Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [128]
Even though Alice would never say exactly how old she was, Kathleen put her age somewhere around eighty. She didn’t ever seem to change much. (“Too evil to grow old,” Maggie’s father often joked.) But here in this moment, she appeared frail, fragile.
“You look too thin, Grandma,” Maggie said, fully aware of the risk involved in making such a statement to Alice. “Are you eating enough?”
Alice scoffed. “There’s no such thing as too thin.”
“Seriously, are you eating enough?” Maggie asked.
Alice sighed. “Okay, you got me. My secret’s out. At the age of one hundred and five, I’ve decided to become an anorexic.”
It was a horrible joke, but Maggie couldn’t help but laugh.
“Where’s your friend?” Alice asked.
“She went back to New York,” Maggie said.
“Yes, I saw her drive off very early this morning. Did you two have a spat?”
“What? No.” How did she know?
“She slept over; I saw her car,” Alice said.
“Yup. It got late.”
Alice nodded. “How is it down at the beach?”
“Glorious. Cold, but glorious.”
“Well, that’s good,” Alice said. “Did you meet Father Donnelly on your way back?”
“Father Donnelly?”
“My priest. He’s an absolute peach,” Alice said. “He helps me with whatever I need done around here. He takes me to lunch.”
He hadn’t been wearing a white collar. Weren’t they supposed to wear those at all times?
There were people, even now, who trusted a priest implicitly, based only on his vocation. And then, based on the same fact, there were those who instantly found everything he did suspect. Maggie fell into the latter category. Since when did priests make house calls to fix a wobbly banister? For less than an instant she envisioned him and Alice, wrapped up in some sort of intergenerational love affair, but then she willed the revolting thought to vanish.
“We’re going to a new place in Kittery around one o’clock if you want to come,” Alice said, smiling now, in one of her good moods.
Maggie exhaled a bit. “That would be nice.”
“Good. That’ll give you time to change out of those play clothes.”
Maggie didn’t see a reason to change out of her jeans and tank top in order to have lunch with her grandmother and a priest, but she responded, “Yup!”
Then she added, “I’m sorry it got so tense last night. I should have warned you more directly that Gabe wasn’t coming and Rhiannon was.”
Alice waved her hand through the air in front of her, as if shooing away a fly. “Water under the bridge,” she said.
The three of them drove to Kittery Point at one o’clock sharp. Maggie sat in the backseat feeling a bit like a little girl, not minding the sensation at all. While Father Donnelly and Alice spoke about the women in Alice’s prayer group and their assorted ailments, Maggie stared out the window at the houses—white and blue and pale yellow with American flags flapping in the breeze.
The restaurant they had chosen was right on the beach, with pink picnic tables out front. They ordered lobster rolls and chowder and iced tea. The waitresses wore crisp white shorts and pink polo shirts. Instead of MEN and LADIES, the signs on the bathroom doors read BUOYS and GULLS.
They took a table overlooking the water.
Maggie thought it sounded like the perfect setup for one of her grandfather’s bad jokes: An unwed mother, a priest, and an old biddy walk into a lobster pound …
When the wind whipped up, threatening to blow the napkins away, the priest covered them with a saltshaker. Inside the glass shaker were grains of white rice. Maggie remembered asking her mother about this when she was a kid: the rice soaked up the moisture in the air, Kathleen had explained, leaving the salt dry. (But why? Maggie thought now. And how was she supposed to imbue herself with all that motherly knowledge? How did it happen?)
Alice started in on the current family gossip, while Father Donnelly (“Call me Connor”) went to ask for more tartar sauce for her sandwich. Little Daniel was getting married to someone named Regina, who everyone loved, though it seemed to Maggie that he had known her for all of nine minutes.
When she said this,