Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [31]
Paul squinted. “Lower your voice,” he said. “The kids are sleeping.”
“Oh! The kids. The kids!” she yelled. “Now you’re worried about the kids?”
“You’re drunk,” he said. “I can’t talk to you like this.”
“You’re pathetic!” she said. She could tell from his face that she had rubbed him raw with that.
“Fine,” he said. “There’s someone else. Is that what you want to hear? Pat and Ann Marie saw us out once—a million years ago. It was his idea, you know, the Kiwanis crap, the poker. I wanted to tell you, flat out.”
Kathleen was stunned. “Well, aren’t you a sweetheart?” she said.
He had been looking straight at her, practically glaring, but now he turned his eyes to a spot behind her, and his face broke into a big fake smile. Kathleen followed his gaze. Maggie stood there in the doorway in her cotton nightgown, her eyelids still heavy from sleep.
A string of painful revelations followed, and Kathleen drank more with each one: Paul had been seeing the other woman for over a year. During that time he had loaned her ten grand, but he hadn’t paid his own mortgage in nine months and now the bank was ready to foreclose. Kathleen might have suspected an affair, but she’d had no idea about the money. Her father offered to help, but there was nothing to be done. In March, they lost the house.
At her father’s urging, Kathleen took the kids and went to the cottage in Maine.
She fell into a fog that spring. She would forget to feed Maggie and Chris their dinner, or she’d lock up the cottage and climb into bed early, only to realize a while later that her children were still outside playing on the beach.
It was her father, as always, who saved her. He came to Maine from Massachusetts one night and gave her the same ultimatum he had given his wife decades earlier: find a way to stop drinking, or he’d take the kids away.
“Remember how much your mother frightened you,” he said, the first and only time he had ever put it that way. “How on earth can you sit here and do the same to Maggie?”
That had been enough to get her to her first AA meeting. She drank again three days later, a quarter of a bottle of gin. Drunk and desperate, she called Paul, begging him to come back. She woke up horrified and went to another meeting the next morning. She hadn’t had a drink since.
Though Paul was the one who had cheated, her family—besides her father and her sister, Clare—acted as though Kathleen were to blame for their marriage coming apart. Patrick said Paul would outgrow the affair, that they should try counseling, try everything, because divorce was plain wrong. That was why he had helped Paul cover it up, he claimed, because their family meant too much to let this destroy them. Kathleen suspected that, as usual, he was thinking only of himself: no member of the Kelleher clan had ever gotten divorced, and Pat took a certain weird pride in that.
Alice insinuated that perhaps Kathleen was to blame for Paul’s infidelity, and said that she couldn’t walk away from a perfectly good marriage.
The funniest part of her mother’s defense of her ex-husband was that Paul had never liked Alice. He had taken to calling visits to her house “Escape to Bitch Mountain.” He was unfailingly polite to her face, but that was only because she terrified him.
The first time Kathleen took Paul home to meet her parents, the four of them were sitting around the kitchen table eating spaghetti when someone knocked at the back door. Through the window in the door, Kathleen could see her uncle Timmy and his wife, Kitty. The previous Thanksgiving, Kitty and Alice had gotten into a screaming fight over the proper weight of a turkey meant to feed twenty people. Alice thought her sister-in-law was accusing her of being cheap. She had hardly spoken a word to Aunt Kitty since. Or, for that matter, to her own brother, who was being punished for marrying such a monster.
Alice came from a family of six siblings and Daniel was one of ten. Kathleen had forty-two cousins altogether. When she and Pat and Clare were growing up, their house was a revolving