Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [98]
“Mom? What are you doing?”
“I’m having a drink, what does it look like?”
She was drunk. Her lips and teeth were tinged dark blue. How much had she had? Kathleen had the urge to run and get her father.
“Maybe we should get you to bed,” she said.
“To bed? It’s six o’clock. I’m not some feeble old woman, Kathleen.”
A few people gathered around the table glanced over at them now.
Kathleen said, in a hushed voice, “I didn’t mean that, I’m—”
“What? You killed him, and now you want me dead, too, is that it?”
Kathleen took a step back.
“Not content to have just most of our money, you want it all,” Alice said, and it took everything in Kathleen not to hit her.
Instead she turned around and made her way through the crowd until she spotted Maggie and Christopher, and then she pulled them by the backs of their shirts as if they were children who had run into traffic. She yanked them toward the door and out to the car, and only then did she allow herself to speak.
“I will never talk to that woman again,” she said.
“What did the bitch do now?” Christopher said.
Under other circumstances she might have worried about his language, even scolded him, but Kathleen was strangely grateful.
The next day, Alice called and left messages in an almost gossipy tone, as if the funeral had been the wedding of a distant cousin: “Call me back so we can discuss Mary Clancy’s obvious face-lift,” she said, and “I thought Ann Marie’s deviled eggs tasted almost spoiled, didn’t you?” That comment made it clear that she knew she had done wrong, but she made no mention of what she had said.
Kathleen went ten months without speaking to her, until they came to a truce brought on by the fact that, like it or not, they had to sit around Ann Marie’s Thanksgiving table with the others.
But the resentment lingered on, even now.
A few months after the scene at her father’s funeral, Kathleen met Arlo. The farm in California was his lifelong dream, and within weeks of meeting each other they were talking about it in earnest. By then, she had already vaguely decided that it was time to leave Massachusetts, where all the ghosts of her life remained. Maggie was settled in New York, and Chris was off at Trinity. There was nothing tying her to Boston anymore. The Kellehers thought she was nuts—“using Dad’s money to fund a worm poop farm” sounded like the perfect punch line to one of their Kathleen jokes. What stupid decision will she make next?
She and Arlo had known each other for all of six months when they moved. Looking back on it now, Kathleen marveled at her willingness to take such a risk, but she might have jumped at any excuse to leave. Arlo had never been married. He had dated a woman named Flora for seven years, and she still called from time to time, to catch up and wish him well. They were that kind of people. Kathleen really wasn’t, but she tried to let it wash over her. She had even gone to dinner with Flora and Arlo once, to a quiet candlelit place up the mountain, and listened almost contentedly as Flora told them about her pottery studio in Portland, her life spent dating Dead Heads (“Even now, no one else does it for me”), her years with Arlo (“We thought we were soul mates because our names were almost anagrams”). It was worth it when Kathleen heard Arlo describe their life. It sounded peaceful, fulfilled. And it was.
She knew that for her it was at least partially about being away from the Kellehers. For the first time in her life, her chaotic family was at a distance. She didn’t have to be a part of all that anymore. Then again, she didn’t get to be a part of all that anymore. She’d hear crazy stories about gossip and arguments and misunderstandings—from her kids, from Clare, and from Alice, now that the hatchet was more or less buried between them—and once in a while she would find with some surprise that part of her missed it, in spite of everything.
And there was guilt, the trademark emotion of the faith they were born into. When Kathleen