Life After Life by Jill McCorkle Page A

and the life of the party and the next, somber and bleak and angry. She can’t even enjoy when her mom seems good because she has to get ready for what she knows is coming. Abby has often thought how wonderful it would be to have a sturdy mother who stays the same, dependable and comfortable with some meat on her body. A mother who doesn’t want to wear what is in the junior department at Macy’s, a mother who loves wearing some big stretchy mom pants. Her one friend, Richie Henderson, has been through divorce and predicted as much for Abby’s future, and after many sad and burdened months thinking about it, Abby has come to look forward to the announcement and the life that will follow. Richie says a lot of parents are much better alone. They try harder. They stop lying about everything.
    “They’re all pretty stupid,” Richie said. “Even the smart ones are stupid assholes.” His mother teaches math and science and his dad is a doctor so it makes sense that he would know the truth. “You’ll see, Abby, it’ll be so much better when they’re apart.” And so she is wishing for that, wishing for separate homes and two different bedrooms, clothes for each house, a dog at her dad’s. When she blows out her candles, she’ll wish for Dollbaby to come home and then she’ll wish for a divorce. A big fat divorce.
    If someone asked her what is the best part of her life, she would say first Dollbaby, which she can’t say anymore, and then story time with her dad and then all of her friends at Pine Haven and then Richie who only thinks about skateboards and science things. For as long as she can remember her dad either read or told a story at bedtime and even though she knows she’s too old, she has begged him to continue. He ends his stories with a magic trick from his old days as an amateur street magician. Her best birthday parties have been the ones where he performed tricks and then people just split a piñata and ate lots of candy and ran around the house and yard until someone got hurt or threw up or both and her mother made them calm down and sit out on the porch until their rides came. But those days are gone and she hates the way her mother is constantly wondering if she has started her period. No.
    Her dad has told her that he is only doing one big trick for the party but promises that it will be his best ever. He has worked for weeks on the disappearing chamber, even when her mother begged that he just pull a rabbit out of a hat or something easy. “It’s a masterpiece,” he had told her, and then whispered so her mother couldn’t hear. “I am going to make all the First Ladies disappear.”
    Her favorite tricks are the ones he calls sleight of hand, and even though she knows how he palms things and uses his sleeves to hide things, it is still really amazing.
    Her parents met because of the magic tricks. Her mom was in college and he has said that he was sort of in college and she stopped on the corner with a crowd of sorority sisters to watch him doing magic. They had told Abby the story for as long as she could remember so their lines of dialogue were firmly etched on her mind, the way her mom described him as “that cute hippie-looking guy” and her dad said that her mom was the prettiest of these very pretty girls all decked out with straw bags and high heels and everything monogrammed, little gold pearl necklaces, which her dad said made them all look like a pack of hunting dogs marked by some lucky owner.
    “Thanks a lot,” her mom would say, inserting correct descriptions like add-a-bead and espadrilles and Capezio, and then go on to describe her dad’s dirty bare feet and near-dead flowers strewn in with the few dollars and bits of change tossed in front of the dove’s cage. He owned Hawk long after his performance days. “He had quite a scene of groupies,” her mom said. “They all looked like girls who did things a good girl wouldn’t be doing.”
    “Like what?” Abby asked