Maine (26 page)

“That sounds cozy.”

Maggie grinned. “I know, right? We have a big Irish Catholic family, so I guess in theory we need a lot of room.”

“I like that you call yourselves Irish. Why do Americans always want so badly to be from somewhere else?” Rhiannon asked.

Maybe she had a point. Maggie’s grandparents and Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat were particularly obsessed, but the whole Kelleher family was crazy about Ireland, including Maggie herself. The music, the history, the dancing, the sad stories from the past. Her mother had once been this way, too, but now she made fun of the rest of them for it.

They all wore claddagh rings instead of wedding bands. Ann Marie and Pat slept in a bed with a headboard that had the words HIMSELF and HERSELF carved in the soft wood above where they lay their respective heads, and a shamrock in between.

Her cousins Patty and Fiona had been forced to take step dancing lessons as kids. They competed at the Stonehill Irish Festival every summer. Patty wore her gillies around the cottage in Maine, laced halfway up her calves, an absurd bathing suit accompaniment that nonetheless made Maggie burn with jealousy.

Since she had grown up in the suburbs of Boston, Maggie’s friends from childhood were all Irish, too, so that it wasn’t until her first March in Ohio that she realized not everyone wore head-to-toe green and ate corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day.

Pat and Ann Marie and their kids made regular trips to Ireland—Patty always mailed Maggie Aero bars and other local candies, which had melted completely by the time they arrived in Massachusetts. On those visits, Uncle Pat had unearthed various distant cousins who lived in County Kerry. He gleefully showed them around Boston, letting them stay over in the guest room, sending them home with Red Sox jerseys and several pounds of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, which apparently they were crazy for.

She told Rhiannon this, and Rhiannon laughed.

“Are there eighty-seven cousins on each side?”

“My mom has something like forty cousins. There are a lot fewer in this generation. On my dad’s side, we have ten,” Maggie said. “But we were never all that close to them growing up. We’d see one another at christenings and on Easter, stuff like that. But my mom’s side of the family was always the closest. Totally messed up, but close.”

“And how many cousins on that side?” Rhiannon asked.

“Only four,” Maggie said. “It always seemed like more, like a bigger family.”

She still pictured them as their childhood selves. Ann Marie and Patrick’s kids: Patty, Fiona, and Little Daniel (her mother often joked that these names had doomed them to sound like a trio of Irish peasants from birth). Clare and Joe’s only child was named Ryan, after someone, though Maggie couldn’t remember who.

Little Daniel, handsome even as a kid, was a charmer who always struck her as unnecessarily arrogant. He was cruel to his younger boy cousins when none of the adults were watching; later he became a young hotshot and now he was in finance or real estate, or some similarly incomprehensible line of work. At Thanksgiving he had given her his business card, which did nothing to shed light on the matter. Maggie really only understood jobs that could be described in a single word:
writer
or
doctor
or
teacher
made sense.
Vice president of debt capital markets and global currencies
did not.

Little Daniel’s sister Fiona was boyish and quiet and unadorned, involved with all kinds of social causes, even in high school. Maggie wondered sometimes whether Fiona was actually happy, still off in the Peace Corps at age thirty. Kathleen thought Fiona might be gay and that she lived halfway around the world partly as a means of keeping that to herself, of never having to come out to the family or deal with their reaction. If that was true, Maggie wished she could write Fiona a letter and say,
You’re my cousin and I love you! You’re allowed to be a lesbian. No one’s going to judge you
.

But Fiona’s parents wouldn’t want to know. For God’s sake, they probably still thought Kathleen was going to Hell for getting a divorce.

Their sister Patty was older than Maggie by four months. The two of them were so similar that as kids they declared that they were the true sisters. (
Poor Fiona
, Maggie thought now, too late.) Patty and Maggie looked alike, with the same brown hair and freckles. They both played basketball and loved writing and chasing boys. As children they each wore one half of a heart-shaped best friends necklace and spent countless hours together after school, listening to music and eating cookie dough straight from the package when Ann Marie wasn’t looking.

They hardly ever spoke anymore. Patty had this big grown-up life: a husband, three kids, a house in the suburbs. The two of them had always been compared to each other, and now Maggie compared them herself.

Last, there was her cousin Ryan—a teenage musical theater prodigy who was coming to stay with her for his NYU audition when she got back to town. (Maggie was crazy about that kid. Once, when he was only four or five, she had taken him to the movies. As soon as the opening credits rolled, he said he had to go to the bathroom. Maggie was nervous to let him go into the men’s room alone, but he said he did it all the time, and it was the type that was designed for one person, so it wasn’t like some pervert could get him. Still, she stood close by the door, waiting. After only thirty seconds or so, he began to sing, softly at first, but then at the top of his lungs:
Off we’re gonna shuffle, shuffle off to Buffalo!
Maggie rapped on the door. People passing by giggled and stared. She tried the handle, but Ryan had locked it. A crowd gathered. Sixteen minutes later, the child emerged. “There’s a full-length mirror in there!” he said, beaming.)

Compared to the other boys in the family, Maggie’s brother, Chris, seemed like a disaster. He’d never gotten a decent job after college. He was now working as a “marketing field rep,” which meant that he stood outside the student union at BU, handing out fliers about new burger joints and sample sales to co-eds. He sometimes had a scary temper. Whenever he acted up, Kathleen would inevitably blame the uncles, Joe and Pat. Why hadn’t they come around more and given the kid some male bonding time? Maggie would point out that they had sons of their own, and it wasn’t like Chris was
fatherless
. But maybe her mother had a point.

Maggie thought of this now, imagined an old photograph of all six grandkids on the beach that sat on the piano in her grandparents’ house in Canton. What would anyone think of how it had all turned out? She had told Rhiannon they were close, because in her head, that was the truth. But so much had changed.

   When she saw the familiar
WELCOME TO MAINE
sign, she felt like she had arrived home. They stopped at Shop ’n Save on Route 1 for groceries. It had changed into a Hannaford sometime in the mid-nineties, but the Kellehers still called it by its original name. Walking the familiar aisles made her feel simultaneously safe and lonesome.

On the drive to the cottage, she pointed out familiar spots—the lobster pound and the old-fashioned pharmacy and the Front Porch, where tourists went late at night to watch male Judy Garland impersonators singing their hearts out.

They passed Ruby’s Market and Maggie thought of how much she had loved bringing Gabe there last summer. The two of them had eaves-dropped on the couple who owned the place, as they railed on about their ungrateful grandchildren, who had dared to move away to the big city. (And by big city they meant Portland, thirty miles north.)

Soon enough, they reached the fork in the road, where the initials
A.H
. were carved into the trunk of a tree, along with an imperfect shamrock. Maggie told Rhiannon to go left.

“Here?” Rhiannon asked skeptically, as newcomers always did, for the opening looked like just a footpath into the woods. They turned onto Briarwood Road and the tires blew sand up off the ground, which gave the impression of a fine mist floating between the pine trees.

“It’s so beautiful,” Rhiannon said.

A few moments later they had arrived, and Maggie’s stomach fluttered, as it always did when she caught sight of the cottage’s weathered wooden shingles, the beach chairs stacked up beside the front door, and the ocean in the distance.

   Alice’s car wasn’t there when they pulled in, but as they unloaded the groceries, Maggie heard someone barreling down the road.

“I think I know who that is,” she said. “Brace yourself.”

Alice turned in without signaling, and pulled up a few inches behind Rhiannon’s Subaru, even though there was enough room in the grass for seven cars. When she got out, she bore a puzzled look.

“Maggie?” Alice said, staring at Rhiannon as if, without Gabe there, she couldn’t be sure it was really her granddaughter standing before her.

“Grandma, this is my friend Rhiannon,” she said. “Rhiannon, my grandmother Alice.”

Rhiannon extended a hand.

Alice shook her head quickly back and forth, and Maggie realized that she probably should have prepared her for this. With all the insanity of the last two days, she hadn’t even thought.

“I don’t understand,” Alice fumbled. “Where’s Gabe?”

She looked past them into the car, as if perhaps they had tied him up in the backseat.

“He’s not coming,” Maggie said. Her eyes met Alice’s and she saw that her grandmother was crushed. “We had a big fight. We sort of broke up. I tried to tell you when I called, but—”

“No, you didn’t tell me,” Alice said. “I would have remembered that. And I wouldn’t have paid full price for the corn muffins he said he liked if I’d known. I don’t want those in my house. What am I going to do with them?”

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, her face turning pink with embarrassment. “I can pay you back.”

What the hell must Rhiannon be thinking? A granddaughter reimbursing her own grandmother for five dollars’ worth of store-brand muffins?

Something in Alice seemed to change then, as if she was reasoning with herself. “Oh, don’t be silly. You’ll still come to dinner, I hope? I haven’t made an entire meatloaf for nothing. Your friend can sleep in the guest room in the cottage; there are sheets on the beds.”

“Oh, she’s actually turning back tonight. She just came along for the ride,” Maggie said.

“Back to New York? Tonight?” Alice said. “That’s ludicrous. You’ll at least stay for dinner, won’t you, Diana?”

“It’s Rhiannon,” Maggie said.

“I’d love to,” Rhiannon said. “Is there anything we can bring?”

“Not at all,” Alice said sweetly, and Maggie wondered if her discomfort was apparent to Rhiannon, or if she was finding Alice altogether charming, as strangers often did.

Maggie started to speak, but Alice had already turned away and was walking toward the big house.

They made their way into the cottage.

“Your grandmother is gorgeous,” Rhiannon said in the kitchen, starting to unpack the food.

“Thanks,” Maggie said, like she always did when people commented on Alice’s beauty. It was a strange, knee-jerk response.
Thank you for being surprised that a relative of mine is particularly good-looking, and by extension giving away what you think of my appearance
.

At Kenyon she had dated Christian Taylor, the son of two Cambridge intellectuals, for over a year. His parents had nothing much to say to her mother when they met, but at graduation, after they were introduced to Alice, Christian’s mother pulled Maggie aside and said, “Your grandmother is stunning, very exotic looking. Does she have Egyptian blood?”

The Kellehers on Maggie’s mother’s side and the Doyles on her father’s had migrated from County Kerry, Ireland, to Dorchester, Massachusetts, three generations earlier, and most offshoots of the clan had since made it no further than the suburbs of Boston.

“No Egyptian blood that we know of,” Maggie had said.

   Before they went next door, Maggie asked whether Rhiannon had a good heavy sweater for walking on the beach later. She wanted to show off the perfect stars, perhaps as a means of deflecting attention from whatever horror show Alice might pull at dinner.

Rhiannon said she hadn’t brought anything bulky.

“That’s okay,” Maggie said. “The dresser in my grandparents’ old bedroom is full of stuff. Take your pick. Just not the green old-man sweater in the bottom drawer. I get dibs on that one.”

“Deal,” Rhiannon said, walking toward the bedroom. A moment later she called out, “Oh, but the drawers are empty!”

Maggie walked toward her. Grains of sand clung to the soles of her feet. When she saw the drawers pulled out with only the familiar seashell-printed liner paper in the bottom, her stomach jolted with alarm. She walked to the closet, expecting to see the oversize pink bathrobe that Ann Marie had left there years earlier, and the stack of white knitted blankets made by her great-grandmother. But the closet stood bare.

Maggie thought of her grandfather’s green sweater, which he had given her on an early-morning walk to Ruby’s Market when she was in middle school. She remembered being mortified wearing it all the way up Briarwood Road, and she shoved it in a drawer in the cottage as soon as they arrived home. But it had become her tradition to pull it out on arrival each summer, and wear it every morning while she drank her coffee. Ridiculously, the thought of someone else—one of her cousins, or worse, a friend of theirs—taking it made her want to cry.

   “We were looking for a sweater in the bedroom in the cottage, and the drawers were all empty,” she said to Alice shortly after they’d arrived for dinner.

The three of them stood awkwardly in the kitchen while the meatloaf cooled on the counter. The potato salad was covered in foil and sitting in a sweaty bowl. Maggie hoped it hadn’t been decomposing in the freezer since the previous summer. With Alice you never knew.

“I can lend you a cardigan, but it might be snug,” Alice said.

“Thanks, but no, I just meant—well, where did everything go?”

“I got rid of some stuff in the cottage,” Alice said. “It was getting too cluttered over there.”