“What difference does it make?”
She rolls her eyes and sighs. “I’ve been dreaming of this wedding since the time I had a Barbie doll, only I thought it would never come true. I figured if I ever found some poor bastard to marry a walrus like me that we’d end up on the courthouse steps somewhere instead of dragging my enormous ass down an aisle. Then I lost the weight. I know it’s stupid; you’re a sophisticated big-city type and you think I’m being childish, but sue me for wanting symmetry in my wedding, okay?”
Her words came out in a waterfall, and she pants slightly now that she’s done. She wrinkles her pert nose up at me, and damned if she doesn’t clasp her hands like a kid wanting a new bike.
“Geez, Amy, isn’t there anyone else?”
I’d forgotten to RSVP because I wasn’t going to go. I didn’t want to be anywhere near Beck and his wife, much less in the wedding party with him.
She shifts in place and glances down at her feet. “Well, you’d fit the dress, I figured. But it’s not just that,” she hastens to add. “You were always so nice to me in school, even when other people called me fat-ass. We would have stayed friends, I think. If you’d stayed.”
It’s only a few hours, only a dress. She bites her lip at me.
“Fine. Okay, fine.”
She sags as if she just put down a two-ton weight. “Oh, thank you!” She hugs me with reedy arms, and then out of her purse she pulls a slip of paper with her loopy cursive on it. “Here’s the information. The rehearsal is tonight, and the dress is at Agatha’s; she can do a quick fix if it’s super-long or loose or whatever, and here’s what time we’re all getting to the church tomorrow.”
I already regret this.
She hugs me again, and I catch Cami smirking at me over her head. I stick my tongue out at her.
Amy says, “Thank you, seriously, so much. I mean, considering everything with Paul, and . . . I know it’s stupid, but it really does matter and . . .”
“All right, sheesh, go plan your wedding . . .” I steer her out the door and lock it again, this time shutting off the lights.
“Well, aren’t you Mother Teresa?” says Cami, still smirking.
“Shut up. Let’s go hide upstairs before someone asks me to cure a leper.”
“I’m just kidding you. It’s nice, yeah?”
“Sucks to be nice.”
”You said it. That’s why I hardly ever am.” Cami takes the stairs two at a time with her long, loping gait.
As she disappears up the steps, I sit in the dark with my phone and send an e-mail to Beck.
Amy just begged me to be in the wedding as a last minute sub. Just thought I’d alert you.
A.
The reply comes in before I’ve even pocketed the phone.
Damn! That’s going to make things really awkward, with you being there in front of Sam and the whole town, in the bridal party. Jesus.
I have to keep fixing typos as I reply, cursing my slow thumbs and the tiny keyboard.
Don’t give me shit, please, I can’t take this right now. I was just trying to be nice. She’s a wreck about it. It will be fine. Right?
This time I stare at the phone, crouched in the office chair, ignoring the rattles as would-be customers try yanking the front door open.
Finally, his answer comes.
Sorry. Of course, you were just being nice. We’ll get through it.
The Nee Nance phone makes me jump in the chair, the ringing echoing shrilly against the empty shelves.
“Nee Nance,” I answer automatically, opening my mouth to say, “we’re closed.”
“Babe! Don’t react, I know you said Anna is there. Just tell me that you got my note.”
I grasp the side of the counter and swallow hard. Coming through the phone line, I hear traffic noises, honking, conversation. The flick of a lighter.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Great! Good. I’ll be there. The address is 506 Huron, right? Not 605. Couldn’t remember what I’d written. And it’s just outside Cadillac. Use the first exit, not the one for the downtown. Got that?”
“Yes.” I scribble on a paper beer sack with the Sharpie.
“Can’t wait to see you, Maeve. Love you.”
And he’s gone.
I find myself staring at the paper sack with my scrawled notes until my eyes lose focus. I look at my watch, think about how long Mom has been gone, and also about how slowly she drives whenever she has to venture onto the highway.
I take the stairs two at a time myself, racing to find my car keys.
Chapter 49
Maeve
My feet crunch on the gravel as I walk up this long, curving driveway.
I parked out of sight on purpose, so I could slip into my dressy shoes and fix my makeup in the mirror. I gave up on eyeliner. My hands are too unsteady; I could have impaled an eyeball.
I also needed a moment to gather my thoughts. I didn’t want Robert rushing out to ambush me before I’d even gotten out of the car.
I’m surrounded by piney woods, the carpet of needles muffling every sound except my own footsteps. I can hear squirrels chase each other in the branches and birds tweet and call from the treetops. There are no phones here. No cash registers, Lotto tickets, rumbling beer trucks with their exhaust seeping into my atmosphere.
I pause a moment before coming around a bend in the driveway to suck in a breath and close my eyes, feeling my smile unfurl across my face.
My step slows as soon as I make the crescent-shaped turn.
Before me is a trailer with rust stains down the side and a graying wood porch.
I look past the trailer for signs of a cabin or perhaps imminent construction. Stacks of wood or some excavation. The silence remains total, especially now that I’ve stopped walking, and then I think with both fear and hope that I have the wrong address. Robert never was good with details.
The door of the trailer slams itself open, the sharp sound echoing around the trees.
I put a hand to my lips.
He runs hitchingly down the three steps of the porch and over the gravel. Something is wrong with his leg; he limps. His hair is the gray of steel wool; he’s wearing a baggy sweater over a plaid shirt, both of which look two sizes too big.
Yet. The twinkle in his eye is unmistakable.
“Oh, baby, I knew you’d come.” He folds me into a hug and I relax into his arms. His smell is just the same: Old Spice aftershave mixed with the stale tang of beer breath and old smoke.
“Robert,” is all I can muster.
He takes my hand and leads me to the trailer. The porch steps moan under our feet.
Just inside, cloths and sheets and doilies cover misshapen piles of unseen junk. A cloying strawberry candle burns on the table in the kitchen area to my right. Underneath the aggressive strawberry, I detect an aroma much like the interior of the store.
Dean Martin is on the stereo, asking me to send him the pillow that I dream on.
He’s gawking at me, up and down, and I tear my gaze away from the inside of the trailer to look down at my feet and blush.
“You look wonderful,” he says, his voice coming out so quiet it’s like a breath more than words.
I want to say the same to him, but I’m still assimilating this present-day Robert with the dark-haired husband of my memory.
When I’d imagined this reunion, it was usually at home because I always pictured him coming home to us, while Anna was still a child. In my fantasies, I’d sometimes thunder at him, other times swoon, and now twenty years of competing emotions all jam themselves together like typewriter keys that went so fast they collided.
“So, where’s this property?” I ask him. “Are we going to see it later?”
“This is it, baby. Isn’t it beautiful?”
I nod, and he leads me down to the couch, which underneath the large throw blanket is rather droopy and tips me nearly backward. I perch on the end and cross my legs primly. He’s staring, hard, at all of me. I can’t
remember the last time I’d been studied with such intensity.
“But wasn’t there a cabin?”
“Well, babe, it’s going to take a while to get the money for that, but this Charley that I’m working with? He’s going to fix me right up. I’m buying this land from him.”
“Buying? You don’t own it?”
“Not yet, but I will. It’s a . . .whaddya call it . . .land contract.”
“What does Charley do, anyway?”
Robert stands up suddenly, jarring me on the couch. “Want a drink? I bought some rosé. Didn’t you used to like rosé?” He pops open a can of beer. The soundtrack of our married life.
“No. Well, I did like it, I guess, but . . . I don’t want anything now. You didn’t answer me about Charley.”
“You know, this and that. He’s an investor. An entrepreneur.”
I close my eyes. Bill was an entrepreneur, too. “Robert, shut that music off, please.”
He limps his way over to the stereo and hits the button. The limping makes him look frail. Dean Martin cuts off in mid-croon.
He puts the beer down on a scuffed faux-wood coffee table and joins me on the couch again, taking my hands in his.
“You haven’t asked me about Anna,” I say.
“You said she’s back.”
“Yes. She’s a lawyer, you know.”
Robert sits back, folding his arms, and a beaming smile comes over his face. “Is that so. Is that a fact.”
A burning sensation rises in my chest. What right does he have to that pride? Did he hunch with her over book reports? Did he drive her to predawn swim practice and sit on hard plastic bleachers surrounded by muggy chlorinated air? Did he fill out college applications and stay up late when she couldn’t sleep with worry?
“I put her through school myself; plus, she took on so much debt she’ll be paying it off when she’s a grandmother.”
“Honey, I . . .”
“Why didn’t you come back?” I stand up, backing a few steps away from him. My voice sounds shrill and loud in the trailer, and it feels so familiar, all those shouted conversations in the Nee Nance back room, trying to hide from customers, from Anna.
“I got arrested, okay?”
“You . . . you what?” All the scenarios I ever imagined, none of them included jail.
“Bill had this great idea to sell cigarettes, you know, buy them where there aren’t so many taxes and bring ’em back to Michigan and sell ’em cheap, but still at a profit. I didn’t know it was smuggling. I thought he was enterprising.”
I close my eyes against the trailer, his weak explanation.
“You didn’t even call.”
“What could I have said? Bill got a lawyer and got himself sprung but left me high and dry. I knew we didn’t have the money ourselves to get me out, so I did my time. I was ashamed of myself, sweetheart. I couldn’t write you from jail. It would be just like your mother always said.”
I flinch because I can hear him coming toward me now.
He continues, his Old Spice cologne filling my nose. “I didn’t want to come back until I straightened myself out as a real man.”
“Do you think your little girl cared about that?” Now I open my eyes to stare right at him. “Do you know what it was like for me to try to pretend you were just on a business trip? To hear her crying at night and know it was because of you? To see her look down the street for you night after night?”
“She did that?” Robert cocks his head like a confused dog.
“Of course she did! What did you think she would do?”
He digs his toe into the thin carpet. “I . . . I tried not to think about it. Her. And you. It was too painful.”
“For you? Painful for you?”
I wrench myself away from him and step toward the door.
“Maeve, baby, don’t leave. I said I was sorry; I’ll make it up to you, I swear I will, but you’ve gotta give me a chance. I didn’t mean for it to happen. One thing just kinda came on top of another . . . There was never anyone else like you.”
Anyone else. I stop at the bottom of the porch steps.
Robert isn’t the only one who was fooling himself all those years. In my daydreams of our reunion, I also hadn’t considered other women in those empty decades.
“Don’t follow me,” I tell him over my shoulder, because I can’t bring myself to turn around and watch him recede in my view. “This was a terrible mistake,” I say, but he probably can’t hear it, as my voice comes out in a choked, weak mumble behind the loud, fast crunching of my stupid high-heel shoes in the gravel.
Chapter 50
Anna
Cami’s driving because I can’t hardly see. Every time I look at something, I see my father’s face instead, trying to imagine what he looks like now, and in my mind’s eye, he seizes my mother in his clutches like a predatory bird grabs a mouse.
I told her to step on it, and I’d pay the ticket for her if she got one.
According to my car’s GPS, my mother arranged to meet my father in some desolate, forested area. She has no idea what the years have done to him. He might not even be alone.
Even the best possible outcome—a happy reunion—is a disaster, because he will do this to her again, I’m sure of it. One thing I’ve learned in my years at Miller Paulson: People don’t change for the better; they don’t learn their lessons. If anything, they only learn how not to get caught.
“Cadillac,” Cami says, pointing to the exit sign. “That’s it, right?”
“Yes,” I say, consulting my paper-bag notes.
My heart only beats faster as the car slows down. My anger at my father has for now eclipsed the betrayal of my mother, who promised—promised!—she wouldn’t write, but then not only wrote, she made plans to meet, and hid all of this from me.
But then, she once promised he’d be coming home, back when I had pigtails and still believed what grown-ups told me.
“Who’s that?” Cami asks, slowing the car down on the shoulder of a narrow two-lane road slicing through woods.
Ahead of us is a bright yellow Hummer, backing out of a driveway. A green reflective address sign at the edge of the driveway matches the address we have for the rendezvous.
In the passenger window, I see a vague male silhouette.
No evidence of my mother or the car she borrowed from Veronica.
“Follow it,” I tell Cami. “But hang back.”
She nods and lets the Hummer get ahead of us for several yards before she pulls gradually back to the road. I turn in my seat to peer through the pine trees at the land, trying to catch a glimpse of my mother’s car. All I see is a rusted trailer.
We’re parked outside a bar on the main road of Cadillac’s downtown. I have my hand on the door to open it, when Cami puts her hand on my shoulder. “Wait. Maybe I should go in alone first.”
“Why?”
“We can see who’s in there, what he’s up to. Who he’s with.”
I nod, numb. I wish my mother had a cell phone. Her absence alarms me. I’d had visions of charging in to find them clinched together and then demanding to know what the hell they were doing. But now that I’m here, and she’s nowhere to be seen, I’m not sure what I want.
“Be back soon. Sit tight.”
Cami lopes into the bar slowly like she does reconnaissance every day.
I wonder why my parents chose to meet in Cadillac. We tried camping around here, I know, but there was no significance to that address that I can remember.
Our couple of camping trips were dismal failures, largely due to my dad’s lack of preparation. He’d forget something important like pillows, so we’d end up sleeping on rolled up towels.
The stars were magic, though, I remember that much. Haven is no metropolis, but the light from the streetlamps and the businesses is enough to ruin the night sky, at least in town, where buildings also help break up the view. The stars were nice out on the beach, but I never had that much time to admire them between working a
t the store, band practice, and homework.
Out camping, up north, I could stare up through the dark trees until my neck ached, my eyes so wide that I’d forget to blink until they itched with dryness.
One of those neck-aching nights I heard my parents fighting in the tent.
Supposedly they were just going in there to look for something, but soon their murmurs turned into normal talking, like they’d forgotten those thin nylon walls weren’t real and I could hear every word.
My dad was saying, “With just a little investment it could pay for itself in a few years or so . . .”
And Mom interrupted: “Could pay, a few years or so . . . When will you learn to listen to yourself? You can’t keep gambling with our future like this. The store was supposed to be temporary.”
“It is, it is, babe . . . but . . .”
I tried to tune my ears into the singing of the nighttime frogs out on Goose Lake, the way you can focus your eyes on something far instead of something near, but it didn’t work. I heard it clear as a bell when my mother said, “I should have listened to my mother years ago.”
“You mean . . . you should have left me?”
I couldn’t take it anymore and cried out in fear of an imaginary animal, and they came rushing out of the tent. My dad took a big stick and charged into the dark outside the circle of firelight, chasing away the big bad monsters.
In the flickering light, my mother’s jaw was set and her face looked grim. But in the cool morning, as we sipped our hot chocolate warmed by the camp stove, my parents were jovial and relaxed again.
At the time I was relieved. As an adult, I don’t understand why she didn’t follow her gut.
Cami startles me by hopping into the driver’s seat, leaving the door open with her foot still on the pavement.
“Okay, this is the deal. They’ve got a card game going at this address.” She shoves a bar napkin at me. “I think your dad and this guy, his name is Charley, are running a card sharp scam and I got myself invited.”
“What? Why?”
The Life You've Imagined Page 24