Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [175]
When she first found out about Alice’s arrangement with the priest, Ann Marie had gotten a bit out of control. She had actually trampled Alice’s tomato plants. It was almost an out-of-body experience. One minute, she was standing there in the yard thinking of what Alice had done, and the next, she was pulling the plants by their green, leafy stalks, breaking them in two. The tomatoes fell to the earth and she stepped on the biggest of them all, digging the balls of her feet in and quickly moving them back and forth without raising them off the ground, as if she were dancing the twist.
After a few harsh words were exchanged later that day, she fled. It had felt thrilling to drive off, knowing they were all watching her from behind the cottage windows. But Ann Marie didn’t have any clue where she was going. She drove aimlessly for a while and then crossed the bridge into Portsmouth. She parked the car in front of an Irish pub and went inside.
The place was dim, the dark floorboards and walls making her almost forget that it was daytime. There was a session going on at the back of the room—old men and young ones played away on their fiddles and uilleann pipes, filling the place with merriment. She thought of her daughters competing at every Feis in New England, Patty always taking the gold, Fiona rarely placing, though she didn’t seem to mind. Afterward, the whole family would spend the afternoon at the festival, walking from tent to tent, dancing the Siege of Ennis with a hundred strangers while her daughters’ banana curls bobbed up and down. Their dresses, heavy with starch and boning and rich with embroidery, had taken Ann Marie six months to make.
Now, already a bit tipsy, she sat at the bar and ordered a glass of white wine. She had never been alone in a bar before and didn’t really know what to do. She stared at the bottles on the shelves, reading the labels one by one, feeling like she might cry.
For all intents and purposes, the house was gone. It would never be hers. Why would Alice do this to her? She couldn’t begin to know.
Two stools down, a man with white hair said, “Oh, come on, sweetheart—smile. A pretty girl like you shouldn’t look so gloomy.”
How long had it been since anyone had called her pretty, let alone a girl? In spite of herself, she gave him a faint smile.
“That’s better,” he said. He scooted over to the seat beside her and patted her hand. He was the only other patron in the place.
He looked ten years older than her, but he was terribly handsome. And fit. His bare legs were tanned, with a light covering of fine blond hairs.
“What’s troubling you?” he said. “Go on, you can tell an old friend like me.”
“My in-laws are driving me insane.” It wasn’t the sort of thing she was used to saying. Other people complained about their in-laws all the time, but not Ann Marie.
“What are you drinking there?” he asked.
“Pinot Grigio.”
“I think this calls for something stronger, don’t you?” He looked to the bartender. “Could you get us two shots of Jameson, Christine?”
“Oh no, thank you,” Ann Marie said. “I don’t drink hard liquor.”
The girl filled two shot glasses and placed them on the bar.
“Me neither,” he said. “Except medicinally.”
He handed her one of the glasses and took the other for himself. They clinked them together and then she swallowed the liquid down. It felt warm in her throat. She took a sip of wine to get the taste out of her mouth.
“Any better?” the man asked.
“I think so,” she said. “Thanks.”
His name was Adam. He told her he had retired early from a job in advertising and now he lived on a sailboat. His home base was somewhere off the coast of South Carolina, but every summer he sailed north and docked in Portsmouth for a couple of weeks.
“That sounds like a dream life,” she said.
“And what about you?” he asked. “What do you do?”
She hated when