Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [192]
Maggie nodded. “It has to be.”
For lunch they ate tomato soup and peanut butter crackers, the closest thing to an actual meal that Maggie had in her cupboards. Maggie sorted through her mail and pulled the stroller from its box. They watched sitcom reruns on television, though Kathleen wasn’t paying attention. She was thinking instead about what came next.
At three o’clock, Maggie had to get on a conference call for work, so Kathleen decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. Brooklyn Heights was beautiful, with its rows of perfectly preserved brownstones and federal houses. She walked to the Promenade, where the view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline never ceased to take her breath away. She almost felt jealous that she herself hadn’t discovered it as a twenty-something. She could see why Maggie didn’t want to leave.
They were hungry again by six. They ordered Thai food. While Maggie went downstairs to pay the deliveryman, Kathleen took the chance to really look closely around her daughter’s apartment. She had thought the place was cute the first time she saw it—a jewel box, she had said. But that was years ago, when she was envisioning it as just a little hideaway for Maggie alone—a room of one’s own, where she might write two or three great novels before moving on to a sprawling country house out west with her stable and appropriately aged husband.
Now Kathleen examined the tiny kitchen, with the window so drafty there was really no reason to close it. The refrigerator’s long orange power cord was strung up over a series of nails toward the ceiling and plugged in across the room. The bathroom door never closed properly—half an hour earlier, the doorknob had come off in Kathleen’s hand. The dust that streamed in from outside could never be controlled, not even by an anal-retentive neat freak like her daughter. And there was the issue of those five flights of stairs. Five!
Maggie had said she could put a crib and a changing table in the living room, but that hideous yellow stroller Ann Marie had sent was already taking up a quarter of the space, so there went that idea.
When Maggie came up the steps with a large paper bag in her arms, Kathleen said, “I think we need to find you a new apartment. Something bigger.”
“I can barely afford this one,” Maggie said.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Kathleen said. “There’s something I want to say.”
Her daughter looked nervous, but she set the bag of food on the coffee table and sat on the couch.
“You haven’t changed your mind about trying to kidnap me, have you?”
“No. You don’t have to come to California,” Kathleen said.
“Oh God, are you planning to move here?”
“No, but thank you for your excitement over the idea.”
“Sorry,” Maggie said.
“I do want to come back—with your permission—when the baby’s born, and help out until you get on your feet.”
“I’d like that,” Maggie said.
“You know your happiness is the most important thing in the world to me, right?” Kathleen asked. “Except sometimes I’m really selfish.”
Maggie laughed, and Kathleen went on talking. “We both know that too. So. I’m kind of rambling here, but the point is, I should have done this right from the start.”
“Done what?”
“I have some money saved for the farm.”
“I can’t take your savings,” Maggie said.
“Yes, you can,” Kathleen said. “It’s twenty thousand dollars. And it would be my great pleasure to give it to you.”
Even as she said it, she felt a deep sense of loss. Her father had made selflessness look so easy. But Kathleen would never be as good a person as he was, and she could not sit here and offer up her savings without thinking about how long she had planned on buying the worm gin, how diligent she had been in setting the money aside, month after month. The farm was doing fine, but now it would likely be years before any kind of meaningful growth could happen.
She felt sorry for Arlo. He had no idea how much she had socked away, but she’d have to tell him now. Her father had often bailed her out, and she had been grateful. But she had never once