The Life You've Imagined (26 page)

My phone rings and the screen says W. B
ECKER
. I just left there; what does he want?

“Excuse me, Cami, I’ll take this in the office.”

“Hello,” I answer, dusting fry salt off my hands as I step behind the metal desk piled with invoices and balance sheets.

“Hi.”

“Beck! What’s going on?”

I glance out into the store, and then I close the office door, slowly. I catch Cami’s eye as I do this and she raises an eyebrow.

As he speaks, a crack runs through his voice. “Sam and I split up. I moved out.”

“What happened?”

“It was ugly. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“She doesn’t . . . You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“But she suspects, doesn’t she?”

“Can we meet up? I hate talking like this over the phone. I want to see your face.”

“We’d better not.” I can’t imagine a single place in Haven that would be safe. Even if the news isn’t public yet—his dad didn’t even seem to know—before long everyone will know that he left his wife.

“Let’s meet in Muskegon.”

I calculate the distance, the drive time, how long Cami is scheduled to work. “I guess I could get away, but I don’t know . . .”

“Please. It would mean a lot to me. You’re my friend. You never stopped being my friend.”

He listened to me about my dad’s letter when I dared tell no one else.

“Okay. Yes.” We decide to meet at the mall, in the parking lot in front of one of the stores.

When I hang up and tell Cami of my plan, she says, “You sure you want to do this?”

“He’s a friend. He’s having trouble, and I think I caused it.”

She only nods. If she’s judging me, she’s not showing it.

As I drive north on the highway, my phone rings again. This time it’s a Miller Paulson number. From my quick glance I can see it’s Mr. Jenison. I let it go to voice mail.

Chapter 38

Maeve

T
wo things jolt me as I write my rent check for August.

The last month in my home, in this store.

The month Robert said we would meet, only he still hasn’t picked a date or sent me a proper letter. A couple of weeks ago he sent a postcard. A postcard! With his name and his own writing, after I’d told him to be careful! He signed it
love
, which would have sent Anna through the roof. I’m just lucky she wasn’t in the store.

The postcard was for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. At least he’s made it to the Midwest.

I’m in the office, with Cami manning the store. Sally is upstairs, sleeping, her wig draped across the top of my dresser like some sort of exotic carcass. At least she let me wash the smoke out, as best I could.

I’ll still have a job if I want it, it seems, thanks to Anna. The pay she negotiated isn’t much, but it’s income. Paul won’t let me lease the space, even with Anna’s help, to run the new business myself. I’m not good enough for that, I guess. I’ll go from proprietor of my own store to some retail clerk with a boss telling me whether I can have a day off or not. Even that is temporary. He let it be known he would be hiring a new manager, eventually, who would handpick his own staff.

I’m glad I wasn’t there to witness Anna try to wring money out of him, arguing about how much I’m worth to punch register keys.

Dean Martin croons on my tape player about being king of the road. Robert always loved that one, crooning along with his voice a bit too sharp, drowning out Dean.

The Nee Nance will be gone, though, even if I stay. It will be shut down for a while, gutted, rebuilt. I won’t recognize the place. Meantime, I’ll have to find an apartment. Anna will help me pay my rent. That’s how she put it, “help me,” when in fact she’ll have to pay it all, at least for now, until the renovation is complete. Without the income of the store, or wages as Paul’s lackey, I’ve got nothing.

Any savings I managed to scrape up always went out the window for medicine, or a new-old car, or repairing the broken boiler.

I look up at my citation on the wall from the Rotary club, for organizing that food drive for years, rallying the chamber of commerce to collect cans for the needy.

And now here I am, hand out to my daughter, pockets turned inside out. At the ripe old age of fifty-two.

As Grandma Geneva used to say, “How do you like them apples?”

I hear Sally stomping down the stairs. She pokes her head into the office. “Hey, sis, can I come apartment hunting with you?”

I suppose, since she’ll be living there, too, it’s only fair. “Yeah. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

I rest my head on my folded arms.

T
he balcony overlooks a vast sea of hot blacktop, with fresh yellow parking-lot stripes.

The rental agent behind me is showing Sally all the “features” of the kitchen. I hear the sink sprayer fire off and Sally apologizes. Honestly, I can’t take her anywhere. And now I’ll have to take her everywhere.

Below and to the right I can see the gray sign which reads E
merald
C
ove:
A
B
ecker
D
evelopment
P
roperty
. I didn’t even know. It was just one of those I circled in the paper yesterday. Anna had told me not to worry about the expense of the rent.

“Even if you picked some place fancy,” she said, “it will be so much cheaper to live here than in Chicago.”

And that’s when I knew. No fanfare, no big announcement. Just like that, with her use of definite future tense, Chicago and Miller Paulson became a piece of her past.

All because of me.

Well, not just me. I turn away from the stunning blacktop vista—the air so hot it shimmers above the pavement—and see Sally trying out all the cupboard doors as if one of them will somehow work differently from another.

I suppose if it were me alone, I could have sponged off Veronica, distasteful as that would have been, or at least Anna could have headed back to work and just sent me a check for a while until I got on my feet.

But with Sally homeless, too, and somewhat battier of late, it must have seemed impossible for her to go back to her old life and leave us to our devices. Poor Anna, saddled with a tiresome sense of responsibility.

I find myself wishing she had just a little of Robert’s devil-may-care attitude, just enough so she’d go back to the big city and not worry about me. I’d get along without her if I had to. Especially if her father would finally write me. “Got held up a bit,” his postcard had read. “Sit tight.”

“Well, ladies,” chirps the rental agent, brushing at speckled dots of water across her dress. “How do you like it?”

“I like it fine,” I answer, as Sally crows from the bathroom, “Hey, sis! Check it out, two sinks!”

The agent smiles at me confidentially, like she’s going to let me in on a delicious secret. “His-and-hers sinks. All those annoying little beard hairs? They all go in one sink only.”

“Hers and hers, I guess,” I say. “It will be just me and my sister-in-law here.”

“Ah,” she says, suddenly busily rummaging in her purse. “So, can I get an application started for you?”

I lick my lips and take in a breath. How to broach this?

“Well, this place is fine, but my situation is a little, well, it’s unusual, because my daughter is going to be paying my rent, at least at first. I run my own business, but my lease is up, and as of the fall, I . . . I don’t have any income, so I don’t have any W-2 statements or anything to show you.”

The air conditioning hasn’t been on and it’s already stuffy in here. Having spelled out my life like that, I can scarcely breathe.

“Hmmm,” she says, tapping a pen against her pursed lips and squinting at me like I’m a confusing modern art piece. “I’ll talk to the folks down in the business office. I’m sure we can figure something out. You can’t be the first person to have this situation. College students and whatever . . .” She starts to walk out, and then turns and says, “Your daughter has verifiable income, I presume?”

“Well, she . . . She’s got a lot in savings. She just moved back to town, but she’s a lawyer, so she’ll have income in no time.”

“I see. I’ll let you ladies continue looking around. I’ll be down in the office if you have any further questions.”

The door swings itself shut, too hard, and it echoes so loud in the beige emptiness that I jump.

I should have let Anna come do this, like she offered, but I had to say “No, no, I’ll find a place myself.” Maybe she has to be the one to rent it and we sublet or something . . . ?

My head is now throbbing. I wonder if this is a blood pressure thing . . . No, I’m sure it’s the heat. My pressure has been up a little, but nothing like it was that one day. I notice just then how quiet it is in here.

“Sal?” I head down the short hallway. I thought this place seemed more spacious from the outside, but it’s not much bigger than the upstairs of the Nee Nance. “Sally!” She’s prone on the carpet in a patch of sun.

At my exclamation, though, she props herself up. “What? Just having a rest.”

“On the floor? What are you, a housecat? Get up, for Pete’s sake.”

“So is this the place?” she asks as I help her to her feet.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“ ’Cuz I like the double sinks. Classy. We can both put on our faces in the morning. Or our hair!” She guffaws and whacks at my arm, staggering a little with the glee of her own joke.

In the hall I take a deep inhale of the common-area air conditioning. It would be nice to have AC for once in my life, though I’m not sure it’s worth the price of living with Sally.

“Anyhoo, I love it,” Sally says. “It smells better than my trailer.”

“No smoking in this place!” I shout suddenly, whirling on her so quickly she draws herself back against the stairwell wall. “I will not have you turning my home into a pit like that stupid trailer.”

“Well, aren’t we fancy. I’ll smoke on the balcony.”

“And you’ll empty the ashtray every day.”

“Yes, ma’am, your ladyship.” She salutes me.

“Oh, shut up.”

We clamber into my old Buick and back out of the parking space, and I glare at the Becker Development sign. “You know, Sal, they’re not going to rent to us, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because neither of us has a job or income.”

“I got Social Security. And my pension from the school system.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s a massive amount for being a janitor!”

In my peripheral vision she draws herself up straighter. “Custodian.”

“Sally, I’m quite sure we can’t afford this place, and come to think of it today, Anna doesn’t have any income right now, either, and she’s the one who’s supposed to be paying for us.”

“Ah, we’ll figure something out. It’ll be fun! We can stay up late, paint each other’s toenails, and hey, with two bedrooms we can bring over gentlemen friends—”

I punch the brakes at a stoplight hard enough that we bounce off our seatbelts. “No, it is not going to be ‘fun’! We’ll be destitute and living off other people, and with no jobs we’ll be staring at those damn beige walls until we want to kill each other. Does that sound like fun to you? And then I get a job, only what kind of job will that be? With twenty credits at a community college three decades ago? I’ll come home and hang up my hairnet and have no one but you for company, you batty old broad!”

A horn blares behind us. The light is green. I punch the gas and the car makes one massive charge forward and dies with a clank and a gasp. I try the key with a shaking hand as the cars behind us lean on the horn again. From the side, I see Sally open the door. I look and she’s glaring at me through some stray strands of her black wig. She flips me the bird, and then slams the car door so hard the keys jingle in the ignition.

“Fine,” I mumble to myself as she recedes into the neighborhood beyond. I put on the hazard lights. “Just go, already.”

I sit back and wait for the traffic streaming past me to clear enough for me to get to a phone and call Anna.

“W
here’s Sally?” is the first thing Anna asks me when she picks me up off the side of the road, moments before the tow truck arrives.

“She took a walk.”

“Funny time for a walk.”

“She’s a funny gal; what can I say?” I rest my head against the side window and close my eyes. Anna is quiet as she drives me back, reopens the store, and sends me up to my room to rest.

“Oh,” she says, as I have one foot on the bottom step. “This came for you. Doesn’t look like business mail so I didn’t open it.”

I come back across the store, trying not to look too eager, only mildly curious, as I accept the envelope.

The address and return address are typed, badly, on a manual typewriter. It appears to be from a “P. C. Harming.” I scurry up the stairs, biting my lip to keep from laughing and crying at once. Prince Charming, indeed.