The Life You've Imagined (28 page)

“I had one rule. One lousy fucking rule and you couldn’t respect it.”

He takes his hand off my chin and slaps me so hard my eyes lose focus and the stem of my glasses cracks.

“Dad!”

“Don’t you ‘dad’ me. You stupid little bitch.”

He yanks me off the wall again, dragging me through the living room. With his free hand, he throws the chair out of his way and uses his foot to prop open the door. He yanks his hand out of my hair and seizes me by the front of my shirt. With this, he throws me across the porch and I tumble down the concrete steps.

“And don’t come back unless you learn some respect!”

He slams the front door, but it doesn’t stay closed. I can see him stumbling back toward his room. My glasses have fallen off my face, so I pick them up along with the broken stem, forcing myself to stand on quivering legs. He might yet investigate his closet and realize that I did more than just cross his threshold.

I taste blood. I think I’ve bitten my tongue, or maybe it’s my lip from where he hit me.

But still I smile. Because under my shirt, down the back of my pants, I still have those papers he sought to hide.

Chapter 41

Anna

I
n the dank confines of the Tip-A-Few, it takes me several moments to search out Cami. When I do see her, she’s curled over a glass of beer, a pitcher at her elbow. Her hair falls like a curtain down to the table. As I approach, I can see she’s concentrating on something, a stack of papers.

“Sorry I’m late, I had to wait for my mom to get up from . . .”

My words fade away as she looks up at me. One side of her face is puffy and discolored, and a shadow has begun to spread from the bridge of her nose under her eye. Her lip is split and swollen. On the injured side of her face, there is no stem on her glasses; they balance on her nose and other ear.

I watch her notice that I’ve seen it and hold my breath waiting for her to explain it.

“Okay, this time he hit me. But I didn’t lie before; that really was a fall.”

I nod slowly. “Are you . . . are you in pain?” I was going to say, “Are you okay,” but that seems ridiculous to ask.

“Not much, but that’s not why I asked you here.”

She pushes the papers across the table at me.

“Cami, we should call the police.”

She rolls her eyes and slaps the papers. “Don’t bother. Read this, I’m telling you.”

“But, he’s—”

“Forget the cops. He’d get out in no time, yeah? Just read this, I’m beggin’ you, read it.”

My phone chimes, letting me know I have a message. I ignore it and read, T
rust of
P
amela
S
ue
D
rayton
.

I glance at her with a questioning look, but she just points down to the paper, wanting me to read. The paper smells musty, and it’s brittle in spots with long-dried dampness.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

“Cami. You won’t believe this. You have a trust fund worth a hundred thousand dollars. You should have gotten it when you turned eighteen.” I try to reconcile this with the state of their shabby house in a dodgy neighborhood.

She nods, takes a swig of beer. “You want some of this?”

I shrug, not really caring. She waves at the waitress and points to me, raising her glass in the air.

Cami continues, having to push her glasses up on her nose continually. “I thought that’s what this said. And I think I know where she got the money, too. I found out that she used to play violin—I know, I had no idea—and that her violin teacher and his wife sort of became like godparents to her, and they were wealthy and had no kids of their own.”

“Oh. So you think they left her money.”

“Sure, I don’t know how else she would have gotten it. And she didn’t spend it. She saved every bit. For us.”

Cami frowns at the table, then rips off her glasses and tosses them down, where they rattle across the waxy surface. She covers her face in her hands, gripping the hair over her forehead with the tips of her fingers.

“Excuse me,” she says, stumbling out of the booth and to the ladies’ room.

I’m not going to follow her, because she doesn’t want anyone to see her fall apart. Sometimes the greatest kindness is space, and preservation of dignity.

Once, in my earlier days at Miller Paulson, I thoughtlessly answered a call from a client on my speaker phone. My hands were full, and this was before the days of the earpiece I eventually wore so often it was like jewelry.

He’d gotten drunk and was upset about a setback in his case. He started shrieking at me, blaming me for everything wrong in his life.

My office door was open. People started to collect in the doorway; others stared as they went by, rubbernecking. I snatched up the handset to switch him off speaker. I kept trying to interrupt him, to bring the conversation back to a something professional, to appease him without simpering, but he ridiculed my attempts to speak.

August came in then. I don’t know if he heard what was happening or just happened by, but he strode right in my office.

Tears were quivering at the edges of my eyelids.

August took the phone, listened a moment, then shouted over the client’s drunken venom, “You can call us back when you’ve composed yourself,” and hung up.

I looked at his face and thought,
Don’t pity me. Don’t you dare.

He said, “Make sure you bill him for that,” and winked. The crowd of gawkers laughed, I laughed, and we moved on with our day.

The reality of August’s death hits me in the chest. It’s been easy to put that aside here in Haven.

The waitress plunks down an empty glass for me and fills it from the pitcher. I check my message on the phone. It’s Beck.

Tough day today. Visit from Maddie and she asked me to come home with her and Mommy. She doesn’t understand why I can’t. Miss you.

Text messages and e-mail only, we agreed. Phone calls only in dire circumstances. Otherwise, we would avoid each other without doing so conspicuously. In the few weeks that have passed, we’ve bumped into each other twice in town, said hello, and carried on.

He broke the rule once already, though: when he left me a copy of Thoreau’s
Walden
on the doorstep of the Nee Nance, ringing the bell as I was closing up for the night, and then disappearing down the street without a backward glance.

On the title page was this inscription:
I imagine life with you. Beck.

There was a bookmark toward the end, and he’d underlined one passage.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

And I was happy to see it. Despite that he’s still married, despite that I never wanted to come back here, despite his brother and the demolition . . . I was happy.

It makes no sense, but frankly I’m a little tired of making sense all the time.

Cami returns with the familiar gait that I recognize from across the bar before I even see her face. She moves so smoothly it’s like she pours herself from one step to the next.

She pauses after she sits down and gives me a smile which seems to say:
Thanks for not following.

And I nod in return. We will never discuss this moment, I know.

“So,” I say, patting the trust papers. “Will you let me sue his ass?”

“Go for it,” she says. “But what if he spent it?”

“He certainly hasn’t been living a lavish lifestyle.”

“But maybe he’s just living off it. I’ve been wondering for years how a drunk like him runs an auto shop. Who would take their cars to him? Maybe no one does, yeah? But how could he do that? Wouldn’t he have to forge my signature and stuff, fool a court?”

“You’d be surprised,” I tell her, dryly. “There’s no end to ways people can get screwed over. Don’t worry, we’ll get you something. He hid this from you, and he’s not going to get away with that.”

“So, what’s your going rate?” Cami says.

“Oh, God, no. This one’s on me. This’ll be fun, in fact.”

I sip my beer and ponder that Cami could never have afforded me in my Miller Paulson days. I also start writing the complaint in my head, to be filed in circuit court the minute I can get to my laptop and to the library to print it out.

“One more thing,” Cami says. “He threw me out, and by that I mean literally . . .”

“Oh, you can stay with us, definitely.”

“I’m sorry about it. I know how cramped it is there. I won’t stay long, just until I figure something out—”

“Shut up already. It’s fine.”

“Well, okay then. But I don’t even have so much as a toothbrush, or any clothes at all. Can you help me go get my stuff tomorrow? After he goes to work?”

“Of course.”

We sit in silence for a few moments, listening to the clack of balls at the pool table and the low rumble of a baseball game on one of the small televisions.

“So, I guess you’re back for a while, yeah?” asks Cami.

“Yeah.”

“You okay with it?”

“It was my call.”

“The siren song of Haven too much for you?” Cami casts an eye around the shadowy interior of the Tip-A-Few.

“There are worse places to be.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Cami says.

My phone rings and I glance at it. It’s the store, and for that number, I answer: “Mom?”

“Oh, good, I caught you. Sally isn’t back yet and I’m really starting to worry.”

“She’s not back
yet
? That’s not a walk—that’s an epic journey.”

Cami cocks an eyebrow at me. I whisper to her:
Sally
.

“I didn’t tell you this before, but . . . we had a fight. An argument. And she stormed off.”

“She’s probably off having a tantrum or something, then.”

“She never stays mad. She doesn’t have the attention span.” I can hear my mother’s voice start to shake.

“Don’t panic. We’ll start looking. Okay, Mom? Don’t panic.”

Cami is already draining her glass. She dusts off her hands as in
that’s that
and says, “Well, I’ve always wanted to be in a search party, yeah?”

Chapter 42

Maeve

T
he Nee Nance is closed.

Now and then someone comes by and rattles the front door. Sometimes they knock. I imagine they cup their hands over their eyes and peer inside. Maybe they think I’m dead on the floor.

I just can’t deal with customers now.

Anna searched for hours last night and came back with Cami—beaten up by that hideous louse of a father, poor thing—and they fell asleep upstairs in Anna’s room. Slumber party style, both of them on the floor in some musty old sleeping bags I dug out of the back room. I looked in on them when I gave up on sleeping before dawn this morning. It pinched my heart to see them sprawled like that, their hair wild, their faces relaxed in repose. I could almost imagine the room scattered with
Tiger Beat
and
Seventeen
magazines, and a stale bowl of popcorn in there, too.

I called the police this morning, and they said although she’s not officially missing yet, they would keep their eyes open for her.
Should I let the local media know?
the young man asked.

I held my breath. Once again the Genevas were falling apart in public. But if everyone saw her face on the news . . .

So this is what brings me into the kitchen with my too-strong coffee, paging through old photo albums to find a usable picture to put on the news.

Only she’s wearing the wrong wig, or pulling such a face that no one would recognize her, or her back is to the camera.

And I keep stopping where I know I shouldn’t linger: pictures of Robert making a muscle for the camera, giving Anna a horsey ride, and then pictures of a teenage Anna with no parent in sight—because Robert had left and I had the camera, always.

I should set these aside and bring them with me. I glance at the wall calendar—a gift from Lakeshore Realty—and see that it’s just ten days until our appointed meeting date. His letter, from “P. C. Harming,” finally came through with a definite date and place, even a hand-drawn map on the back of an IHOP placemat. He’d drawn hearts and flowers all around our destination, the piece of land he’s promised to build a cabin on, for the two of us.

Only, what if I haven’t found Sally by then? And what on earth would I say to him?
Hey, remember your sister? The one you never talked to again, either? Well, she’s missing, by the way. No, she never did marry anybody; no, I was all she had, actually . . .
until I lost my temper and drove her away . . .