Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [10]
They said Alice should be smarter with her money, because in the wintertime, cooped up in her house with a Manhattan or a glass of cabernet, she enjoyed buying items off the television every now and then—Time Life music collections, hand blenders that promised perfectly thick soups in minutes, even a replica of Lincoln’s log cabin for her granddaughter Patty’s children. But she never spent much, not more than $19.99. She went to the department stores in the mall after church one Sunday a month, and made herself feel better by trying on silk scarves and lipstick or mascara at the Chanel counter. But she certainly didn’t buy any of it. She just memorized the feel and the look, and then went to Marshalls and bought the closest knockoff. She followed the sales at Macy’s and Filene’s like a hawk. She clipped coupons every morning, and called Ann Marie to let her know about any really good deals.
Still, it was hard to keep much money in the bank just between her pension and Daniel’s. A couple years back, when Patrick looked over her taxes, he frowned and said, “You’re shelling out a heck of a lot more than you’re bringing in. You need to reverse that situation, pronto.”
Her very first thought was that perhaps she ought to sell the property in Maine. It surprised her that she would even consider it, but there it was.
Alice wasn’t particularly attached to the big house, but she still felt sentimental about the cottage, with its familiar details, and stories from their past tucked inside each cupboard and under every bed. On the doorway leading to the kitchen, hundreds of dates and initials had been written in by hand, chronicling the heights of her children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews over the years. This was where Clare had learned to walk, and Patrick had broken his arm one summer, trying to jump off the roof of the screen porch and fly like Superman. Where her grandchildren had first stepped in sand and had their tiny bodies dipped into the ocean. Where she and Daniel had taken countless strolls to look at the stars, hand in hand, not a word spoken.
But those were only memories. The place wasn’t moving forward anymore, not for Alice. In recent years, her children had even created an asinine schedule for the cottage: One month per family each summer. Kathleen and her kids got June; Patrick, Ann Marie, and theirs got July; Clare, Joe, and Ryan got August.
It made Alice nervous, unsettled, to have to see her children one at a time like this. The joy and spontaneity of summers past were gone now. Daniel’s death had ended them as a family. Each had pulled away from the others, and at some point without realizing it, Alice had gone from the matriarch—keeper of the wisdom and the order—to the old lady you had to look in on before the day’s fun could begin.
She got the feeling that none of her children particularly liked one another, or worse, that they had no use for each other. So why keep the old place? And why bother coming up, year after year, when it only made her feel lonely, longing for something she’d already had?
It seemed to Alice that everyone these days was out for themselves. The sort of families she and Daniel had grown up in and tried to carry on no longer existed, not really. Her mother had had eight children, including the two babies that died. Daniel’s mother had had ten. Though she had hated the noise and the chaos and the sacrifice this implied back then, now Alice saw that it gave you something, being part of a family like that. Her own children and their children would never understand it. That was why they were so comfortable splitting up their summer home, or living a few miles apart but only seeing one another every couple of weeks. Or, in Kathleen’s case, moving clear across the country for no good