The Life You've Imagined

by Kristina Riggle

  Then Robert and Sean and the gang came in. My heart leaped; I was saved! But they chose a seat so far away from that man, they’d never see a thing.

  I served them some sodas, and when Robert asked me what was wrong, I smiled at him and said nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine.

  Moments later, I steeled myself to approach the Wolf Man’s table. As I was trying to hear his buddy’s snack order, I found myself in the wolf’s lap, encircled in his meaty arms. I pushed against him and he squeezed tighter. I kicked my feet and he laughed, his oniony breath in my ear, my hair. I could feel his erection under my thigh and I hollered, “Let me go!” and wanted to cry with how pathetic and fearful I sounded.

  The next moments happened all at once. The chair was knocked down, and in a moment I was back on my feet and Robert was on top of the man, pummeling him in the face. His buddies were closing in and pushing up sleeves.

  “Robert!” I screamed, because he was not a big man, and the other men were, in fact, all rather large.

  At last Uncle Mike and my cousin Sean and a couple other friends of ours finally swooped in. The wolf and his whole pack were ousted into the parking lot, banned for life, and threatened with jail and worse if they ever came near the place, especially that night.

  Uncle Mike pleaded with me not to tell my mother. No doubt he feared her wrath, too, that this should happen under his watch.

  He insisted I take the night off. I tried to refuse, playing it cool, though my hands trembled in my lap like I’d been taken with some kind of palsy. He sent Robert and Sean to guard my walk to my car.

  Sean beat it back to his bowling game the minute he established that there were no villains lurking about.

  Robert put his arm around me for the rest of the trip across the parking lot, and I still tried to play the woman of the world.

  “It was nothing,” I said. “Some horse’s ass.” The curse word felt strange in my mouth and sounded too quiet for the circumstances.

  “It wasn’t nothing. He was scaring you, and doing it on purpose, which makes him one sick prick. You don’t ever let anyone do that to you, Maeve. You come get me, or if you can’t, get somebody. Don’t ever let anyone hurt you like that.”

  He squeezed my shoulder and helped me into the car, even slamming my door for me. He stood in the circle of light under the parking lot lamppost until he disappeared from view in my rear mirror.

  Rumble strips startle me back to the present with a loud, grinding growl.

  I aim the car straight again and roll down the window, tuning the radio to a talk station. No more daydreaming allowed. The real thing will be in front of me soon enough.

  Chapter 47

  Amy

  When I see myself in the mirror, I turn to look over my shoulder. My mother thinks I’m looking at her, and she smiles and gives me a thumbs up, tears carving furrows through her makeup.

  In truth, I thought for just a moment that this reflection belonged to someone else, and I was turning to see the other bride in Agatha’s, wearing my dress.

  Now that the dress has been ordered to size and altered to fit me just so, the effect is astonishing. My waist has never looked so tiny, and the special strapless bra I ordered makes it look like I even have a chest.

  I vow I will not let one sweet, one carb, one glass of wine, pass my lips until after the big day.

  My bridesmaids were horrified that I cancelled my bachelorette party. I told them to go get drunk without me, and I think they’re going to do exactly that. Considering how close I came to not having this wedding at all, “celebrating” my single life hardly seems worth the effort.

  No one has been speaking. They’re waiting for me, I realize, Agatha and my mother.

  “It’s beautiful.” My voice breaks.

  “You’re beautiful,” Agatha says, fluffing out my gown here and there, pulling on bits of the dress to make sure it fits. Of course it does; she’s a genius, and every bride in town knows that.

  My mother starts to speak and has to clear her throat and start again. “I wish . . .”

  She doesn’t have to finish her sentence. She sits behind us on a cushioned bench, wearing a column-shaped lavender dress with a jacket. It falls nearly to the floor. The embroidery on the jacket echoes the lace on my dress. It’s perfect; rather, the best Agatha could possibly do.

  “You look lovely,” I tell her.

  “Not hardly,” she answers, but waves away further protest and starts digging in her purse. I know enough to give up at this point. Persistent argument will only escalate, and she’ll just get more and more vicious with herself in an effort to convince us she truly is hideous.

  I notice Aunt Agatha has paused in her dress-fluffing to rub her hands. They look knotty, like branches on a dying tree.

  “Are you all right?”

  She seems to only just realize what she’d been doing. “Oh, this. My arthritis is kicking up. I don’t know how many more weddings I can do. I’m just glad I held out for yours.”

  “Will you be hiring someone, then?” Agatha has had shop assistants before, girls who work the register, if she can find someone reliable enough and the business is brisk. But she’s never had anyone else do the tailoring.

  Agatha steps forward with my veil. It’s old-fashioned, an actual veil that comes over my face, attached to a headpiece that will be combed into my hair in its updo. I didn’t want one of those cascading bits of tulle stuck in my bun. I wanted a real veil. I wanted for so long to see the candlelight muted through the tulle, to have it pulled back for complete clarity just as I reach my husband.

  “No,” she says, stretching to reach over my head. I bow at the neck, feeling like royalty. “No, I’ll probably just close up.”

  “Oh, no, you can’t!”

  Agatha shrugs, but her eyes are sad. “Well, it couldn’t be forever.”

  My mother interjects. “Why don’t you hire someone?”

  She shakes her head firmly. “You don’t keep your own business going for forty years and then just hand it over. It would be like handing your kid to a stranger and telling him ‘You be careful now.’ No way.”

  This speech sounds rehearsed, giving me the impression she’s had this talk before. “You don’t have to give up everything,” I tell her, thinking of all the brides in Haven who won’t have her personal attention, all the fat girls crying in fitting rooms who won’t have Agatha to make their clothes fit. “Just hire an assistant. For the sewing.”

  Agatha looks up at me, honest surprise on her face. “My dear. The sewing is everything.”

  My cell phone rings, and I flap my hand toward my purse. My mother reaches over and she can’t get up fast enough, she knows that, so she passes it to Agatha, who hands it to me, fire brigade style. It’s Paul, and I’m a little breathless when I answer.

  “Hi, babe,” he says.

  “Hi, honey!” I chirp.

  “Listen, um, do we have anything going on tonight? Anything that can’t be rescheduled?”

  “Nope, not at all!” We were supposed to be finally deciding on a first song, the one we’ll dance to as husband and wife. It was one of the many chores that got dropped in the last weeks. We only just got the invitations done, telling everyone who asked that there had been a typo in the first batch and we were so sorry for the delay.

  He sighs, a huge whoosh right into the phone. “Oh, good. I’ve just got to stay late tonight, I . . . I’m sorry, honey. I’ll make it up to you. Let’s go out for a late dinner? Or maybe tomorrow?”

  I think of the calories in a restaurant meal, even in the so-called salads. “No, it’s okay, really. Do what you need to do.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yep!”

  “Bye. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I click the phone closed, and Agatha takes my purse from me, fluffing my veil again. “So nice to hear,” she said. “That’s the nice thing about a bride who’s not a twenty-year-old. You know how to take things in stride.”


  My mother laughs, and it startles me because I don’t know what’s funny. “Lord, yes!” she cries. “When Marlin was working so late in the garage all the time, I used to get so angry I think I smashed a dish on my own kitchen floor. And of course he was only doing it because he thought he had to be the hardest worker in town, and . . .”

  My mother and Agatha start their patter, reminiscing about their own days as newlyweds, and their words trail to nothing in my ears. I can think only of Paul, hunched over his desk, his sleeves pushed up and his tie tossed over his shoulder so it won’t hang down on his papers.

  My phone rings again and I sigh and extend my hand for it, knowing now that Paul has gotten my blessing for late work, it won’t be him calling again. Next I hear his voice will be tomorrow at the earliest.

  “Hello?”

  “Amy? This is Nikki’s mom. Listen, I’m afraid there’s some bad news. Nikki was trying to water-ski last week on her vacation and she broke her leg, quite seriously. She’ll have to have surgery and she’s in a lot of pain. She’s not going to be in the wedding. I’m so sorry.”

  I stumble through some polite words of sympathy for her injury and add to my mental list of chores a get-well card for her, but all I can think about, truly, is the problem this creates.

  It’s asymmetry. An orphaned groomsman.

  My heart starts to flutter in my chest like a frantic bird, and a wave of heat breaks over my skin. I start to zip myself out of the dress, because if I faint I might rip it.

  My mother and Agatha ask me what’s wrong, and I can hear myself telling them Nikki broke her leg, but I’m not really in the room; my brain is whirring away at how to fix this.

  The Beckers can’t demote any groomsmen at this late date; all their people are important. Snubs in a large, rich family can carry on for generations, so I’m told. Not that the guys would care, no. It would be their mothers, their wives.

  But what do we do with a groomsman alone? Walking down the aisle with no woman on his arm? “It would look awful,” I murmur.

  “What? What’s awful?” asks my mother as I step out of the crinoline. I seize my sundress and throw it over my head as fast as possible; in my distraction I hadn’t realized I was undressing in front of them. I’d intended to ask them to step out of the dressing room first.

  “It’s all wrong,” I say. “It won’t look right.”

  “Your dress? But you just said it’s gorgeous.” Agatha frowns, clearly worried about where she’s gone wrong. She starts inspecting the dress, which is once again on its hanger.

  “Oh,” says my mother. “Oh. I see.”

  She slips out of the dressing room door, with Agatha right behind.

  I need a substitute. I need a fill-in bridesmaid who can wear a size ten dress, because my dresses were special ordered, and because of Paul and his “gee, maybe we shouldn’t get married” stunt, we’re so far behind . . .

  “Amy!” calls Agatha, and I seize my purse and run out of the room at the urgency in her tone.

  The look on her face freezes me in mid-step. She beckons me with one finger.

  As I get close, she folds her arms. “Young lady. Your mother is in her own dressing room now, and I’ll have you know she’s bawling her eyes out because you’re so upset her weight will make everything look all wrong.”

  “What? No! I didn’t mean her! I meant we lost Nikki as a bridesmaid and so . . .”

  She doesn’t change her expression one bit.

  “Agatha, I’m telling the truth. I’m upset because now we’ve got a groomsman without a partner!”

  “I’m not the one you have to convince.”

  I tap the dressing room door where my mother’s feet are showing. She nearly crashes the door into me when she slams it open. I try to stop myself from grimacing at the way she waddles when she’s in a hurry, swaying her bulk from side to side on her way past Agatha, to the car.

  “Something tells me I’m going to suddenly take ill on your wedding day,” she says as she hits the sidewalk.

  “No, Mom, please, I wasn’t talking about you!”

  I load her into my car—parked mercifully close this time—and climb in my side, explaining to her all the way about Nikki and how stupid it will look to have one groomsman alone.

  My mother shakes her head, but her frown has softened into a look of weary exhaustion. “Fat mother, lone groomsman—what does it matter, Amy? You should have seen the look on your face. You looked like someone just died. I thought I raised you to believe that looks weren’t important.”

  “Ha!” I smack the steering wheel. “Remember high school? Me, and the girl with cerebral palsy, and John with the huge nose and horrible acne, all in the Loser Club. Then I lost the weight, and huh, guess what? Miraculously people look my way. Men ask me out. I get a job sitting at a reception desk instead of working the stock room at T. J. Maxx. Looks don’t matter? My size six ass.”

  “So then explain to me why your fat-ass mother should be in your wedding?”

  I drop my head back to the car’s headrest. “Mother. Of course I want you there. I love you more than . . .” a perfect wedding, I finish in my head. “More than anything.”

  “I’ll be there. But I won’t be in the pictures.”

  “Mom, please . . .”

  She holds up a hand to me and turns to look out the side window. “I’m not going to be looking at those pictures the rest of my life thinking about this moment. Take me home.”

  I can’t help but try one more time. “But what if this is the day you decide to change things?”

  She snorts and doesn’t turn around. I drive her back home and walk her up the porch steps in silence, her wheezing filling the space between us.

  Chapter 48

  Anna

  When the tenth person says, “I heard this is your last day!” I turn to Cami and say, “That’s it. Close up.”

  I don’t know how they figured it out. Maybe it was the absence of my mother that tipped them off, or maybe somebody just made a guess down at Doreen’s, and the rumor gained traction, and for once it turned out to be true.

  Whatever, I’m sick of the funeral this has become, everyone parading in here to tell me some sappy memory of me in pigtails selling them a Snickers bar.

  It was especially cloying to see the chamber of commerce crowd in here, that bunch who used to praise Mom so extravagantly until Haven started gentrifying and they gussied up their businesses, and all of a sudden the Nee Nance became a “liquor store” instead of a “family-run shop.”

  Cami turns the key and slams the door with her hip to make sure it’s locked. She salutes, starts to hum “Taps.”

  I wad up a piece of register tape and throw it at her. She flinches harder than I would have thought, and I regret it at once. She must be skittish about things flying at her face. Considering.

  On an old invoice, I take a Sharpie and scrawl closed forever and hand it to Cami.

  “Got any tape?”

  I look around at the desk, momentarily at a loss.

  She shrugs and sticks it to the door with her chewing gum.

  “Let’s box up this stuff for the food pantry, especially the baby formula and stuff. They could use it. I’ll get some boxes from the back.”

  We start stacking and I try not to look at the gaping shelves. I shake my hair out of my face and try to think of something else. “You sure you want to come with me to meet with your father?”

  As soon as I’d heard from Mr. Drayton, I offered to let Cami come to the meeting and instantly regretted it, watching her face get hard and her eyes turn to slits.

  “He’s not going to hit me in front of the lawyers, yeah?”

  “I didn’t figure the chances for actual violence were all that high, but—”

  “I just want the house.”

  “What?”

  Cami has straightened up from her packing, hands on her hips. “I know he owes me more, but all I want is that house that he’s been fucking up all these
years.”

  “Oh, come on, that house can’t be worth more than . . .” I stop to think, and she carries on talking.

  “I don’t care what the valuation is. I know it’s a crappy neighborhood and it’s falling apart.” She angles her head so that she’s glaring at me over the tops of her glasses. A piece of long hair slides in front of her face. “That house and a few old photos are all that I have of my mother.”

  “All? Not a piece of jewelry or anything?”

  She grabs a box of cereal and whips it into the box at her feet, overhand. “He sold it. Said we needed the money. Donated her clothes. Threw away boxes of her stuff.” She heaves the box up onto her shoulder and walks toward the back, calling out, “That house is all there is.”

  “You’re the boss,” I tell her, but I still want to grab the rat bastard by his ankles and shake him upside down until every last cent falls out.

  For all those years in the store, it only takes a couple of hours for us to box up the stock. Cami and I looked at the beer and wine cocktails in the cooler and shrugged. Let Paul have it. He can throw it away himself, or just let the wrecking ball smash it all to bits.

  A frantic pounding at the door startles us out of inspecting the naked shelves of what was once my family’s livelihood.

  Amy peers between her cupped hands, calling through the glass. “Anna? You in there?”

  I let her in and rush her into the store like I’m running a speakeasy. I just don’t want any more looky-loos in here reminiscing.

  “What’s the problem, Amy?”

  She looks gaunt to me, instead of attractively thin. The skin under her eyes is shiny and bruised. Her rouge stands out bright against her skin.

  “I have a huge, huge favor to ask, and please say yes.”

  I fold my arms, stiffening right away. “Tell me what it is, at least.”

  “Nikki broke her leg, and I need someone to fill in as a bridesmaid. Please, will you do it? It’s just a few hours, and you were invited to the wedding anyway.”