Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [26]
Arlo believed that life was short and you should interact only with people you enjoyed. He also believed that loyalty was earned—sharing a bloodline didn’t mean you had to be close. He saw his father and brother every few years, when one of them happened to pass through the town where another one lived. When Kathleen asked him, he said he felt no remorse about seeing them so rarely. “We have nothing in common,” he said. His brother was an accountant with three kids who had moved to Des Moines when he met his wife, a former Iowa beauty queen.
“What on earth would we talk about?” Arlo asked, as if most people interacted with their families for the riveting conversation.
The Kellehers considered it sacrilege that Kathleen went back East only twice a year. Whereas Arlo, when she told him she was planning another trip to Massachusetts, just said, “Why are you such a glutton for punishment?”
Needless to say, he had not been raised Catholic.
“You’re lucky there’s no such thing as Presbyterian guilt,” she had told him once when they were discussing it.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Never mind.”
“It would be a different story if you didn’t let them get under your skin like you do, but they seem to make you so stressed,” he’d said. “Around your family, you never act like yourself.”
“I know,” she replied, though sometimes she feared that the opposite was true, that her real self was that dark, angry one she had shoved in a box years ago, the one that emerged only when she was home.
When Ann Marie called a few days earlier, she practically bit Kathleen’s head off about the fact that Maggie and Gabe were going to Maine for just two weeks this year. Ann Marie had apparently decided that Alice couldn’t be alone up there for the remainder of June, despite the fact that Alice was alone all fall, winter, and spring, and managed just fine.
Kathleen tried to take deep breaths and to channel Arlo’s calmness. Her sister-in-law was only a person, after all. Why shouldn’t they be able to talk rationally? But when it came to Ann Marie, Kathleen could never help it. Her temper flared. Did Ann Marie actually think she could drop her business, her dogs, and Arlo, because she said so?
When Ann Marie realized that Kathleen refused to entertain this ludicrous concern, she told her to forget it. Translation: it wasn’t a big deal in the first place; Ann Marie had just felt like making a fuss. This was typical of her sister-in-law, who might as well have had the word MARTYR stamped across her forehead.
Ann Marie called Alice Mom. Kathleen still found this jarring, more than thirty years after the first time she heard it. Who, if given the choice, would want to claim Alice for a mother?
Back in Massachusetts, Kathleen had occasionally pretended in her head that her AA sponsor, Eleanor, was her mother. When they sat in the coffee shop below Eleanor’s apartment in Harvard Square, Kathleen would drink tea and talk about her day—another fight with Paul over money for the kids, another meeting with Chris’s principal that had ended in tears.
Eleanor had always told Kathleen that a sober life didn’t mean a perfect life. You could do everything right, and still, things might not turn out the way you’d imagined. She herself had been married three times. The first two were booze-soaked, dramatic, passionate, stupid. Just like Kathleen’s marriage to Paul had been. Just like she feared Maggie and Gabe’s relationship might be, if Maggie didn’t end it soon. Eleanor’s third marriage was a sober one. Even so, it ended in divorce. Then she met a wonderful man, and two years later she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. You never knew where a day or a year would take you. Kathleen hoped Maggie understood that.
She also hoped that Ann Marie wouldn’t try to guilt her daughter into staying on in Maine any longer than