Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [174]
Kathleen refused to go, probably out of spite. She said she had good reason: she hadn’t convinced Maggie to move to California with her yet (smart girl), and she wasn’t leaving Maine until she succeeded. At Maggie’s insistence, Kathleen had finally agreed to vacate the cottage and stay at Alice’s. So the two of them were bunking at the big house, and Ann Marie, Pat, and the Brewers would stay together in the cottage next door, as planned.
She had never seen Kathleen so badly behaved as she had been this week, which was really saying something. Her mere presence made Ann Marie nervous. She could picture Kathleen pitching a fit in front of the Brewers, embarrassing everyone to no end. Kathleen was in a state over Maggie’s pregnancy, and while she claimed to have come here to help her daughter, she mostly seemed to have upset the girl ever since she arrived.
Ann Marie was distressed about it too. At night she lay awake thinking about poor Maggie, wondering how she could help. She wanted to impress upon her that while the situation was not ideal, God would provide. How many women could honestly say that their children’s conceptions had been planned? It was not preparedness for a child that made the timing right, but the fact of the child’s existence. Begotten, not made, that was what the Bible said. She feared that Kathleen was advising her niece to pass the buck, the way she would—to get rid of the pregnancy, or to get rid of the baby after he was born, as if this new life hadn’t come along for a reason.
Her sister Susan’s oldest daughter, Deirdre, had had a hell of a time getting pregnant. Maybe Ann Marie ought to tell Maggie about her. She spent thirty thousand dollars on in vitro, and gained forty pounds, only to have it fail twice. She attempted it a third time, and finally, after four painful years of trying, Deirdre had given birth to triplets.
Ann Marie’s mother had nearly lost it, raging at Susan, saying that the Catholic Church didn’t support such procedures, that they killed millions of innocent embryos, and that it was up to God to decide when a life came along. It was easy enough to think so when you yourself had effortlessly given birth to four children, as their mother had. Ann Marie considered herself a model Catholic, but she knew that if her only way to have babies had been through petri dishes and science labs, she would have done all of it in a heartbeat.
Her mother came from a generation of married Catholic women who had gone to the Church begging to be allowed to use birth control in order to keep their families at a manageable size. When the Church refused, they obeyed, and for that reason plenty of them ended up with ten, twelve, or fourteen children, as if they were cattle. So many of those women had died young, their bodies exhausted. Thinking on it now, Ann Marie wondered if it wasn’t all a bit absurd, this business of celibate men deciding who got to be a mother, and when.
It was because of the Church that Alice believed Maggie should marry the awful boyfriend. Ann Marie had considered this—if it were her daughter, she might have felt that marriage was imperative, whatever the circumstances. But she couldn’t really picture her niece settling down for a lifetime with Gabe. Maggie would probably be better off alone. Clearly, Kathleen thought so.
Ann Marie had told Pat about his sister’s plan to stay on, and he was ticked off. But he didn’t say anything to Kathleen, reasoning that they had bigger fish to fry with this business about Alice giving the property away. Pat had consulted his attorney, who said that the deed was in Alice’s name, so it was her right to sell the property, or give it away, even though Pat had paid for the main house to be built, and paid the taxes and the homeowner’s insurance since his father died. The only way around losing the house was if Alice changed her mind. It made Ann Marie more furious than she had ever been.
Alice had been avoiding Pat’s phone calls all week and acting as if nothing had happened around Ann Marie. They agreed that they would confront