Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [2]
They were mostly widows who had let themselves go. They wore sweat suits and chunky white sneakers, and their hair was a uniform disaster. Alice was the sole one among them who had kept her figure. Only her deep, deep damn wrinkles even hinted at the horrifying fact that she was eighty-three. But like the rest of them, she was alone. Sometimes she wondered if they all took their morning prayer sessions so seriously because they each needed someone to bear witness to their presence. Otherwise, one of them might have a stroke at the kitchen table some morning, and simply go unnoticed.
Her husband, Daniel, won the property in 1945, just after the war ended, in a stupid bet with a former shipmate named Ned Barnell. Ned was a drunk, even by the standards of his fellow navy men. He had grown up in a fishing village in Maine, but now spent his time squandering his paychecks in some of Boston’s finest barrooms and underground gambling clubs. He made a fifty-dollar wager with Daniel on some basketball game, which absolutely enraged Alice. They had been married two years then, and she was pregnant with Kathleen. But Daniel said the bet was a sure thing, that he never would have made it otherwise. And he won.
Ned didn’t have the money to pay him.
“Surprise, surprise,” Alice said when Daniel came home that night and told her the news.
He had a wild grin on his face. “You’ll never guess what he gave me instead.”
“A car?” Alice said sarcastically. Their twelve-year-old Ford coupe sputtered and pooped out whenever she started it. By then, they were so accustomed to gas rations that they mostly walked everywhere anyway, or took the streetcar. But the war was over now, and another New England winter was coming. Alice had no intention of being one of those mothers on the train, shushing her screaming newborn while others looked on with disapproving stares.
“Better,” Daniel said.
“Better than a car?” Alice asked.
“It’s land,” Daniel said gleefully. “A whole big plot of land, right on the water in Maine.”
She was skeptical. “You better not be joking, Daniel Kelleher.”
“I kid you not, Mrs. Kelleher,” he said, coming toward her. He pressed his face to her stomach.
“You hear that, jelly bean?” he said to her belt.
“Daniel!” she said, trying to push him away. She hated when he talked directly to the baby, already attached.
He ignored her.
“This time next summer we’ll be making sand castles. Daddy got you your own beach.” He straightened up. “Ned’s grandfather gave all his grandkids some land, but Ned’s got no interest in his piece. It’s ours!”
“For a fifty-dollar bet?” Alice asked.
“Let’s just say it was the last in a long line of fifty-dollar bets that may or may not have gone unpaid.”
“Daniel!” Despite the good news, her blood boiled a bit.
“Honey, don’t worry so much, you married a lucky guy,” he said with a wink.
Alice didn’t believe in luck, though if it existed she was fairly sure that hers was lousy. In two years of marriage, she had already miscarried three times. Her mother had lost two babies in infancy before the rest of her children came along, though Alice wouldn’t dare ask her about it. All her mother ever said on the topic was that she assumed God had taken away the things she loved most as some sort of test. Alice wondered if in her case the children simply vanished because they knew they weren’t quite wanted or, more to the point, that she was no mother.
She was used to the routine—no dark spots on her delicates at the usual time of the month, followed