The Life You've Imagined (17 page)

I was still living with Elizabeth then, before she moved out to live with her boyfriend, sticking me with half the lease left and no roommate. My tutoring paychecks were flimsy, and I was just seeing Steve. We were bored of movies and the weather was too rotten to take a walk, so he suggested ducking into the MGM Grand. We were laughing about it, poking fun, having drinks, all the while acting like we were above this kind of thing.

I sat down at a table of five-card draw and won Elizabeth’s share of the rent for the next three months. Then I tore down the poster in my grocery store advertising for a new roommate and moved my things into her side of the closet.

By the time I moved in with Steve, when my lease was up, I’d discovered online gambling, and sure, I had my ups and downs, but I was mostly up.

Until I wasn’t. And every attempt I made to get back on top, I only lost more. I just knew I was about to get back on track. He was never supposed to know.

I walk up to the bar to fetch myself a 7-Up.

“Having a lucky day?” asks a round-faced blond guy next to me. His hair is sticking up funny and he looks like Dennis the Menace in a midlife crisis. He’s actually wearing a Members Only jacket.

“Not really, no.”

He smiles at me, too huge for the occasion, and looks me up and down. “I’d say my day is lucky, now.”

“Spare me, Casanova.”

“Bitch,” he spits, and stumbles off his barstool.

The bartender hands me my pop and smiles. “Good for you. He’s used that same line on the last three girls that came up here. Everyone else just ran away.”

I turn my back to the bartender and put my elbow on the bar. He’s flirting, too. Everyone’s always out for something.

A blackjack table is in my line of sight, and as a matter of fact, so is an ATM machine. Maybe I’ll just check my balance, and only take out a little bit. Only what I can afford to lose; isn’t that what the public service announcements say?

My hands are quivering just a bit as I punch in my PIN number. It’s not nerves or fear. This is the beginning of the buzz, and I want to weep with how happy it makes me to feel it again. I’d almost succeeded in burying it in the recesses of my animal brain, pretending I never enjoyed the cards, the winning, the battle.

I snatch the cash out of the mouth of the machine and stuff it down into my pocket, striding over to the little window where a young man supposedly named Felix fetches my chips.

“Good luck,” Felix says, and winks.

The dealer greets me extravagantly, like an old friend he hasn’t seen in years. The feeling is mutual.

Chapter 24

Anna

W
hen I return to the Nee Nance, my clothes still haven’t completely dried from this morning’s sprint in the rain. The sensation is sticky and I can’t wait to get these clothes off, especially since I felt like a rube sitting there in my shorts and cotton shirt next to three people dressed for business.

My mother is at the counter, leafing through a tabloid.

“Mom, I thought you were resting. Where’s Cami?”

“The store isn’t busy. I was going batty upstairs anyway, and Sally was making me batty down here. I sent Cami and Sally to the casino.”

“Want me to run down to the store and pick up a book for you? Or the library?”

My mom glances down at the magazine, closes it, and then slips it to the side. “No, thanks.” She comes around the counter and glances around. We’re alone in the store. She reaches for my hand and I let her take it, though physical affection now that I’m an adult feels strange to me. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. You were trying to help. And this was your home, too.”

I glance around at the store, which I hated as soon as my dad left. It quit being a fun place when he wasn’t there to hand me candy off the rack, ignoring Mom’s
tsk
about screwing up the inventory and the enamel on my teeth. Plus, I was just starting middle school and kids started to notice who was wearing second-hand clothes and who couldn’t have sleepovers because there was no room in her tiny cubby above a liquor store.

But all that was before someone was trying to take it away from my mother, from me.

“I don’t want to give up on this, Mom.”

She squeezes my hand again. “Honey, what’s the point? You hated this place, and this isn’t exactly what I wanted for myself.”

“But you don’t have any time! You won’t get unemployment as a sole proprietor, and you don’t own any property. You need some kind of income, and . . . jobs aren’t so easy to come by these days.” I’d started to say
unskilled jobs
but knew how that would sound.

A customer approaches the counter with an armload, and a few more come in the door. I join my mother at her side, bagging up the stuff to speed things along.

I’m immediately distracted by the mental play-by-play of the lunch I just endured. I’d hoped to catch Beck for a quick bite, one measly hour with an old friend outside the confines of this lousy store. We just had to bump into that brat brother and Amy Rickart in the same restaurant and get stuck with them. So when the meal ended and the rain had finally faded away, I walked with Beck even as he turned in the opposite direction of Becker Development and the Nee Nance.

First he invited me to his family’s Fourth of July party, insisting it was no problem with his wife and saying I could easily avoid Paul in the crowd. I laughed at that, because I couldn’t even avoid Paul at lunch. After extracting from me a promise I’d think about attending, he asked about my job, when I was going back.

And I told him, much to my own surprise, I don’t want to. So don’t, he said, and I told him it’s not that simple, and he replied, in effect, I was the only one making it complicated.

He stopped walking in front of a store selling Petoskey stone renderings of the lower peninsula and other whimsical magnets, and I stopped in front of him. He put his hand on my elbow and said, “I’m just saying life is too short to do something you don’t want to.”

“Oh, like you always wanted to work for your dad’s business.”

“Low blow, Annie. I’m not saying I’m perfect in that, either. But I’ve been thinking along these lines for a few months now, and sometimes forcing yourself to go through the motions of what seems sensible is the biggest waste of time possible. What if twenty years from now we both look back and say, ‘Why did I put up with that?’ Think of the pain of all that time just lost, forever.”

“Are you thinking of quitting your job, then?”

“Not exactly. I’m just saying, you’re not locked into anything. You don’t have to keep doing something just because you always have, especially if it’s hollow.”

Hollow
. Beck always could do that: put just the right word to my emotions.

The flow of customers finally dries up and I turn back to Mom, trying to find the thread of our conversation again. I’d forgotten that about being back here, how every discussion is halting and disrupted.

“So, Mom, here’s what I’m thinking about the store. Let’s work up a plan and go to Paul. I’ve got savings, if you want to call it a loan, call it a loan then, and I’ll pay your rent in the new building for a while. We can spruce up the exterior, change the name, and, fine, work on a long-term plan for you. But in the meantime you won’t have to live with Sally in that stinky trailer.”

She sighs. “But I can’t do all that myself. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I can help you.”

“You’ve got to go back to work!”

“I don’t know about that. I’m thinking of making a change myself.”

She gapes up at me, searching my face as if she’s not sure who I am.

I know the feeling.

Chapter 25

Maeve

M
y first thought, when I see Anna with her hair frizzy in her grubby clothes, telling me she’s thinking of giving up her job at Miller Paulson, is to scream,
No! I will not allow it!

My second thought:
This is all my fault.

Customers interrupt us, and Anna takes charge of them like she was born to it, and this thought stings me because in a way she was born to it, you could argue, learning to pull up and toddle along the shelves with the canned cat food and toilet paper and Slim Jims.

She would bring home those gold stars on her homework, and I’d sit there in the crowd as she collected accolades for National Honor Society, and I’d know down to my toes that she would have a better, bigger life than I ever dreamed of.

And she did it, by God. She did it.

If only I could tell her that she doesn’t need to hover over me, that her father is going to build me a house. I can just see her sneer, though. She was too young to remember him at his best. A person shouldn’t be boiled down to one mistake, especially if that person is sorry and was a decent sort to begin with.

Now that Anna is at the register, I wander back upstairs to have my own lunch and think about her suggestion, fixing up the store to serve some snobby summer people. A waste of time and energy when I’m going to leave anyway. And all the while beholden to that Paul kid! Beholden to the whole Becker bunch.

I take my egg salad out of the fridge and start scraping it on the bread, after a tentative sniff to make sure it hasn’t gone over.

Mr. Becker was always nice enough to Anna, but it always seemed to me he treated her like a pleasant pet: a little too amazed at her success, as with a dog who can open a refrigerator door. If I end up crawling to them and begging for a chance to clean up my store, it would confirm his view of us. Of me.

I can’t let her throw away a career she slaved for just so she can save a store I don’t even want and, in fact, don’t need.

But if I don’t do something visible that she can see and understand to provide for myself, she won’t go back.

And to think I exhaled at her college graduation, thinking I’d leaped some towering hurdle: She’d made it through childhood and four years of college unscathed and poised for success.

Parenting never ends, my old friend Veronica told me once.

I dump the remaining half sandwich in the trash because it tastes like cardboard anyway. I’ll grab something else to eat on my way to see Veronica.

A
t first glance, Veronica’s house looks modest and unassuming. That’s only because it’s built on a hill, so the front view is of a simple, low, ranch-style home with a nice picture window.

Out back, the house sprawls down the hill with another two floors. The kids used to have such fun stumble-running down that hill, back when Alex was just a boy who was maybe a little more active than the others.

I hear Veronica call “I’m out back, Maeve!” when I come in the front. I cross her entryway (she calls it a “foy-yay”) and down a winding path. She and Grant have an in-ground pool now, though I’ve never seen her use it for actual swimming. She seems to have installed it only for its reflection of shimmering sun.

She’s under a monstrous umbrella, lounging in a terry-cloth wrap of some kind. After this morning’s rain, the sun has been heroically pushing through the thinning clouds and it’s nearly bright.

We dispense with the small talk about the weather, and she pours me an iced tea from her pitcher.

“How’s Alex?” I ask, by way of steering the conversation toward our children.

She has been sitting facing me, but at this she stretches out again on her chair, staring through her sunglasses at the underside of the umbrella. Or maybe she closes her eyes; I can’t tell from here.

“I wish I knew. He never tells me anything anymore because he doesn’t want me to harangue him for it. I send him money when he asks because I’m afraid what will happen if I don’t.”

I swallow hard. This makes my worry about Anna seem so petty. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what else I can do. Grant says I ‘enable’ him, but at least he’s alive. At least I know if he’s getting some money from me he’s not doing something out of desperation. The last time I tried to be tough? He was beaten within an inch of his life by some man, and I can’t even imagine the details of how that transpired. It was horrifying to get that call. Grant watches too many documentaries. They don’t do documentaries about the kids who end up dead when their parents cut them off. That wouldn’t be very inspiring, now, would it?”

“I know you’re doing the best you can.”

“I’m sorry, I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear today.”

“No, don’t apologize. I want you to talk about it.”

“How’s Anna? Still a superstar?”

This could have been said with bitterness, but it comes out weary. Kids make you tired at every age, every stage.

“I’m worried about her, honestly.”

Veronica sits up again, pushing her huge glasses to the top of her head, where they perch on her blond-frosted, feathery hair. “What’s wrong?”

“I think she’s going to quit her job.”

“Okay.” She waits for me to continue.

“She’s worked so hard for it, her whole life.”