Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [103]
She told Rhiannon this, and Rhiannon laughed.
“Are there eighty-seven cousins on each side?”
“My mom has something like forty cousins. There are a lot fewer in this generation. On my dad’s side, we have ten,” Maggie said. “But we were never all that close to them growing up. We’d see one another at christenings and on Easter, stuff like that. But my mom’s side of the family was always the closest. Totally messed up, but close.”
“And how many cousins on that side?” Rhiannon asked.
“Only four,” Maggie said. “It always seemed like more, like a bigger family.”
She still pictured them as their childhood selves. Ann Marie and Patrick’s kids: Patty, Fiona, and Little Daniel (her mother often joked that these names had doomed them to sound like a trio of Irish peasants from birth). Clare and Joe’s only child was named Ryan, after someone, though Maggie couldn’t remember who.
Little Daniel, handsome even as a kid, was a charmer who always struck her as unnecessarily arrogant. He was cruel to his younger boy cousins when none of the adults were watching; later he became a young hotshot and now he was in finance or real estate, or some similarly incomprehensible line of work. At Thanksgiving he had given her his business card, which did nothing to shed light on the matter. Maggie really only understood jobs that could be described in a single word: writer or doctor or teacher made sense. Vice president of debt capital markets and global currencies did not.
Little Daniel’s sister Fiona was boyish and quiet and unadorned, involved with all kinds of social causes, even in high school. Maggie wondered sometimes whether Fiona was actually happy, still off in the Peace Corps at age thirty. Kathleen thought Fiona might be gay and that she lived halfway around the world partly as a means of keeping that to herself, of never having to come out to the family or deal with their reaction. If that was true, Maggie wished she could write Fiona a letter and say, You’re my cousin and I love you! You’re allowed to be a lesbian. No one’s going to judge you.
But Fiona’s parents wouldn’t want to know. For God’s sake, they probably still thought Kathleen was going to Hell for getting a divorce.
Their sister Patty was older than Maggie by four months. The two of them were so similar that as kids they declared that they were the true sisters. (Poor Fiona, Maggie thought now, too late.) Patty and Maggie looked alike, with the same brown hair and freckles. They both played basketball and loved writing and chasing boys. As children they each wore one half of a heart-shaped best friends necklace and spent countless hours together after school, listening to music and eating cookie dough straight from the package when Ann Marie wasn’t looking.
They hardly ever spoke anymore. Patty had this big grown-up life: a husband, three kids, a house in the suburbs. The two of them had always been compared to each other, and now Maggie compared them herself.
Last, there was her cousin Ryan—a teenage musical theater prodigy who was coming to stay with her for his NYU audition when she got back to town. (Maggie was crazy about that kid. Once, when he was only four or five, she had taken him to the movies. As soon as the opening credits rolled, he said he had to go to the bathroom. Maggie was nervous to let him go into the men’s room alone, but he said he did it all the time, and it was the type that was designed for one person, so it wasn’t like some pervert could get him. Still, she stood close by the door, waiting. After only thirty seconds or so, he began to sing, softly at first, but then at the top of his lungs: Off we’re gonna shuffle, shuffle off to Buffalo! Maggie rapped on the door. People passing by giggled and stared. She tried the handle, but Ryan had locked it. A crowd gathered. Sixteen minutes later, the child emerged. “There’s a full-length mirror in there!” he said, beaming.)
Compared to the other boys