The doctor had discharged me with an armload of pamphlets, including one about stress reduction. I almost laughed in his face, but he was just trying to help.
I suppose, in her way, Anna is also just trying to help, but she must have realized the last thing I need is harassment, because since the hospital she’s backed off.
My wedding ring taps my chest as I sit back for a moment and stretch. I didn’t even hesitate when I put it back on, though I made sure Anna wasn’t looking. It’s my ring and I can wear it how I like. As I sit forward to snip again, it swings briefly into my view, a glint of white gold.
Small white flowers swirl over a field of blue in the shade of a cool spring sky. It will be a shift dress, sleeveless, to the knee. It’s always been flattering on me and I can’t find them anymore. It was the style of dress I was wearing when I met Robert, in fact.
Dean Martin croons on my CD player about pillows and dreaming. I used to take so much flak for my taste in music, because all the other kids were shimmying to the waning days of disco or getting stoned listening to The Who. I didn’t like the teasing, but I didn’t change my ways, either. I wasn’t like all those other girls, and maybe that’s why Robert liked me back.
It was 1973 when we met. I used to tag along with Sean, my older cousin and the closest thing I had to a brother. Sally was hanging out in the group, too. She was quirky, and her quirky was still cute. She was eight years older than Sean and shaving years off her age even then. Her wild, kinky black hair and heavily kohled eyes were exotic and exciting to me. Sally called me “doll” and I loved being included that way in their circle of sophisticated people. I was only eighteen, still in high school.
One night in early fall I went to the drive-in. I was supposed to meet Nick, a pock-marked boy with big teeth who I’d thought was nice. I’d grabbed a ride with Sean and then wandered around the concessions and through the rows of cars trying to find Nick, getting colder and colder because I hadn’t brought a sweater.
When I finally gave up, embarrassed but not all that crushed that Nick hadn’t shown up, I wandered back to Sean’s car. No one was paying any attention to American Graffiti, and in fact no one was in the car at all. Sally was passing around a flask.
Robert saw me approach first and said, “Well, look here, a fair Irish lass.”
His voice was rich in a way that set him apart from the other boys. Not deep, exactly, but warm and resonant. He had a shock of dark, dark hair, and in the faint light from the movie screen and the moon, his smile made my stomach shiver.
I looked at my shoes and rubbed my bare arms with my hands.
“Hey, you’re cold,” he said, draping his jacket around my shoulders like a cape.
“Won’t you be cold?” I asked him. I could see goose bumps on his arms where his short-sleeved shirt ended.
“Nah.” He winked at me. “Not a bit.”
He drove me home himself that night and walked me to the door, so I wouldn’t have to spend one cold moment without his jacket. He stood on the porch while I let myself in, smiling at me but doing no more than that. I was just a kid, after all.
I had to lean on the door to catch my breath.
Of course, Robert understood the effect he had on me. He was a savvy twenty-two years old by then. I was just a teenager and experience-wise barely out of puberty. And I thought I was playing it cool! I was a puddle every time I saw him.
We saw each other at the drive-in, the bowling alley, the pizza place. Always in a group, always with Sally or Sean or both. But then, he never brought around other girls, and at the end of the night, I always seemed to end up with his jacket.
Now that I’ve finished cutting out the front of the dress, I scoot my sewing to the side and rest back on my pillow. I close my eyes and conjure up the jacket. It smelled like him, and the crackled leather rustled slightly when I moved. I could cry now to think that I gave it away to a thrift store in a fit of pique right after he left.
After I graduated, Robert asked me out properly. I was already a goner by then, and our first real kiss nearly made me swoon, just like in my favorite romance novels.
I didn’t mean to insult Anna by telling her she’s never known love like that. I just don’t see how she possibly could. She was always so very serious, even when she was with Will Becker in high school, insisting they break up because they couldn’t possibly maintain a long distance relationship, with him at Michigan Tech way up in the frozen north and Anna at University of Michigan. I tried to talk her out of it then, to give Will a chance, because he looked so utterly wrecked when he left here that day. Anna, on the other hand, glided down the steps after he’d gone, with her hand lightly on the railing. She simply started mopping the floor.
She probably had boyfriends in Chicago, but none that she ever told me about. I’ve never seen her giddy, not since . . .
Well, not since she was ten years old.
Another memory of Robert comes to me, of him pushing her on the swings at the park and Anna shrieking, “Higher!” Her freckles sparkled in the sun and her limbs were all akimbo, and Robert was hooting and laughing and running underneath her swing.
I shake my head, stretch, and pick up my scissors again. I’d better get busy if I want this dress done by August.
Chapter 18
Cami
When I see the cop come through the Nee Nance front door, the first thing I think is, he’s dead.
He asks me, “Is Mrs. Geneva present?”
So my dad’s not dead. I should be happy. Or something. “She’s resting right now, Officer. Can I help you with something?”
When I say “officer,” Anna pops out of the back office, where she’s been rummaging in papers. Her hair springs out of her head, and without her makeup in her casual clothes she looks like an overgrown twelve-year-old. She says to the cop, “I’m Anna Geneva, her daughter. What’s wrong?”
“We need to talk to your mother about an incident here a couple of days ago, with a boy and a broom.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say, remembering the scrawny kid and the shoplifting.
Anna shoots me a warning look, so I sit back in the office chair and let the attorney-at-law handle this one.
“She was defending her property. She believed the boys to be stealing and she ordered them to leave and they refused to go.”
The cop folds his arms. On closer inspection he looks younger than I would expect. Then again, I’m getting older, so these people are going to start turning up younger than me. Cops, doctors, and so on. He’s got a shaving nick on his jaw and I can see a tiny piece of toilet paper stuck there. He tells Anna, “She can’t go around hitting kids with brooms. She should have called us.”
“And what, made a citizens arrest? What if they’d turned on her? They were already showing a blatant disregard for her rights as proprietor of this store. Are you going to charge her with a crime?”
“Felonious assault with a cleaning implement. Very serious,” I intone. “We’re just lucky it wasn’t a Swiffer.”
“Cami!”
I unfold from my chair. “Seeing as this officer needs to talk to your mom, why don’t I go see if she’s awake.”
As I pass between them, I stop just in front of his face. He looks overly tense, like it’s a hostage situation. So I think better of actually reaching for his face to flick off the toilet tissue. “You’ve got something stuck to your jaw,” I tell him, and proceed up the stairs.
I knock on Maeve’s door and she says she’s awake. There’s a great deal of rustling before she opens the door.
When I tell her what’s going on downstairs, her jaw falls open.
“Yeah, I know,” I tell her. “What a world. Let’s get it over with before your daughter decides to file suit against the Haven Police Department.”
“Billy Patterson!” says Maeve as she comes down the stairwell. The cop swallows hard and stares at his shiny black shoes.
Turns out Maeve has known him since he was a kindergar
tner and used to stop in with his mom to buy a Snickers bar when they ran errands downtown. Billy, rather, Officer Patterson, is visibly relieved when Maeve shows him the offending broom. He’d thought it was a heavy shop-floor-type broom, something that could have done some damage.
He has to write up a report, he says, since the kid’s mom complained, but he felt pretty sure the prosecutor wouldn’t be bothered.
Anna shoos her mother back upstairs, and with Officer Billy safely down the street, Anna picks up a pencil and begins to twirl it in her hand.
“I cannot believe she hit that kid. She could still get sued. I read his notebook upside down; the kid was only twelve.”
“Take it easy, yeah? The little hoodlums were stealing from her.”
“I know, I know. I just . . .” Anna squints at me, then glances over her shoulder, checking for customers. We’re alone at the moment. She leans in closer, dropping her voice low. “Her decision making lately hasn’t been stellar. She’s not thinking clearly and I’m worried.”
“She didn’t decide to get high blood pressure, and she was worried about the cost of the drugs . . .”
“That’s not what I mean.” Anna looks down, working her jaw, and I think she’s working up to tell me something.
The bells on the front door clang and a couple of customers straggle in, one after the other. Anna holds my gaze for a moment, then sighs and returns to her papers in the office.
In a half hour, she taps me on the shoulder and we switch places. Her turn to work, just like back in school.
“I can close up for a few minutes to drive you home,” Anna says, wrapping her wild hair up in a ponytail off her face. “Wouldn’t take so long and you wouldn’t have to sit around here.”
“I’ve got nothing there to do, yeah?”
“You still painting your room?”
“Yeah, and I’m tearing up the carpet, but . . . Well, my dad usually has a houseguest this time of day and I’m not in the mood to run into her.”
“Ah. Charming.”
When the door opens, Anna stiffens, her hand frozen in the act of restocking cigarettes.
“Hi,” says Amy Rickart quietly, looking like she just ran over Anna’s dog with her car.
Anna doesn’t acknowledge her and goes back to her stocking. Amy nods at me briefly, then addresses herself to Anna’s back.
“Is your mom okay?”
“She’ll be fine,” Anna says, not turning around.
“I was sorry to hear she was ill.”
Anna slams the cigarette packs in place, denting some of them in the process.
“I’m really sorry about what’s happening to the store,” Amy says, cringing as if those words cost her much effort.
Anna pauses at this and turns to Amy, her face a still mask.
Amy continues, “Paul does have his reasons. He’s really not a monster, honest, but it is really awful, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry for being so defensive before.”
Anna relaxes one degree from her ramrod posture. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. It’s not your fault.”
“You’ve had a rough few weeks, I guess.”
Anna nods slightly but doesn’t elaborate or allow her mask-face to betray her thoughts.
“I do have a question, Amy,” she says. “Has this project been approved by the city council yet?”
“Um,” Amy looks up toward the ceiling. “I don’t really know, because the other day was the first I’d heard of it. He doesn’t really tell me much about his work, not specifics.”
“Well, I can find that out easily enough.” Anna resumes her stocking, with less force.
“Why do you ask?” Amy says, and she’s clutching her purse, I notice, as if someone’s trying to rip it out of her hand.
“I might want to attend the meeting, is all.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad your mom is okay.”
As Amy leaves, I notice a tiny wrinkle puckering her pert little forehead.
“Anna, how long are you planning to stay in town?” I ask her. “The meeting couldn’t be any sooner than next week at the earliest. How much time off did they give you?”
She shrugs. “I was not specific about how much time I needed to help my mother.”
“Aren’t you . . . Your bosses might be a little mad, yeah?”
“They’ll get over it. I can’t abandon her right now. She’s been abandoned quite enough, I’d say.” Anna dusts off her hands. “Hand me that phone book. I’m going to call city hall.”
I walk home after a time, not wanting to interrupt the running of the store or disturb Maeve to get a ride. It’s not all that far. Nothing is far away, here. I have to thread through the tourists and the kids on summer break slopping ice cream around, and seeing the messy, sticky kids reminds me of my job waiting for me in the fall and how much I’ve grown to loathe kids. Okay, not all kids, I guess. Just about nine out of every ten kids I’ve tutored.
At least it’s a job, and even though I’m not making much money now, I’m also not spending it on rent and not gambling it away, so it’s something I can offer to Steve, some money and a mea culpa and a Look at me, I was so good all summer.
I glance back at the Nee Nance when I turn the corner. It looks older than its neighbor stores, like the weary grown-up standing watch over the shiny young kids. So Anna is fixing to save the store somehow, bringing her law degree to bear at the city council meeting, which she discovered on the phone is in two weeks, just before the Fourth of July. I then heard her lie to her bosses on the phone about her mother’s delicate state of health, and from what I could hear of her end of the conversation, things were a little testy.
I see no signs of my dad’s truck, but that’s no indication of whether Sherry will be there. She stumbles home from here on foot, I think, though I don’t know exactly where she lives.
I hear breathing inside, a deep, rattling snore. As I creep down the hall in my bare feet, I see his door ajar. He’s in his bed, alone. Sherry must have driven the truck somewhere.
I never go in his room. As kids, Trent and I knew there was “hell to pay” if we crossed that threshold, and he reminded me of that when I first got back. So that’s why I’ve never noticed this particular pile of stuff in the closet, which is diagonal from his door. The closet door is one of those folding shutter-style doors and is dented, off the track, and open. Looks like photo albums in there.
Dad’s no shutterbug, so these must be family pictures, from when we were still a family, before Mom’s cancer ate her up.
I’m still outside his door, just a few feet from his head, but not inside. I have broken no rule. I strain to see how many albums there are . . .three? . . . and try to guess their age based on how yellowed they look.
He’s sleeping really hard. Passed out from a good lunchtime drunk is my guess.
The door squeaks when I swing it open, but his snoring doesn’t even change pitch.
I pick my way across his floor, over landmines of smelly laundry and glass bottles. I slip the top album off the pile, resisting my desire to open it right then. I slip it under my shirt.
The snoring stops.
I snatch some crumpled clothing off the bottom of the closet and hold it over the rectangular bulge in my shirt. I freeze there, waiting.
“You little bitch,” he slurs.
I turn, still in my crouch. “Just doing some laundry, thought I’d grab some of yours.”
I straighten up slowly, balancing the album in my shirt, making sure to keep the clothes in front of it.
“I told you . . .” he says. His tone is menacing, but he’s not gotten off the bed. He’s only up on one elbow; his finger pointing at me is weaving in the air. “. . . to stay outta here.”
“I’m going.”
I skirt the bed as far as I can without looking like I’m doing so, because What, are you afraid of me? is another thing I really don’t want to hear.
I almost drop the bundle when he hollers at me, just as I make it to the hallway
, “And close the fucking door!”
I do close the door and force myself to carry out the ruse by walking down to the basement laundry, though I want nothing more than to shut myself in my room and study this piece of my past.
Chapter 19
Amy
Every time I walk into the Becker house, I have to remind myself to stop gawking at it like some kind of hick.
But honestly, I can’t help but look up in the two-story foyer at the winding staircase and the “light fixture,” as Mrs. Becker dismissively called it the first time I gasped about the chandelier.
Mrs. Becker escorts me to the kitchen while the men prepare for the city council in Mr. Becker’s upstairs office.
“Want some wine, Amy?”
“No, thanks, but I’d love a sparkling water, if you have some.”
She gives me her hostess smile and takes a glass from the cupboard. She’s wearing only flannel pants and a T-shirt, but she still looks regal to me. “Big night for Paul, isn’t it?” she says. “You’ll get used to the nerves. I used to chew my fingernails to bits wondering how the projects were going. You get so tied up in it sometimes, their work, and the business. When it’s a family business, it’s not just punching a clock. Everything can seem like it has such high stakes.”
I take her water and glance away. I am nervous, but not for the reason she thinks.
“Paul doesn’t really tell me that many details, actually.”
Mrs. Becker waves her hand through the air, looking briefly like she’s conducting an orchestra. “Oh, well, it’s not very interesting anyway. Easements and zoning variances and drainage. Don’t get your brother-in-law started on drainage! In the old days he was always going at us about green spaces and the danger of run-off and using up farmland.”
I sip my water and remember Paul one night telling me how his big brother sank one of his family’s projects when Will was still a high school kid by hanging out with this group called Youth for Earth. The newspapers loved it, Paul said, his face thunderous with old anger. The developer’s kid fighting his own family’s project. At the time I pictured Paul at the dining room table, just a kid, watching his brother and his dad fight, and I wanted to hug him. So I did. He’d kissed me on the forehead and said, “Thank God you understand me.”
The Life You've Imagined Page 9