Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [194]
A few days earlier, she had decided to make peace with the family of rabbits who had been hanging around all summer. They had withstood every challenge she had given them since May. You had to admire the sort of gumption it took to break through a fence and stomach an entire bottle of liquefied cayenne pepper just to get a bite of good lettuce.
When she gave it some thought, she realized she was their type exactly: someone who seemed to bug everyone around her, when all she was trying to do was survive.
In recent days she had even gone so far as to put a few carrots out on the grass by the car, but the bunnies hadn’t touched them, probably because they could smell the human scent she’d left behind.
This one was the father—at least she figured he was, since he was the biggest. She was worried about the little babies in this heat. She wished they would take a bowl of water. Father Donnelly told her this was the hottest August in southern Maine on record since 1893. He said it with a sort of awe for how long ago that seemed, as if dinosaurs might have roamed the earth that summer. Alice kept to herself that it was the year her mother was born, and so to her it didn’t seem like such ancient history.
She still wouldn’t let the rabbits near her garden, but there was hardly anything left there anyway. The strawberries and beans had been harvested. The lilies were wilting and brown. The tomatoes—well, she’d have to replant those next spring.
Kathleen was finally back in California. She and Maggie had left Cape Neddick so abruptly after the Fourth of July fireworks that Alice assumed she must have offended them somehow. They were both so damn sensitive. But Kathleen assured her she was just ready to leave—she had a lot to help Maggie sort out, she said.
Yes, like the pesky business of finding a father for her child.
In the month that had passed since, Maggie had sent Alice one letter a week, like clockwork. Most recently, she reported that she had moved further into Brooklyn, to a nice family-friendly neighborhood. The apartment cost less than her old one and it was twice the size, with a large bedroom and a second, much smaller room, which most people would use as an office, but which she planned to turn into a nursery. She had begun telling friends that she was pregnant, and her boss had agreed to let her work from home three days a week once the baby came. She had not seen Gabe since she got back, but planned to meet him for coffee in the next couple of weeks to sort out logistics. Imagine that. A coffee date with the man who impregnated you. It seemed a bit late for logistics.
Maggie wrote that she was fifteen weeks pregnant. Her morning sickness hadn’t abated. She had read in her baby books that her child was now growing hair, and wasn’t it strange but wonderful to think of someone sprouting a full head of brown curls inside your belly? Alice squirmed a bit, reading that part. Women had entirely too much information about such things these days. Maggie added at the end of her letter that in five weeks she would find out if she was having a boy or a girl. If the child was a boy, she wanted to call him Brennan, Alice’s maiden name. A baby boy named after our fearless matriarch! she had written, and that at least had made Alice smile.
She responded to Maggie on small notepaper, so that she wouldn’t have too much room to speak freely. She tucked a Mass card into each envelope. Alice was so worried about the girl—Maggie acted as if hanging a mobile and buying some tiny socks was all it took to raise a child. But Alice held her tongue.
Ann Marie and Pat’s daughter Patty had been up for two weeks in July with her brood. Watching Patty and her husband, Josh, chase their three rug rats around made Alice think of Maggie and everything she had in store: the sleepless nights, the bad winter colds, the fights with a maddeningly obstinate toddler.
Patty’s only daughter—Alice’s great-granddaughter—was a four-year-old called Maisy. Who named their child Maisy? It was a name better suited