Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [150]
Kathleen
Kathleen stopped at a gas station five miles outside Cape Neddick to buy cigarettes. She had already gone through an entire pack of Marlboro Lights and two Snickers bars on the drive from the airport.
Before yesterday, she hadn’t smoked since eleventh grade, and even then only once or twice. Arlo would be shocked if he found out, but Arlo was home in California, the lucky bastard. He had been smart enough not to have children, so he would never know the peculiar sensation of caring terribly, insanely, for a person over whom you had no control; a person who was your responsibility yet no longer had to answer to you. This made Kathleen irrationally angry at him. She was angry at a lot of people right now. At Maggie, for dropping such a bomb on her in an e-mail. At Arlo, for acting like nothing was wrong. At Gabe, who was no doubt responsible for the whole mess. And most of all, in a vague way, at the Kellehers, who always found some method of drawing her back into the fray, of reminding her that underneath the AA mantras and the California calm, she was just the same old angry, overwhelmed girl she used to be.
Given the circumstances, she figured smoking was the least of many evils.
Kathleen drove slowly, trying to relax, reminding herself that life was messy, conflict inevitable. It didn’t mean you had to fall apart.
When she read Maggie’s e-mail five days earlier, she had sat still in front of her computer for several minutes, unable to move. She worried all the time about her daughter’s safety in New York, about pickpockets and rapists and the diseases that could take young people out so fast. But this she had never feared, never pictured. Maggie had always been so responsible. Christ, Maggie had told her to go on the Pill when she was only a freshman in high school and years away from getting on it herself.
Kathleen had called down to Arlo in the den after a while, softly at first, and then louder and louder. She felt hysterical by the time she heard him climbing the stairs. When she showed him the e-mail, he whistled and said, “Oh, man.”
“I have to go to her,” she said.
“It sounds like she wants you to sit with this for a while, let it sink in. She knows you well,” he said with a gentle smile.
“How can you be so goddamn calm about this?” she had snapped. She tried to take a deep breath.
“Because it’s not the end of the world,” he said, rubbing her shoulders. “A baby is good news.”
She shook his hands off.
“I’m going out there to talk sense into her.”
“Meaning what?”
She considered the options, none of them entirely pleasant. Maggie should probably have an abortion, but Kathleen doubted her daughter could go through with that. Adoption might be a better choice for her. Joni Mitchell did it, and she seemed to have recovered okay. I bore her but I could not raise her. Wasn’t that how the song went?
But the thought of carrying a baby around inside of you for all those months and then having to say good-bye—she wasn’t sure Maggie could handle that either.
“I don’t know. Jesus. Why did this have to happen?” she said. “What does she expect me to do?”
“I think she just wanted you to know and to be supportive,” Arlo said.
“I’m her mother. I know her better than anyone,” she said.
“And?”
“And nothing. That’s it.”
Arlo frowned. “I wish we had some money to give her, Kath.”
She thought of the twenty thousand she had saved for the worm gin, but that was theirs; they needed it for the business. Even so, Kathleen felt guilty for not wanting to let it go.
They went to an AA meeting that night and a woman with gray-tinged skin and bottle-blond hair told a story about being so out-of-her-mind drunk that she left her kids in the car for hours one afternoon in the middle of August.
“I forgot all about them,” the woman said. “I’m afraid they will hate me someday. I never thought I’d be the type to do something as awful as that.”
Arlo held Kathleen’s hand and she squeezed hard, imagining all the ways that motherhood