Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [167]
“What’s so funny?” she had asked.
“Whitey Bulger?” he said, incredulous. “That sounds like something a frat boy would name his dick.”
Kathleen put her bare feet up on a plastic cooler that had probably been sitting there since the previous August.
“Do you feel like going to the diner for breakfast?” she asked.
Maggie was famished, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone with her mother. She felt annoyed that Kathleen had come, and mad at herself for being annoyed. She kept trying to shake the feeling, but truly, it had been better here without her.
Kathleen wanted her to move to California. Each time they were alone, she brought it up. It was a preposterous idea, though Maggie wondered if it rubbed her the wrong way because she knew it was a real possibility. She was consumed by fears of not having enough money—in New York, she still struggled just to support herself. What if she couldn’t afford this child, and actually had to move in with her mother? There she’d be, raising a kid alone, in the shadow of Kathleen’s goofball hippie boyfriend and his worm farm; in the shadow of Kathleen herself, who would never be able to stop reminding Maggie of how little she wanted a baby around.
“Aunt Ann Marie?” she asked now. “The diner?”
“Oh, no, not for me, thanks, sweetie,” Ann Marie said. “I’m trying to slim down for Fourth of July week.”
“Why?” Kathleen asked. “You want to wow Patrick with your hot bikini bod?”
Ann Marie looked down at her buttons again.
“What are you doing over there anyway?” Kathleen asked.
“I’m making a slipcover.”
“For?”
“A couch.”
“She’s a finalist in this really prestigious house decorating competition,” Maggie said.
“Yes,” Ann Marie said. “Pat and I are going to London for the judging.”
Kathleen stretched out her leg, pointed her toes. “House decorating?”
“Small-scale house decorating models.” Ann Marie looked flustered. It seemed like maybe she was just making up terms now.
“Dollhouses,” Maggie said, and before her mother could get a word in she continued, “It’s so cool. There was an entire exhibition of them at the Brooklyn Museum recently. Amazing stuff.”
Kathleen looked at Maggie. “So go throw some clothes on and I’ll buy you breakfast, just the two of us.”
“I’d love to, but I have to do some work stuff,” Maggie said.
“Are you avoiding me?” Kathleen asked in a joking tone, though Maggie knew her well enough to know she was dead serious. It wasn’t even the first time she’d said it in the last twenty-four hours.
They had gone to dinner the night before and then been trapped in the cottage together until they went to bed. Her mother had had plenty of time to lay out her absurd plan: Maggie should move to wine country and raise her child in the healthy surroundings of a teetotaler’s worm farm. Delightful! Maggie didn’t say that she thought Kathleen’s lifestyle was odd, or that visiting for a week was enough to put her over the edge. She didn’t say that Kathleen’s house was so damn filthy she’d be afraid to raise a hamster in it, let alone a child. Maggie understood how to hold back.
Kathleen, however, had come in with guns blazing—with accusations and harsh words about Gabe, all of which might be true, but they still hurt. No one could ever injure Maggie with words the way her own mother could; that was just a fact. She’d rather not hear it, especially after the e-mail she had received from Gabe.
“Where’s Alice?” she asked now.
“We don’t know,” Kathleen said.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened with the house?” Maggie said.
Ann Marie shook her head. “I’m so angry, I can barely talk about it.”
She didn’t seem angry. She sounded like her usual chipper self.
Ann Marie went on, “Alice has signed this entire property over to St. Michael’s in her will.”
Maggie felt stunned. “When did this happen?”
“Apparently the papers were drawn up six months ago. But Pat’s looking into whether we have a legal right to somehow undo it. We built that house next door, you know.”
“Oh, we know,” Kathleen said.
Ann Marie ignored her. “We must have some