Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [39]
“Mom, let me call you back,” Ann Marie said.
She was booked to the gills that second half of June. She had to make the arrangements for a luncheon she was helping to organize at the club. There was a meeting of the Lucky Star Fund on the twenty-seventh. She had purposefully overbooked herself in June so that she could be at the cottage in peace in July. She wasn’t sure she’d have the time to go up to Maine and check on Alice.
Two whole weeks. What kind of women left their aging mother alone for two whole weeks?
At the end of June, Clare and Joe would be on their annual buying trip in Taiwan. (Who knew Taiwan was the place to go for vestments, statues of the saints, and crucifixes on silver chains? And how could two atheists run a business based on peddling sacred objects? If you asked Ann Marie, there was something blasphemous about it.)
A ball of anger lodged itself in her stomach. She didn’t usually do things like this, but without thinking, she dialed Kathleen’s house in California.
“Hello,” Kathleen said flatly. She had probably recognized the number on her caller ID. Ann Marie was surprised that she even picked up.
“Hi there, it’s Ann Marie,” she said, feeling uncomfortable, wanting to lighten the mood even before there was a mood to lighten. “How are you, good?”
“Sure,” Kathleen said. “I’m good.”
“Great. Well, I wanted to call because Alice told me that she’s going to be alone up in Cape Neddick for the last couple weeks of June, and I feel like that’s a long stretch of time for her to be by herself. It’s bad enough she’s alone all May, but Pat and I have at least tried to see her on the weekends this past month. I have a very busy June ahead of me and I can’t be going back and forth.”
“Who asked you to?” Kathleen said.
She tried again, putting it simply. “Alice will be all by herself for two whole weeks.”
“Ann Marie, she’s by herself all year long.”
“Well, yes, but it’s different when she’s here in Massachusetts, close by us. I worry when she’s all the way up there at the beach.”
“It’s an hour and a half drive,” Kathleen said. Then, her voice intensifying, “Why are you calling me with this?”
“Technically June is your month at the cottage. I thought maybe we could come up with a plan to—”
“You realize I live three thousand miles away,” Kathleen said, like this absurd fact might have slipped Ann Marie’s mind.
“Yes,” she said. “But I thought maybe Maggie or Christopher could go, even if it’s only for a couple extra days to break things up.”
“They have lives. They can’t pick up and go to Maine for half the month.”
As if she and Pat didn’t have lives. “No one said half the month.”
“Maggie and Gabe will be there for the first two weeks. I think that’s plenty,” Kathleen said.
Ann Marie could feel her resolve fading. As always, her eagerness to end this unpleasantness would override her desire for what was fair. She had been raised in a family full of fighters. When she met the Kellehers, she was all too familiar with the slamming doors, the accusations, the hang-ups at the other end of the line. Familiar too was the manner in which they always seemed to find their way back to one another. She recalled a time when she was a teenager and her mother discovered that her father had had an affair with her childhood friend. Ann Marie’s mother had chased her husband down the block with a frying pan. Afterward, she swallowed a bottle of pills, hoping to die. Two days later, it was as if it had never happened. He came home and sat down to supper, and after a few drinks, she was in his lap.
Then there were deeper grudges, the ones against family members who simply disappeared after some unforgivable altercation—their photographs taken down from the shelves, their names never uttered. It seemed ludicrous