Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [193]
“I couldn’t take it,” Maggie said. “Could I? Oh God. I’d pay you back, Mom.”
Kathleen shook her head. “No, it’s a gift. I wish I had more to give you.”
And with that, she actually did feel somewhat selfless. Maggie needed her, and she had answered the call. Her father would be proud.
“You can use the money to take out a hit on Gabe,” Kathleen said. “Or buy diapers. Whatever you want.”
“That’s a lot of diapers,” Maggie said.
“You’ll be surprised.”
She stayed for a week. Just long enough to help Maggie find a bigger place—two bedrooms, right on the edge of a park, further into Brooklyn, Dominican kids running this way and that, an ice cream truck playing its tinny tune, ambling up the block. The rent turned out to be cheaper than her current apartment’s. If Alice ever came here, she would probably say that the neighborhood wasn’t safe, but Alice would never come. Maggie would have to bring the baby to her if she wanted her grandmother and her child to meet. No doubt, Maggie would do this, having inherited Daniel’s belief in the importance of generations, of one person understanding life through the experiences of all the people who came before.
They packed boxes and listened to Beatles CDs. They ate a lot of takeout, and Kathleen began to feel her pants grow tighter. They shopped online for maternity clothes, which she was pleasantly surprised to find resembled real clothes—gone were the ridiculous muumuus and sailor dresses pregnant women had been forced to wear back when she was having kids.
She accompanied Maggie to her doctor’s appointment and had to excuse herself for a minute so she could cry in the ladies’ room. Kathleen wished Maggie had some handsome sweetheart standing by her side, holding her hand. That was what she deserved. When they walked out into the waiting room, crowded full of pregnant ladies wearing enormous diamond rings, Maggie looked like she might lose it—but a moment later she shrugged, as if to say that that was just life.
“What will you do when I’m not here to come with you?” Kathleen asked. “Come alone?”
“I can ask Allegra to bring me,” Maggie said. “Maybe I should have a dinner party and break the news to all my friends at once.”
“That might be a good idea,” Kathleen said, and her heart swelled to think that this fearless young woman was her daughter.
At night, they slept side by side in Maggie’s bed. Kathleen felt afraid to leave, though she missed Arlo. She missed her dogs. She missed working the farm and eating dinners made from ingredients they had grown right there in their garden.
She missed yoga. You couldn’t throw a rock in Brooklyn without hitting three yoga studios, but her kind of yoga had nothing to do with svelte twenty-six-year-olds in trendy workout gear. Her kind of yoga included Arlo and her in the backyard, wearing sweatpants, gazing at the mountains in the distance, rather than looking out at a sea of taxicabs through a dirty window.
They both cried when she had to leave for the airport.
“I’m scared,” Maggie said.
“That’s just part of it. And you can change your mind anytime about coming to stay with us. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Maggie said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, kiddo.”
Several hours later, Kathleen sat barefoot at the kitchen table with Arlo, drinking ginger tea, telling him everything that had happened since they had kissed good-bye two weeks earlier. He had arranged white tulips in a vase on the counter, and made a pumpkin cake with the words WELCOME HOME etched unevenly across the top in white icing. Kathleen felt at peace.
The dogs sat at either side of her chair, as if they were guarding her, as if to say You’re right where you belong.
Alice
Alice had been watching him all afternoon. He had reddish hair, unlike most of the others. He paused for a moment and looked her way to make sure that she was still sitting there on the screen porch, observing his work.
She gave him a wave and took a sip