Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [58]
Maggie cried until she fell asleep. She dreamed of her grandfather at the beach in Maine, dancing on the shore alone, in his old palm-tree-print bathing suit, little curls of white hair on his chest. He was laughing, carefree.
When she woke up, she thought first of him. In a lot of ways, he had been more of a dad to her than her own father ever had. It was her grandpa who used to make her giggle with his ridiculous jokes when some kid at school hurt her feelings; her grandpa who came over and shoveled their driveway after a snowstorm. At the cottage in Maine, he’d sing lullabies to the grandkids at bedtime, always in an exaggerated, melodramatic voice.
He had been the one to drive Maggie to college, with all of her belongings in the back of his Buick, all the way to Ohio. That road trip was one of her happiest memories: she got to talk to him in a way that she never had before, without her brother and cousins there vying for his attention.
After ten hours in the car, they stopped for dinner at some ramshackle place on the side of the road. Her grandfather drank a pint of Guinness, and told her that when he had first met Alice he’d been so startled by her beauty that he nearly ran off; every word out of his mouth was utter nonsense. He told her that the day her mother was born was the most amazing one of his life, and that he had left his wife and new baby sleeping in the hospital room and gone straight to morning Mass at St. Ignatius, where he put a hundred-dollar bill in the collection plate.
“Your grandma and I are so proud of you,” he said. “We know you’re going to be a very bright star, Maggie.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re the first one in our family to go to a non-Catholic school, you know,” he said, and she rolled her eyes because he had been mentioning this all summer. “You’ve broken our hearts, but that’s fine.”
“Grandpa!”
“Be sure not to give up on your faith, okay?” he said. “You’re going to the sort of place where they’re not too keen on religion. But remember where you came from.”
The food arrived, and he said with a straight face, “Maggie, my dear, do you know why you shouldn’t lend money to a leprechaun?”
She sighed. “Because they’re always a little short.”
He nodded approvingly. “Well, will you look at her! All right, how about this: Paddy told Murphy that his wife was driving him to drink. Murphy told Paddy he’s a lucky bastard because his own wife makes him walk.”
Maggie groaned but she couldn’t stop him from launching into a series of Irish jokes, delivered in a terribly unconvincing brogue, which lasted all the way through dessert.
Maggie was twenty-two when he passed away, and even now, ten years later, the thought of it was jarring. She recalled a line from a poem she had memorized in college: No thing that ever flew, not the lark, not you, can die as others do.
But he was gone, and maybe Gabe was gone as well. It was almost ten, and the sky outside had turned pure black. Maggie looked at her phone. No missed calls.
In twelve hours, they were supposed to be leaving for Maine. Should she still go? She wished she were the kind of person who could bury her head under the covers and order pizza from Fascati’s every afternoon and ignore reality, without thinking obsessively about him, or showing up at his door like a lunatic.
Maybe they’d make up in a day, or a week’s time, and carry on with their plan. But Gabe was rarely flexible like that, never kind after a battle. And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn’t happen. That was just the way life went.
She sat up in bed now, and looked around at her place, the whole apartment—minus the tiny bathroom—visible from where she was. Could she really raise a child in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, alone? She had thought that she was ready to be a mother. But maybe the whole idea was absurd. If it was really over, she wondered how long she could stay here, before the ghosts of them would be too strong to bear. This apartment had brought them