Mom pokes her head in. A neglected pencil falls from behind her ear and she picks it up again. “Oh good, honey, you’re awake. You have a visitor.”
“I do?”
“Cami Drayton.”
“Really?”
“She’s back in town and stopped to say hello, so I told her you were home and I’d see if you’re awake. Should I send her up or tell her to come back?”
Back in town? I wonder if she means for a visit or that she’s moved back. That’s a girl I never expected would stick around this little speck on the map.
“I guess, send her up. Just stall her a few minutes first.”
As I wrestle the frizz back into a ponytail, I try to remember how many years it’s been. She was a skinny, sharp-edged girl with huge round glasses who did projects with me in school and worked at the store in the afternoon. We’d be elbow to elbow at the front counter, one of us punching the register, the other doing homework. People would sometimes ask if we were sisters, which we thought was terribly funny—since we looked nothing alike—until I got older and stopped finding it amusing at all. Rather, it was evidence of how little the customers paid attention to the living, breathing humans handing over the cigarettes. Anyone with eyes could see we weren’t related.
We lost touch after graduation, then briefly touched base again during my flirtation with Facebook, before I got tired of having old boyfriends and former clients try to be my pretend-friends on the computer and stopped updating anything on my page. I now try to remember what her page had said about her job, her life. Was she “in a relationship”? I believe she was. Her posts were always cryptic and funny but left few clues as to what her life was really like. Not unlike the flesh-and-blood Cami I remember. Her profile picture was windswept and romantic, black and white. Her glasses were small and rectangular, but she looked much the same as her girlhood self. She was turned slightly away from the camera, as if she hadn’t known it was there.
I hardly hear Cami coming up the steps and startle when she comes into the room.
“What are you, a ninja?” I say, smoothing down the last few strands of hair and trying to straighten my blouse.
“It’s my night job, yeah? Pays well, but the uniform doesn’t exactly catch the eye.”
She’s wearing a man’s shirt tied off at the waist and a pair of narrow black pants. She looks like a modern version of Audrey Hepburn. She’s taller than I remember.
“Well, hi,” I finally say, having put myself back together as best I can. “What brings you back to town? Vacation?” I smile but don’t try to hug her. Neither of us was much for hugging.
Everything on her face seems to pull tighter and close in. “Something like that. I’m home for the summer.”
“Home? At your . . . At your dad’s?”
“Yeah.”
I try not to visibly react to this, which means I’ve already reacted, in a way.
I clear my throat and say, “I’m home for a couple of weeks.” I don’t feel like elaborating, and Cami doesn’t ask. She was always good like that.
“I thought I’d see if your mom needs help at the store again. Like old times, yeah?”
“Yeah, exactly. Old times.”
We seem huge in this room, now that we’re grown-ups. If we stood hand in hand we could just about span it with our arms.
There’s nowhere else to sit in my room except on my bed. I sit down cross-legged on my pillow such that my back touches the headboard. Without needing to be invited, Cami sits down facing me, also cross-legged, her hands lightly resting on her ankles, posture straight, like a Buddha.
“We used to sit this way all the time, remember?”
Cami nods. “When we weren’t stretched out cross-wise on the bed. Not sure that would work these days, though.”
Indeed. My narrow twin bed isn’t suited for sprawling adults, just daydreaming girls on their stomachs, their legs bent at the knees and their sock-feet waving in the air, their chins propped in their hands. We used to talk about our crushes. Typical in that way, at least.
“Remember that kid, Damon?” I say now, picturing a boy with braces and a popped-up collar. “I used to write A loves D in my notebook, thinking I wasn’t giving anything away by using initials. I wonder what happened to him?”
“Dead.”
“What?” My hand flies up to my face, and then drops back to my lap as I wait for Cami to elaborate.
“Yeah, he fell through the ice out on the lake. Weeks before they found him. Left behind a daughter, too.”
“How did I not hear this?”
She shrugs lightly. “Why would you? You were in Chicago by then. I only heard because one of the parents where I tutor had been in Haven and saw it on the news. She knew I was from there—here, that is—so she told me. It was about three years ago.”
So he was about twenty-seven. Damon had graduated from high school, pumped his fists into the air and danced a little jig on stage in his cap and gown to the delight of the entire assembled crowd of parents and giddy kids. And he had ten years to live.
When I saw August last, he had hours to live, only.
“I don’t know why I’m so shocked. I mean, accidents happen. We’re not immune.” I wonder who else might be dead, the news not having reached my office on Wacker Drive.
Cami adjusts her glasses on her nose, not looking directly at me. “No, we’re most certainly not.”
A minute or two pass, punctuated by the sounds of cars motoring down the avenue and shrieks of gulls. I’m about to ask Cami about that tutoring job she mentioned when she points to my mirrored vanity.
“Hey, you’ve still got yours.” She indicates a magazine clipping on the mirror above the old brown vanity table. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, it says. Live the life you’ve imagined.
I shrug. “I never took it down when I moved out.”
Amy had photocopied it for us out of Ladies’ Home Journal, too many years ago to count.
“I never put mine up,” Cami says, her gaze resting on the tiny octagon-shaped window near the ceiling of my room. “I always thought it was bullshit.”
“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.
Once 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. Robert Geneva, 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?
The 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 pers
on.”
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.
The Life You've Imagined Page 2