Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [7]
“Like in Monopoly,” he had said, a comparison that made Alice laugh, though she could see through Daniel’s tight smile that he found the comment patronizing.
After the house went up, Patrick had the whole place appraised. When he told her that it was now worth over two million dollars, Alice nearly fainted. Two million dollars for land that had been handed to them for free half a century earlier!
“See? Our boy is a smart one,” she had said to Daniel then.
He shook his head. “It’s dangerous, talking about money this way. Our home is not for sale.”
She looked into his sad eyes and gave him a smile. She wanted to hold on to it all every bit as much as he did.
She put a hand on his cheek. “No one said it was.”
Of their three children, Patrick, the youngest, had done the best by far. They sent him to BC High. His last year of high school he dated Sherry Burke, the daughter of the mayor of Cambridge. Sherry was a sweet girl, and her family exposed Pat to the finer things. Alice always thought those years with her might have been what motivated him to make money later on. (She still saw Sherry—a state senator in her own right—in the newspaper now and then.) Pat went on to Notre Dame, where he finished sixth in his class. He met Ann Marie, who was studying at his sister school, Saint Mary’s. They were married the summer they turned twenty-two. They had a strong marriage, and three wonderful children—Fiona, Patty, and darling Little Daniel, Alice’s favorite of all her grandkids. Pat was a stockbroker; Ann Marie stayed at home. They lived in an enormous house in Newton, with a swimming pool out back and matching blue Mercedes sedans.
Alice’s daughters called them the Perfects. Well, by comparison, yes. Alice was always quick to point out that Ann Marie was a better daughter to her than either of them was. Ann Marie included her in weekend activities; they got their hair done together at a fancy place in town. They had long lunches and traded recipes and thick hardcover books and fashion magazines. Alice’s own two daughters could barely manage to call her once a week and update her on their lives. Clare made up for it every now and then with nice presents, but Kathleen didn’t even bother trying.
Clare was Alice’s middle child, born two years before Patrick. When they were young, Alice had worried the most about her. She had a shock of red hair, the color of autumn leaves; an unfortunately round face; and freckles (Daniel’s side). She was a tomboy, and she was smart, perhaps too smart for her own good. In high school, Clare acted as serious as a nun, cloistered away in her bedroom, reading her textbooks by the open window, sneaking cigarettes when she thought Alice wasn’t looking. She never had many friends, no more than one or two at a time, and never for longer than a few months. Daniel said it wasn’t very motherly of her to say so, but Alice feared it was something Clare was doing that kept chasing people off, rather than the opposite.
After graduating from BC, Clare worked with computers, doing something Alice still didn’t quite understand. She was completely devoted to her job, and never went on any dates as far as Alice knew. In her late thirties, she met Joe, through work, of course. His family business was a religious goods store in Southie that sold ornate Bibles and prayer books to true believers, and crosses and Infant of Prague statues to children making their First Communion. Joe’s father gave him the company when he retired and Clare put the merchandise on the Internet somehow.
They had done well for themselves. They lived in an old Victorian house in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood that they claimed to love for its diversity and public victory gardens. (Those sound like the sort of traits you’d use to praise a slum, Alice thought each time they mentioned them, though