Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [65]
But when she answered, it was her sister, Clare, at the other end of the line.
“Did you guys know you’re in the current issue of Organic Living magazine?” she said.
“You read Organic Living?” Kathleen asked.
“Joe picked it up at the doctor’s office. He smuggled the copy out in his shorts!”
Kathleen smiled.
“Why didn’t you tell us? Joe’s taping the article in the store window right now.”
Clare sounded happy. In her former job, Kathleen had always thought of her when she advised awkward adolescents that life would get better. For Clare, this had proven true. She had always felt somewhat removed from their relatives, Kathleen thought. They treated her like she was a snob for being inquisitive and bookish. (Even Kathleen herself was guilty of it. She didn’t come around to seeing the beauty of her sister until much later. She realized that maybe she had been jealous of Clare when they were younger, because Clare was the smart one, the one who really didn’t care what anyone else thought. Kathleen wasn’t brave like that until she hit middle age.) Clare and her husband, Joe, were both the brains of non-brainy families. Their business, selling Catholic paraphernalia to priests and grandmothers, was a strange fit for a couple of liberal intellectuals who lived in Jamaica Plain. But they made a killing.
“How’s Ryan?” Kathleen asked now.
“He’s great. He got a second callback for Kiss Me Kate at Wheelock Family Theatre. The rehearsals are in August, so if he gets it, it will completely mess up our plans for Maine.”
“Don’t tell Ann Marie. She’ll accuse you of elder abuse for abandoning Alice there.”
“Oh please. Those two should just run off together and make it official already,” Clare said. “That was mean of me. Joe’s a bad influence. I’m sure we’ll go for at least a week. Maybe more, depending. You and Arlo should join us.”
“I don’t think we can get away,” Kathleen said, and though they both knew there was a lot more to it than that, neither of them elaborated.
“Well, if you change your mind, let me know. We won’t pull up the drawbridge for our allotted month the way the Perfects do.”
They talked about work and about Alice and an old schoolmate of theirs who had gotten married for the seventh time last month.
Then Clare said, “Which reminds me! Ryan told me this funny idea he had for a musical. It would be about different couples at their weddings, and then it would follow them into their marriages. The idea being that the wedding a couple has will predict what their marriage will be like. I think he’s a genius! I know I’m biased. But he’s on to something, right? Think about our three weddings—yours, mine, and Pat’s.”
Patrick and Ann Marie’s had been an over-the-top affair at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, exactly what one might expect from a couple of show-offs like them, pretending at the wealth they wanted so badly. Ann Marie’s dress was pure white lace; the flower girls wore pink tutus. All of their parents’ friends were in attendance, the average guest’s age hovering somewhere around fifty-three. But as far as Clare noticed, Pat and Ann Marie never exchanged a single tender gesture: no handholding as they came off the dance floor, or kissing, unless someone did the hideous fork ding, in which case they’d pucker for the cameras like a couple of hams.
Kathleen and Paul’s wedding was emblematic of their shitty relationship, too, Clare said. They kissed passionately in the church, a fact that irked Alice to no end. They danced like crazy, bodies rubbing up against each other as if no one else were in the room. By ten thirty, they were both drunk. Two friends of Paul’s got into a fistfight in the men’s room. Kathleen tried to break them apart and ended up with blood on her dress. Afterward, she sobbed unabashedly at the head table, and when Clare came to check on her, she grabbed Clare’s wrist and said, “In