Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [73]
Kathleen came empty-handed. According to her, this was because she had to travel. (Did travel preclude a person from picking up a bottle of wine or a box of crackers and some cheese?) Before she moved to California, she would bring her two huge slobbering German shepherds along on Christmas. Ann Marie would be forced to let the dogs stay in her kitchen, where they had once been caught licking the leftover roast.
Those dogs were ancient now. Alice had told her that a year ago, Kathleen paid something like ten thousand dollars to give one of them chemotherapy. Ann Marie had never heard of such a waste of money in her life. She had cousins in Southie who would have been put to sleep for less.
Now when Kathleen came home for the holidays, she often tried to educate Ann Marie’s children on the Gospel According to Her. A few months after Patty’s first baby was born, he cried at dinner, and she rose to take him into the bedroom and feed him, as Ann Marie had instructed.
“Nurse Foster right here at the table,” Kathleen had said. “It’s perfectly natural, honey. Don’t go lurking in the shadows. Don’t be one of those women pumping in the handicap stall at the Olive Garden.”
Maggie nearly spat out her wine. “Really, Mom? The handicap stall at Olive Garden?”
Ann Marie responded softly, mortified, “I think Patty feels, as I do, that some people are made uncomfortable when they see a woman’s bare breast. And so it’s really better for everyone, including the baby, to find a nice solitary spot.”
“That’s bullshit,” Kathleen said.
If this were her own sister, or if she were a different sort of woman, perhaps Ann Marie might have pointed out that Kathleen had bottle-fed both her kids from the time they were three months old. Instead, she swallowed her reply.
“I hardly think this is appropriate dinner conversation,” Alice had said, silencing them. Patty went into the bedroom and shut the door.
There was a long pause. A few years earlier, Daniel Senior would have been there to make a joke, lighten the mood. Ann Marie assumed they were all thinking as much.
Finally Clare said, “Could someone pass the milk?” and they laughed.
Three solid hours of storytelling followed, as if for Daniel’s sake.
The Kellehers allegedly hated one another, but when they got together and things were good, they stayed up all night, laughing and talking. More so when Daniel was alive, but still now from time to time.
Even after thirty-three years of marriage, Ann Marie sat at every family dinner and listened to them tell the same stories, over and over. She had never met a family so tied up in their own mythology.
What drove her around the bend most was when Alice would mention Sherry Burke, then put her hand on Ann Marie’s and say proudly, by way of explanation, as if Ann Marie didn’t know, “Patrick used to date her. She was the daughter of the mayor of Cambridge. A beautiful girl. She’s a senator now!”
“A state senator,” Ann Marie would correct her.
Her husband had dated Sherry Burke in high school, for goodness’ sake.
Sitting there on those nights as they drank countless beers and bottles of wine (the next morning she would be the one to pick up all the glasses and load the dishwasher and wipe down the surfaces), she sometimes dreamed of screaming at them: “If you tell that goddamn story one more time, I will tie up the lot of you and duct tape your big mouths shut.”
She meant the kids also—the nieces and nephews and even her own three, who were true Kellehers in their way. After letting the thought linger in her head a moment, she’d be overcome with guilt and do something ridiculous, like decide that she should go into the kitchen and whip up some brownies from scratch, then serve them warm with ice cream on top.
On the way to the dollhouse show, she called Patty from the car. There was no answer on the cell