Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [147]
“Hello, darling,” Alice said, full of pep. She was wearing black capri pants and leather flats and a short-sleeved red sweater that they had purchased together on sale at Eileen Fisher months ago. Her makeup was done to perfection.
“You remember Father Donnelly?”
“Of course,” Ann Marie said, forcing herself to smile. There he stood, all in black, save for his white collar, looking about twelve years old. One of many things that disturbed her about aging was the fact that she could actually be twenty years older than a priest.
“How are you, Father?”
“Very well, thanks. I hope we didn’t wake you.”
“Not at all,” she said, making her way toward the coffeepot.
“I told Alice that I’d come by and take a look at this sink,” he said. “I’m saying Mass at nine, so we figured the earlier, the better.”
“He’s very handy,” Alice beamed.
Ann Marie nodded. “How nice. But Mom, Pat can do all that stuff when he comes in a few days.”
“It’s no trouble,” Father Donnelly said. “It’s the least I can do.”
Ann Marie’s mother used to invite the parish priests over to their house for dinner one Sunday a month. She’d make an enormous roast and mashed potatoes and pineapple cake. Ann Marie had carried on this tradition for years. Her entire life, she had seen women catering to priests, providing them with the sort of warmth a wife would under normal circumstances. Leave it to Alice to turn the tables and put the priest to work for her.
The two of them headed out to church before long. Alice left her car behind. Did Father Donnelly provide chauffeur services too?
After they left, Ann Marie scrubbed down the kitchen counters and mopped the floor. She made a chicken salad from a cold roast chicken she had found in the freezer the night before, with only four or five bites taken out of it. (Alice still cooked for a big family, even though she ate like a bird. Ann Marie did the same, but it was somehow less sad when two people were eating.)
She showered and dressed, and then she set up shop at Alice’s kitchen table, pulling out a large white towel and a slight floss of pale pink ribbon. She got to work, making half a dozen tiny facecloths and bath towels, sewing the ribbon on by hand. Maggie came over and they ate toast and blueberry preserves from a local farm stand for breakfast. Ann Marie told her about the dollhouse competition, and Maggie talked about her new novel. She didn’t say anything about the boyfriend, and Ann Marie didn’t mention him, not wanting to pry. But she thought to herself that by the time she was Maggie’s age, she’d had three children. What would become of her niece?
“You know,” Maggie said, “I don’t think you and I have ever been alone together before.”
Ann Marie thought of that New Year’s Eve at her house when the kids were small. Kathleen and Paul, Clare and some boyfriend, and both of her own sisters and their husbands had come over for Chinese food, as was their tradition. Everyone was trashed, no one more than Kathleen, who had had so much gin that she was passed out on the couch in the den by ten o’clock. Ann Marie wasn’t drinking. She had had maybe two glasses of champagne all night. Around eleven, she heard a thud from upstairs. She ran to Patty’s room, following the sound of Maggie’s cry. They had been roughhousing with the boys, and Maggie, only five years old, had fallen off the top bunk.
“She’s fine,” Paul had said with a laugh. “My daughter is tough as nails.”
Since her parents were both intoxicated, it was Ann Marie who took the child to the hospital. It was Ann Marie who rocked Maggie in her arms, as patients and staff gathered around the nurses’ station to count down to midnight. It was Ann Marie who told her stories over by the window, and tried to shield Maggie’s eyes from the steady stream of drunks who came through the door.
They waited for four hours. In the end, the doctor said she had a severely strained wrist and should ice it as much as possible.
“I think taking her to the hospital