Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [111]
Patrick and Ann Marie’s daughter Fiona was a saint. Alice often thought that if Fiona had been around in her day, she would have been one of the girls who chose to become a nun. Perhaps she still would. As a child, Alice had loathed the nuns. They rapped her knuckles, and made her write with her right hand, her left hand tied to the back of her chair, though it was perfectly clear she was a lefty.
Even so, to have a granddaughter in the sisterhood would be a real point of pride at Legion of Mary meetings. Mary Daley’s son was only a deacon and she got so much attention for it, you’d think he was the pope.
Patty, Ann Marie and Patrick’s middle child, had gone to law school and was now working long hours, despite the fact that she had three small children. She had married a Jew, which had just about killed Ann Marie. She never said so, but Alice could feel it.
Still, Ann Marie and Pat’s three kids would always be her favorites, especially Little Daniel.
She found Maggie to be the most difficult of all the grandchildren. When the girl let her guard down and had a few drinks, she could really be a hoot. She had a good sense of humor, like Daniel’s. But there was a sort of forced quality about her most of the time, a formality that rubbed Alice the wrong way. Maggie was obsessed with getting to the bottom of every conflict, thanks most likely to the fact that Kathleen had shoved her onto a therapist’s couch as soon as she was in middle school. After Daniel died, when Alice didn’t want to think of him or Kathleen at all, there was Maggie, calling her every other day like clockwork. Alice tried to ask God for patience, to tell herself that her granddaughter meant well, but she felt annoyed even so.
Daniel had loved the stuffing out of that child, same as he had with Kathleen.
Once, when Maggie was six or seven, Alice had gotten up for a glass of water and found her crying in the cottage kitchen in the middle of the night.
“What happened?” Alice asked.
“I heard a scary noise,” Maggie said. “It woke me up.”
“Did you tell your parents?” Alice looked in vain toward their bedroom.
“They’re asleep,” Maggie said. She kept right on crying.
“Did you think it was a ghost?” Alice asked. She meant it as a joke, but Maggie’s face turned deadly serious.
“Oh, Grandma, I wish I could see a ghost,” she said. “Then death wouldn’t be so scary. Seeing a ghost would mean we get to keep on living. Well, sort of. Right?”
Alice was startled. What kind of child said a thing like that?
“Get back to sleep now,” she said sternly. “You’re fine. You only heard the wind off the dunes.”
When she got into bed beside Daniel a few moments later, having forgotten all about her glass of water, Alice felt so rattled she had to shake him awake to tell him the story.
Daniel just chuckled groggily. “What a clever munchkin that one is,” he said, before immediately falling back to sleep.
After she hung up the phone, Alice walked to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of wine, and then she set to washing the dishes.
Maybe she ought to be kinder to Maggie. After all, she was going through a breakup. She seemed a bit out of sorts. But why the hell did she have to bring that friend here with no notice at all? Why had she said those things about Daniel right in front of that Scottish girl?
Alice saw her grandchildren as extensions of their parents, so that Ryan’s ambition and disappointment had her praying for Clare, and Chris’s roughness made her light candles for Kathleen. But she also blamed her daughters for how their children had turned out. How could she not? Kathleen had no sense of propriety whatsoever, and so her child saw nothing wrong with coming to Alice’s dinner table and asking her about her life’s most devastating moments.
Maggie had said that Daniel would want to see her painting again. That alone made Alice want to slap