Hope Out Loud

by Kristina Riggle

  I’ve almost made it to the tent when I hear her voice.

  “Where were you? I was looking all over for you before the . . .” Amanda trails off when she notices the sweater in my hand, and the glass and bottle in my other. She looks fixedly at my face, then without a word reaches into her purse for a tissue. “Here,” she says, her voice flat and her eyes narrow. “You’ve got lipstick on you.”

  My hands are full, so I stand there like an idiot as she mops me up.

  “Amanda . . .” I have no followup, though.

  “It’s fine, Will. We weren’t exclusive or anything. I just wish you’d told me how much you were carrying a torch, you know? Would have saved me some trouble. I mean, that’s what people said, but you know small towns. I thought it was just a B.S. rumor. I mean, really. Five years? And like what, twenty years before that? You really are stuck on her.”

  I’ve finally sidled over to a round table and deposited the glass and beer. I place the sweater over the back of a folding chair, as if that’s Anna’s seat and she’ll be right back.

  “It was just for old time’s sake. It didn’t mean anything.”

  God, I’m a rotten liar. And Amanda knows it. She just shakes her hair back and rolls her eyes. “I’ll bring the ad copy to Paul. Probably makes more sense I talk to him from now on. See ya.”

  She turns on a heel and strides off into the throng, ignoring my dad, who tries to stick a hand out to shake hers.

  The only beer left is Bud Light, but I don’t really care by now. I grab one and plop down in a rented folding party chair, nearly tipping over backwards in the soft grass. The night air is cooler, but the humidity of July still presses in. My chest feels heavy, like it’s hard to draw in a deep breath.

  It’s Amy who sits down next to me, and for this I’m glad. She’s never been one to judge.

  “So. Word gets around. You and Anna a thing now?”

  “Not hardly. We were having a nostalgic moment, let’s say. And anyway, what, a little lipstick on my face and suddenly I’m going to marry her or something?”

  “Easy there. I only said ‘a thing’ not ‘engaged’ or even ‘dating’. Hey, you’re racing through that beer pretty fast.”

  “I think I’ll just stay the night.”

  “Probably wise. Fireworks traffic is hell, and anyway—”

  “Anyway, what?”

  “Nothing.”

  She’s looking away from me. I know what she was going to say. Anyway, what do I have to go home for? Not a goddamn thing is what.

  “So, where’s Paul?”

  “He went in the house with Penelope.” An expression passes over her face I can’t quite read.

  “Are you guys okay?”

  She picks at her thumbnail, frowning as if in deep concentration. “Oh, we are. I mean, we’re not fighting, nothing like that. But this whole thing we’re going through . . .” Amy lets the sentence trail off into the night. “I’ve been let down so many times, I’m starting to cut to the chase and go straight to the worst.”

  The Amy I knew best, the newly thin Amy, engaged to Paul, used to have cheerful slogans pinned up around her house, the kinds of things on kitschy motivational posters, but she reveled in them with a charming lack of irony. Her half-full glass had a silver lining and her sun was always coming out tomorrow.

  I pat her arm in as brotherly a way as I can manage. We don’t have much chance to be affectionate, Amy and me.

  Amy sits up straighter and forces a smile. “Well, maybe you should get busy on some more nieces and nephews.”

  “I’m old, too. Call Tabatha and get her on the job.”

  “Doesn’t matter how old the men are. Amanda is fresh as a daisy.”

  “And done with me. She saw the lipstick on my face and leapt to a conclusion about me and Anna.”

  Amy rolls her eyes and stretches out her arms overhead. “Ah, that’s the trouble with the young. Always making rash decisions.”

  Paul spots us and charges across the grass. “Hey, honey,” he says, ignoring me, his mushy grin only for his wife. He takes her hands and pulls her up. “Pen fell asleep inside and Mom is going to keep an eye on her here tonight. Let’s get out of here, what do you say?”

  Finally, a smile lights her up, and I recognize the Amy I have always known. My brother waves to me before spiriting her away and it occurs to me, watching them go, that he’s a better husband than I ever was.

  Chapter Seven

  Anna

  Friday, July 5, 2013

  We’ve picked up Mom’s dress, freshly cleaned and pressed, and hung it on the back of a door in the sewing room. It had been Cami’s bedroom as a girl, and she painted it sunny yellow in that last vicious summer living with her father.

  Even behind the plastic of the garment bag, the dress is lovely.

  “Lunch?” Mom asks brightly.

  “No. Not lunch. A talk, instead.”

  I sit down on a futon against the far wall, facing her Bernina sewing machine, one of the last relics from her life with my dad. It had been a gift from him, both perfect and horribly wrong because they couldn’t afford it.

  “Have you talked to Al about how you feel about the house?”

  My mom slumps against the back of the futon. “Yes.”

  “Oh, good. And?”

  “And nothing’s changed. He can’t move in here. He just absolutely feels he can’t, and in fact he was upset that I didn’t say something earlier. He wonders what else I haven’t been telling him.”

  A thread of a crack runs through her voice and she tugs at a curl.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  She looks around the room, and I know in her mind’s eye, she’s seeing the rest of the house, as lovingly restored first by Cami and then by herself as tenant.

  “I’ll probably marry him.”

  “Probably? I hope that’s not what you said to him.”

  “No, goodness. I told him I would get used to the new house. And he promised I could take my time moving in, and he’d help me move as many plants from my garden as would survive the transfer.”

  “So where does ‘probably’ come in?”

  My mother angles toward me on the futon, but her eye is on the sapphire engagement ring she turns around and around on her finger. “I’m worried that part of me is just getting married because he asked, because I didn’t want to be a burden to you, and don’t you dare object, Anna Geneva. A single, aging mother hundreds of miles away from where you live is a burden even if my blood pressure is good and it isn’t always.

  “And here we come down to it. Leaving this house and moving in with him and suddenly I’m his wife? I haven’t been a wife, not really, in so many years. I’m not sure I know how to do it anymore. I never knew! With Robert, I felt most of the time like his nagging older sister, or heaven help me, even his mother. Always telling him he was in the wrong.”

  “He always was in the wrong.”

  “Being right was cold comfort, especially when he left me, left us. Alone.”

  “Al won’t be like that.”

  “I know he won’t, but I feel how I feel. Is it normal to be this terrified?”

  “I wouldn’t know firsthand, but look, you’re not a naïve little ingénue who thinks that marriage is a lifetime of sunset walks on the beach. Of course you’ve got worries. But Al is not Robert Geneva, and thank God for that. ”

  I stare hard at her face, trying to discern from her minute expression changes if I’ve gotten through to her at all.

  “Well.” She dusts off her hands as if she’s been working. “Speaking of the beach. Let’s get some lunch and go. I feel like a swim.”

  *

  As my body nestles into the sand, I decide there is no single sensation better than the warm July sun drying cool drops of Lake Michigan off of my skin.

  Okay, maybe there’s one that’s better. But this is number two.

  The rhythmic rushing of the waves punctuated by the shrieks of gulls and children—with my
eyes closed, I can’t tell which—casts me back to the best times of my life here in Haven. If only I could bottle this up and take it home with me to Chicago, and I could open it up in the grinding gray gloom of February, or for that matter, sunny July days when I’m stuck at the computer or in court.

  As I heave a contented sigh that seems to empty me out from my scalp to my soles, I realize how seldom I have reason to exhale like this.

  I detect a snore next to me, where my mother lies prone, her hat over her face and SPF 50 on the rest of her. She’s only dipped her feet in the lake so far.

  My cell phone buzzes on the towel. Oh jeez, is Michelle in crisis again? But no, it’s Cami. My voice is bright with my smile as I pick up. “Hey, preggo!”

  “Can’t call me that anymore, yeah?”

  “Oh congratulations! Really?”

  “Yes really. I’ll text you a pic in a minute of Mr. Graham. We named him that because it rhymes with my mom’s name and we liked it better than Stan. We’re already calling him Graham Cracker and talking about how we want to eat him. I never knew that was literal, Anna. I do kinda want to eat him. Do I sound insane? I think it’s the lack of sleep. That’ll last a while, so they tell me.”

  Hot tears quiver in my lashes. Cami deserves this so much after the start in life she had. “I know you wish your mom could be here.”

  “And my dad, too, believe it or not.”

  “I do believe it.”

  Cami starts cooing to the baby and I can feel this huge dopey grin unfurl on my face. Hard-edged, laconic Cami and she’s cooing and everything.

  “There, Hank took him. Aww, he’s going to change his butt for me. What a guy. So tell me, Anna, how’s Haven? And the house and the bride-to-be and all of it? Tell me quick before I get sucked back into Babyland, never to return. Did you do it with Beck yet? You going to smuggle him back home in your trunk?”

  “Of course not.”

  “If you say so. Ooh, the Graham Cracker is hungry. Here comes the boob! Sorry, that was TMI. Meant to hang up first. I’ll text a pic when he’s not sucking on my nipple. See you back home!”

  I tuck my phone back under my wadded-up T-shirt and sigh now for a different reason. Home, which means lawsuits and clients and emergencies from Poor Divorcing Michelle and the apartment that had been feeling cozy but here on this bright and windy beach seems like a dark cubbyhole. Cami’s there, but then she won’t be there for me, not the way she used to. I’ve watched it again and again with my friends who procreate, without bitterness but with some sadness as parenthood enveloped them. Sure, I could rescue them for happy hour sometimes, or stop over for a quick drink on the balcony while the husband is conned into supervising the brood. But they’ve crossed a border and they will never be back on this side, with me.

  “God, I don’t want to go back,” I say, to myself really, and throw my arm up over my eyes.

  “So don’t.” My mom’s voice is muffled somewhat by her hat. “And congrats to Cami.”

  “Eavesdropper. Anyway, I have work when I get back. I haven’t won the lottery.”

  “You know, Anna, sometimes it’s okay for a job to be just a job. I like sewing at Agatha’s but is that my life’s mission? Hemming prom dresses and letting out seams for bridesmaids who can’t leave the potato chips alone?”

  “It’s my own practice. I’ve spent five years building it up and learning to do my own paperwork and—”

  “You spent that long and more trying to make partner and you got off that treadmill at the last minute. And now you work just as hard, don’t you? For less money, too.”

  “I like my job.” I prop up on my elbows and lift my mother’s hat off her face. She flinches in the glare and turns over. “You want me back here, don’t you? That’s why you’re trying to get me to quit.”

  “Who’s trying? You’re the one who said you didn’t want to go back.”

  “It’s vacation. I said this same thing in Cancun once but I didn’t mean it.”

  My mom turns her head on her folded arms, facing me. She looks so young like this, stretched out on her towel with her floppy hat, her pink plastic flip flops in the sand by her head. “I do worry about you. Whenever you call, you’re calling from work, or pausing your work at home. I almost never hear you talk about friends, or hobbies, or men. But the other thing is I don’t hear you really fired up about your work. You used to love the law. Remember how you’d recount to me an exhausting debate in one of your classes over some fine constitutional point? Or you’d call me all pumped up with a victory that I probably wouldn’t understand either, in your Miller Paulson days? If your work filled you up I wouldn’t care, but it doesn’t seem to.”

  “You just said your work can be just a job.”

  “If you have a life outside your work, that’s true.”

  “Poor spinster Anna, is it? Et tu, Mom?”

  “That’s a cheap shot. I’m not doing ‘poor spinster’ with you. I’m just worried.”

  “I promise you, I’m doing fine.”

  “And is ‘fine’ all you want?”

  “What if it is?” I flop down on the sand flat again, closing my eyes against the searing disk of the sun, which just minutes before had seemed like such a balm.

  I can hear my mother sitting up and rearranging. I throw my arm over my face again. The haloes of the sun swim around in the darkness behind my lids. She says, “You know, you once told me that I was brave, in a way, to have tried to reunite with your father.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me.” I was either quietly furious or shrieking back then, livid that my mother would be so foolish after years of abandonment.

  “I remember it distinctly because it was so unlike everything else you said all summer. You said, ‘Maybe you were the braver one for daring to hope out loud.’ ”

  “I must have been delirious.”

  “You were both right and wrong, I think. It wasn’t hope, or courage, that tempted me to let your father back in my life. It was fear. All those years, I never dared to become anything other than Robert’s wife. I’d given up any hope of a career of my own, I gave up a relationship with my family when I eloped. I rotted away in that store, wearing my ring under my shirt, never dating anyone, aging behind the counter. It was all out of fear that I didn’t know how to be anyone else. On the other hand, it indeed was a kind of crazy hope to think I could be happy again with him. I think anyone who gets married at all has that kind of hope. It’s insane, if you think about it, that you pledge to spend the rest of your life with someone no matter what. Yet people do it every single day. Even old ladies like me.”

  “Maybe I’m not wired that way.”

  “Wiring, my skinny freckled behind. You’re not a machine.”

  “You have a freckled behind? News to me.”

  “You’re changing the subject, Counselor.”

  “Oh, God, don’t call me that. I hate that.”

  My mother falls silent, letting the waves and the gulls and the splashing fill the air instead. Then she asks—quietly, almost speaking to herself—“Is there anything you hope for, Anna?”

  It surprises me that I can’t answer her.

  *

  Back at the house, I almost knock my mother down in the driveway because I’m distracted by the picture Cami texted me of her new baby. She’d taken the photo selfie-style with one outstretched arm and so her radiant face and the baby’s scrunched sleeping face are in the frame.

  My mom is stock-still in the driveway, staring at something in her hand. I stash my phone and realize it’s a postcard. She shakes her head and hands it to me before stomping her way up the drive.

  It’s a Chicago postcard with the Buckingham Fountain on the front. My dad’s scrawl on the back reads:

  Dear Maeve,

  I am happy for you that you finally found someone to take care of you. I hope he treats you right. If my travels so permit, I might stop by to wish you well, but I promise that’s all I have on my mind. It’s hard to believe but I never
stopped caring about you and that’s still true even though you’ll be someone else’s wife.

  Yours,

  Robert

  My mom has already stomped her way into the house and left the door open behind her. I can hear her muttering and slamming before I even cross the threshold.

  “Go ahead!” she shouts back from the kitchen. “Go ahead and tell me you were right about telling him about the wedding.”

  “The thought never crossed my mind.” Well, I wasn’t going to say it out loud, anyway. “If it’s any consolation, it’s probably just another big plan that will never come to fruition like all the rest. Anyway it’s not like you gave him the exact location. Watch him stop in every church in the county looking for you, when you’ll be on the beach.”

  “I’m so foolish. Al’s going to be upset.”

  “Are you sure?” I drop my beach bag on the floor and join her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter next to her, our ankles crossed. We often do this, accidentally mirror each other. “It doesn’t seem like much gets to him.”

  “Robert gets to him. In fact . . .”

  She trails off, staring at her feet.

  “In fact what, Mom?”

  “He wondered if part of the reason I don’t want to move is so that I don’t stop getting the postcards.”

  “Oh, no.” I’m tempted to challenge her: is that, in fact, the real reason? Even a little? But I don’t dare add to her agitation. I fear for her blood pressure. “So, what did you say?”

  “I said that was nonsense and how dare he think that? But we smoothed it over some, so I think it’s okay.”

  “Mom, I truly don’t think he’ll show up. He just wants to stoke his ego by imagining he can still get to you. Remember how he never has two quarters to rub together and always has to rely on rides and favors from other people? Those crooks from the gambling ring for instance? Is he really going to get one of those jokers to drive him all the way here so he can spy on his ex? And if he does, well, so what? We’ll get someone to haul him off if he causes the least disturbance.”