Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [131]
“So do I,” said Father Donnelly. “I can’t imagine why anyone lives anywhere else.”
“Did you grow up in Maine?” Maggie asked.
“Yes, further north. In a village about three hours toward Bangor.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It was a simple, no-frills kind of house,” he said. “No TV or anything like that.”
“His parents were in the Church too,” Alice said. “His father is a deacon.”
Maggie started to romanticize his childhood: a log cabin in the woods, a young boy reading the Bible by a crackling fire.
“Naturally, my brothers and I raised Cain,” he said with a smile. “We would speed down these long country roads and bash people’s mailboxes with baseball bats.”
Maggie wanted to know how on earth he had gone from that to becoming a priest, but it seemed rude to ask.
“Sounds like my three,” Alice said. “Did they put me through the ringer! Especially Patrick and Kathleen. Clare was the quiet one. But sometimes the quiet ones are the wildest, and you never even suspect. I know she smoked like a chimney in high school. Always out the bedroom window. She ruined my white curtains!”
Maggie had heard all the stories of late-night parties at the house in Canton when her grandparents were away, and the time her mother and Uncle Patrick were pulled over with two open beers in their hands. There was the incident of Daniel tossing and turning one night and deciding to take a late walk around the block to cure his restlessness—as soon as he made it to the front lawn, he heard a noise from above and saw a boy climbing the trellis toward Kathleen’s open window. She was guiding him in whispers, as if she herself knew the route well: “Step to the right, now over toward the left.” Then there was the time Uncle Patrick drove back drunk all the way from Cape Cod at midnight, pulled into the driveway, and promptly plowed Daniel’s new Cadillac straight through the garage door. (To this day, whenever the story came up, he maintained that in that light, the door had looked open.) It sometimes seemed to her that previous generations had had more opportunities to mess up big and still bounce back. Whereas Maggie had always felt like one misstep, and she would be ruined.
“We torture our parents,” Father Donnelly said. “But then we get older and wiser and we give them the adoration they deserve. At least, we ought to.”
Alice beamed. “I’d like to meet your folks one day. They really raised you right.”
The conversation wound on, and Maggie tuned out for a few moments, watching a toddler and his father launch a toy sailboat at the edge of the bay. When she tuned back in, it was because she heard her name. Somehow they had arrived at the topic of the cottage schedule.
“Maggie’s mother, Kathleen, gets June, but you won’t be seeing her because she hates me,” Alice said.
“Grandma!” Maggie said. “She does not! She lives all the way across the country, that’s all.”
Father Donnelly grinned. “Well, Maggie, if you have the whole of June set aside for your mother and her kin, I don’t see why you wouldn’t stay all month. It seems like the perfect place to get your writing done.”
Was he flirting? No, that was ridiculous. He probably had old ladies and young ones all over town imagining that he was desperately in love with them. For some, she thought, the priest was the ultimate sex symbol: a really consistent, kind man, who was always happy to see you or to listen to your worries. Completely unthreatening, yet vaguely sexual, his vow of chastity serving the opposite of its intended purpose in that way, making everyone think about sex.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” she said.
“Well, that’s good,” Alice said. “You’ll stay! I’m glad.”
History had shown that when Alice was kind, she would soon be something entirely different. But right at this moment, she wanted Maggie here, needed her, maybe.
They took the back roads toward home. A ways out of town the houses got shabbier, closer together, and every so often there was a trailer wedged between two trees. In front of one little house, Maggie saw a man and a teenage boy sawing at what