The Imperfects Page 4

  She emails her children to tell them she’ll be there. She does not mention her inheritance. She doesn’t open the will attached to Beck’s email, either.

  * * *

  As Jake unlocks the door to his apartment, a haziness lingers from the pot he smoked that afternoon. Somehow he made it through his shift at Trader Joe’s, although he couldn’t have named a single characteristic about anyone who had been through his checkout line, not even the person who had yelled at him for double-charging his credit card. The only things he could focus on were that Kristi was pregnant and Helen was dead. At some point, while he distributed samples of edamame hummus on garlic pita chips, those facts became aligned, as though one life was exchanged for another. Suddenly, Jake couldn’t imagine anything he needed more than to have the baby.

  In his kitchen, he sets down the bag of groceries to prepare chicken cacciatore—the only dish he knows how to make from scratch—and flowers he bought for full price rather than salvaging from the throwaway pile. Lilies, Kristi’s favorite. The blooms have just opened. They’ll last for days.

  By the time Kristi’s key turns the lock on the front door, the apartment is warm from the oven and rich with the aroma of spicy tomatoes and peppers.

  “Chicken cacciatore,” she calls. “You must be feeling like a real jerk.”

  “Words can’t begin to describe.” He hands her the bouquet of magenta lilies. She takes the flowers, offering him her cheek in place of her lips. He gives her an exaggerated kiss, mashing his lips against her skin until she laughs.

  Kristi sighs as she throws her tote bag over one of their mismatched dining chairs and opens the cabinet to find a vase for the lilies. Jake can usually tell by her mood if they put a dog down, if they performed a risky surgery that was unsuccessful. Today, between the pregnancy and her spat with Jake that morning, Kristi has other reasons to be somber and fatigued. Kristi has never met Helen, but she knows how close Jake was to his grandmother. When he tells Kristi about Helen, she will stroke his hair and tell him everything will be all right. She will instantly forgive him. Although Jake sees Helen’s death and his baby’s life as inextricably linked, he doesn’t want to use Helen to make Kristi forgive him. So, for now, he doesn’t tell Kristi about his grandmother’s death.

  Instead, he asks, “How long have you known?” watching her trim the lily stems.

  “A week or so.” She fills the vase with a few inches of water and arranges the lilies. He knows it’s important not to act hurt that she hasn’t told him until now. “I know we can’t afford to, but I want to have the baby.”

  Again, Jake plays it cool even though his heart is pounding. Does she assume he’ll to try to talk her out of it? Was he the type of guy to talk a girl out of it? Could they have a baby in their one-bedroom apartment? What else could they do? It’s not like they could afford a bigger apartment. Should they get married? And what would Kristi’s parents think? Jake lives in perpetual fear of the Zhangs, who, although perfectly fluent in English, speak to each other in Cantonese when he is around, almost certainly commenting on their disapproval of their daughter’s choice in partner. He hates how thoughts of the baby end in fear of Kristi’s parents.

  “Did you hear me?” she asks, and Jake looks up at her. “I’m going to keep it.”

  “Okay,” he says even though he means, Of course we’re going to keep it. Helen is dead and Kristi is pregnant. There was never any doubt they were going to keep it.

  “Jesus, Jake, it’s not like I said I feel like Indian instead of pizza. You can’t just say okay.” She disappears down the hall into their bedroom, pulling the door shut behind her.

  Jake sits alone in the kitchen, dismayed. He’s screwed up so many things in his life—his writing career, his closeness with Beck, his spacious, rent-stabilized apartment, his two previous relationships. Somehow, he’s been with Kristi for two years and hasn’t ruined it. Yet.

  Jake walks down the hall, stopping at the closed plywood door.

  “Kris,” he calls, trying to amass words that might make her feel better.

  Before he can say anything, his phone buzzes, and he reaches into his back pocket.

  “What?” Jake says as he reads Beck’s email. Deborah gets the house? Deborah? “This can’t be right.” Jake opens the will attached to the email. In Article III, it couldn’t be clearer: Helen left the house on Edgehill to Deborah. Jake leans against the wall, banging his head on the plaster.

  Kris throws open the door, offering a concerned look. “What happened?”

  “It’s Helen,” Jake says. “She’s...she’s dead.” He’s not ready to tell her about the house, to hear her rational explanation for why Helen would have left it to Deborah.

  Kristi burrows into Jake’s chest. “Oh, Jake.”

  He holds her tighter, relieved that she’s momentarily forgiven him for failing to show enthusiasm about her pregnancy. “I’m sorry I’m so bad at this. I can’t wait to have a baby with you. From the moment you told me, it’s been the only thing I’ve wanted. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to tell you that.”

  “I’ve had a week to process this.” She gazes up at him and he kisses the crown of her head. “You’ve only had a few hours. I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.”

  Jake laughs. “If that’s you jumping down someone’s throat, I’d hate to see your version of blind rage.”

  Kristi slaps him lightly on the arm. “It’s a horrible sight, so I’d recommend staying in line, mister.” The smile falls from her face. “Can we really do this?”

  “People raise children on less all the time.” The look on Kristi’s face is dubious. “I’ll pick up some extra shifts. Or I can start bartending again, do two jobs for a while.”

  “But when will you write?” After all this time, she’s still worried about his career.

  Jake runs his hand through her silky hair. “Let’s just be excited for now. There’s lots of time to worry later.”

  In general, Jake knows his ethos of “enjoy now, worry later” is not an effective worldview. As Kristi hugs him tighter, he realizes, for the moment, it’s the right perspective.

  “The funeral’s on Sunday. Will you come with me?”

  “Jake, we can’t afford one plane ticket, much less two. You go. Your family needs you.”

  Kristi has only met Ashley and her kids when they visited last spring. She hasn’t met the other Millers. She doesn’t understand that they don’t need him at all. Still, she’s right. Jake hasn’t seen Beck or Deborah in six years. This is something he needs to do alone.

  So the Millers will be united again. The four of them. Together, for the first time since Jake ruined everything in Park City.

  Three

  When Jake Miller’s movie premiered at Sundance six years ago, he decided to fly the Miller women to Park City: Beck, Ashley, even Helen, although he knew she wouldn’t attend. Helen had never been on an airplane and hadn’t been to the movies in at least a decade. “I’ll just fall asleep,” Helen had told him. “And that’s an awful lot of money to spend on a nap.” Then she’d added, “Invite Deborah,” and Jake promised he would. Deborah had surprised him by saying yes, then surprised him even more by making it to the airport without any car accidents or lost licenses or unexplained disappearances. Then again, Jake should have known that an all-expenses-paid trip to a film festival wasn’t something Deborah would have missed.

  The Millers knew little about Jake’s movie other than it was called My Summer of Women and was about the summer a twenty-one-year-old boy came of age in a house of women. If the Millers had known anything about storytelling, they would have realized that no man writes such a story unless it’s based on personal experience. But they didn’t think a twenty-one-year-old boy meant Jake, or that a house of women meant them. They didn’t look up the trailer online or read the script. Well, Beck had asked to see the script. Jake avoided sending
it to her. Looking back on it, Jake knew what he was doing. Even if he’d told himself it was nerves—the desire to remain infallible in the eyes of his younger sister—if he was completely honest with himself, he knew the film was about them, that it was funny at their expense. What he didn’t foresee was that it was a ticking bomb, about to upend everything.

  Beck was in her second year of law school, subsisting off instant ramen and boxed wine. On the flight, she sat in business class beside her mother, clinking champagne glasses as they toasted Jake, the family artiste, soon to make theirs a household name. Ashley was flying from New York, also sipping champagne on a business-class ticket purchased by Jake, enjoying a respite from her three-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, a break that made her feel guilty but not so guilty that she didn’t ask the flight attendant for a second glass of bubbly.

  The Miller women met in Salt Lake City where a driver took them to that small, usually quiet town in the mountains. When they arrived at the hotel, Jake was doing an interview and had left a note saying he would meet them at the premiere. They opened the bottle of champagne welcoming them to Sundance and modeled their clothing options like they were college girls. Deborah even let Ashley put makeup on her, and she marveled at how much younger her skin appeared, lacquered and blushed. While Beck opted for her standard look of thick black eyeliner and crimson lips, she agreed to wear one of Ashley’s black dresses and a pair of heels rather than the jeans and vintage sweater jacket she’d selected for the premiere. Jake had told them to be casual, but nothing about this was casual. So they dressed the part of the family in the film, over-the-top and ridiculous without even knowing it.

  Jake sat between the Miller women in the second row of the theater. When the opening credits cast his name in thick black letters, Deborah squeezed his knee. Beck elbowed him approvingly from the other side, and Ashley reached over Beck to ruffle Jake’s hair. Jake felt his cheeks warm at the unusual bounty of affection.

  From the first scene he realized just how willfully ignorant he’d been. Deborah was the first to notice. The opening credits dissolved, and an approximation of her filled the screen, pacing a front porch that looked suspiciously like the porch at Edgehill Road. The actress wore just enough makeup to look haggard, draped in a long gray sweater and bangles. Deborah ran her hand through her short, purple-red tousled hair, stopping when the actress ran her hand through her short, purple-red tousled hair after she realized she’d locked her keys in the house. Ashley stifled a laugh, and Beck shot Jake a wary look.

  The film took place in the late ’90s and detailed the summer after the protagonist Josh’s junior year of college. Instead of doing an internship or something that would ease the transition into his looming post-college life, he’d returned home to work at the local hardware store, as he had every summer since he was sixteen and his family had moved into their grandmother’s house. Now he was twenty-one and could drink at the local bar, which was where he ran into their neighbor, a sultry divorcée. She spent the summer teaching him to understand women’s bodies, even as he failed to understand the minds of those in his own home: his disheveled mother, who was always in and out of their lives, in and out of jobs, in and out of doomed relationships; his disturbed and brilliant sister, who had been expelled from high school for breaking into the principal’s office to change her grades; his grandmother, who pretended not to see the money his mother took from her purse, the empty beer cans his sister hid at the bottom of the trash bin; and his older sister, who lived in New York with her oafish fiancé and only made a brief appearance at the end of the film.

  The Miller women grew stiffer as the film continued. Meanwhile, the audience laughed, inching their bodies toward the screen, entirely engrossed.

  Toward the end of the summer, the mother was hospitalized following a mishap at a catering event that had almost cost her her arm. Instead of a limb, the accident had cost her her future earnings, as she had no health insurance. From the divorcée, Josh had learned how to ask women what they needed, how to listen to their desires. In the end he did hear the women around him, their pain and their loneliness, which he couldn’t fix, but could try to understand.

  The film ended the night before Josh went back to school, with a barbecue at the family house. Josh had used the money he’d made that summer, an unrealistic sum from part-time hours at a hardware store, to anonymously pay off his mother’s medical bills. His family wrongly assumed the support came from their absentee father, penance for abandoning them for the open road. Josh’s silence was his final sacrifice, his noble understanding that he was better off not taking credit. In the final scene, three generations of his family laughed as their mother served them ears of corn with her one good hand, her cast a sign that she was staying put, at least until her bones reset.

  When the film was over, the crowd applauded, and Jake stood to thank them, keenly aware of the women beside him who weren’t applauding, who looked as though they’d seen a ghost.

  The Miller women remained seated once everyone else left the theater. After walking out with some producers, Jake returned to retrieve them. The delight faded from his face as he realized he couldn’t keep pretending this was just a movie.

  “Nancy Bloom?” his mother howled. “You slept with Nancy Bloom?”

  “That’s your takeaway?” Beck barked at her mother. “Who gives a fuck about Nancy Bloom?” And then to Jake, “The stuff with grades? The beer?” Jake looked confused, and she tapped her head like he was brainless. “Were you trying to completely humiliate me?”

  At the time, Beck wasn’t considering the possibility that her law school adversary might do a little digging and realize that Jake’s movie was more fact than fiction. She wasn’t thinking about how she’d chosen to leave her high school expulsion off her law school application. At the time, she was focused solely on the impossible betrayal that her brother had taken her most vulnerable moments and used them to garner a few laughs.

  “It was just a movie.” Jake shrugged, doing his best to look innocent.

  “That—” Beck pointed at the dark screen “—was character assassination.”

  Jake was blocking the aisle, so Beck shoved him as she stormed toward the lobby.

  “I’m glad Helen wasn’t here to see this,” Deborah said as she swept past Jake. “And you could have been a little easier on Beck.”

  Jake and Ashley watched her leave, dumbfounded, since the film had undoubtedly been the hardest on Deborah. People saw what they wanted to see in others’ images of themselves, Ashley reasoned. Sure, it stung when the crowd had laughed at Ashley’s character’s attempts to eschew her middle-class Philadelphia roots. Even she had to laugh when an exaggerated version of Ryan drunkenly bounced off a taxi, unhurt. It was funny, and Ashley could take a joke.

  Sound trickled in from the lobby where people were milling, waiting for the shuttle to take them to the after-party. Ashley studied her brother’s troubled face. Wrinkles were starting to form at the corners of his eyes, white hair at his temples. He still had a boyish look to him, but his looks weren’t aging as elegantly as they might.

  “It was a beautiful film,” Ashley told her brother. “But you never should have made it.”

  “I didn’t realize,” he said. “I knew it was about me. I didn’t realize it was about them, too.”

  Ashley wanted push back; he had to realize. How could he not? In his stunned expression, she could see that, like always, Jake Miller had been so focused on what he wanted that he’d blinded himself from the destruction his self-absorption caused. All of the characterizations in the film had been accurate, all except that of Jake/Josh, the family savior.

  Ashley wove her arm through her brother’s and escorted him out of the theater. “I’ve got twenty-four hours with no children and no husband—I don’t intend to waste it.”

  Jake laughed as they stepped into the bustling lobby where everyone wanted to talk to him.
Ashley stood at his side, agreeing with all the middle-aged men in faded jeans and leather boots that Jake was brilliant, that no one deserved this more than him. And no one did.

  By the time they got back to the hotel suite, Deborah and Beck were gone.

  * * *

  With everything set for the funeral, Beck doesn’t know what to do with herself until Sunday. She should take the day off; only, if she does, she’ll sit in her apartment reflecting on Helen’s death, on the brooch, on the mat by her front door emptied of Tom’s shoes, on all the other ways he’s disappeared from the apartment—his bag of softball gear by the couch, his clothes intermingling with hers in the hamper—and the ways he’s remained. The furniture he purchased and left for Beck; the mail that’s addressed to him, mail she sneaks into his office when she knows he’s at court or a deposition; the rent, which he’s paid his share of through the end of their lease in October. She hadn’t wanted Tom to pay the bulk of their rent when they’d been living together and certainly doesn’t want him to continue paying it now that he’s gone. But she can’t afford to pay it by herself, nor to move, so she chooses to see it as reparation for his cowardice.

  She doesn’t want to spend the day wallowing, so she puts on her blazer and black jeans, buttons up her vintage wool coat, winds her scarf around her neck, and locks her apartment. As she’s stepping onto her stoop, something catches in her chest, and she rushes back inside. On her nightstand, she locates the brooch and pins it to her lapel. Its presence on her plaid coat calms her, like a black ribbon to commemorate Helen.

  At just before nine, the office is only half-full. The light in Tom’s office is off, and Beck swiftly passes, settling into her cubicle and rousing her monitor to life.