The Life You've Imagined (19 page)

“So what are your plans today?” I turn back to my can stacking. An odor has begun to creep out of the pantry. I discover a bag of something that according to the label had once been potatoes. I retrieve a trash bag from under the sink and dispose of them, trying not to look disgusted.

“I dunno. I was supposed to spend the day with that bitch Sherry.”

“What’s her problem?” I risk stirring his ire out of curiosity.

“You know women. She thought I was looking funny at this other girl, and then I didn’t call her right the damn minute I said I would. Shit, she ain’t worth it. If I wanted to be nagged to death, I’d get married again. How come you never got married?”

“I’m not an old maid, yeah?”

“Old enough. You ain’t queer, too, are you?”

“No.”

“So what the hell is your problem?”

“Maybe I don’t want to be nagged to death, either.”

Done with the potatoes, I retrieve my plastic gloves and begin scrubbing the shelves. But having my head inside the pantry—my hearing and sight dulled from the box-like effect of the shelving—kicks up my adrenaline.

“Men don’t nag,” my dad says, raising his voice, either because he knows I can’t hear or because he’s getting worked up.

“Maybe I’m just a stupid bitch, then,” I shout back. I can tell from the location of his voice that he has stood up. I will not give him the satisfaction of pulling my head out of here and turning around.

I will not.

I breathe deep to slow myself down, but the fumes from the Soft Scrub make me dizzy in this tiny space.

“You ain’t stupid. No kid of mine is stupid.”

My face safely hidden in the pantry, I can smirk openly at this.

“You had a fight with your boyfriend, I figure.” He’s very close now, within arm’s reach, I’d say. “No other reason you’d be crawling back here.”

This makes me pause in my scrubbing. But I’m not even close to done yet, so I renew my effort with vigor, not answering.

“I’m gonna go work out downstairs,” he tells me, and his voice retreats across the kitchen toward the basement steps. “Make me some lunch at noon. There’s money on the table if we need groceries.”

When I can hear him clanking around the free weights, I withdraw my head from the pantry, glaring furiously at my stubbornly shaking hands.

H
e starts with the beer at lunch. I count during his sandwich: three. This is a speedy pace, even for him.

I can’t say a rich folks’ party is normally my favorite place, but tonight I much prefer the Becker manse to Chez Drayton. I think Anna made sure I was invited, because despite my distant-cousin relations with Amy Rickart, I don’t think I’d be at the top of the guest list.

It takes me all afternoon, but I take everything out of the cupboards and scrub until my fingers ache and my arms feel weak. By four o’clock, I wash down some Advil with a Diet Coke and admire my handiwork. The whole place smells vaguely of lemon, and the empty cupboards seem inviting, as if no one lives here anymore and they’re waiting for a fresh start. Half the food should really be thrown away, as it’s out of date, but I know what will happen if I start throwing away his food. Instead, I’ll just inspect the labels when I cook and leave the oldest stuff at the back.

I spent my modest casino winnings on fresh white paint and new cupboard hardware almost as soon as I got back from the casino with Sally. It was exhilarating to win, and frightening, too, in the same sense of a near-miss on the highway.

And what if Sally hadn’t gotten lost among the slot machines and had me paged while I was still ahead? I remember cursing when I heard the page and pounding the table with my fist, drawing startled glances from the other guys sitting at the table. The dealer eyed me curiously, drawing back slightly.

I was like a hungry dog, and someone was trying to take away my food.

A wave of disgust hits me, just as familiar as that buzzing high I got when I bellied up to the table. That’s how it was, the whole time I was trying to get on top again when I was still with Steve: the lightheaded thrill followed by the crash when I realized I’d only dug in deeper.

All these years since my mom died I’ve hated my dad for his drinking, and then what do I go and do? Steal money from my boyfriend so I can keep gambling. And then just yesterday, I threw money on the table I didn’t have to spare, because if I had even two months’ rent for the smallest hovel in town I’d be gone, not to mention that I’m gonna pay Steve back no matter what he thinks of me.

Even with the intercom system calling my name at that casino, I almost anted up again anyway, but then Sally must have seized the intercom phone because her voice crackled over the speaker: “Hey, Cami! You didn’t leave me, didja?” I wasn’t sure, but she sounded slightly panicked. She was pacing like a zoo animal when I got to her at the courtesy desk.

That’s why I spent that cash on the paint, so I wouldn’t have it to gamble again. Then I cut up my ATM card. If I need cash, I’ll go to the bank and get it out in the daylight, when I have to stand in line and think about it, and sign a paper to get it, just like they used to do in the old days, before punching buttons and swiping plastic.

Because if I can’t stop myself from doing it again, even knowing what it costs me, I’m more like my father than I ever wanted to admit.

The front door slams open. Sherry charges in. “Where’s your asshole father!”

I jerk a thumb toward the hall. “In his room.”

My adrenaline revs up again. I had the feel for the afternoon, but Sherry changes things and I don’t know exactly how.

Raised voices come from down the hall. I glance around the disheveled kitchen, but I think I’d better retreat to my room while the going’s good.

Too late.

The two of them burst out of the room, looking for a moment like those old cartoons of the cats and dogs fighting so hard all you see is a cloud of flailing limbs.

I backpedal down the hall ahead of the maelstrom. They’ve got each other by the arms. If they weren’t trying to kill each other, they could be square dancing.

Grab your partner by the throat . . .

We all scramble into the relative openness of the living room. This is when I notice something about Sherry: She’s about half the size of my father.

I throw an arm in between, pulling on whatever I can grab of the pair of them until I find myself directly in the middle, like some kind of demented version of the children’s game London Bridge.
My fair lady!
The kids shriek, and you’re caught.

“Bitch, get outta my way!”

I tumble to the side, over a chair, onto something really hard and metal.

Chapter 28

Anna

I
’d forgotten how small this place is. Not the Becker house, which lords over its front lawn. No, I mean Haven.

I park my car where everyone else did, along the huge circle drive, and begin trudging alone to the backyard. Haven isn’t just physically small, but claustrophobic. Why else would I be attending the party of the family who wants to evict my mother and destroy the store she spent her life building? Because another son in the family happens to be my old friend and he’s the only person I feel like seeing now. Not my mother, who is angry at me instead of at the man who left her. Not Sally, who grows more irritating by the day. And certainly not Paul Becker.

Shelby, back in Chicago, has started to feel like a mirage to me. So has Dorian, though once the mere mention of her name would make me work harder, longer, just to make sure to stay out ahead.

August is a dream. Nothing left of him at all.

Mr. Jenison was disgusted with me, I know, when I called to extend my leave. They weren’t paying me anymore, he said, as if that would make me hasten back to my desk. He expected me to answer all e-mails from anyone at Miller Paulson promptly, because it wasn’t easy picking up someone else’s work.

He, too, mentioned the partner selection committee.

Before hanging up, he wished my mother a speedy recovery in a tone that revealed his doubt that my mother had so much as a hangnail.

I wonder if I can stretch the Family Medical Leave Act to my purposes. That would give me up to twelve weeks, though they’d deduct the weeks I’ve already been gone. Still, it would get me through the summer.

The first thing I notice when I walk through the garden archway is Beck’s daughter, Madeline. She’s whirling away on the grass with that abandon only children have, that innocent lack of self-consciousness. Or, if she’s conscious of people watching her, she probably already knows how wonderful she looks. She has that kind of beauty. I glance around for her mother. Samantha is never far behind, to hear Beck tell it, always in Maddie’s orbit. No sign of her, though. The party has a general watchfulness about it, with various adult heads turning at intervals to gaze at her and meet the eyes of the others:
She’s just spinning; no danger right now
. No mother nearby, though. No Beck, either.

Something charging at me from my left gets my attention.

It’s a chocolate brown dog galloping away, its tongue hanging out.

“Frodo!” shouts Amy, running up behind him. She seizes the dog’s collar just as he leaps to either slobber me or eviscerate me. Probably slobber, given how his tail is wagging, and he’s got one of those dopey-looking dog grins. Amy was knocked off stride by grabbing the dog, and she’s bent over awkwardly now. She looks like she might saddle him up.

I put my hand down to let him snuffle me.

“I’m sorry,” she pants. “I brought him because I hated to think of him locked up in the apartment all night with the fireworks, thinking he might be spooked—he’s not crazy about thunder—only I’m having to grab him off people all the time. He already knocked over Maddie once.”

I give Frodo’s ears a scratch. “Oh, it’s okay. As long as he’s not going for the jugular, I don’t mind. Go ahead and let go of him.”

“You sure?”

“Sure. I like dogs, but a pet was out of the question for me with no yard or anything.”

Our eyes meet briefly, and her expression is soft with understanding that hovers just above the point of pity.

Frodo jumps a couple times, but after sniffing me and being rewarded with the scratches, he bounds off in search of new friends to make. Amy watches him go.

“I’m sorry to horn in on your lunch the other day,” Amy says, looking at me sideways, still watching her dog romp. Someone has produced a tennis ball and is throwing it. “They’ll be throwing that ball all night now.”

“You didn’t horn in. It was just a lunch. We shouldn’t have interrupted you, the lovebirds getting married.”

“Yeah, well, it just seemed so rude to say, ‘No, we don’t want to sit by you.’ ”

“And yet that’s what everybody wanted. Isn’t that funny, how people can’t say just what they want so they end up doing the exact opposite?”

“I don’t know about that. I do what I want.”

“Aside from awkward lunches.”

“Well, maybe occasionally I endure something out of politeness, but in general I do live my life just the way I want.”

I look carefully at her. She’s wearing a candy-colored sundress, a fine gold chain, and her hair gleams in the angled late afternoon sun. “I’m glad for you, then.”

I spot her trio of friends who were nasty to me at the engagement party, the ones with the snotty remarks about my SAT score. “What about them? Do you endure them out of politeness?”

Amy’s mouth hardens into a thin line. “They’re my friends. Don’t talk crap about them.”

“Do you have amnesia? They were awful to you in high school.”

“We were all just kids then. Everyone’s changed, don’t you think? God, I hope so. I’d hate to be the same as I was at fifteen. And I’m not just talking about being fat.”

“I do know what you mean. Where can a girl get a drink around here?”

She points me toward the bar on the patio and spies Frodo doing something naughty across the grass and goes scampering after him.

I wish Cami had come. She called my cell just as I was leaving, saying she had a terrible headache and couldn’t get away. I offered to drive over with some intravenous morphine if I had to, but she chuckled and said she really needed to stay in.

I almost gave up on the party, but my mother about shoved me out the door, saying I needed to do something that resembled fun.

Now I just feel conspicuous. No date, no friend to stick by my side. Just the memory of Marc last year, when we were still together and he’d been watching kids tumble around on the grass at Grant Park.

“We’ll make even cuter ones, don’t you think?” he said, nudging me playfully.

For days afterward, whenever this conversation came up, he’d swear he didn’t mean anything by that, and I’m the one who overreacted. He said I “hit the panic button at the mention of commitment to anything but the job.”

I told him he was being such a girl about it and offered him a tampon. That didn’t go over well.

Marc was not a direct guy by nature. He’d hint at something, sidle up to it, and try it out like tossing a baseball in his hand on the pitcher’s mound. That’s why I didn’t believe that he was just kidding around.