Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [57]
Now Kathleen was off in California. Maggie knew her mother had her reasons for leaving, but part of her felt like Kathleen had chosen Arlo—a man she hardly knew at the time—over her own children. It was the same feeling she had as a child when Kathleen would go on dates and leave them with Ann Marie. On those nights, Maggie would sit at the table with her cousins in Ann Marie’s bright, open kitchen, wishing she belonged there.
• • •
When she got home from Gabe’s apartment, she climbed the stairs to her fifth-floor walk-up, sobbing. From the fourth-floor landing, she heard a door above creak open and prayed it was not Mr. Fatelli, the lecherous old guy next door, who always smelled like soup and wanted her to come inside and have a look at his pet lovebirds, Sid and Nancy.
But then she heard Rhiannon’s voice: “Maggie?” came the soft Scottish accent.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said, walking up the last flight, wishing she could get inside and be alone, despite the fact that she genuinely liked Rhiannon.
Her neighbor on the other side was a gorgeous girl from Glasgow. She was not yet thirty, but had already divorced the older American businessman who had brought her here. Now she worked as a hostess at a trendy restaurant in SoHo by night and attended graduate school at NYU three days a week. Rhiannon seemed like a free spirit, maybe because she was a foreigner, and therefore felt adventurous (or maybe it was the reverse—she was bold enough to come here because she was just the adventurous type). She was always going on a boat ride up the Hudson or biking through the Bronx or trying every pizza place in Staten Island in the course of a week. She lived in New York the way everyone imagined living there, but no one actually did.
A few months earlier, at Rhiannon’s urging, Maggie and Gabe had gone to the restaurant where she worked for dinner. Rhiannon had worn a tiny tight dress in Lewinsky blue; her muscular arms and legs were everywhere as she led them to their table.
Afterward, she chatted with them for a bit, joking with Gabe about her name: “This is what happens when Fleetwood Mac fans mate,” she said. “I’m thinking of starting a support group with my friend Gypsy.”
“Seriously?” he responded, clearly captivated.
“No, not seriously,” she said.
“Ah, you got me,” he said, giving her a wink, which annoyed Maggie ever so slightly. She imagined for an instant how he behaved when she wasn’t around.
Out in the street afterward, Gabe said, “She’s pretty hot stuff.”
“You’re not really her type, sweetie,” Maggie said. “She goes for rich, old geezers.”
“I meant her attitude,” he said. “She’s spunky. She must get bored with a gig like that. Why does she do it?”
Rhiannon had told Maggie that she had gotten the restaurant job only because she needed dental work. Until then she had done fine without health coverage. Maggie herself wouldn’t dare to live without insurance for a single day. That would no doubt be the day that a piano fell from a tenth-story window and landed on her head.
“Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked now, seeing Maggie’s tears.
“Gabe and I had a fight,” Maggie said.
Rhiannon nodded. “Why don’t we pop downstairs for a drink?”
“I just want to go to bed,” Maggie said. “I hope that doesn’t sound rude.”
Rhiannon laughed. “Yeah, goddamn your rudeness. You really need to get that in check. Seriously, though, I’m worried about you. Do you want to talk?”
Maggie shook her head. “Maybe later?”
Rhiannon was her first New York neighbor who had become something like a friend. The two of them weren’t all that close, but they had had several long chats out in the hallway, and on the day Rhiannon’s divorce was finalized, they’d gone for dinner at a new place on Orange Street, and toasted to freedom, though Maggie wondered whether Rhiannon actually saw it that way.
“I’ll be here if you need me,” Rhiannon said now.
“I appreciate it,” Maggie said.
Inside the apartment, she left her packed suitcase by the door and crawled into bed. A pair of Gabe’s corduroys