Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [63]
Feeling sick to her stomach, Maggie dialed the number from her own phone and heard a voice mail recording: “You’ve reached Stephanie. Leave a message.”
When he came home with sandwiches from the deli, she asked him about the calls. He went into the bedroom without saying a word and slammed the door, locking it behind him. She sat on the couch, still as stone, waiting. He returned to the living room twenty minutes later and screamed at her for snooping, saying he had been out with guys from college and didn’t always want her in tow. He needed his space, time away from her, if this could ever work.
“Whose number was that?” she said, shaking.
“One of the guys. You don’t know him.”
“Gabe, I called it,” she said.
He hung his head. “Oh.”
“So?”
“It’s not what you think,” he said, a phrase that never led anywhere good. “It’s the number of a dealer, someone who sells coke. It wasn’t for me, I swear. It was for these guys who were visiting.”
“I heard a girl’s voice,” she said.
“It’s a decoy. It always goes straight to that voice mail; you leave a message and they call you back,” he said. Then he actually began to cry, which she had never seen him do before. “You have to believe me. I don’t want to lose you over something stupid like this.”
Somehow she ended up feeling relieved by his explanation. At least he hadn’t cheated; at least he still loved her. It wasn’t until a week or so later that she considered the fact that Gabe had the number of a cocaine dealer. She didn’t know anything about cocaine, but she knew enough to realize that there was a difference between occasionally trying it at a party, say, and being the guy with the hookup.
She didn’t want to leave him. She just wanted him to change, even as she recognized this as classic child-of-an-alcoholic behavior, even as she could hear her mother’s voice in her head saying the only person you can ever truly change is yourself.
Still, Maggie wanted somehow to jolt him into action, to make him realize that certain parts of him needed transformation, or she’d be forced to go. She remembered nights when she was a little girl. Sometimes, long after dinner and homework and baths were through, they would hear her father’s car pull into the driveway, and her mother would say with a broad smile: “Let’s hide from Daddy.”
Back then, this was Maggie’s favorite game, one of those deliciously rare moments when the grown-ups entered the world of children. But as an adult, she often wondered what all that had been about and imagined that perhaps her mother did it to send her husband a warning: If you keep coming home at any time you choose, smelling like liquor without a decent excuse, someday you will walk through that door and find your family gone.
Kathleen
The ginger tea had steeped now and on the kitchen table were six large buckets of steamed organic waste, ready to be served. Kathleen got a kick out of imagining herself writing in to the BC alumni magazine: Kathleen Kelleher lives in California and is considered the best worm chef on the West Coast. Her most popular dish consists of four hundred banana peels, hold the mold, and fifteen dozen eggshells, lightly toasted, with a soupçon of decomposing apple core.
Later, they would feed the newly hatched worms the first meal of their lives. She had once told Maggie that doing this felt somehow profound. You wanted to welcome them into the world properly. Maggie found all of it revolting. Kathleen understood—hers was not a glamorous way of life, and okay, yes, she could see how it might seem kind of goofy. But she couldn’t help but get caught up in it. Arlo’s passion was contagious.
The worms across the barn from the newborns had filled their containers with droppings now. This afternoon she would have to coax them into the corners of their boxes with sweet rose petals, while Arlo scooped up the results. He would place the droppings in oversize garbage bags and then put the bags in the back of his pickup. Tomorrow they would transport several loads to the edge