Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [43]
Alice’s mother had been a lucky one too. She had lived to be ninety-six. Each morning in those last, dark years of life, her mother would dress in a good skirt and flats, and read the Globe, circling the names of the dead men and women she knew, from grade school, from the neighborhood, from church—her peers and first loves and even friends of her children, who were, impossibly, somewhere around seventy years old. (Alice’s father, dead more than twenty years by then, had always referred to the obituaries as the Irish sports page.) Near the end, her mind began to slip. She would show up to the funeral parlor in Upham’s Corner and forget which wake she had come for, so she’d stop into each of them. Some mornings she would go there without even looking at the paper, reasoning that she was bound to know someone being buried that day, so she ought to go down to Kearney Brothers and pay her respects. When she finally died, hers was one of the smallest funerals Alice had ever seen—only Alice’s brothers and their kids and grandkids, Patrick and Ann Marie and their brood, Clare and Joe, Kathleen and Maggie. She didn’t have a single friend on earth to see her off. She had outlived them all.
At Alice’s house in Canton, junk mail still arrived addressed to Daniel. It amazed her how a person’s death had no impact on these practical matters. The bank statements and pay stubs and old report cards he had filed so neatly in his basement office didn’t vanish into the ether as she wished they would. Nor did the plaque he had received from the insurance company when he retired, or the framed picture of President Kennedy, both of which he had hung in a place of honor over his desk. All of it remained, a constant reminder: He existed, then he didn’t. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess.
There were parts of living alone that she hadn’t gotten used to, probably never would, even though her husband had been dead nearly ten years. She would never learn to cook for one—she still poured the whole box of spaghetti into the pot, or made a five-pound roast that took hours to brown up, with onions and potatoes and carrots and turnips in the pan, despite the fact that she didn’t care for vegetables.
She would never get used to the quiet that settled in gently, pleasantly once the kids were gone, and then with a ferocity after Daniel. They were married for forty-nine years, and every day of it, much as she loved him, Alice wished he would shut the hell up. He read the headlines of The Boston Globe out loud over breakfast. He sang “The Wild Colonial Boy” and “Molly Malone” in the shower. He whistled as he raked the lawn, and bellowed into the phone when the grandkids called, telling them the same jokes he had told his own children decades earlier: A three-legged dog walks into a saloon, hobbles up to the bartender, and says, “I’m lookin’ for the man who shot my paw.”
Or: Well, Chrissy, I’m afraid your grandmother’s Irish Alzheimer’s has gotten quite advanced—she’s forgotten everything but her grudges.
Now she missed that joyful way he had, especially in summertime, when she was up here at the beach.
Alice took a sip of her Bloody Mary, taking care not to let the condensation drip onto her blouse. That was another thing she hadn’t gotten used to: dressing down in play clothes, like old ladies were supposed to. She never changed after Mass. Today she wore white linen slacks with a white shell, a black short-sleeved silk jacket, and sandals. She still put on a full face of makeup every morning, same as she had when she was nineteen and working at the law firm in downtown Boston. She still wore her hair in a straight bob, and colored it black. (Her daughter Clare had once commented in front of company that it was a miracle how Alice’s hair had actually gotten darker as she aged, instead of turning gray like everyone else’s.)
No one, not a soul, knew exactly how old she