Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [110]
All that she had imagined fell away, set against those words. He was not curled up on his couch, waiting for her to come home. Had she stayed in Brooklyn, waiting around, he wouldn’t have shown up at her door tomorrow or the next day or the next.
“It’s gorgeous here,” he said. “We’re actually about to take a nighttime sail.”
He sounded like he was having the time of his life.
“What did you need to tell me?” Gabe asked.
“Forget it,” Maggie said. “I should go; I think I hear Chris’s car outside.”
“Okay,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry for how things went the other day. But it seems like cooling off for a while is probably smart, right?”
“Good-bye, Gabe,” she said.
She hung up, feeling wholly unsatisfied. She resisted the urge to call him back. Instead, she sat down at the table and switched on her computer. Her uncle Pat had had the cottage wired for Internet the previous summer, even though there was still no TV or phone.
She started typing an e-mail, and when she finished she didn’t even bother to read it over. She just hit SEND.
Gabe,
There are two things I want to say that for some reason I could not get out over the phone just now. First, that I think I’ve finally realized how bad you are for me. I’m grateful to you for really hitting me over the head with it this time. Clearly I needed that. Second (and I admit this bit of news is complicated by my first point), I am having a baby. Mostly when I imagine it, this child is only mine. But I know that technically he or she is yours too. You deserve to know, so I’m telling you. I don’t think you deserve much more than that. Please leave me alone for now. I’ll be in touch when I’m ready.
Alice
After dinner, Alice went out to the screen porch and called Ann Marie.
“Your niece arrived today, and not with Gabe,” she said.
“Oh?” Ann Marie said, sounding distracted, not seeming to care.
“Instead she brought a woman,” Alice said.
“What do you mean, a woman?” Ann Marie asked.
“A woman who lives next door to her,” Alice whispered, as if Daniel were sitting there and liable to scold her for gossiping with their bigmouthed daughter-in-law.
“You mean, like a date?” Ann Marie said. “Hold on, Mom. Pat, honey, can’t you watch this in the other room?”
It hadn’t even dawned on Alice that Maggie and Whatever-Her-Name-Was might be together in that way. No, she was positive they weren’t. Then again, Alice had always been clueless about such things. She had once remarked to Daniel that it was nice how many pairs of brothers you saw walking around Ogunquit, arm in arm, and he had laughed like a hyena.
Now she replied, “I’m not sure what sort of relationship it is, to be honest. Just strange, that much I know. Maggie has the girl drive her here and tells me she’s leaving tonight. Well, I can see quite clearly that she hasn’t left. I’m not blind.”
“That’s odd.”
“Kathleen made such a mess of that child. I wish there was something I could have done to fix her. Now it’s probably too late.”
She was fuming from their dinner conversation, but she didn’t feel like getting into the specifics with Ann Marie.
“You’re always taking too much upon yourself,” Ann Marie said. “There’s nothing you can do. Lately I’m starting to think that children just become who they become.”
“Well, I thank God every day that your three turned out the way they did,” Alice said.
“Our three have their moments,” Ann Marie said.
It was precisely this sort of comment that made her so dear, because really her children were angels. They had probably turned out so well because of Ann Marie’s refusal to make excuses for bad behavior, as Alice’s own two daughters were prone to doing for their kids. Alice had sent Christopher and Maggie a twenty-dollar check on every one of their birthdays since they were babies, and had either of them ever bothered to write a thank-you note?
Little Daniel always mailed a card on Alice’s birthday and even sent her