Maine (49 page)

Maggie stuck out her bottom lip. “Thank you.”

They listened to the radio for a while until the station faded out of range.

“Aren’t you even going to mention how virtuous I’m being about this Ann Marie situation?” Kathleen asked.

Maggie didn’t respond.

Kathleen turned to look at her. She was fast asleep. She brushed a dangling strand of hair behind Maggie’s ear and kept driving.

   When they arrived in Brooklyn, there was a huge box blocking the door to Maggie’s apartment. Kathleen’s first thought was that it was from Gabe. She looked at the address label.

“It says it’s from Bugaboo,” she said. “What the hell is Bugaboo?”

Maggie looked embarrassed, and Kathleen pictured a sex swing or something crazy like that.

But Maggie responded, “It’s a gift from Aunt Ann Marie.”

“Tell me she didn’t buy you a dollhouse.”

“No! It’s a stroller.”

“A stroller.”

“Yeah, a really trendy one, I guess. It cost like six hundred bucks.”

“Oh, well that sounds practical. Nice of her to let you know what it cost.”

“She didn’t let me know. I saw it in the catalog.”

Kathleen felt her goodwill toward Ann Marie slipping a bit. She would probably end up telling Clare about the kiss, but that was all. No one else. Clare wouldn’t tell anyone besides Joe.

They heard footsteps on the staircase behind them then, and a moment later a gorgeous young thing with mile-long legs was saying hello.

“Maggie!” she said. “You’re back!”

Kathleen remembered the first time she had visited her daughter at college, how pleased and reassured she had felt to see that Maggie had built her own community there, full of friends Kathleen had never laid eyes on. Now Maggie had done the same here in New York. Her daughter was okay on her own. In fact, she thrived on independence, just like Kathleen herself.

“Rhiannon, hi. This is my mom. Mom, Rhiannon lives next door. She’s the one who drove me up to Maine.”

“Oh,” Kathleen said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” the girl said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Kathleen wasn’t sure she liked her tone.

“How’s everything been around here?” Maggie asked.

“Same old, same old. I went to Governor’s Island for the first time yesterday.”

“Cool,” Maggie said. “Listen, I should have called you sooner, but I’ve been kind of a mess, as you might imagine.”

It was strange how easily these words came out of her mouth when she was talking to an acquaintance in the hallway. It was something she hadn’t yet said to Kathleen.

“I’m sorry for how I reacted when you told me—”

Rhiannon interrupted. “Oh no, I’m sorry. I never should have said that. I’d just had too much to drink. I didn’t think it through.”

“You probably saved me from begging him to take me back with that piece of information,” Maggie said.

What the hell were they talking about?

The two of them hugged. Rhiannon put a hand on Maggie’s belly.

“Hello there, teensy neighbor,” she said.

So Maggie had told her first. Kathleen tried not to let this bother her.

Inside the apartment, she asked, “What was that about?”

Maggie sighed. “She works in this restaurant, and Gabe and I went one night for dinner. Apparently while I was in the bathroom, he grabbed her butt and tried to kiss her.”

Kathleen nodded. In a way, she wished she still drank, because then she might have downed half a bottle of gin and driven over to that little shit’s apartment, and egged his car, or calmly asked him to come down to the street and then beaten the crap out of him with her purse.
Ah, the good old days
.

“He pretty much sucks,” Maggie said.

“Yeah,” Kathleen said.

She was somewhat relieved, realizing that Maggie was smart enough not to go back to him. But she felt sad for her daughter too. Through her child, she would be linked with Gabe for the rest of her life. They had so much to sort out, but most of the questions probably wouldn’t even be clear until they were in the midst of it, never mind the answers.

“Can I ask one thing?” Kathleen didn’t wait for Maggie to say yes. “Was this an accident, or did you get pregnant on purpose?”

“Something in between those two,” Maggie said. “I guess you could say I sort of tempted fate. I was stuck. I needed a push, one way or the other. That probably sounds insane.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Kathleen said, maybe more to herself than to Maggie.

Maggie nodded. “It has to be.”

   For lunch they ate tomato soup and peanut butter crackers, the closest thing to an actual meal that Maggie had in her cupboards. Maggie sorted through her mail and pulled the stroller from its box. They watched sitcom reruns on television, though Kathleen wasn’t paying attention. She was thinking instead about what came next.

At three o’clock, Maggie had to get on a conference call for work, so Kathleen decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. Brooklyn Heights was beautiful, with its rows of perfectly preserved brownstones and federal houses. She walked to the Promenade, where the view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline never ceased to take her breath away. She almost felt jealous that she herself hadn’t discovered it as a twenty-something. She could see why Maggie didn’t want to leave.

   They were hungry again by six. They ordered Thai food. While Maggie went downstairs to pay the deliveryman, Kathleen took the chance to really look closely around her daughter’s apartment. She had thought the place was cute the first time she saw it—a jewel box, she had said. But that was years ago, when she was envisioning it as just a little hideaway for Maggie alone—a room of one’s own, where she might write two or three great novels before moving on to a sprawling country house out west with her stable and appropriately aged husband.

Now Kathleen examined the tiny kitchen, with the window so drafty there was really no reason to close it. The refrigerator’s long orange power cord was strung up over a series of nails toward the ceiling and plugged in across the room. The bathroom door never closed properly—half an hour earlier, the doorknob had come off in Kathleen’s hand. The dust that streamed in from outside could never be controlled, not even by an anal-retentive neat freak like her daughter. And there was the issue of those five flights of stairs. Five!

Maggie had said she could put a crib and a changing table in the living room, but that hideous yellow stroller Ann Marie had sent was already taking up a quarter of the space, so there went that idea.

When Maggie came up the steps with a large paper bag in her arms, Kathleen said, “I think we need to find you a new apartment. Something bigger.”

“I can barely afford this one,” Maggie said.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Kathleen said. “There’s something I want to say.”

Her daughter looked nervous, but she set the bag of food on the coffee table and sat on the couch.

“You haven’t changed your mind about trying to kidnap me, have you?”

“No. You don’t have to come to California,” Kathleen said.

“Oh God, are you planning to move here?”

“No, but thank you for your excitement over the idea.”

“Sorry,” Maggie said.

“I do want to come back—with your permission—when the baby’s born, and help out until you get on your feet.”

“I’d like that,” Maggie said.

“You know your happiness is the most important thing in the world to me, right?” Kathleen asked. “Except sometimes I’m really selfish.”

Maggie laughed, and Kathleen went on talking. “We both know that too. So. I’m kind of rambling here, but the point is, I should have done this right from the start.”

“Done what?”

“I have some money saved for the farm.”

“I can’t take your savings,” Maggie said.

“Yes, you can,” Kathleen said. “It’s twenty thousand dollars. And it would be my great pleasure to give it to you.”

Even as she said it, she felt a deep sense of loss. Her father had made selflessness look so easy. But Kathleen would never be as good a person as he was, and she could not sit here and offer up her savings without thinking about how long she had planned on buying the worm gin, how diligent she had been in setting the money aside, month after month. The farm was doing fine, but now it would likely be years before any kind of meaningful growth could happen.

She felt sorry for Arlo. He had no idea how much she had socked away, but she’d have to tell him now. Her father had often bailed her out, and she had been grateful. But she had never once asked him what he would have done with the money if he hadn’t given it to her. For the first time, she wondered how Alice had felt about all that.

“I couldn’t take it,” Maggie said. “Could I? Oh God. I’d pay you back, Mom.”

Kathleen shook her head. “No, it’s a gift. I wish I had more to give you.”

And with that, she actually did feel somewhat selfless. Maggie needed her, and she had answered the call. Her father would be proud.

“You can use the money to take out a hit on Gabe,” Kathleen said. “Or buy diapers. Whatever you want.”

“That’s a lot of diapers,” Maggie said.

“You’ll be surprised.”

   She stayed for a week. Just long enough to help Maggie find a bigger place—two bedrooms, right on the edge of a park, further into Brooklyn, Dominican kids running this way and that, an ice cream truck playing its tinny tune, ambling up the block. The rent turned out to be cheaper than her current apartment’s. If Alice ever came here, she would probably say that the neighborhood wasn’t safe, but Alice would never come. Maggie would have to bring the baby to her if she wanted her grandmother and her child to meet. No doubt, Maggie
would
do this, having inherited Daniel’s belief in the importance of generations, of one person understanding life through the experiences of all the people who came before.

They packed boxes and listened to Beatles CDs. They ate a lot of takeout, and Kathleen began to feel her pants grow tighter. They shopped online for maternity clothes, which she was pleasantly surprised to find resembled real clothes—gone were the ridiculous muumuus and sailor dresses pregnant women had been forced to wear back when she was having kids.

She accompanied Maggie to her doctor’s appointment and had to excuse herself for a minute so she could cry in the ladies’ room. Kathleen wished Maggie had some handsome sweetheart standing by her side, holding her hand. That was what she deserved. When they walked out into the waiting room, crowded full of pregnant ladies wearing enormous diamond rings, Maggie looked like she might lose it—but a moment later she shrugged, as if to say that that was just life.

“What will you do when I’m not here to come with you?” Kathleen asked. “Come alone?”

“I can ask Allegra to bring me,” Maggie said. “Maybe I should have a dinner party and break the news to all my friends at once.”

“That might be a good idea,” Kathleen said, and her heart swelled to think that this fearless young woman was her daughter.

At night, they slept side by side in Maggie’s bed. Kathleen felt afraid to leave, though she missed Arlo. She missed her dogs. She missed working the farm and eating dinners made from ingredients they had grown right there in their garden.

She missed yoga. You couldn’t throw a rock in Brooklyn without hitting three yoga studios, but her kind of yoga had nothing to do with svelte twenty-six-year-olds in trendy workout gear. Her kind of yoga included Arlo and her in the backyard, wearing sweatpants, gazing at the mountains in the distance, rather than looking out at a sea of taxicabs through a dirty window.

   They both cried when she had to leave for the airport.

“I’m scared,” Maggie said.

“That’s just part of it. And you can change your mind anytime about coming to stay with us. Okay?”

“Thanks,” Maggie said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, kiddo.”

Several hours later, Kathleen sat barefoot at the kitchen table with Arlo, drinking ginger tea, telling him everything that had happened since they had kissed good-bye two weeks earlier. He had arranged white tulips in a vase on the counter, and made a pumpkin cake with the words
WELCOME HOME
etched unevenly across the top in white icing. Kathleen felt at peace.

The dogs sat at either side of her chair, as if they were guarding her, as if to say
You’re right where you belong
.

Alice

Alice had been watching him all afternoon. He had reddish hair, unlike most of the others. He paused for a moment and looked her way to make sure that she was still sitting there on the screen porch, observing his work.

She gave him a wave and took a sip of her wine. He went back to eating the grass.

A few days earlier, she had decided to make peace with the family of rabbits who had been hanging around all summer. They had withstood every challenge she had given them since May. You had to admire the sort of gumption it took to break through a fence and stomach an entire bottle of liquefied cayenne pepper just to get a bite of good lettuce.

When she gave it some thought, she realized she was their type exactly: someone who seemed to bug everyone around her, when all she was trying to do was survive.

In recent days she had even gone so far as to put a few carrots out on the grass by the car, but the bunnies hadn’t touched them, probably because they could smell the human scent she’d left behind.

This one was the father—at least she figured he was, since he was the biggest. She was worried about the little babies in this heat. She wished they would take a bowl of water. Father Donnelly told her this was the hottest August in southern Maine on record since 1893. He said it with a sort of awe for how long ago that seemed, as if dinosaurs might have roamed the earth that summer. Alice kept to herself that it was the year her mother was born, and so to her it didn’t seem like such ancient history.

She still wouldn’t let the rabbits near her garden, but there was hardly anything left there anyway. The strawberries and beans had been harvested. The lilies were wilting and brown. The tomatoes—well, she’d have to replant those next spring.

Kathleen was finally back in California. She and Maggie had left Cape Neddick so abruptly after the Fourth of July fireworks that Alice assumed she must have offended them somehow. They were both so damn sensitive. But Kathleen assured her she was just ready to leave—she had a lot to help Maggie sort out, she said.

Yes, like the pesky business of finding a father for her child.

In the month that had passed since, Maggie had sent Alice one letter a week, like clockwork. Most recently, she reported that she had moved further into Brooklyn, to a nice family-friendly neighborhood. The apartment cost less than her old one and it was twice the size, with a large bedroom and a second, much smaller room, which most people would use as an office, but which she planned to turn into a nursery. She had begun telling friends that she was pregnant, and her boss had agreed to let her work from home three days a week once the baby came. She had not seen Gabe since she got back, but planned to meet him for coffee in the next couple of weeks to sort out logistics. Imagine that. A coffee date with the man who impregnated you. It seemed a bit late for logistics.

Maggie wrote that she was fifteen weeks pregnant. Her morning sickness hadn’t abated. She had read in her baby books that her child was now growing hair, and wasn’t it strange but wonderful to think of someone sprouting a full head of brown curls inside your belly? Alice squirmed a bit, reading that part. Women had entirely too much information about such things these days. Maggie added at the end of her letter that in five weeks she would find out if she was having a boy or a girl. If the child was a boy, she wanted to call him Brennan, Alice’s maiden name.
A baby boy named after our fearless matriarch!
she had written, and that at least had made Alice smile.

She responded to Maggie on small notepaper, so that she wouldn’t have too much room to speak freely. She tucked a Mass card into each envelope. Alice was so worried about the girl—Maggie acted as if hanging a mobile and buying some tiny socks was all it took to raise a child. But Alice held her tongue.

Ann Marie and Pat’s daughter Patty had been up for two weeks in July with her brood. Watching Patty and her husband, Josh, chase their three rug rats around made Alice think of Maggie and everything she had in store: the sleepless nights, the bad winter colds, the fights with a maddeningly obstinate toddler.

Patty’s only daughter—Alice’s great-granddaughter—was a four-year-old called Maisy. Who named their child Maisy? It was a name better suited for a beagle than a little girl. Anyway, this summer Maisy couldn’t get enough of Alice. She’d be sitting alone on the porch drinking her morning tea in peace, and she’d hear a nasally voice at the door, “Great-grandma Alice, can I sit with you?” Or she’d be watering her flowers and Maisy would toddle up in her bathing suit and ask to help, plastic shovel in hand.

“She really loves you,” Patty cooed, and of course Alice couldn’t say anything, because it would be rude to tell her to go away. She was already in hot water with Ann Marie. But God help her, she found that child annoying. She wished Patty would have the good sense to realize that she didn’t feel like being a damn babysitter. After they left, she found the remains of an oatmeal cookie under one of the chairs on the porch, absolutely covered in ants.

Alice had been alone for ten days straight now, fourteen if you didn’t count Ann Marie’s last visit, which had lasted only two hours. Alice had asked her if she wanted to go somewhere for lunch, but Ann Marie said she had a lot to get back to at home, which Alice assumed was code for “I’m still angry.”

The silence in the house did not bother her one bit. She felt rather exhausted from the events of the summer as it was, and when Clare had called to say that Ryan was in rehearsals for a play the first three weeks of August, so they wouldn’t be coming up until the twenty-first, Alice had felt almost relieved. Her world grew small again, as it had been before the Kelleher women descended on the place with all their drama and their worries and their strife.

Now she watched as Papa Bunny ran behind her rhododendron bushes and out of sight, back home to his family.

“Toodle-oo,” she said out loud, and she felt good for having made amends.

She looked at the bottle of cabernet on the side table, registering that it was now half full.

Aha
. She had actually thought those words:
half full
. That meant she was an optimist, didn’t it? Alice smiled. Daniel would have gotten a kick out of that.

“How do you like that?” she said. “You always said I failed to look on the bright side, but I think I just proved you wrong.”

She poured herself a bit more wine.

Right after he died, she had talked to her husband out loud all the time, letting him know what the children were up to, how she was passing her days. At a certain point she had stopped, but lately she found herself doing it again. She had even told him how much she resented having Maisy underfoot, adding, “I only tell you this because I know you can’t respond and scold me for being so awful.”

Now she said, “I haven’t heard from Patrick and Ann Marie for three days. The nerve of them. They didn’t get their way, so now they’re punishing me. Is that any way to treat your mother?”

She refused to feel bad about the house, no matter what they did or said. Really, she hadn’t expected them to get so worked up about it. Patrick and Ann Marie were the most noticeably upset, but even Clare had called her in tears when she heard the news. Alice told them all that there was nothing she could do about it now. St. Michael’s was counting on the money.

Ann Marie had asked how she could do this to them, how she could just go ahead and give their summerhouses to the Church, as if the Church were nothing. The Church was the only constant companion of Alice’s life, the only thing that made sense, always.

She sipped her wine. Out in the distance, heat lightning flashed across the sky. Alice thought a little rain would help cool the air down, but the rain didn’t come.

   The next day was Sunday the fifteenth, the Feast of the Assumption. Alice was up early to get to the Legion of Mary’s celebration. It was her job to bring the cinnamon rolls, and she had made a special trip to a bakery in Wells.

She wore a pale violet pantsuit that she had never worn before, and she took special care with her hair and her eye makeup. In a departure from their usual schedule, they were meeting before Mass to honor the Virgin Mother’s assumption into Heaven and to prepare for their role in the offering.

As she walked to the car, Alice looked out over the ocean and remembered how the Catholic mothers of her generation—her own, and Daniel’s, and Rita’s, and everyone’s—believed there was a blessing in the water on the fifteenth of August that would help any struggling young woman to get pregnant. Early on in her marriage, back when she was having all that trouble, Alice herself had been forced to head to the shores of Nantasket Beach. Before dipping in, she stood back for a moment to behold dozens of pretty young war brides with the same miracle in mind, immersing themselves in the cold New England sea with all the faith and determination of the saints.

That was a year before Kathleen came along. Daniel had called her their greatest blessing the morning she was born.

Alice got into the car and headed toward St. Michael’s. The Irish Hit Parade was on the radio, Daniel’s favorite. She left it on, even turning up the volume a bit. Five minutes later, she pulled into the parking lot and climbed up the front steps. The door was unlocked, and as she opened it, the smell of incense filled her lungs. She stepped inside. The church was vacant, and looked even grander than usual for that. There was still half an hour until her meeting began, and an hour before Mass.

She chose her usual pew and knelt down on the red velvet kneeler. She found her rosary in her purse, and then looked up at the stained-glass window behind the altar, a depiction of Jesus on the cross.

Troubling the glass beads between her fingers, Alice prayed for Maggie and Ann Marie, and for all the members of her family, the living and the dead. She prayed for her own soul, and for forgiveness for the things she could never undo. Over and over, she said the words that she had learned so long ago, words that had brought her comfort when nothing else could.

When she was finished and came to the final bead, she started again from the beginning. She prayed until she heard footsteps behind her, coming slowly down the aisle, a familiar voice softly calling out her name: “Alice? Alice. It’s time.”