Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [176]
She told Adam she was an interior designer based in Boston. It came to her so quickly, she almost felt it was true. Well, it was, almost. Then she mentioned her husband and three children.
He said he had gotten divorced five years back. He had a grown son in Florida who was thirty-eight and still single.
“Are yours all coupled up?” he asked.
“One married, one engaged, and my younger daughter is single,” she said.
As far as she knew, anyway.
“Does she live near you?” he asked.
“She’s been in Africa for the past several years. She’s in the Peace Corps.”
“Wonderful.”
“Yes. She’s a very special girl.”
She craved Fiona then, the way you might crave a favorite food from your childhood. She wanted her daughter beside her instead of this stranger. Fiona had always been patient and good, yet utterly unsentimental. That was why she could tell schoolchildren about the importance of condoms and the dangers of AIDS, while fully aware that half their parents had already died of the disease. Why she could sing the little sick ones to sleep and discipline them, too, the same as if they were perfectly healthy.
Fiona would know how to handle Alice right now; she was made for situations like this. Suddenly Ann Marie realized that it was the first time in months she had thought of her youngest child as anything other than just gay. It felt like an important step.
“Maybe we should set her up with my son,” Adam joked, and Ann Marie felt a bit sad, but not as sad as she might have expected.
“Maybe,” she said.
The group in the back began to play a song she recognized, “The Black Velvet Band.”
“This is one of my favorites,” she said. “I heard the Dubliners play it live in the eighties.”
“Shall we dance?” he asked.
“No,” she said, grinning.
He stood up, extended his hand. “Come on now, it’s one of your favorites.”
She got to her feet, both embarrassed and flattered. He was what her daughters would call smarmy, but she thought he seemed sweet. She let him put his palm flat against the small of her back, and she put hers up on his shoulder as they swayed side to side. It had been forever since she was this close to a man she didn’t know.
The musicians gave a cheer, happy for the accompaniment.
Their voices rose, and Adam sang along with the chorus: Her eyes they shone like a diamond, you’d think she was queen of the land, with her hair flung over her shoulder, tied up with a black velvet band.
Ann Marie wanted to sing, too, but she felt self-conscious. If Pat were there, she would have. She closed her eyes and thought of their honeymoon, when they had traveled around the Ring of Kerry in a rented Peugeot, singing their way through Ireland, stopping into pubs in tiny towns where every person they laid eyes on looked like someone they knew in Boston. Pat had tracked down some of his relatives in Killarney, and when they met, each and every one of them hugged Ann Marie close as if she, too, were family and said, “Welcome home.”
Ann Marie had been so excited for what she knew would come next—children, a nice house of their own. But she had never pictured what came after that. Some women she knew were elated to have their grown children out of the nest. Ann Marie felt worthless. She might have thirty years left to live, and she had no idea how she was going to fill them.
The bartender’s voice rose over the music: “Ma’am? Your phone.”
Ann Marie opened her eyes and saw that her cell phone was lit up and vibrating on the bar.
“Excuse me,” she said to Adam, breaking away from him, suddenly feeling silly.
She picked up the phone and saw Alice’s number on the screen. She inhaled deeply, said hello.
Alice didn’t apologize for what she had done, but she asked Ann Marie to come home, and said she couldn’t be alone with Kathleen.
“I’m afraid something awful will happen if you don’t come back,” Alice said.
Ann Marie knew it was manipulative, and