Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [99]
Maggie
Maggie and Rhiannon had arranged to drive to Maine on Tuesday morning. By the time she woke up, Gabe still hadn’t called. Her sharp disappointment made her realize how much she had been hoping, believing, he might come around. She felt weighted down with gloom, but somehow managed to drag herself toward the shower so that she’d be on time. Politeness above all else, she thought. Where the hell had she learned to be like that? By watching her mother, she realized, and then doing the exact opposite of what she saw. Or possibly it came from her aunt Ann Marie.
Maggie made her way next door with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, just half of what she had originally packed, since she’d be staying only a few days now.
She knocked, and Rhiannon appeared in a cotton sheath that ended at the midpoint of her thigh. (“Your knees should have a party and invite your skirt down,” Maggie’s grandfather had said whenever she wore a dress he deemed too short.)
Maggie had never had a knack for clothing. Women in New York amazed her with their perfectly chiseled bodies; their ability to wear stiletto heels in rain, sleet, or snow; and their innate resolve around bread baskets. Given the choice, she’d prefer that everyone walk around in a potato sack to level the playing field a bit.
Her size-eight jeans had felt snug when she put them on this morning. Now they felt as tight as snake skin, and she had to remind herself that she was pregnant, after all (while sparing herself the knowledge that the size eights were tight long before she was pregnant).
They were on the road at nine fifteen, and had already stopped for rations by nine thirty. Rhiannon pumped the gas while Maggie went inside to pay and get breakfast.
“Something very sugary with nine hundred grams of fat,” Rhiannon requested, surprising her.
“I like the way you think.”
Maggie walked the aisles as an instrumental version of Journey’s “Open Arms” played over the loudspeaker. Gabe had drunkenly belted out the song at the karaoke birthday party of one of his former co-workers a few weeks earlier.
She couldn’t quite say where they were now. Queens, maybe.
Her phone was in her pocket and set to vibrate. She pulled a bag of powdered mini doughnuts from a hook on a wall of processed desserts.
The man behind the counter wore a cross the size of a brick around his neck. She thought of the tiny silver crucifix she herself had worn as a child, the type her grandmother and Aunt Ann Marie still wore to this day. That sort of understated cross, always tucked into a sweater or blouse, said, “I love Jesus Christ.” A cross like the one this man wore seemed to say, “I want you to think I love Jesus Christ.”
“Nice day for driving,” he said as he rang up her purchases. “Lucky you’re not stuck in here.”
She considered pointing to her head and saying, “Well, you’re lucky you’re not stuck in here.”
Instead, she just smiled. “Have a good one,” she said.
Back in the car, Maggie opened the bag of doughnuts and handed one to Rhiannon.
“Onward, driver,” she said.
She was grateful to Rhiannon for the special treatment. But she couldn’t help thinking she should be with Gabe right now, driving fast, laughing and singing along to the radio. She suddenly wondered what the hell she had been thinking. She sucked on her bottom lip to keep from crying, feeling like a stupid little girl.
“So,” Rhiannon said cheerfully. “On a scale of one to ten, how much do you feel like killing yourself today?”
Maggie grinned. “No comment.”
“I know how you feel,” Rhiannon said. “I got pregnant when I was still married to Liam. I found out two days after the first time he shoved me. Which was also the day I knew I’d leave him. Though I probably knew long before