Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [86]
“I’ll be there tomorrow. So maybe we can watch the rest of the show together.”
“Okay, well, tell Gabe I’ve got a new book of sheet music from the library—Broadway: The Patriot Songs.”
“Actually, it’s just going to be me,” Maggie said.
Perhaps Alice hadn’t heard her, because she only responded, “I need to get to the Shop ’n Save before they run out of the good muffins that he likes. And they’ve got hamburger meat on sale, so we can do burgers on the grill tomorrow night if you want. Or I could do a meatloaf. Let’s do that, because it might rain.”
Maggie wished she didn’t feel envious of the fact that Alice clearly wanted to see Gabe more than she wanted to see her. Maybe she should have said, We broke up, or Grandma, he’s an asshole.
Instead, all she said was “Sounds good.”
“Well, this must be costing you a fortune,” Alice said. “A long-distance call on a cellular phone? We’d better wrap it up.”
“There’s no such thing as a long-distance call from a cell phone,” Maggie said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Love you.”
It felt sort of unnatural, saying I love you to Alice. But it was just as strange not to say it, so Maggie did.
As soon as they hung up, Maggie looked at her phone, in case she had somehow missed a call from Gabe.
Her fear began to swell but she pushed it down. She knew she was pregnant, but at certain moments it was still easy enough to believe that nothing was happening. Perhaps this was how those women who delivered full-term babies into McDonald’s toilets started out.
She watched TV. An hour later, in the middle of a Golden Girls episode, her heart began to thump out of nowhere. She tried to take deep breaths. When she looked down at her calves, they were covered in red splotches.
Maggie put her head between her legs—wasn’t that something people did?
It didn’t seem to help. A moment later, she sat up straight and called her mother. She couldn’t keep the secret any longer. This child was literally making her sick. (Could you possibly be allergic to your own fetus? No, that was ridiculous.) Kathleen would know what to do.
Maggie spoke to her mother at least once a day, but now that there was actually something important to say, she feared it.
It would never have dawned on her to call her father, even though he was in the same time zone. She talked to him every couple of weeks, but only about the most banal topics: how the Red Sox were faring, what he thought of the latest season of Law & Order, whether her super had properly installed the carbon monoxide detector. He had married his longtime girlfriend, Irene, the previous year and asked Chris to be his best man. Maggie had felt so sad for her younger brother that this well-meaning but emotionally tone-deaf man was his one and only father, though of course he was her only father too. He and Irene were heavy drinkers, just as he and Kathleen had once been—they were fun and boisterous much of the time, but the flip side was that they had loud, drunken arguments in front of other people, and did God only knows what when no one was looking. Maggie prayed her father had had the good sense to get a vasectomy.
After Maggie dialed her number, Kathleen answered the phone sounding muffled.
“We’re out in the barn up to our elbows in shit,” she said happily. “You okay?”
“I’m freaking out,” Maggie said. “I really need to talk.”
“Okay,” Kathleen said. “Let me go into the yard. Hold on.”
There were a few banging sounds and her mother said, “Oh Jesus, can we get rid of some of this?”
Then Kathleen came back clearer. “What’s wrong?”
“I have these red splotches all over my legs, and I can’t breathe too well.”
“Like big clusters of splotches or more like bug bites?”
“Clusters.”
“Are they red or brown?”
“Red.”
“Sounds like hives,” Kathleen said calmly. “You never get those.”
“I know. I’m freaking out. I can’t breathe.”
“Calm down. I think you might be having a panic