Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [105]
Something in Alice seemed to change then, as if she was reasoning with herself. “Oh, don’t be silly. You’ll still come to dinner, I hope? I haven’t made an entire meatloaf for nothing. Your friend can sleep in the guest room in the cottage; there are sheets on the beds.”
“Oh, she’s actually turning back tonight. She just came along for the ride,” Maggie said.
“Back to New York? Tonight?” Alice said. “That’s ludicrous. You’ll at least stay for dinner, won’t you, Diana?”
“It’s Rhiannon,” Maggie said.
“I’d love to,” Rhiannon said. “Is there anything we can bring?”
“Not at all,” Alice said sweetly, and Maggie wondered if her discomfort was apparent to Rhiannon, or if she was finding Alice altogether charming, as strangers often did.
Maggie started to speak, but Alice had already turned away and was walking toward the big house.
They made their way into the cottage.
“Your grandmother is gorgeous,” Rhiannon said in the kitchen, starting to unpack the food.
“Thanks,” Maggie said, like she always did when people commented on Alice’s beauty. It was a strange, knee-jerk response. Thank you for being surprised that a relative of mine is particularly good-looking, and by extension giving away what you think of my appearance.
At Kenyon she had dated Christian Taylor, the son of two Cambridge intellectuals, for over a year. His parents had nothing much to say to her mother when they met, but at graduation, after they were introduced to Alice, Christian’s mother pulled Maggie aside and said, “Your grandmother is stunning, very exotic looking. Does she have Egyptian blood?”
The Kellehers on Maggie’s mother’s side and the Doyles on her father’s had migrated from County Kerry, Ireland, to Dorchester, Massachusetts, three generations earlier, and most offshoots of the clan had since made it no further than the suburbs of Boston.
“No Egyptian blood that we know of,” Maggie had said.
Before they went next door, Maggie asked whether Rhiannon had a good heavy sweater for walking on the beach later. She wanted to show off the perfect stars, perhaps as a means of deflecting attention from whatever horror show Alice might pull at dinner.
Rhiannon said she hadn’t brought anything bulky.
“That’s okay,” Maggie said. “The dresser in my grandparents’ old bedroom is full of stuff. Take your pick. Just not the green old-man sweater in the bottom drawer. I get dibs on that one.”
“Deal,” Rhiannon said, walking toward the bedroom. A moment later she called out, “Oh, but the drawers are empty!”
Maggie walked toward her. Grains of sand clung to the soles of her feet. When she saw the drawers pulled out with only the familiar seashell-printed liner paper in the bottom, her stomach jolted with alarm. She walked to the closet, expecting to see the oversize pink bathrobe that Ann Marie had left there years earlier, and the stack of white knitted blankets made by her great-grandmother. But the closet stood bare.
Maggie thought of her grandfather’s green sweater, which he had given her on an early-morning walk to Ruby’s Market when she was in middle school. She remembered being mortified wearing it all the way up Briarwood Road, and she shoved it in a drawer in the cottage as soon as they arrived home. But it had become her tradition to pull it out on arrival each summer, and wear it every morning while she drank her coffee. Ridiculously, the thought of someone else—one of her cousins, or worse, a friend of theirs—taking it made her want to cry.
“We were looking for a sweater in the bedroom in the cottage, and the drawers were all empty,” she said to Alice shortly after they’d arrived for dinner.
The three of them stood awkwardly in the kitchen while the meatloaf cooled on the counter. The potato salad was covered in foil and sitting in a sweaty bowl. Maggie hoped it hadn’t been decomposing in the freezer since the previous summer. With Alice you never knew.
“I can lend you a cardigan, but it might be snug,” Alice said.
“Thanks, but no, I just meant—well, where did everything go?”
“I got rid of