Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [138]
Ann Marie suddenly felt deflated. It was only a dumb contest. It couldn’t fix the fact that Fiona was gay, that Little Daniel’s life was a mess, that everyone expected her to do everything at all times. And she’d never have enough hours to make her dollhouse perfect. She needed a break.
After Pat left for work, she cried. She sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands and just let it out. Sometimes that could be good for a person. She allowed the pity party to continue for a few minutes, and then walked into the front hall. She looked at herself in the mirror on the wall and laughed. What was she crying for anyway? Maybe the news had been too good. Her kids always bawled at their own birthday parties when they were young, overwhelmed by the attention.
“Ann Marie Clancy, you need to get a grip,” she said out loud. (Sometimes she still thought of herself by her maiden name, even though she had changed it to Kelleher nearly thirty-five years earlier.) “You’re a finalist. A finalist!”
She felt a bit better. She went and looked at the dollhouse again. Then she called Patty at work. She dialed the office number, and Patty’s cheerful secretary, Amy, picked up.
“Patricia Weinstein’s office,” she said.
Each time Ann Marie heard this name spoken aloud it was unrecognizable for a moment, even eight years after Patty had gotten married. She had to dig for it—My daughter Patty Kelleher is now someone named Patricia Weinstein.
“It’s her mother,” Ann Marie said. “Is she in?”
“Hold on, please.”
Patty picked up, sounding frazzled.
“How’s Foster feeling?” Ann Marie asked, before even saying hello. He had had a bad cold all weekend, a sore throat and a terrible cough. Patty had called her, worried as could be, on Friday night, and Ann Marie had told her calmly to make him a hot toddy with lemon and honey and a dash of whiskey, like her own mother used to make.
“He’s okay,” Patty said now. “He’s on the mend.”
“Are you making sure he gets plenty of fluids?”
“Yup.”
“Good girl. And he’s at school now?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Hmm.” Ann Marie probably would have kept him home for one more day to let him rest.
“I’ve got some big news,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Remember I told you I entered my dollhouse in that prestigious competition?”
“Um, sort of.”
“I’m a finalist! Daddy and I get to go to England for the judging in September. Which means I have to build an entire house by then, which is daunting, if you ask me.”
“You do realize the house you have to build is only three feet tall?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just teasing. That’s really cool, Mom. Congrats.”
Ann Marie might have liked to talk about it a while longer, but Patty changed the subject. Josh’s mother would be looking after the kids on Tuesdays and Thursdays while Ann Marie was in Maine. Patty was trying to find a polite way to ask her not to swear around the children.
“Josh says she was always this way. The woman talks like a truck driver. I really don’t want to have to explain to Maisy what ‘shit’ means and why she can’t say it at preschool.”
“Patty!” Ann Marie exclaimed on instinct. She had rarely heard any of her children use profanity.
“What? I wasn’t actually saying it.”
A short while later, Ann Marie pulled her car keys off the hook beside the back door and hurried out to start her errands. The spring in her step was back, and it lasted all day—through traffic jams and department store lines and listening to some woman ahead of her at the deli yammering into a cell phone about her next-door neighbor’s alopecia.
It lasted through an afternoon at her mother’s apartment, where the dark carpets and thick old wallpaper made the rooms feel physically heavy, and the framed photographs everywhere were caked with dust: here were Ann Marie and her sisters at their First Communions and on the beach, always with their little brother, Brendan, in the background, haunting them like a ghost. He was now fifty years old, if he was even alive. Ann Marie often wondered about that.