Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [27]
“Technically, June is your month,” Ann Marie had said during that call a few days earlier, as if this was a prize that had been bestowed upon Kathleen, instead of what it really was: the raw end of the deal.
It hadn’t escaped Kathleen that when Patrick decided they should divvy up their time at the cottage, he had assigned the worst month to her. Who wanted to take their summer vacation in June, when it wasn’t even hot yet?
She had called him one night a few years ago after an AA meeting focused on standing up for yourself rather than internalizing your anger.
“You gave me the worst month for Maine,” she said into the phone.
“Excuse me?” Patrick said. “You haven’t even been there in years.”
It was true that she had avoided the place ever since her father died, wanting to forget both the good and the bad of it. With few exceptions, she had never really liked going there. The act of vacationing in beautiful surroundings always made her turn melancholy, as if in the absence of external annoyances to displease her, she suddenly realized her own inferiority—her fleshy upper arms, the sun spots that had worsened with age, and just how little she wanted to return to her day-to-day life. (No doubt, picturesque Sonoma Valley would be intolerable if not for the fact that her industry was worm shit.)
But this wasn’t about that. It was about fairness, about her children’s rights too.
“Anyway,” her brother went on, “I wasn’t aware that there was a bad month to take a free beach vacation.”
Oh, he had to add that word, free. As if she wasn’t well aware that he had been paying the property tax in Maine since Daniel died. (Only to stake his claim to the place, she assumed.) Never mind that he hadn’t offered her a penny after her divorce, when she and her children were practically on the verge of living on the street.
“It’s easy to be generous when you have cash coming out of your eyeballs,” she said, which was actually kinder than Patrick deserved. The truth was he wasn’t generous, not toward anyone who actually needed help. He never donated in a big way, or volunteered, or assisted anyone outside his immediate family. Patrick was the kind of person whose worldview made him think he was the whole, rather than a part of it.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he said in such a measured, almost jolly, tone that she wondered if he was standing among his rich yuppie friends, maybe in the middle of a cocktail party or a round of golf.
The Serenity Prayer floated through her head: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Why was it so much easier to buy all that in an AA meeting full of strangers than when she was interacting with her own family? She had learned techniques for coping with almost anyone, but the Kellehers still aroused such anger in her, such terrible behavior.
“What was I thinking?” she said, unable to stop herself. “Questioning the boy king, Jesus Christ himself. Apologies.”
She hung up. There was a pull from inside her then, which she recognized as the urge to have a drink. She sat with the feeling for a moment, letting it be, observing where it manifested itself in her body: smack in the middle of her chest.
The resentments had piled one on top of another over so many years, so that Kathleen couldn’t think of her adult brother’s arrogance without remembering in anger how her parents had sent him to an expensive Catholic boys’ school while she and Clare went to public school, how Alice had always bent over backward to tell him how gifted and smart he was, though she had never done this for her daughters.
Alice had grown up poor, and though she had raised her children middle-class, she always let