Maine (35 page)

Love you always,
Maggie

P.S. I think there might be some weird sexual tension between Grandma and her priest.

Ann Marie

When the phone rang, Ann Marie was clipping coupons from the Sunday circular at the kitchen table, same as most Monday mornings, unaware that something big was about to happen. She pressed the cordless receiver between her shoulder and her cheek so she could continue cutting out a three-for-one special on Windex. She’d leave one bottle here at the house and bring the other two with her to Maine the next day.

If they had it to do over again, she would have asked Pat to put less glass on the architectural plans for the big house in Cape Neddick. It got so dirty. Though it did have a gorgeous view of the beach from almost every room.
Focus on the positive
. That was a motto of hers.

Someday that house would be theirs. Then perhaps she’d make a few changes. The kitchen, for instance, was almost too modern. The cottage had to stay—Pat wouldn’t have it otherwise—but maybe they could do more landscaping, allow for more of a real yard for the grandkids to run around in, and a proper driveway.

“Hello?” she said now.

“I’m calling to speak with Mrs. Ann Marie Kelleher,” said a woman with an English accent.

“This is she.”

“My name is Louise Parnell. I’m calling from the Wellbright Miniatures Fair offices with some wonderful news. Your dollhouse, entry number 2374, has been selected as a finalist in our annual worldwide competition.”

Her heart sped up. Could this really be happening? In some ways, she had almost expected it, but then she’d tell herself not to be silly, that it was just a fantasy. She knew the decisions were being made this week, but she hadn’t thought it would happen on a Monday. (After church on Sunday, while Pat went to get the car, she lit a candle for this very reason, and then felt ridiculous about it.)

“A finalist?” she said softly, as if she might have misheard.

“Yes. You should be very proud. Out of over two thousand contestants, you’ve made the top ten. The finals take place September first in London. All expenses paid for you, plus one guest.”

God help her, she immediately envisioned herself walking hand in hand with Steve Brewer down a cobblestone street.

“That’s wonderful,” she said, and then, almost as a sort of consolation to Pat: “My husband will be so excited. He studied abroad in London one semester during college.”

“I expect you know all the rules and restrictions already, but we’ll be mailing you a packet with the relevant information later today.”

“Oh, I know them,” Ann Marie said. She had practically memorized the competition section of the Wellbright website. The finals required you to submit a brand-new house. You couldn’t have any outside help or even use a preexisting floor plan from one of the trade publications. You had to decorate it from the ground up. The grand prize winner got to have her house featured on the cover of
Dollhouse World
magazine, a five-thousand-dollar Wellbright gift certificate, and a brief lecture tour of craft fairs in the United Kingdom.

Last year’s winner had been at it for decades—she owned two shops in Canada. And here was Ann Marie, with only a year’s experience under her belt. After she hung up, she went to the dollhouse and actually kissed the front door. Then she removed the canopy bed from the master suite and kissed that too.

“Oh, you beauty,” she said to the house. “Thank you.”

Unsure of what to do next, she squealed like a child and bolted upstairs. Raul, her trainer, would be proud. She hadn’t run this fast since high school.

“Pat!” she called. “Honey!”

He emerged from the bedroom in his suit, straightening his tie.

He chuckled. “Yes?”

“I won! I won! Well, I’m a finalist, anyhow. I just got a call from the Wellbright people.”

“That’s great,” he said.

She tried not to let the fact that he sounded slightly underwhelmed stand in the way of her joy. This wasn’t really his thing, she reminded herself. But she kept pushing.

“Out of two thousand applicants, they only picked ten.”

“That’s fabulous. I’m so proud of you. Why are we standing in the hall?”

“And we both get to go to London, all expenses paid, for the grand prize judging.”

Now he nodded, his eyes widening.

“Look out, world, here comes my wife, the interior designer.”

“Oh, I’d hardly call myself that.”

“So you build it here and they judge it across the pond?”

“Right.”

“Your dollhouse will make one hell of a carry-on,” he said. Of all things.

“You send it ahead, silly,” she said.

“Should we go out to dinner tonight to celebrate?” he asked.

“That would be nice.”

“It’s our last night together before you ship off to Maine,” he said.

“I know. I have so much to do before I can start working on my house.”

“You’re going to start today, huh?” he asked, sounding amused.

“There’s not much time!”

She thought of everything she had to do: She needed to finish packing. She needed to go grocery shopping and pick up her mother’s prescriptions and drop them off to her. Which meant she’d probably end up staying for lunch and helping her mother hang those blinds in the den. She had told Patty that she’d buy bathing suits for the kids at the Filene’s sale. Then she had to come home and cook some meals for Pat to heat up while she was away. Plus maybe go over to Alice’s house in Canton and retrieve whatever her mother-in-law needed from there. She had library books to return. The car was filthy. She should get it washed. She needed to remind the girl next door to water her plants while she was gone.

Ann Marie suddenly felt deflated. It was only a dumb contest. It couldn’t fix the fact that Fiona was gay, that Little Daniel’s life was a mess, that everyone expected her to do everything at all times. And she’d never have enough hours to make her dollhouse perfect. She needed a break.

After Pat left for work, she cried. She sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands and just let it out. Sometimes that could be good for a person. She allowed the pity party to continue for a few minutes, and then walked into the front hall. She looked at herself in the mirror on the wall and laughed. What was she crying for anyway? Maybe the news had been too good. Her kids always bawled at their own birthday parties when they were young, overwhelmed by the attention.

“Ann Marie Clancy, you need to get a grip,” she said out loud. (Sometimes she still thought of herself by her maiden name, even though she had changed it to Kelleher nearly thirty-five years earlier.) “You’re a finalist. A finalist!”

She felt a bit better. She went and looked at the dollhouse again. Then she called Patty at work. She dialed the office number, and Patty’s cheerful secretary, Amy, picked up.

“Patricia Weinstein’s office,” she said.

Each time Ann Marie heard this name spoken aloud it was unrecognizable for a moment, even eight years after Patty had gotten married. She had to dig for it—
My daughter Patty Kelleher is now someone named Patricia Weinstein
.

“It’s her mother,” Ann Marie said. “Is she in?”

“Hold on, please.”

Patty picked up, sounding frazzled.

“How’s Foster feeling?” Ann Marie asked, before even saying hello. He had had a bad cold all weekend, a sore throat and a terrible cough. Patty had called her, worried as could be, on Friday night, and Ann Marie had told her calmly to make him a hot toddy with lemon and honey and a dash of whiskey, like her own mother used to make.

“He’s okay,” Patty said now. “He’s on the mend.”

“Are you making sure he gets plenty of fluids?”

“Yup.”

“Good girl. And he’s at school now?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Hmm.” Ann Marie probably would have kept him home for one more day to let him rest.

“I’ve got some big news,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Remember I told you I entered my dollhouse in that prestigious competition?”

“Um, sort of.”

“I’m a finalist! Daddy and I get to go to England for the judging in September. Which means I have to build an entire house by then, which is daunting, if you ask me.”

“You do realize the house you have to build is only three feet tall?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just teasing. That’s really cool, Mom. Congrats.”

Ann Marie might have liked to talk about it a while longer, but Patty changed the subject. Josh’s mother would be looking after the kids on Tuesdays and Thursdays while Ann Marie was in Maine. Patty was trying to find a polite way to ask her not to swear around the children.

“Josh says she was always this way. The woman talks like a truck driver. I really don’t want to have to explain to Maisy what ‘shit’ means and why she can’t say it at preschool.”

“Patty!” Ann Marie exclaimed on instinct. She had rarely heard any of her children use profanity.

“What? I wasn’t actually saying it.”

   A short while later, Ann Marie pulled her car keys off the hook beside the back door and hurried out to start her errands. The spring in her step was back, and it lasted all day—through traffic jams and department store lines and listening to some woman ahead of her at the deli yammering into a cell phone about her next-door neighbor’s alopecia.

It lasted through an afternoon at her mother’s apartment, where the dark carpets and thick old wallpaper made the rooms feel physically heavy, and the framed photographs everywhere were caked with dust: here were Ann Marie and her sisters at their First Communions and on the beach, always with their little brother, Brendan, in the background, haunting them like a ghost. He was now fifty years old, if he was even alive. Ann Marie often wondered about that.

Her father had been born in that apartment, back when the rent was only thirty dollars a month. He had never lived anywhere else in his life.

After she left, the drive through the old neighborhood warmed her with its familiarity, but it embarrassed her too. The three-story wood houses looked as worn as they had during her youth. She had often brought her children here, and they had loved being so close to the beach, even though some of the rougher types made them nervous. They weren’t built for this environment. Out in front of the L Street Bathhouse, a group of old Irishmen in their scally caps stood around talking and laughing. Each year on New Year’s Day, they plunged into the frigid harbor, and everyone in the neighborhood came down to cheer them on. Ann Marie gave them a wave now, happy to be heading home.

All day she had been designing the new house—the grand prize winner—in her head. She thought it ought to be brick. She had seen some beautiful brick houses at the fair, though they were rare. She’d wire it for electricity herself, as she had learned. She would make sheets and facecloths from the best she had in the hall closet, the high-thread-count linens she reserved for guests. The kitchen should be all white. In the living room, she envisioned a stately family portrait over a fireplace, with maybe a couple of hunting dogs in the foreground. What if she commissioned a local Boston artist to paint it? That had to be worth a few extra points.

She felt so energized that she decided to launder all the bath towels in the house while she made Pat two chicken and broccoli casseroles, a roast beef, mac and cheese, and a ziti bake.

   Late that afternoon, she showered for dinner. Afterward, wearing just her terry-cloth robe, Ann Marie decided to have a celebratory glass of wine. She poured until the golden liquid was almost at the rim of the glass. She took a big sip.

She went into the office and sat at the computer. At last. Pat wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours. It was finally her time. She began making her purchases, AmEx in hand. Pat might moan a bit about the bill, but she would simply remind him that they were getting a free trip out of this, so really they were saving money in the long run.

A free trip
. She felt terribly proud.

Ann Marie would have to have all the items express mailed to Briarwood Road, since that’s where she would be for the next month. It wasn’t ideal. She’d either have to finish building the house there and have it shipped from Cape Neddick (did she trust the sleepy little UPS Store in York, a few miles from the cottage?) or transport everything back home to Newton in the middle of July. All her tools were here. But there was always a silver lining.

Ann Marie pictured herself on the screen porch of the cottage alone, opening each box, pulling out her treasures. She’d have hours to work in peace these next ten days before Pat and the Brewers arrived in Maine. That was something.

She focused on her shopping.

The house she had had her eye on forever was a three-story Newport brick, with shingles and white trim and a widow’s walk. It had eleven rooms, a floor-to-ceiling height of ten inches, sixteen windows (two of them working bay windows complete with window seats), and a detailed staircase with a molded banister.

The house cost more than a thousand dollars. She thought it was worth it.

She bought gray shingle dye and a little doghouse and border plants for the yard, and then she added an old-fashioned push mower and a rake. She bought a Victorian hat vanity for a hundred dollars. (She had never even heard of a hat vanity before, but now she realized she most definitely needed one.) She bought a love seat and a dining table and a tiny iron and even an electric mixer, no bigger than a silver dollar.

When she looked at the clock on her computer screen, she was shocked to see that an hour had passed. She went to the kitchen for more wine, then came right back into the office.

She chose fabric for the window treatments, but decided to go down to the store in the morning and pick it up in person, rather than buy it online. That way she could make sure it was high enough in quality before she paid.

She went to a site that sold heirloom collectibles and bought a hand-carved desk and two newspapers to place on top. She added an antique umbrella stand.

Ann Marie imagined the father in this brick house coming in from a long day of work. Perhaps he was named Reginald, an Englishman. He might have a thin mustache. His wife (Evelyn?) greeted him at the front door each night in a pink gown, her cheeks rosy, her smile a bit mischievous. The children were already bathed and asleep. Dinner was on the table.