Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [186]
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
“I keep wishing my dad were here to talk sense into her. He was really the only one who ever could. Well, him and you.”
His eyes followed a mother and two boys with bright blue zinc smeared across their noses. They were all carrying pails and shovels and towels and flip-flops, hopping around on the hot pavement, trying not to burn their feet.
Ann Marie looked at her husband. “I feel lost, Pat.”
“It’s been a tough year,” he said.
“Yes.”
He raised his voice, trying, she imagined, for an upbeat tone. “I, for one, cannot wait to get to London in September and see you get your gold medal.”
She smiled weakly. “And then what?”
“And then—who knows? It feels like we ought to start thinking about a new chapter, me and you.”
She nodded. The idea made her feel slightly tired, but hopeful, too, in some small way.
“Maybe after London, we could go back to Ireland. A second honeymoon?” He raised an eyebrow suggestively, and she laughed.
“I was just remembering that trip,” she said. “I’d like that.”
“I missed you a lot while you were up here with my mom,” he said. “It got me thinking.”
They sat in silence for a few moments, each with certain private thoughts that the other could guess in an instant, and thoughts that the other could never imagine.
“Do you want to get a drink somewhere?” he asked.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “All right.”
They got out of the car, and he took her hand as they made their way toward town.
The next morning, Patty and Josh arrived, their station wagon so full that Josh couldn’t see out the back windows as he drove.
“We’re here!” Patty said, stepping onto the screen porch, where Ann Marie and Pat were waiting. She held the baby on her hip.
“Come to Grandma,” Ann Marie said, taking the child into her arms, the warmth of that little body like a balm to her soul. She hadn’t seen her grandchildren in seventeen days, which was exactly thirteen days longer than she had ever gone before. To think that her reason for leaving was concern over Alice’s welfare.
“Did you hit a lot of traffic?” Pat asked.
“Not really,” Patty said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone. She was just like her father. Ann Marie had to fight the urge to tell her to turn the darn thing off.
“There’s still no signal out here?” Patty asked.
“What took you so long?” Pat said. “I thought you were leaving at seven.”
“We did, and we hit a new record for number of times we had to stop for someone to go to the bathroom,” Patty said. “Seriously. Seventy-five miles, five bathroom breaks. I’m contacting the Guinness people. I really think we might have something special here.”
Maisy and Foster burst onto the porch like Mexican jumping beans.
“Grandma!” they shouted, and Ann Marie hugged them with her one free arm.
“They missed you,” Patty said. She dropped her volume. “And they’ve learned all kinds of colorful new language from their other grandma.”
Apparently Foster heard this, because he piped up then, “Our Grammy Joan lets us drink tonic.”
“What kind of tonic?” Ann Marie asked with a frown.
“Coke and root beer,” Foster said.
“That stuff will rot your teeth,” Ann Marie said, actually feeling a bit annoyed about it. “You don’t want that!”
“No,” Foster said.
“We already put our bathing suits on,” Maisy said. Last summer she had pronounced it babing suits. “They’re under our clothes, see?”
She pulled up her T-shirt to reveal the purple polka-dotted one-piece Ann Marie had picked up at the Filene’s sale a few weeks back.
“I slept in my suit!” Maisy said gleefully.
“Don’t tell Grandma that,” Patty said.
Maisy went on, “Foster says the water might be too cold for me like last time, but I said no, because you get used to it once you’re in.”
Ann Marie smiled. Where had Maisy heard that? They had all said it so many times over the years. Her own children, never content to play with just one another, would call to her on the shore as she tried to read a magazine in peace—Come on, Mom, come swim! You get used to it once you’re in. Never mind that