It was Ava’s turn to stand motionless, her expression blank, her eyes unreadable.
“Uncle Buddy . . . Please.” Suzanne pleaded softly.
“I’m sorry, Suzie, but some things just have to be said.”
She’d only seen him this angry once before, when he’d found her crying on the steps of O’Shenanigan’s after closing. The boy she’d been dating had wanted more than she’d wanted to give, and there had been a tussle before she’d been able to get out of the car. She’d hitchhiked to the pub, and Buddy had been there.
Oh, yes, he’d been this angry then—there had been rages and yelling and threats of violence, and that particular young man had never shown his face around O’Shenanigan’s again. But that was the only time she’d seen his temper show itself before now.
“I loved James, Ava.” Buddy’s voice was choked with thick emotion. “Like a brother, I loved that man. Do you hear me? Like a brother!” He pounded his cane again. “And where I come from, lady, that means more than any damn restaurant.” He took a moment to calm himself, trying to force his voice back down to its normal register.
Suzanne closed her eyes, remembering other fights, long ago, fights about Daddy’s flirting, fights about Mom’s drinking. She remembered clapping her hands over her ears, just wishing this would stop, wishing she were somewhere else. This, strangely, felt an awful lot like that.
“I will take a lot of crap in the name of that love,” he said evenly, “but there is a limit, and as usual, you just kept pushing and pushing until you found it. You found it, lady. Believe me, if you wanted to hear, there are things I could fill you in on. There are plenty of things I could tell you. I could . . .”
He stumbled and shot a panicked look at Suzanne. She raised her head and listened keenly, waiting to hear what he could tell them. Buddy’s mouth worked, he swallowed hard a couple of times, but nothing came.
“You could tell me what, Mr. McKinley?” Ava asked icily.
When he spoke, it was in a gentle voice full of regret. “How just plain rotten and nasty it is for you to keep rubbing my face in this,” he said at last. “Those mistakes cost me the business I loved too, you know. I lost too. I lost plenty. But I guess you never thought about my losses, did you? You never thought about anyone but Ava, and what Ava wanted, and who to bulldoze over in order to get what Ava wanted, and who to punish,” he tapped his chest, “once things didn’t turn out the way Ava hoped.”
His voice was rising again, so he stopped then. It was enough. Time to go. He bent over, gingerly, to pick up his cane. Brandon leapt to his feet to try to help him, but Buddy waved him off impatiently. Once he had it firmly in hand, he stalked angrily up the stairs into his house.
“Uncle Buddy, please,” called Suzanne, knowing it would be futile, but needing to try. “Come on, come back here. You know she didn’t mean it.” She turned to her mother and savagely hissed, “Tell him. Tell him you didn’t mean that.”
Ava remained silent, but it didn’t matter anyway; the door to his house slammed shut so loudly that Suzanne was amazed the glass didn’t shatter. She slowly turned to look at Ava, still unable to process the fact that her mother, her very own, normally intelligent and rational mother, had made such a patently ridiculous accusation.
“Alcoholics aren’t made,” she’d told Suzanne a thousand times or more. “They’re born. Just like people are born deaf or with a clubfoot. We have a medical condition that we have to be treated for.”
So to hear her allege that anything Buddy had done, no matter how awful, had caused her condition . . .
Well, she knew Ava couldn’t possibly believe that was true. The way her mother was staring after Buddy, fidgeting just ever so slightly, confirmed it.
“Why don’t you go into our house,” Suzanne suggested to Brandon. For the moment, she’d completely forgotten that he was This Brandon, the enemy. “He probably needs a little space.”
“Thanks.” Brandon cast one last disappointed look at Ava, then hopped up the stairs to the deck, into the kitchen, and out of sight.
It was just the two of them now, and for the first time in a long, long time, Suzanne couldn’t make her mother meet her gaze.
“Well,” Suzanne said finally. “Well, well, well.”
“Well? That’s a very deep subject.” Ava forced a bright smile. “Get it?”
“Mother.” Suzanne’s voice was full of meaning.
Ava sighed heavily and turned to her daughter. Their identical deep brown eyes locked, and Suzanne could literally feel what her mother was thinking.
What Ava had done was wrong, and she wanted her to apologize; moreover, she wanted her to apologize right now.
But from the look in Ava’s eyes, she might as well have wished for the moon in a Mason jar, to quote her father. There seemed to be a lot of Jimmy’s quotes floating around all of a sudden.
The streetlight came on just then, though it wasn’t quite dark yet, and the buzz startled them both.
“After we lost the pub, the stress was . . . overwhelming.” Ava said colorlessly, reaching up to fix her perfectly secure chignon. “No, more than that, it was smothering. The money worries were a nightmare, and your father had to find work, and we didn’t know how long it would be until he got back on his feet.” She shuddered. “Picking up a new career in your late forties—I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. After a few years, we got Grandpa Joe’s money, and things got a lot easier, let me tell you. You remember that?”
Suzanne did remember. The inheritance had left her parents so giddy with relief it was hard to recall that someone had recently died. Debts were paid, money was put away for retirement, and their house was paid off. Brand-new cars replaced the old ones for the first time in Ava and Jimmy’s marriage.
Once, on a class trip to Boston right after they’d lost O’Shenanigan’s, Suzanne had seen something she didn’t know existed: an entire homeless family. Two parents and a son who appeared to be nearly thirty walking along the cobblestone sidewalks, looking for cans, for money, for food people dropped. The mother had been nagging the son.
“Flatten this up, and put it inside your shirt, for God’s sake,” she’d scolded, handing him a newspaper she’d picked up from the gutter. “Or you’ll catch your death of cold.”
For months afterwards, Suzanne wondered if someday that wouldn’t be her family. She could almost imagine Ava’s raspy voice saying, “Don’t smoke that cigarette out of the gutter, dear. God knows what you’ll catch.”
But then grouchy Grandpa Joe had died from a stroke in his sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-three. In life, he’d never hugged his son or given him compliments or even showed up for his basketball games in high school. But in death, he’d given Jimmy every penny he’d ever pinched, nearly three hundred thousand dollars of it. Hardly a fortune, especially after Uncle Sam took his share, but enough to buy an awful lot of reconciliation, Daddy used to say. Pay off the mortgage and lots of other pressing bills. Buy a car that wasn’t a hazard to drive. Put a little aside for the future. Invest.
In short, it did all the things that O’Shenanigan’s was supposed to do for them . . . except paying the fines incurred when O’Shenanigan’s was closed.
“Come on, Suze,” Ava held out her hand, breaking the terrible tension. “Let’s go find you that yoga class.”
After a moment, Suzanne took her mother’s hand, and together they climbed the stairs to the warmth of the kitchen to look for the brochure. But she couldn’t resist a quick glance back at Buddy’s house when she was sure Ava couldn’t see. She and Ava wouldn’t discuss what Ava had said to Buddy, Suzanne knew. They would gloss over it, as though it never happened. Trademark of alcoholic dysfunction, she recognized. Anything to cover up Mommy’s missteps . . . She knew the drill well.
“Believe me, if you wanted to hear, there are things I could fill you in on,” Buddy had said to her mother. “There are plenty of things I could tell you. I could . . .” And then he’d looked right at her, ended th
e conversation, and marched back into his house just as quickly as a man with arthritis and a cane can march.
What in the world had he meant? Just what was it that he could he tell Ava? Suzanne had no idea . . . but she damn well intended to find out.
EIGHT
“Why are we out and about so early?” Suzanne complained the next morning as she followed her mother through the farmer’s market. She hadn’t had her coffee, her shower had been cut short by Ava’s nagging, and worrying about Molly had robbed her of sleep. All in all, a totally crappy way to start the day. “I’m not usually awake yet, let alone walking anywhere.”
“It’s Wednesday,” Ava told her, as though this should be obvious. “I do all my marketing on Wednesday mornings.”
The outdoor farmers market, during the summer, was held in the old Citizen’s Bank parking lot. From there it spilled onto Prescott Park, right on the waterfront, about a quarter of a mile from home.
It was easier to go on foot than to try to find parking, Suzanne agreed, but it didn’t make walking along the Market Street extension, where cars came whipping around from Woodbury Avenue, any more fun or less life-threatening.
Retail therapy, Ava decided, would be good for Suzanne. There was nothing for the soul like spending money, as far as Ava was concerned.
“Fine, you hate shopping—come with me, so I don’t have to do it alone, and you can consider it rent,” she said, when Suzanne tried to protest that she was one of the few females who really didn’t enjoy shopping. (Ava correctly assumed that it was all the years of penny-pinching on a small salary that supported three people that had turned Suzanne off the idea of spending money on things that weren’t absolutely necessary).
Though Suzanne would never admit it to her mother, she always found herself enjoying elbowing tourists out of her way and haggling over the price of a wooden spoon that had cost a twentieth of the sticker-price to make.
The summer people had already left, but the leaf-peepers had just begun to trickle in, even though the colors were just barely beginning to shift.
“Why do we have to call it ‘marketing,’ Mom?” Suzanne grumbled. “It doesn’t make it sound any more fun than just plain, old grocery shopping.”
Ava waved the complaint away, carefully looking over the carrots. “Do you see a grocery store here, anywhere?” She gestured around. “No? Me neither. I see a good, old-fashioned outdoor market. So, it’s marketing.”
Suzanne sipped the coffee she had picked up at her favorite coffee shop, Breaking New Grounds (or, BNG, as Molly called it), and waited patiently while Ava found the perfect okra and cabbage. She refused to think of what dish her mother might have in mind for those two particular ingredients. Ava had spent a great deal of time and energy all summer trying to find some way to cook two of her favorite dishes that Suzanne would eat.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Ava’s voice dripped mock sincerity. “You’re right. It’s much better to go inside with the cement floors that give you shin splints, and the fluorescent lights that wreck your eyes, and arm wrestle old Mr. Petrovski from down the block for the last unbroken pushcart. And then, you get stuck with the one with the crazy left wheel anyway. Then you have to make sure you’ve got your discount cards, and those young kids, they don’t help you out with your groceries anymore the way they used to . . .”
“All right, all right, all right!” Suzanne held up her hands, officially surrendering. “I’m wrong. You’re right. You’re always right. You’re superior to me in all ways. Why do I ever question you? Happy now, you wicked old witch?”
“Ecstatic.” Ava reached out to pinch her daughter’s peach-colored cheek. “Hearing those words is every mother’s dream, my darling.”
“Yes,” Suzanne admitted, “but knowing Molly, I doubt I’ll be getting hit with them any time soon.”
“You might be right, at that.”
Suzanne took a good look around at the sea of booths. The sun was hot, even at this time of day, but the trees provided a canopy, granting a break from the relentless glare. She breathed deeply, tasting the clean air by the water—which was really why she secretly enjoyed the outdoor market. She had always loved being around the milling shoppers; she loved the ambitious retailers and their inventive products. But her token resistance was a preventative measure so that Ava wouldn’t get in the habit of having her on call for any and all social outings.
One perk about shopping here was not having to fork over her hard-earned cash to the Corporate Monster, in the form of any “superstore.” She remembered once, over a decade ago, Molly had asked her to explain the difference between a store and a superstore. Suzanne had thought about it for a moment.
“Maybe superstores can fly,” she’d finally suggested. Molly had dissolved into giggles. From then on, every time they passed by a self-proclaimed superstore, Molly would swear she could see it readying itself for takeoff.
Where did those days go? We used to have our own language. We laughed at things no one else got. We were closer than two peas in a pod . . . Where did that go? Suzanne ruminated but then shook the thoughts away.
Melancholia was no way to start the day.
“Hey, Mom?” She picked up a wedge of cheese that was made in Milton. “How did you feel when I told you I was pregnant?”
She was as startled to ask the question as Ava obviously was to hear it.
Where the hell did that come from? she wondered.
Ava put down the zucchini she’d been squeezing; she clearly wondered the same thing. “You’ve never asked me that before,” Ava said softly.
“Well, it’s like . . . it’s just, it’s the one topic we never touch,” Suzanne stammered. “We’ve tiptoed around it for years like it’s a land mine that might go off.”
“Well, it was such a long time ago,” Ava began. “And I never wanted you to feel as though I was judging you. Motherhood is hard enough without that.”
“I know, Mom.”
Ava was in the last throes of her embarrassingly pickled days when she learned she was going to be a grandmother at age forty-six. It had probably been hard for her to judge anyone else when she was drinking vanilla extract and Scope.
The first year of Ava’s sobriety had been the first year of Molly’s life. Suzanne never knew if it was the impending baby that did the trick, but Ava had put down the bottle, and this time it had stayed down. AA meetings, which previously had been “for whiners and losers” in her book, were suddenly part of her daily routine.
Slowly, during that last trimester, Suzanne began to see bits and pieces of the mother she remembered from her earliest years.
Understandably, they had been wary around each other—Ava out of humility, as she had a lot to make up for; Suzanne out of caution, as she didn’t want to get bitten again.
But when the baby came, that pink little bundle of smells with her long eyelashes and tons of hair, with the big dark eyes that seemed to seek out her own and find comfort there, Suzanne had been terrified.
How on earth am I supposed to take care of this child? she wondered. I couldn’t even pass advanced physiology junior year. This is the real thing. What if I accidentally kill her? Maim her? Sing her the wrong lullaby and emotionally scar her for life?
Despite herself, Suzanne desperately craved her mother’s nearness. Not drunk, drooling, smelly, rambling Mom; the sober, sweet, nice mother that she once was. It was an ache so deep that it felt like a physical longing.
Ava, for her part, didn’t push herself too hard toward her daughter. Instead, she called twice a week, religiously, to ask if there was anything Suzanne needed, and once a week she’d stop by to help with the housework. (Steve, even then, spent most of his time out with his friends or locked in his studio.)
The first few times she’d done that, Suzanne had been furious; she was perfectly capable of keeping a house, even if the “house” was a tiny one-bedroom on Rockingham Street. After all, she reasoned, she’d been taking care of Ava’s since Ava decided that drun
kenness was more important than cleanliness.
But as the months went by, and she got bigger and bigger (after her seventh month, she had them weigh her backwards on the scale—she knew she was officially a whale, but there was no need to rub it in), Ava’s assistance with the vacuuming, dusting, and folding the laundry became a welcome event. To her horror, she found herself looking forward to seeing her mother’s car pull into the driveway each week as she brought along a snack (she’d begun cooking as a way to keep her hands busy) and usually just one more thing she’d seen for the baby that she couldn’t resist.
Grimly, Suzanne staved off the feelings of gratitude, of pleasure in her mother’s company. After all, it could, and probably would, end at any moment. She knew alcoholism was a disease, and she knew it would be difficult for anyone to conquer.
It’s not like I don’t have compassion for her, she reasoned darkly. I’d also have compassion for a rabid dog caught in a bear trap . . . But I’m sure as hell not going to get so close that it can bite me.
It was during one of these visits, when Ava came to take Suzanne to her high school graduation where Steve was performing with the band, that Ava had noticed Suzanne wincing and touching her stomach. “What’s the matter, dear?”
“Nothing,” Suzanne replied, her teeth clenched. “I’m just nervous about graduation tonight . . . I think I’m constipated again. I’ve been having the most awful cramps all . . .”
As soon as the words came out of her mouth, Suzanne realized what the pains really were; from the look on Ava’s face, she did too. She expected Mommy Dearest to fall to pieces, as she always did in time of crisis, but if necessary she’d walk right over Mommy, call a taxi, and get to the hospital herself.
But Ava didn’t fall to pieces. Instead, a calm that Suzanne had never seen before seemed to settle over her features.
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