The Life You've Imagined (3 page)

“I don’t know. A little confidence never hurt anybody.”

Cami smirks, and I give her the respect she gave me and don’t ask what she’s thinking.

O
nce Cami left and I went downstairs again—holding my breath against the peculiar stench of the bottle-return bin—Mom apologetically asked me to watch the register for her so she could take Sally to the doctor, nothing serious, she said, just a cough she thought should be checked out.

I happily sent them on their way, grateful for the quiet and the respite from Mom’s questioning eyes.

Now I can’t wait for them to get back, because the silence isn’t silent after all, what with the occasional jingle bells from a customer at the front door and the wheedling of the fan from the corner, blowing its whisper of air now that the June sun is heating up the front windows.

I flick the security monitor on, which shows a view of the alley—no trespassers, just a couple of gulls—and flip through our few broadcast TV channels we can also watch on the tiny screen. But I can’t bring myself to sit through the insulting dreck of daytime TV, with its advertisements for paycheck-advance loan rackets and “schools” in cooking and becoming a medical technician. And that doesn’t even take into account the court shows, which make a mockery of my very way of life.

Judge Judy, my ass.

I can’t help but look at the clock and remember what I would have been doing now. Yes, that deposition. Rescheduling was a pointless waste of everyone’s time.

But when Mr. Jenison shoved that paper across my desk with his forehead plowed by three deep lines, I knew it was hopeless to argue. It was a furious e-mail, half of which was typed in all capital letters, from a wealthy client.

I’d been tired and feeling a little buggy cooped up in the August-less office, weary of the pitying stares (“I know you were so close,” people kept saying, which started up the stupid rumors again) and so I decamped to a coffee shop and fielded a phone call about this client’s case from my cell phone, during which time I may have been less than discreet.

Chicago is too big a city for his wife to be in the booth behind me; really, how could I be held responsible for such a wild fluke? Mr. Jenison was not persuaded. He rattled off a few other examples of recent mistakes—innocent stuff anybody could have flubbed, whether their mentor got hit by a bus or not—and sent me home.

An hour oozes by before the front windows darken in the shadow of a huge truck. The Pepsi vendor hustles in and plops a clipboard in front of me for my initials. I’m about to sign and go back to my crossword (I almost ask him, what’s the French word for
stop
?) when I see that he’s brought in an impossibly large order.

We argue for a moment or two about it—I can’t accept all this; he says it’s what we ordered—and I disappear into the back office to find the paperwork we surely have.

The filing is nonsensical, nearly random, and outside he grows more blustery by the moment. I can’t help but picture my assistant, Kayla, clicking over to a file cabinet or tapping keys to come up with just the thing I need.

“Give me another minute!” I call, not wanting my mother stuck with this inventory she’ll never unload, and then . . .

A letter. It’s oddness calls to me among all the invoices and carbon copies of important business papers.

I drop it as if burned. R
obert
G
eneva
, begins the return address, printed in spiky capitals with such pressure that the envelope is visibly dented. Addressed to my mother, postmarked only three days ago.

The vendor appears in the office doorway. “Miss? If you can’t show me something different on your end, I’m leaving the order. I have other stops to make.”

“A minute, give me . . .” I trail off, gaping at him, until he turns away with a sudden scowling exhale.

My hands go back to riffling the papers, only I can’t remember what I was looking for, seeing nothing else for the searing flash of my father’s name.

Chapter 4

Maeve

I
blink in the white lights of the Walgreens, startled by its contrast to the Nee Nance. Instead of the rattly fan and Sally’s chatter and neighborhood gossip passed over the top of the counter, I can hear only canned music nearly vanishing behind the hiss of industrial-strength central air.

I’m not a Walgreens customer. I’ve been going to Clawson’s Drugs since I was pregnant with Anna. But if I walked into Clawson’s today, Chuck Clawson would start readying my blood pressure meds, only I can’t really afford them right now. I’d have to tell him a story, either a lie about not needing them anymore, or, heaven forbid, the truth, which would start the tongues wagging of anyone who happened to be right handy, and they’d start up the
poor Maeve
business.

I had quite enough of that twenty years ago, when Robert left.

Of course, this being Haven, even in Walgreens your neighbor or somebody’s cousin could be at your elbow before you can say “none of your beeswax.”

I don’t see anyone I know today, though.

I slide into the blood pressure machine and slip my arm into the cuff. Before I release the quarter into the slot, I take some deep breaths—
cleansing
breaths, Veronica would say—and think:
low numbers, low numbers
. The cuff tightens up like the fist of an angry man.

There should be a way to sneak someone’s blood pressure reading, so they can’t be anxious about it and have high blood pressure.

I open my eyes and flinch away, then look again, just to be sure. No, that’s not good at all.

Well, no wonder, with Anna dropping in all brittle and sad and acting like she’s not, and now Robert’s letter arriving with her right in front of me. That and the eviction notice, well, of course it’s high. That’s all, a little stress. In the fall when this is all sorted out, it will be better, I’m sure.

I wonder how Robert has fared, physically. We’re in our fifties and no one gets there unscathed, except for those geezers I see in the “Healthy Living” feature in the
Courier
sometimes, running marathons into their eighties.

I picture his liver swimming in beer, and this image makes me grin but also cringe. He was not often fall-down drunk, but he did nearly always have his hand wrapped around a can, unconsciously flicking the pull-tab the way Anna will start to twirl a pencil like a majorette whenever she forgets herself.

I don’t imagine he puts it away like he used to. Who could keep up that kind of pace for all those years? The decades are bound to mellow out a person. I don’t shout as often as I used to, and if the cash drawer doesn’t balance, I don’t . . .

“Ma’am? Is everything okay?”

I jump and this crashes my knee into the machine. It smarts something awful, but I mumble excuses, untangle my arm from the cuff, and limp as quickly as I can out of the store, ignoring the pain because what else is there to do?

T
he first thing I see when I slink back in the store—feeling guilty, as if I’ve just snuck out to smoke crack instead of check my blood pressure—is that Anna has crisscrossed piles of papers spread out across the countertop. She’s stacking them crisply and with enough force that she’s crinkling the edges.

“How’s Sally?” she asks, not looking up.

“She’s okay, I guess. No pneumonia or anything. She smokes too much, though she told Dr. Simon she didn’t. She also told him she’s fifty-nine when he’s looking at her paperwork and he knows damn well she’s sixty-four. So anyway, he starts asking me about her mental state.”

Anna looks up as if she’s only just now heard me. “Mental state?”

“Yeah. He actually asked if I’ve noticed any unusual behavior. I said, ‘Relative to what?’ and he looked at me like I was crackers, too.”

“Who’s this guy? Simon?”

“Yeah. Setterstrom retired. He just doesn’t know her. You okay?”

Anna seems more pale than when I left, her spray of freckles standing out against a waxy complexion.

She pulls out an envelope from under one of the stacks and tosses it into my field of vision.

Oh, no.

“He’s writing you?” she says, now folding her arms and aiming her full attention at me. I’ve never seen her in court, but I bet she’s got her lawyer face on now.

“So it would seem, and it’s none of your business.”

“How do you figure that, since he’s my father, and for all we knew he was dead?”

“I knew he wasn’t dead.”

Anna seems knocked off stride by this. “Have you been writing him all along?”

“No, I just . . .” How to explain to her that I just somehow knew? And that I always believed he’d come back? “Forget it.”

“How long has he been writing? Does he want money? Don’t you dare send him any money.”

“ ‘Dare’!” I throw my purse down to the floor. In my peripheral vision a customer steps in through the door and right back out again. “Don’t you talk to me about ‘dare,’ young lady. I’m still your mother.”

“Well, what does he want, then?”

I try a new tactic, using one of her own favorite lines. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, and whirl on my heel to run upstairs.

I hear the store’s front door slam and the lock click into place. I’ve miscalculated; she’s going to follow me after all. I duck into the kitchen as if I can hide in this stupid tiny apartment.

She finds me easily enough.

“What’s he been doing all this time?” Her voice betrays her, snapping and cracking like kindling in a fire. “What’s so important to keep him away from us?”

It’s useless, useless to talk to her about it; I can fast-forward the whole way through the conversation and she’ll be angry at any answer I give, because from me it will sound stupid and weak.

“He says he’ll explain it all.”

“What’s stopping him from explaining it so far?”

“He’s . . . He wants to tell me in person.”

Anna draws back. She’s still wearing half of her business suit, and then, for the first time, I see my daughter as a tired grown woman on the precipice of middle age.

“You’re not going to see him, are you?”

“Again, I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” I would like to have said that with some conviction, but my words trail off.

“Does he ever ask about me? Or would that be sort of a buzz kill, you know, the abandoned child.” She throws that last phrase like a punch and I flinch from it. Anna rubs her hands over her face then, rearranging her features away from anger, and for a moment I see the hurt emerge until she’s collected herself. Her breath is at first shaky, then her voice comes out even and precise. “Mom. Please don’t write him anymore. I don’t know what he wants after all these years, after leaving you the way he did, leaving
us
, but I can tell just from what you’ve said he’s being evasive, which means he’s being dishonest. He’s not telling you anything now because he knows he has no good reason to have left, and what good reason could there be? No call from him, no visit, never seeing me grow up or anything?”

Words of protest fly to my lips.
He loved me, he was a good man, he made some kind of mistake. Everyone deserves another chance if they’re truly sorry.

Anna holds out the letter to me, and as I take it, I notice her hand is trembling. In her spring green eyes now I can see the tears of twenty years ago as I tried to explain something that is still beyond comprehension.

“You’re right,” I hear myself say. “I won’t. I won’t write him. It can only lead to grief, I suppose.”

Anna wiggles her nose with the effort of trying not to cry and sniffs hard. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she says. “It’s been a hard couple of days.”

I’m crossing the kitchen to her when she turns and trots back down the stairs, saying over her shoulder, “I’d better open up the store.”

At the kitchen table, I turn over the letter, which is held closed by the tiniest bit of adhesive. Robert always was in a rush with things like this: sealing letters, putting the right dates on things.

With the barest flick of a fingernail the letter opens.

Chapter 5

Cami

M
y dad fixes me with his slit-eyed look, the one he reserves for special occasions, and in response I lean back in my chair at the kitchen table, propping my knee on the table’s edge for balance and an extra show of nonchalance.

“So, you think you’re hot shit, do you?”

This is a classic from the Tim Drayton repertoire, in the vein of such standards as “Who do you think you are?” and “I brought you into this world and I can take you out,” and my personal favorite, “Get out of my face, you stupid slut,” which has a nice alliterative feel.

I’m not sure this time why I’m hot shit. In school it was for getting all A’s in most everything without doing much homework, and then during family holidays it was for showing up in a car so fancy that it wasn’t missing any windows, hubcaps, or fenders. Sometimes I brushed my teeth in an uppity fashion.