Maine (44 page)

Ann Marie

It rained like crazy through the final days of June, but on the first of July, the sun broke through to reveal the finest morning of summer so far. Ann Marie stepped outside the cottage door, and the air was warm, the sky pure blue. She took it all in, looking down to where the ocean met the sand. Alice’s lilies were thriving. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the trees overhead.

She hadn’t minded the lousy weather. She mostly needed to stay inside anyway and focus on cleaning the cottage. Kathleen had been staying there for all of four days, and the place was a disaster. Newspaper pages were strewn across every surface. Cigarette butts had been hidden in the bottom of the bathroom wastebasket, leaving behind hideous black smudges and a smoky odor that took nearly forty minutes of scrubbing with a mix of baking soda and water to cover up. Kathleen seemed incapable of putting a glass in the sink once she had used it. There were business cards for California school superintendents in a stack on the dresser (why?), as well as handwritten notes that Ann Marie couldn’t begin to understand:
Remind them that orchid will bloom faster/richer colors/longer life span with tea … liquid seaweed = increased fungal activity … With the gin we will need to start looking for more workers AND TRASH! …

Ann Marie fastened all the pages together with a paper clip and shoved them into her sister-in-law’s purse. Then she set to undoing the rest of the damage Kathleen had done.

Now there were freshly washed sheets on the beds and vases of Free Spirit roses on the kitchen counter and on top of the piano, blooming in orange and peach and yellow sunbursts. The grill out on the deck had been scrubbed down. The fridge was stocked with champagne and blackberries and pastries and fresh steaks, and corn on the cob, and three different kinds of cheese for the cheese tray. She had removed a lamp painted with seashells from the dining table and hidden it up in the loft, replacing it with her dollhouse, which now held the spot of honor smack in the middle of the living room.

This was exactly how she wanted the place to look when the Brewers arrived later today, the perfect start to her official month in Cape Neddick. Except for the fact that Kathleen and Maggie still hadn’t left.

Kathleen refused to go, probably out of spite. She said she had good reason: she hadn’t convinced Maggie to move to California with her yet (
smart girl
), and she wasn’t leaving Maine until she succeeded. At Maggie’s insistence, Kathleen had finally agreed to vacate the cottage and stay at Alice’s. So the two of them were bunking at the big house, and Ann Marie, Pat, and the Brewers would stay together in the cottage next door, as planned.

She had never seen Kathleen so badly behaved as she had been this week, which was really saying something. Her mere presence made Ann Marie nervous. She could picture Kathleen pitching a fit in front of the Brewers, embarrassing everyone to no end. Kathleen was in a state over Maggie’s pregnancy, and while she claimed to have come here to help her daughter, she mostly seemed to have upset the girl ever since she arrived.

Ann Marie was distressed about it too. At night she lay awake thinking about poor Maggie, wondering how she could help. She wanted to impress upon her that while the situation was not ideal, God would provide. How many women could honestly say that their children’s conceptions had been planned? It was not preparedness for a child that made the timing right, but the fact of the child’s existence.
Begotten, not made
, that was what the Bible said. She feared that Kathleen was advising her niece to pass the buck, the way she would—to get rid of the pregnancy, or to get rid of the baby after he was born, as if this new life hadn’t come along for a reason.

Her sister Susan’s oldest daughter, Deirdre, had had a hell of a time getting pregnant. Maybe Ann Marie ought to tell Maggie about her. She spent thirty thousand dollars on in vitro, and gained forty pounds, only to have it fail twice. She attempted it a third time, and finally, after four painful years of trying, Deirdre had given birth to triplets.

Ann Marie’s mother had nearly lost it, raging at Susan, saying that the Catholic Church didn’t support such procedures, that they killed millions of innocent embryos, and that it was up to God to decide when a life came along. It was easy enough to think so when you yourself had effortlessly given birth to four children, as their mother had. Ann Marie considered herself a model Catholic, but she knew that if her only way to have babies had been through petri dishes and science labs, she would have done all of it in a heartbeat.

Her mother came from a generation of married Catholic women who had gone to the Church begging to be allowed to use birth control in order to keep their families at a manageable size. When the Church refused, they obeyed, and for that reason plenty of them ended up with ten, twelve, or fourteen children, as if they were cattle. So many of those women had died young, their bodies exhausted. Thinking on it now, Ann Marie wondered if it wasn’t all a bit absurd, this business of celibate men deciding who got to be a mother, and when.

It was because of the Church that Alice believed Maggie should marry the awful boyfriend. Ann Marie had considered this—if it were her daughter, she might have felt that marriage was imperative, whatever the circumstances. But she couldn’t really picture her niece settling down for a lifetime with Gabe. Maggie would probably be better off alone. Clearly, Kathleen thought so.

Ann Marie had told Pat about his sister’s plan to stay on, and he was ticked off. But he didn’t say anything to Kathleen, reasoning that they had bigger fish to fry with this business about Alice giving the property away. Pat had consulted his attorney, who said that the deed was in Alice’s name, so it was her right to sell the property, or give it away, even though Pat had paid for the main house to be built, and paid the taxes and the homeowner’s insurance since his father died. The only way around losing the house was if Alice changed her mind. It made Ann Marie more furious than she had ever been.

Alice had been avoiding Pat’s phone calls all week and acting as if nothing had happened around Ann Marie. They agreed that they would confront his mother after the Brewers left, since they didn’t want Steve and Linda getting mixed up in their family’s business. It was sure to be an unpleasant conversation, and Ann Marie didn’t need the whole neighborhood hearing about it.

When she first found out about Alice’s arrangement with the priest, Ann Marie had gotten a bit out of control. She had actually trampled Alice’s tomato plants. It was almost an out-of-body experience. One minute, she was standing there in the yard thinking of what Alice had done, and the next, she was pulling the plants by their green, leafy stalks, breaking them in two. The tomatoes fell to the earth and she stepped on the biggest of them all, digging the balls of her feet in and quickly moving them back and forth without raising them off the ground, as if she were dancing the twist.

After a few harsh words were exchanged later that day, she fled. It had felt thrilling to drive off, knowing they were all watching her from behind the cottage windows. But Ann Marie didn’t have any clue where she was going. She drove aimlessly for a while and then crossed the bridge into Portsmouth. She parked the car in front of an Irish pub and went inside.

The place was dim, the dark floorboards and walls making her almost forget that it was daytime. There was a session going on at the back of the room—old men and young ones played away on their fiddles and uilleann pipes, filling the place with merriment. She thought of her daughters competing at every Feis in New England, Patty always taking the gold, Fiona rarely placing, though she didn’t seem to mind. Afterward, the whole family would spend the afternoon at the festival, walking from tent to tent, dancing the Siege of Ennis with a hundred strangers while her daughters’ banana curls bobbed up and down. Their dresses, heavy with starch and boning and rich with embroidery, had taken Ann Marie six months to make.

Now, already a bit tipsy, she sat at the bar and ordered a glass of white wine. She had never been alone in a bar before and didn’t really know what to do. She stared at the bottles on the shelves, reading the labels one by one, feeling like she might cry.

For all intents and purposes, the house was gone. It would never be hers. Why would Alice do this to her? She couldn’t begin to know.

Two stools down, a man with white hair said, “Oh, come on, sweetheart—smile. A pretty girl like you shouldn’t look so gloomy.”

How long had it been since anyone had called her pretty, let alone a girl? In spite of herself, she gave him a faint smile.

“That’s better,” he said. He scooted over to the seat beside her and patted her hand. He was the only other patron in the place.

He looked ten years older than her, but he was terribly handsome. And fit. His bare legs were tanned, with a light covering of fine blond hairs.

“What’s troubling you?” he said. “Go on, you can tell an old friend like me.”

“My in-laws are driving me insane.” It wasn’t the sort of thing she was used to saying. Other people complained about their in-laws all the time, but not Ann Marie.

“What are you drinking there?” he asked.

“Pinot Grigio.”

“I think this calls for something stronger, don’t you?” He looked to the bartender. “Could you get us two shots of Jameson, Christine?”

“Oh no, thank you,” Ann Marie said. “I don’t drink hard liquor.”

The girl filled two shot glasses and placed them on the bar.

“Me neither,” he said. “Except medicinally.”

He handed her one of the glasses and took the other for himself. They clinked them together and then she swallowed the liquid down. It felt warm in her throat. She took a sip of wine to get the taste out of her mouth.

“Any better?” the man asked.

“I think so,” she said. “Thanks.”

His name was Adam. He told her he had retired early from a job in advertising and now he lived on a sailboat. His home base was somewhere off the coast of South Carolina, but every summer he sailed north and docked in Portsmouth for a couple of weeks.

“That sounds like a dream life,” she said.

“And what about you?” he asked. “What do you do?”

She hated when that question came up at a dinner party or a work event of Pat’s. She always answered “I’m a homemaker,” which hadn’t bothered her when the kids were living at home, but now seemed a bit silly.

She told Adam she was an interior designer based in Boston. It came to her so quickly, she almost felt it was true. Well, it was, almost. Then she mentioned her husband and three children.

He said he had gotten divorced five years back. He had a grown son in Florida who was thirty-eight and still single.

“Are yours all coupled up?” he asked.

“One married, one engaged, and my younger daughter is single,” she said.

As far as she knew, anyway.

“Does she live near you?” he asked.

“She’s been in Africa for the past several years. She’s in the Peace Corps.”

“Wonderful.”

“Yes. She’s a very special girl.”

She craved Fiona then, the way you might crave a favorite food from your childhood. She wanted her daughter beside her instead of this stranger. Fiona had always been patient and good, yet utterly unsentimental. That was why she could tell schoolchildren about the importance of condoms and the dangers of AIDS, while fully aware that half their parents had already died of the disease. Why she could sing the little sick ones to sleep and discipline them, too, the same as if they were perfectly healthy.

Fiona would know how to handle Alice right now; she was made for situations like this. Suddenly Ann Marie realized that it was the first time in months she had thought of her youngest child as anything other than just gay. It felt like an important step.

“Maybe we should set her up with my son,” Adam joked, and Ann Marie felt a bit sad, but not as sad as she might have expected.

“Maybe,” she said.

The group in the back began to play a song she recognized, “The Black Velvet Band.”

“This is one of my favorites,” she said. “I heard the Dubliners play it live in the eighties.”

“Shall we dance?” he asked.

“No,” she said, grinning.

He stood up, extended his hand. “Come on now, it’s one of your favorites.”

She got to her feet, both embarrassed and flattered. He was what her daughters would call smarmy, but she thought he seemed sweet. She let him put his palm flat against the small of her back, and she put hers up on his shoulder as they swayed side to side. It had been forever since she was this close to a man she didn’t know.

The musicians gave a cheer, happy for the accompaniment.

Their voices rose, and Adam sang along with the chorus:
Her eyes they shone like a diamond, you’d think she was queen of the land, with her hair flung over her shoulder, tied up with a black velvet band
.

Ann Marie wanted to sing, too, but she felt self-conscious. If Pat were there, she would have. She closed her eyes and thought of their honeymoon, when they had traveled around the Ring of Kerry in a rented Peugeot, singing their way through Ireland, stopping into pubs in tiny towns where every person they laid eyes on looked like someone they knew in Boston. Pat had tracked down some of his relatives in Killarney, and when they met, each and every one of them hugged Ann Marie close as if she, too, were family and said, “Welcome home.”

Ann Marie had been so excited for what she knew would come next—children, a nice house of their own. But she had never pictured what came after that. Some women she knew were elated to have their grown children out of the nest. Ann Marie felt worthless. She might have thirty years left to live, and she had no idea how she was going to fill them.

The bartender’s voice rose over the music: “Ma’am? Your phone.”

Ann Marie opened her eyes and saw that her cell phone was lit up and vibrating on the bar.

“Excuse me,” she said to Adam, breaking away from him, suddenly feeling silly.