The Life You've Imagined Read online

  The Life You’ve Imagined

  Kristina Riggle

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A+

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Kristina Riggle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  To my parents, who always helped me “go confidently”

  Epigraph

  Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.

  (MIS)QUOTED FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S Walden

  Chapter 1

  Cami

  The taxicab exhaust curls up around me like a fist. I turn toward the departing cab and raise my hand, my mouth forming around the word wait. Then my dad comes out of the house and I know that actually, yes, this is the right place.

  He remains on the porch, crossing his arms and leaning in the doorframe. For a blink before that, I could have sworn he looked happy and was leaning forward expectantly. But now he’s propped up like he’s always standing there and I just happened to catch him.

  The house . . . Paint the color of dried blood has begun to peel. One front window shutter is missing and the other is leaning sideways as if trying to escape. The porch sags like a slackened jump rope.

  This house was never the Taj Mahal, no.

  I stride across the scruffy, weedy lawn and skip a step going up the porch.

  “Like what you’ve done with the place,” I tell him, not looking him in the eye as I pass, though I tense up without meaning to.

  “You watch your smart mouth.” He cracks his knuckles.

  The inside smells as if an old folks’ home were in a bar: old sweat, piss, and the unmistakable aroma of beer. A regiment of brown bottles lines the kitchen table, a few of them fallen.

  “Your room’s the same place it’s always been.”

  First door on the right, across from the bathroom, and there it is. A small square with one small window overlooking the neighbors’ car, up on blocks in the gravel driveway. It’s a different car, at least, from the one I remember seeing.

  I can feel him standing behind me. I can almost hear the toothpick he’s chewing, something he does in the morning before he starts cracking open beers.

  “You get here all right?” he asks, then coughs hard.

  “No, I was in a terrible accident and couldn’t make it.”

  He slams my bedroom door so hard the only thing hanging on the wall rattles down to the dirty beige carpet.

  I pick up the brown wooden frame and blow the dust off the glass, which has gone foggy with some sticky filth of unknown origin. So I scrub the film off with the hem of my shirt, adjusting my glasses to get a proper look.

  There’s me, with my hair in pigtails—I always hated to sit still so long to get those dumb braids—looking scrawnier than ever. This, I think, is my last picture without glasses. There’s Trent, too, giving the camera a thin smile. As I remember, my dad fought with him over what kind of smile he was going to give, and finally Trent produced this effort to keep the fight from getting worse. For Mom’s sake.

  My mother, in the center, looks like me. Her face is a little fuller and she wouldn’t wear her glasses, so she’s got these wrinkles by her eyes from squinting all the time. Her smile is relaxed, and to me she looks relieved that we can finally get the picture and there will be no more arguing.

  But maybe I’m just projecting back. Maybe we didn’t fight at that moment. It’s hard to remember because this picture is twenty years old and my mom is long dead.

  I drop my bag on the bed, and the bedsprings squeak. I wish I’d been able to bring my queen-size, but it’s not as if I could have stashed it in the luggage area of the Greyhound bus.

  I sit yoga-fashion in an old bowl-shaped chair in the corner, with a cushion so thinned by the years that the canes of the chair imprint themselves on my back. I hesitate for a moment before dialing, but I did promise.

  “Hey, Steve. It’s me.”

  He’s at home. I can tell from the pattern of traffic outside and the way it echoes off the wood floors.

  “Hi. So you made it okay.”

  What is it with men and stating the obvious? I bite down my sarcasm for Steve, though. “Yes. The ride was fine. I had a fascinating conversation with a pothead about the best ways to smoke in public without getting caught. He showed me a pipe that looks just like a cigarette.”

  He doesn’t reply, and the silence is like a slap.

  “Look, you told me to call.”

  “I know. I’m glad you made it okay.”

  Now it’s my turn to be silent, fingering the ends of my hair and pushing my glasses around on the bridge of my nose.

  “I’ll make it right,” I offer.

  “You can’t.”

  I stand up suddenly, as if he can see me and it matters. “How do you know what I can’t do? I’ll be tutoring again in the fall and I’ll get a job here this summer.”

  “And you can gamble some more and win it back? Sure.”

  I can feel him holding his temper back, like yanking on the reins of a barely tamed horse. I’ve seen it in his face any number of times. “It was . . . It was a loan you were never supposed to know about. You were giving me very favorable terms. Big of you, actually.”

  “Ha,” is the only thing he says. He lets his retort hang there and I know we’re both going back over it, his discovery and my admission and the sordid week that followed.

  “So are you going to call me later, or what?” I ask him.

  “I don’t think I’d better.”

  Now I sink back down to the edge of the bowl chair. The position feels precarious, and I tense up to keep from falling. “So you don’t want me to call you, either?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got another call, Cami. Take care.”

  He’s gone.

  I turn the phone over in my hand, again and again, until I look down and realize that’s exactly what I do with a hand of cards.

  Chapter 2

  Maeve

  As my daughter steps acros
s the threshold, dragging her wheeled suitcase behind her, the word that floats through my mind is brittle.

  Maybe she senses it, too, and maybe that’s why she won’t let me hug her tight.

  “Hi, honey,” I say. “I’m so glad to see you.” I bathe her in my smile, loving her from across the waxy countertop of this convenience store that’s been my business and home for nearly as long as I’ve been Anna’s mother.

  If only I’d known back in her baby days, during all those long nights of feeding and burping and rocking, that my years hugging my daughter would be counted on one hand . . . Well, I wouldn’t have looked so forward to her sleeping through the night.

  It’s disorienting, thinking of her baby days as she stands before me, with her penny-colored hair pulled up tight into a bun on the back of her head and a prim fashionable black suit. Her lawyer gear, she calls it.

  Sally bursts in from the alleyway door, where she’d snuck off to have a smoke. The vapor follows her in and she shouts, “Well, isn’t this a regular Geneva convention!”

  She doesn’t wait for permission and wraps her arms right around Anna, who allows it and waits until Sally isn’t looking to sigh and send me a look that says, Geez, that same old joke. Will she ever give it a rest?

  No, of course she won’t. Why would Anna expect anything to change at the Nee Nance Store?

  “Will you still make that joke if I get married, Aunt Sal?” Anna says when Sally finally releases her. She wheels her suitcase to the stairway behind the beer cooler, which leads to the upstairs apartment. “Because I won’t be a Geneva anymore, then.”

  “Look, doll,” Sally retorts, her hand resting on her hip. “You’ll always be a Geneva. You can’t escape us!”

  Sally’s black seventies-era-Cher wig is askew, giving her the effect of looking slightly sideways, and with that lopsided huge grin, she could be a maniac. Anna pats her on the shoulder indulgently and begins bumping the suitcase up the narrow stairs.

  I could escape being a Geneva, technically. Sally, being my wayward husband’s sister, is biologically a Geneva, as is my Anna, of course. But me? I married into the name and with some paperwork could prune myself right off the family tree.

  Carla lumbers in to the store and jars me back to reality by asking for some Virginia Slims. It’s not until that moment I realize I’ve been fingering my wedding ring, which is hanging from a chain and normally hangs inside my shirt, unseen.

  Anna clomps back down in her heels, hurriedly, as if she has somewhere critical to be. She takes up the mop that I left leaning against the potato chip rack, where I was interrupted by her homecoming.

  “Honey, you don’t have to do that. You’ll get mop water all over those nice shoes.”

  She shrugs lightly. “I’ll be careful,” she says, and then of course mop water sloshes all over them. I know better than to say a word, though, and anyway, she’s had a rough time of it, I gather.

  I wait until Carla leaves to broach the subject. In the old days, we talked about nearly anything in front of the customers. When you live upstairs from your place of business, the line between personal and private gets pretty fuzzy. It was easy to forget they had ears, especially since most of them discreetly pretended there was nothing unusual about a redheaded mother and daughter having a red-faced fight right in front of them.

  But since she left town for college and then her Chicago job, she’s gotten awfully fussy about that kind of thing. All kinds of things.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I ask her. “About everything?”

  “About August being dead, you mean?”

  That’s Anna, cutting through the euphemisms.

  “Well, yes, if you want to put it that way.”

  “I’m okay,” she says, leaning on the mop wringer with more force than I could have imagined she had under that fancy suit. She straightens back up and puffs a loose strand of hair that’s dropped out of her bun. “It’s sad. Kind of hard to be around there now.”

  She doesn’t look at me for any of this. I’ve tried to catch those avoiding eyes for twenty years now. I miss the childish openness she used to have. I miss the glimpses into those eyes that always reminded me of that line of poetry Nature’s first green is gold . . .

  “Let me know if you need anything, and sweetie, you really don’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t mind,” she says, and she slaps the mop onto the floor again.

  I hope someday she meets just the right man and has babies—a whole passel of babies, more than I could have—so she understands how it kills me now that she won’t let me hug her when she’s in such obvious distress. Well, maybe not obvious to anyone else. But I’m her mother. I knew the moment she called me.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, and that was all I needed to hear.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, and then she sighed as if I’d done something wildly irritating.

  It was the forced brightness that gave her away, which made her voice just as brittle as she looks here in living color, right now, wielding that mop with the same determination she gave to spelling bees, exams, her finals, and she must now apply to court papers and trials, though I don’t see her in action anymore.

  Sally has gone silent, thank goodness. It’s rare, but even my daffy sister-in-law can be sensitive to atmosphere and know to shut the heck up. She’s biting her tongue and working on a sudoku puzzle now, in the office chair behind the counter, that stupid chair her brother bought that is so pointless behind the waist-high countertop.

  It was comfortable but useful only if no one was in the store. Like so many of Robert’s grand intentions that only sort of worked out.

  “Good morning, Maeve!” calls out Mailman Al, his shadow slicing the June sunshine. I wave at him and begin ringing up his Diet Coke and Snickers while he’s still plopping the mail on the counter.

  The top piece of mail nearly makes me gasp aloud. I slip it off the top as Al turns to get his drink. I slide the letter into the pocket of my pants, where it fits awkwardly, one corner poking out.

  Al leaves exact change for his snack and heads back out with a jaunty wave. Anna has disappeared into the utility closet to dump the mop water down the big sink.

  “Sal? Keep an eye on the door for a sec, okay?”

  “Hmmph.” She’s chewing on her pen and not looking at me, which is just as well.

  I scuttle sideways like a crab to the office, where I yank open a file drawer and drop the letter in the first folder I see, which happens to be H, maybe for husband, which Robert technically still is. I thank the heavens that Mailman Al started his route only ten years ago, not twenty, when Robert was still here, because then he’d have caught on by now that my husband is writing me letters, and I’m not sure if I could stand his knowing that.

  “Oh, Mom, there you are,” Anna says as I emerge. “I might run upstairs for a bit, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course. Have a rest, dear. You’ve had a long train ride.”

  Sally has closed her sudoku book and she’s riffling through the mail now.

  “Sally! Do you mind!”

  “Just wondering if you have any good catalogs.”

  “Honestly, Sal. What would I do with a catalog? You think I’ve got any room for any of that Crate and Barrel crap?”

  I snatch the mail away from Sally and steal a glance at the stairs where Anna has just disappeared. Maybe I need to tell her that Robert is writing, not to mention what’s coming in September.

  But she’s had such a shock already, with her friend dying. No. Now is definitely not the time.

  Chapter 3

  Anna

  Before my eyes are even open, I’m confused. What’s under my arms that’s so scratchy?

  So I wake up to the sight of brown fake-wood paneling and what’s under my arms is a scratchy, nubbly bedspread instead of the smooth comforter that was back home and is now in some storage locker.

  Oh, shit, is my first thought. Back in Haven again.

  Then, August is dead.r />
  I told him not to jaywalk and talk. Over and over, I told him. I’d hear air brakes and honking in the background and say, “You’re not crossing the street, are you?” and he’d laugh and say “Yes, Mom, I’ll be careful,” which made me smile because he is thirty years older than I am and has this huge white sweep of hair that makes him look like a lion.

  Was thirty years older, I mean. Had the hair.

  And I was supposed to be staying with him since the lease in my apartment had run out and I couldn’t close on the condo yet. And for that matter I was supposed to be taking a deposition today and working on that brief, only Mr. Jenison made me take a bereavement leave, though August was not a relative but a mentor, a professional colleague with whom I’d had a pleasant relationship.

  I pull off the bedspread and touch my hair. It feels like Velcro that’s been ripped too many times. I should have left the bun in and just slept on my side.

  Stupid bereavement leave. I should be working, because I’m coming before the partnership review committee soon and now is not the time to be swanning off for a visit home, only Mr. Jenison made it clear that I had no choice.

  I open my closet to look at the few clothes I’d unpacked. I brought home primarily my weekend grubby stuff because the rest got all packed up in anticipation of moving in with August for a bit, only then he got hit by a bus. I had to wear my favorite trial suit to his funeral. He would have appreciated that, come to think of it.

  I don’t want to wear the crummy stuff, so I step back into my skirt and blouse. I skip the pantyhose and heels, though, and slip into my flat sandals. No one will see them behind the counter, anyway.

  My phone bleeps. Shelby, sending me a link to an obit about August in the Tribune. August Canfield, a fixture on the Chicago legal scene for decades, was known for his fierceness in the courtroom and his gentleness outside it, where he served as a volunteer on several . . .

  I know all that stuff, so I toss the phone back on my bed.

  Careful footfalls signal Mom’s approach. Aunt Sally would stomp, being constitutionally unable to do anything quietly.