had happened, anything to not be shut out of their lives. And didn’t everyone deserve a chance to explain themselves, a chance to put things right?
Evie
When they reached Nicole’s apartment, Evie dumped the bags of coats in the third bedroom. This was the first port of call after another collection, the sorting room where all coats would be pulled out and the pockets emptied. Then they’d go to the laundry or get in line for a visit to the drycleaners if necessary, after which they’d be ready to mend and made to look like new before taking them to the shelter to hang on portable coat stands.
Evie began taking coats out of bags, emptying rubbish from pockets, when the doorbell to the apartment rang.
‘I’ll go,’ Nicole called on her way past the bedroom door. ‘You keep doing what you’re doing.’
Evie pulled out old tissues—she’d wash her hands next—coins she put in an old plastic tub in the corner of the room … they’d quite a collection now and would take it to the shelter when it was full, use it to buy more supplies: toilet rolls, kitchen towel, more cutlery. She pulled out subway tickets, a flyer for the Empire State Building, a paperclip, a cigarette lighter.
‘Here’s another one for you.’ Nicole came in and dumped a plain black garbage bag inside the doorway. ‘How about a mug of hot chocolate?’
‘Now that sounds lovely.’ Evie smiled.
Humming away, Nicole went to make the drinks and Evie emptied out the pockets of the last few coats, laughing when she took out a plastic whistle, grimacing when she pulled out a sticky wrapper containing the remains of a Hershey Bar. She opened the unmarked garbage bag that had just arrived. The smell was oddly familiar as she took out a black mid-length man’s coat. It was reasonably new with no signs of the usual damage: missing buttons, a torn pocket. It wasn’t as musty as most items they received either, items that had been stashed away and forgotten about for months, until the coat drive had done the owner a favour by taking away their unwanted goods. No, this coat had been worn recently. It still had the pungent smell of cheap cologne.
‘Here you go.’ Nicole came through with two mugs of hot chocolate and the smell overpowered anything else.
‘Put it in the living room and I’ll wash my hands, take a break. Who delivered this, by the way?’ She held the latest bag aloft.
‘I don’t know. Reggie brought it up before he went home from his shift. He said it was by the main entrance with your name on it.’
Evie had got to know so many people who volunteered at the shelter, chatted with others who had left their marked garbage bags out for collection. It was probably one of them being even more generous and far too modest. She smiled at the spirit of the season.
‘I’ll turn on the fire,’ said Nicole as she walked away, back to the living room, ‘so we can sit and gossip while we drink our hot chocolates.’
Evie loved it when they chatted the evenings away, when they forgot the time, forgot the circumstances that had brought them together in the first place. It made her feel as though she’d truly found her place in life, her happiness, her way forward. She pulled out the contents of the last of the pockets in the remaining coat, and that was as far as she got before her heart thumped against her chest and she felt as though she’d almost stopped breathing.
Evie held a single photograph. She stared at it, eyes welling with tears.
She had a nasty feeling her happiness was about to take a serious nosedive.
