Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen

to the red birdhouse and to Tuna, holding his finger out for her to perch on. When she didn’t come out, he held up a handful of sunflower seeds and clucked to her as if she were a chicken. “It’s all right, little bird. I won’t hurt you.”
    Eveline walked to the door with Lulu’s gun in her hands. For a moment, the last moment of real thinking, she wondered if her heart was the thing in her hands. At the threshold, she raised the gun to the level of her shoulders.
    “What do you think you’re doing, darling?” Cullen said.
    “I’m saying goodbye,” Eveline said.
    Cullen’s dimples appeared at the corners of his mouth, but boyishly as they did when he arrived at her door the first time. “A woman like you shouldn’t have a gun.”
    “It’s not mine,” Eveline said.
    Cullen stepped backward carefully until he was standing on the sandy ground in front of the porch. “Of course it isn’t. You’re too good for it.”
    “I’ll shoot you,” Eveline said.
    “No, you won’t,” Cullen said, stepping back even farther so that now he stood amid the milk thistle Emil didn’t have time to clear before he went away. “You’re going to let me go and raise that boy of yours and your husband’s going to come home from Germany.”
    Eveline looked at Hux in the reed basket.
    “You’re going to tell your husband how much you missed him,” Cullen said. “It’ll be a true shame, but you’ll forget all about me. You’ll grow old. You’ll get gray as a mule.”
    “I’ll—” Eveline started.
    “Jail’s no place for someone like you,” Cullen said. He was already at the edge of the forest, the place where shadows met shadows. “You don’t want a rope around your neck.”
    A flash of steel bars. A broken neck. A headline in the Gazette .
    “We were having dinner,” Eveline said, the scent of trout and lemon on her hands.
    Cullen tipped his hat like a gentleman.
    “It was delicious,” he said just before he disappeared.

9
    Eveline didn’t know how much time passed between firing Lulu’s gun into the forest and Lulu running toward the cabin, calling, Are you all right? At some point, Eveline put the gun down and picked up Hux, who was crying like he used to when nothing would soothe him but her breast. Tuna came out of her red birdhouse, but she didn’t make a noise.
    “I know I gave you the gun, but I didn’t expect you to use it,” Lulu said when she reached the milk thistle. “I thought you shot your toe off. Are you all right?”
    “We were having dinner,” Eveline said, clinging to the porch railing, to Hux.
    Tuna hopped onto the railing. She craned her neck strangely.
    “I thought Hux only gummed things,” Lulu said.
    “The surveyor,” Eveline said.
    Lulu looked at her curiously. “Why would you invite him in? He’s the worst kind of person. I’d have put him six feet under if Reddy had let me.”
    “His boat broke down,” Eveline said. “Only it didn’t.”
    Lulu looked back at the forest, the river, the last of the day’s light.
    Eveline dug her fingernails into the railing. “We were having dinner.”
    “What did he do to you?” Lulu said.
    All at once, as if she could see into Eveline’s heart, she came rushing through the milk thistle, up the porch steps.
    “I knew something wasn’t right with him,” she said, unbuttoning her coat and wrapping it around Eveline’s shoulders. She lifted Hux out of Eveline’s arms. “Those dimples. I should have come sooner.”
    Eveline rubbed her cheek against the soft, worn fur of Lulu’s coat. She didn’t know if she was breathing or not. “I thought he was Emil when he knocked.”
    Lulu pressed her lips against Eveline’s forehead. “Where is he? I’ll kill him.”
    “Emil likes rosy cheeks. Sundresses. I let him go.”
    Hux kept touching his ears.
    “Stop thinking,” Lulu said, looking at the thin streaks of blood drying on Eveline’s legs. “You can do that later.”
    Lulu took Hux inside, prepared a bottle, and