Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [74]
“What’s up, Mom?” Patty answered, sounding flustered.
“It’s a Sunday. What are you doing there?” Ann Marie asked.
“I’m swamped.”
“Where are the kids?”
“I think they went to a sports bar to watch the Sox game.”
“What?”
“They’re home with Josh.”
“Oh. Are they doing okay?”
“You saw them two days ago,” Patty said with a laugh.
“I know,” Ann Marie said. “Maisy’s coming over after school tomorrow for our special tea party, right? The teacher knows I’m picking her up?”
“Yes. Hey, Mom, I’ve got a brief I need to file first thing tomorrow, and I’ve barely made a dent. Can I call you later?”
“Sure, honey,” Ann Marie said.
They hung up. Ann Marie felt a bit sad, but couldn’t say why.
Turning onto Sycamore behind two twenty-somethings in a yellow convertible, she wondered whether Patty knew about Fiona. They had never been particularly close. Patty had always liked her cousin Maggie better. Ann Marie had once washed her mouth out with soap when she came across the child taunting her younger sister: “You’re not really my sister, Maggie is.” Fiona was crying her eyes out, but Patty kept on going.
Recently, Patty had remarked that she was shocked by how cruel her children could be.
“Sometimes they’re like animals,” she had said. “I want to lock myself in the bathroom and hide. How did you survive?”
Ann Marie waited in a short line of cars to turn onto the expressway. She glanced at the clock, even though she knew she was right on time.
Patty and Fiona seemed to start talking more after they moved out of the house, just as Ann Marie and her own sisters had. At Ann Marie’s urging, her daughters began writing letters to each other from college. (She had sent them the cutest stationery sets and plenty of stamps.) They chatted easily and went out for lunch when they were home for the summer. But then Fiona left for Namibia. Had she been running away? Was that what it was all about? Ann Marie didn’t know anyone with a gay child. Who could she ask?
She hadn’t spoken to Fiona about it since that first night at dinner. When she wrote to her daughter, she reported on the latest family gossip and the weather and her dollhouse. She could feel herself almost begging Fiona not to bring it up. Fiona, in turn, wrote about her work with children, the beautiful sunset over her village. Ann Marie felt relieved. She had long wanted Fiona to come home, but now, to her great shame, she almost wished she could freeze time: Fiona, caring, generous, far away, like she had always been. Not here, bringing a girlfriend over for Sunday dinner, adopting an African baby and carrying him around Newton in a sling while everyone whispered and stared.
Pat had said that it felt almost like a death: He was mourning the fact that Fiona would never have a wedding, never meet that charming do-gooder husband they had imagined for her, never have kids. Most painful of all, she could not possibly be a true, accepted Catholic now. If such places did exist, she would not go to Heaven with the rest of them.
Somehow Ann Marie had managed to raise three children who turned their backs on Catholicism in all sorts of ways. She had taught their CCD classes and taken them to church every Sunday. Pat was a eucharistic minister. She had forced Little Daniel to be an altar boy, and enrolled the girls in the choir. She had done all she could, and for what?
Patty had married a Jewish man, which was fine. Times had changed; Ann Marie still had to remind herself of that once in a while. She had held out hope for some time that Josh would convert. When he didn’t, she dealt with it. But the fact that they had chosen not to baptize the grandchildren was like a slap in the face.
For a long time, Ann Marie thought her younger daughter was the one true Catholic among them. Fiona was prone to strep as a child, and once, after several rounds of antibiotics failed to keep it away for long, they took her to get the blessing of Saint Blase, patron saint of throat ailments, as a last resort. The blessing seemed to cure her, which generated