The Life You've Imagined (7 page)

“The cash register drawer is stuck,” I tell her.

“Oh, that. I can fix that.”

Anna disappears into the back room and comes out with a screwdriver, and damned if she doesn’t fix it, lawyer clothes and all.

O
n the way walking back to my dad’s house, I stop in Jack’s Hardware and buy some paint with my last good credit card. I’ve tried to rationalize this purchase twelve different ways since I made up my mind, but there’s no legitimate reason to spend money I don’t have, money that I should be giving back to Steve, and in fact I shouldn’t be working at the Nee Nance but someplace a little more profitable, like temping or even waitressing, which I’ve done in a pinch. It’s not like Maeve can pay me much.

I just need to paint my room, and that seems to be as good a reason as any to do something. Also it keeps me busy, and busy is good because it keeps me from thinking about the closest casino and whether I can take a bus to get there.

I’m rehearsing a conversation with my dad on the way back, as the houses get shabbier and the streets get more rutted, but his truck is gone so there’s no need tell him,
You should be happy I want to paint, make this house worth more someday . . .

Almost makes me wish he were there, since I’ve gone to the trouble of thinking all that up.

He’s forgotten to lock the door behind him. I’d be pissed about that if I owned anything more valuable than a few paperback books.

The door swings into the wall behind it, the doorknob neatly sticking into a hole punched by an earlier, harder bang. It isn’t until I yank the door free and close it behind me that I see a body on the couch and shout, “Jesus!”

And the body moves, so at least I know it’s not dead.

She’s got chlorinated hair with black roots and black around her eyes from makeup applied too heavily, too long ago. She carries the same eau de booze that clings to my father.

“Get out of my house,” I tell her.

“Fuck, he’s married?” she groans, throwing an arm over her eyes.

“Oh, God, no. Not at all and definitely not to me. I’m his daughter and I’m home now, so get out.”

I stomp past the couch and down the hall, slamming my thin bedroom door and dropping the ersatz hook-lock into place. I pick up my deck of cards for some restless shuffling, but no sooner do I spill them out of the box into my hand than the chlorinated chick taps on my door. Least, I assume it’s her.

“What,” I shout at the door, shuffling the cards rapid-fire so they sound like a tommy gun.

“You gotta light?”

“No.”

“You’re out of toilet paper and I really gotta wee.”

Wee
?

I forget the hook is there, and when I yank on the door, it pulls right out of the cheap, thin doorframe.

I stomp past her and rummage in the hall closet for toilet paper. I haven’t been to the store in a couple days and I didn’t know we were running out. Presumably my dad must have done this kind of thing for himself before I came back.

“Use a Kleenex.”

“Why so snippy? If you pardon my expression.” She leans on the hallway wall with her unlit cigarette propped between her fingers, ready for action.

“I’m not used to extending Chez Drayton hospitality to random women my dad is nailing. If you pardon my expression.”

“I’m not random. I’m Shirelle. Most people just call me Sherry.”

She sticks out her hand. I take it and her fingers feel bony and hard. I look at her face directly and I see the makeup seeping into lines around her eyes. She’s older than I thought; I’d assumed from the bleach job that she was a youngster, my age or younger. But no, she’s probably about dad’s age. My mother’s age.

“Just go. I’ve got things to do, yeah? Makes me nervous having a stranger here.”

“What stranger? I just told you my name is Sherry. You must be Camille.”

I stop in my bedroom doorway, then turn back to her slowly. “He talked about me?”

“Oh, sure. Says you’re real smart and everything, can do math in your head like some kinda whiz-kid computer. Too bad about your brother.”

“What do you mean?”

“Being a fruit and all.”

I take her elbow and start walking toward the front door. She’s wheeling along behind me with her limbs flapping everywhere. “Hey!”

When I deposit her on the porch, she clutches the railing as if I’d tossed her like a pro wrestler. “There’s a bathroom at the gas station on the corner. I bet they even have toilet paper.” The door is too light to slam hard, but it’s something.

With the curtains off the window, the room looks cleaner already. I would love to jump right to the yellow I bought, but I have a lesson to learn, I think, about instant gratification. So instead I pry open the primer can.

Even with primer, the room is better. Disappearing under my roller are scuffs and scrapes, smears of unknown origin, a sheen of dirt and neglect. I roll hard though my arms ache, and then I realize I have to do the ceiling, too, because it’s also filthy.

The radio croons behind me, tunes from my days in college, when I was so dizzy with freedom.

That’s when I hear stomping feet down the hall. I left the door open for ventilation, so I stand and watch the empty space in the frame until it fills up with my father.

His shoulders are tight and aimed forward. His black hair juts out from under his hat, and he’s got three days of beard going. Now he smells as much like the shop as he does the booze. It’s that pinnacle of the day before he really lets loose. Even so, I do not relax.

“What’s this I hear about you attacking my girlfriend?”

“I convinced her to leave, yeah? After she didn’t respond to my subtle hinting along the lines of ‘Get out of my house.’ ”

He smiled. “Oh, your house, is it? Yours? Bitch has been back one week, crawling back because your boyfriend threw you out, and now this house is yours? And now you think you can paint, too?”

“Why not? It’s in my room, which you never see. Someday you’ll sell this house, and then you’ll be glad I fixed it up.”

“So my piece-of-shit house isn’t good enough for you.” His eyes dart down. “You stupid slut, you’re getting paint on the carpet. Ain’t you heard of a drop cloth?”

“I’m going to tear up the carpet, so it
is
the drop cloth, yeah? There’s hardwood underneath.”

“And what if I say no? It’s my goddamn house and if I want carpet, I want carpet. And what if I tell you you’ve gotta get down on your knees and scrub off every little paint splotch? Whaddya say to that?”

“I say fuck you to that.”

As he swings, I only have time enough to close my eyes, so it isn’t until I hear the smack of his hand into the wall that I know he didn’t hit me. When I look, he’s grinning at a black, greasy handprint he’s left on the wet primer, and smeared straight down a good three feet. He wipes his hand on his overalls.

“I’m going out. With Sherry. And you know what? She’ll sleep here if I want her to and she’ll stay as late as she feels like. And if you lay a hand on her again, I’ll call the cops and have your ungrateful ass thrown in jail for assault. Don’t think they won’t do it, neither. Betcha your fancy tutoring people wouldn’t take kindly to a teacher with a criminal record.”

After he storms down the hall, I hear something hit the floor and shatter. And something else, six or eight of them. Beer bottles, is my guess. The beer bottles leftover from last night’s partying with Sherry. He’s wearing his same heavy boots he always wears to the shop and he’ll crunch right over it.

I’m barefoot, though. And my shoes are by the front door.

I lower the roller into the primer again and roll a swath over his handprint, again and again, until it finally fades from view.

Chapter 11

Anna

W
hen I was twelve, walking in here made me gasp in awe. I stared at the fine woodwork, fingered the linen napkins, and stole furtive peeks at the other diners, making up elaborate stories in my head about what they did when they went home. They went to their mansions and played pool in their downstairs rec rooms, I figured, the grown-ups holding cocktails at the bar and watching their children play. And in my fantasies of other people’s lives, even the rich ones never got out of the fancy clothes they wore to dinner. I imagined they kept those clothes on because they knew how beautiful they looked and wanted to stay that way.

Now, standing in the purposefully dim Portobello Ristorante, I’m wearing nice clothes myself. I know that the people in pretty dresses go home and sit in their pajamas and watch TV, same as anyone.

Well, they probably watch a nicer TV.

Beck is a little late. I imagine his wife grilling him about where he’s going, and with whom, although it’s probably nothing more than a work delay. I know how those things go.

Mom took me here after Dad left, as a treat for getting straight A’s. I believe the real reason was to distract me from his absence. I wore my mother’s jewelry and some cloying perfume she bought from the Avon lady. I tried very hard to pretend that we were going to keep our pretty dresses on all evening.

I wasn’t the only one pretending.

I was holding the giant leather-bound menu, and it was so tall it blocked my mother’s face. I insisted on ordering from the adult menu, and Mom was talking about school and how I joined the swim team. Then she said something about how “Your father will be so excited to see you swim. Do you know he’s quite a good swimmer himself—”

“He’s never going to see me swim. He’s never coming back. For all we know he’s dead.”

I slammed the menu shut, and when I flopped it down on the table, it caught the basket of rolls by the edge. They spilled out across the tablecloth. Mom and I hurriedly shoved them back in the basket, lest it look like we were going to cram the rolls in our purses or something.

Mom’s hand was shaking. I folded my hands over my menu so I wouldn’t fidget. When the waitress arrived, I ordered the “quee-chee” and blushed hard when the waitress replied, “The quiche, then? Or maybe the young lady would prefer some pasta?” with a sideways glance at my mother.

Now I hear the heavy door squeak open, and the man is framed by a corona of sunshine, coming right at me with arms outstretched.

I return Beck’s hug warmly.

“So good to see you,” he says, and we follow the hostess to a booth. It might be my imagination, but as he glances over his shoulder, it looks like he’s worried about being seen by someone he knows.

We make small talk about pleasant June weather and exchange polite inquiries about family. His parents are fine; his sister is fine at Harvard. I tell him my mother is fine. There’s no reason for him to ask about my father.

“Nice that your brother is getting married,” I say, carrying on the family thread and stirring my iced tea. “Is he in the family business, too?”

“Yeah, so far Dad has kept us all on the reservation, except Tabitha, but she’ll probably stay out east, she says. New York or somewhere. Boston, Philly. Somewhere like that.”

“What’s it like working for your dad?”

Beck’s smile is thin. “It’s swell, you know. He’s so experienced and everyone knows him. It’s gratifying to see buildings go up that you first saw on blueprints.”

He doesn’t meet my eye for the “gratifying” part.

I already know from e-mails that he works for his dad as an environmental consultant, adding green spaces and proper drainage to the Becker Development projects.

“Hug any trees lately?” I ask him as our food arrives: salad for me, a Reuben for him.

“As many as possible. Though I don’t have much time for petitions and such these days. I do recycle and compost at home. Couldn’t talk Sam into cloth diapers, but we’ll try that next time, I guess.” His smile fails completely and he looks down into his lap.

“You okay?” I ask him. He’s ignoring his sandwich.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I’m just a little frustrated at home. Sam has been so mad at me all the time lately, like I can’t do a single thing right. Like just today, I left a dish out on the counter this morning and she called me at work to yell at me over it just before I had a big meeting with the city planners. She said it showed I didn’t care about how much work she had to do all day.”

I clear my throat and glance around. In all our friendly e-mail banter, he’d never before complained about his wife. “Ever occur to you to put the dish away, Boy Genius?”

“Well, of course, I should . . . Hey, whose side are you on?” He smiles but quickly looks away, back at his sandwich, which he’s still not eating.

“We’re taking sides now? I’m just saying, it seems pretty simple to me. Put the dish away. Ta-da!”

He shook his head. “Marriages aren’t that simple, and then adding a child adds a whole other level . . .”

In other words, I know nothing about having a family. I cross my arms and tune him out.

“Hey, I’m sorry.” He reaches across for my elbow, but he can’t reach it and I don’t give in to the gesture. “I shouldn’t have started complaining and all. It’s fine, it’ll all work out. Let’s stop carrying on about me. Are you enjoying your vacation?”