Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [168]
Ann Marie smiled. Maggie wondered if maybe she was one of those women whose extreme agreeableness had to do with some sort of massive addiction to pills.
“The whole thing is classic Alice,” Kathleen said. “I wish my dad were here.”
The painful memory of her grandfather’s funeral returned to Maggie then. Her uncle Patrick had given the eulogy. Chris and Little Daniel said the Prayers of the Faithful from the altar, reading aloud sheepishly like schoolkids. Chris’s voice cracked as he said, “That we might console one another in our time of grief, just as Jesus needed consoling upon the death of Lazarus.”
“Lord, hear our prayer,” the congregation replied robotically, and Maggie thought of how Chris had pronounced the word console like he meant a cabinet where you store electronics, as if Jesus were a fifty-inch TV requiring a place to sit and collect dust.
They always turned to the men for strength in these moments, perhaps because they looked so invincible in their suits. The men pulled the cars around to the front of the church and dropped their wives and daughters off so they didn’t have to walk from the parking lot; the men carried the casket up the stairs from the hearse. But in the end, it always fell to the women to do the hard work of putting everything back together again.
The choir sang “Ave Maria” as the gifts were brought up to the altar. Everyone wept. It was the sort of song that made you remember it all, your whole life a movie montage full of people who moved you deeply, and then were gone. She thought her mother must be crying to think of herself as a sort of orphan now.
Maggie cried for Daniel. She cried for the fear of ever losing Kathleen, and the fact that they would probably never have a perfect understanding between them, though there was love so strong it suffocated.
At the cemetery, there was an American flag draped over the coffin. The crowd of mourners stood still and silent as two young servicemen in uniform played a recording of “Taps” on a boom box, and then folded the flag into smaller and smaller triangles, snapping it taut with each turn. One of them presented the flag to Alice and said, “On behalf of a grateful nation, I present this flag as a token of our appreciation for the faithful and selfless service of your loved one for this country.”
Maggie realized that she had never heard Daniel talk about the war.
She looked out into the swarm of faces as a priest led them in prayer, and thought that these Catholic customs, which were morbid in a way, served their purpose even so: let no one leave this world alone. There was still the question of who would come later. Who would visit Daniel’s grave when it was bitter cold, or when his birthday arrived each year. One noticed in these cemeteries that certain graves were more tended to than others, that some were always heaped with fresh flowers. Maggie wondered whether these were the people who had been the most beloved in life, or the least. She imagined it could go either way.
Now, here in the cottage with her mother and aunt, she thought of the baby in her belly. She would have a life—a childhood, an awkward adolescence, a marriage and kids, like anyone—and then this baby too would die, and her grandchildren sitting in the church pews would probably not know Maggie, at least not as anything more than their feeble old great-grandmother. Kathleen would be someone they’d heard about in a story once, maybe.
Maggie heard tires on the road, and she craned her neck to see the plain brown top of a delivery truck coming toward the cottage. A moment later there was a knock from the screen porch, and all three of them went out to investigate. This was the sort of thing that happened when you were at the beach. There was something quaint about it. Back home, where televisions and cell phones and computers were all going at once, who would care enough to even get off the couch and answer the door to see what the UPS