Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [23]
The entire house was a mess. She and Arlo could never manage to get the dirt out from under their fingernails, no matter how much they scrubbed. They left smudges on clothes and walls and book covers. There was dog hair everywhere. The bathroom probably hadn’t been cleaned in months. She blamed it on the business, but really she had never been one for housekeeping. In theory she’d love a tidy home like Ann Marie’s, but when she set that desire against all the other possibilities for what she could be doing if she weren’t inside with a mop, well …
Kathleen put two pots of water on the stove to boil—a small one for her ginger tea and a large lobster pot for steaming the worms’ food. One of many facts she had learned about worms along the way was that just because they ate garbage didn’t mean they weren’t discerning. They loathed orange peels, and weren’t fond of citrus in general. They preferred their food soft and mushy, so when she had the time she over-steamed banana peels and vegetable scraps and hunks of carrot tops and apple cores before loading them into the worm bins.
She pulled a ginger root from the cupboard and set to peeling it in front of the window. Outside, the dogs were lying side by side in the grass. She chopped the ginger into cubes and dumped them into the pot, leaving them there to simmer. Then she returned to her spot at the table, soaking in the quiet.
She opened the newspaper, which Arlo had set out for her. She flipped past the front-page news and the Arts section, landing finally on the Sunday circular. She didn’t clip coupons, but the women in her family had always been so obsessed with them that she could never shake the habit of looking them over, just in case there was something amazing to be found, though of course there never was. One ad offered free floss with the purchase of five tubes of toothpaste. As if floss had ever broken the bank for anyone. Human beings were strange about free stuff. Her mother was the queen of it—I got four bottles of ketchup for the price of one, Alice had bragged over the phone a few weeks earlier. Who needed four bottles of ketchup?
Kathleen made a point of speaking to Alice once a week, even though when she did this she often felt as though she had been roughly awakened from an exquisite dream. From this distance, it was easy enough to pretend her mother and the rest of the family didn’t exist. Well, all of them except for her children, who she missed every minute.
Kathleen worried about her son, Chris, about what kind of person he really was. He didn’t seem to have much ambition or enthusiasm: he drank a lot of beer and got into fights with his girlfriend, after which she ended up in tears and he ended up out at a bar with friends. In short, he was terrifyingly like his father.
She had to admit, at least to herself, that she felt jealous watching Pat and Ann Marie bask in all of Little Daniel’s professional success. That kid seemed to get a promotion every year, while Chris could barely find work. Maybe if he had had a real father, it would be different. She wished she had seen it sooner, done more for her son. But Kathleen’s attention had always been drawn more naturally toward Maggie.
Her daughter had turned out so well, despite Kathleen and Paul’s best efforts at completely fucking up her life.
Kathleen had taught her to be her own person. When Maggie was a kid, wanting desperately to fit in, Kathleen repeated a single phrase to her, over and over: “Don’t be a sheep.” She wished someone had said it to her when she was young. She couldn’t stand the thought of her remarkable daughter living out some ho-hum life like everyone else. And Maggie had taken this advice. She had made it as a writer in New York City, the sort of big, bold, independent existence Kathleen had realized too late that she herself wanted.
By the time she figured out that she was no Kelleher, not really,