It was her father, as always, who saved her. He came to Maine from Massachusetts one night and gave her the same ultimatum he had given his wife decades earlier: find a way to stop drinking, or he’d take the kids away.
“Remember how much your mother frightened you,” he said, the first and only time he had ever put it that way. “How on earth can you sit here and do the same to Maggie?”
That had been enough to get her to her first AA meeting. She drank again three days later, a quarter of a bottle of gin. Drunk and desperate, she called Paul, begging him to come back. She woke up horrified and went to another meeting the next morning. She hadn’t had a drink since.
Though Paul was the one who had cheated, her family—besides her father and her sister, Clare—acted as though Kathleen were to blame for their marriage coming apart. Patrick said Paul would outgrow the affair, that they should try counseling, try everything, because divorce was plain wrong. That was why he had helped Paul cover it up, he claimed, because their family meant too much to let this destroy them. Kathleen suspected that, as usual, he was thinking only of himself: no member of the Kelleher clan had ever gotten divorced, and Pat took a certain weird pride in that.
Alice insinuated that perhaps Kathleen was to blame for Paul’s infidelity, and said that she couldn’t walk away from a perfectly good marriage.
The funniest part of her mother’s defense of her ex-husband was that Paul had never liked Alice. He had taken to calling visits to her house “Escape to Bitch Mountain.” He was unfailingly polite to her face, but that was only because she terrified him.
The first time Kathleen took Paul home to meet her parents, the four of them were sitting around the kitchen table eating spaghetti when someone knocked at the back door. Through the window in the door, Kathleen could see her uncle Timmy and his wife, Kitty. The previous Thanksgiving, Kitty and Alice had gotten into a screaming fight over the proper weight of a turkey meant to feed twenty people. Alice thought her sister-in-law was accusing her of being cheap. She had hardly spoken a word to Aunt Kitty since. Or, for that matter, to her own brother, who was being punished for marrying such a monster.
Alice came from a family of six siblings and Daniel was one of ten. Kathleen had forty-two cousins altogether. When she and Pat and Clare were growing up, their house was a revolving door of people. You might be sitting down to dinner on Sunday, and Uncle Jack and his wife and seven kids would come bounding in, and Alice would sigh and whisper, “Fill up on the potatoes.” Kathleen always hated this, and vowed that when she had kids of her own (no more than two!), her little family would be snug and solitary, an island unto themselves.
Now Aunt Kitty gave an exuberant wave and Paul instinctually waved back. It was a normal reaction when you were in a suburban kitchen on a Sunday night and a little gray-haired lady was smiling at you through the window, but Alice hissed, “Paul, don’t look at them! Pretend we’re not in here.”
Paul chuckled, and then, seeing the serious look on Alice’s face, he turned to Kathleen, confused.
“Mom, they can see us,” Kathleen said, not looking up.
“Be quiet and they’ll go away,” Alice whispered. “You don’t show up at someone’s door at dinnertime unannounced.”
In fact, their relatives did this all the time, but now Alice had something against Kitty, and she couldn’t let it drop.
“Who are they?” Paul asked in a hushed voice.
“My brother and his wretched wife,” Alice said. “Don’t worry, they’ll get the hint.”
They looked down at their plates and kept eating. Kitty knocked harder, as if they might not be able to hear from just a few feet away. She jiggled the doorknob, but it was locked.
“Jesus, Alice, enough already,” Daniel said finally. He rose from his chair and went to the door, ushering them inside.
“Hey, you two,” he said in his usual cheerful tone. “Hungry? It’s spaghetti night.”
“Gosh no, we wouldn’t want to impose!” Kitty said.
“Sure you would,” Alice said tartly. “But knowing me, there won’t be enough.”
“That’s my Alice, always a lady,” said Kathleen’s uncle Tim. “How about a beer?”
Alice didn’t move to get him one, so Uncle Timmy opened the fridge himself and pulled out a Schlitz. He was a funny, kindhearted guy, a lot like Kathleen’s dad. He had once told Kathleen that he was the one who introduced Daniel and Alice, back during World War II.
“We were visiting with Kitty’s cousins a few blocks over and thought we’d stop in and say hi,” he said. “And don’t worry, because they fed us and we’re full to the gills.”
“Good, because as you can see, we have company,” Alice said.
Timmy raised an eyebrow. “Kathleen and her boyfriend qualify as company?” he said.
Alice still hadn’t risen from her chair.
“Daniel, I didn’t slave over that stove so you could eat cold food,” she said. “Sit down!”
He sat.
Paul drank several beers at dinner. Kathleen couldn’t blame him. On the drive home that night, he said, “Honey, I love you, but I am scared shitless of your mother.”
Any other girl might have been insulted, but Kathleen felt drawn to him more than ever in that moment. It was so easy for Alice to fool people—most strangers thought she was simply delightful because she was pretty, larger than life. But Paul knew better right away.
“Please promise me you’re not gonna become her,” he said.
“Jesus, I promise,” she had said. “If I do, you’re completely within your rights to kill me.”
Ann Marie
Ann Marie was up early, even before the alarm. The room was silent, and through the sheer curtains, she could see that the streetlights were still on. She looked at the clock on the nightstand: five fifteen. Her whole body fluttered with excitement. She closed her eyes tightly, thinking of children on Christmas morning.
She got to her feet and slid into her slippers and robe. There was a lot to do before she left, so she had better hop to it. She had vacuumed all the carpets before she went to bed, and emptied the dishwasher. She usually gave the whole house a good cleaning on Sundays. But today she would be away until late afternoon at least.
It was finally June second. All spring she had been counting down the days until the Wellbright Miniatures Fair. For the first time in twenty-five years, the English festival was coming across the Atlantic for a United States tour, beginning right here in Boston. She had been reading online about the different exhibitors for weeks. She planned to attend a ten o’clock workshop on how to wire your dollhouse with real electric lighting. She had already picked out a chandelier for the dining room, with opaque bulbs that looked like pearls.
After the workshop, she would take her time walking from stall to stall, finally seeing in person the objects she had long coveted through a computer screen. Minnie’s Minis from Staffordshire made the most gorgeous little cakes, with frosting that looked like real marzipan, and tiny ceramic strawberries on top, each berry no bigger than the head of a pin. A slice of cake could even be removed to show the chocolate and raspberry filling inside.
Puck’s Teeny Tinies produced intricate silver beer steins, the size of your pinky nail. She thought one of these might be a funny tribute to her husband, Pat, and the trip they’d taken to Germany a few years back.
Home Is Where the Heart Is was her favorite company. She probably spent eight or nine hundred dollars a month on the website. And now perhaps she’d get to meet the owners—Lollie and Albert Duncan, a married couple who had put themselves on the map with kitchenware items, almost all of which Ann Marie had purchased (gorgeous spatulas and whisks, a blueberry pie baked in a beer bottle cap, a stainless-steel fridge that hummed with the help of a single D battery).
At the end of the day, if she could keep her nerve up, she’d bring some of the photographs she had snapped to the Judges’ Circle booth, and submit them in the annual Dollhouse Designer Showcase. Win
ning was a long shot, she knew that. Most of these people had been competing for years; some were even professionals. But when she looked at her photos, she could swear she was staring at a real house, not a replica. Pat said he agreed completely.
She had gotten interested in dollhouses a year ago, with the intention of decorating one for her granddaughter. She bought a Victorian kit in a toy shop—three bedrooms, with a wraparound porch. Ann Marie spent a week lovingly putting the house together, piece by piece. She painted the outside a pale yellow with white trim. She hung curtains using a hot glue gun and scraps from her sewing basket—heavy green floor-length velvet in the living room, short red-and-white gingham in the kitchen, a fabric covered in multicolored polka dots in the nursery. Next, she added furniture: little blue-and-white painted bunk beds and a matching crib. A white rocking horse with silky hair. A toy chest. What looked like a real Kohler toilet in the bathroom, and fluffy hand towels she had made by cutting a facecloth into two-inch strips and sewing a white ribbon around the edge. She bought a sofa and an armchair for the living room. A grandfather clock. Side tables. A canopy bed for the master bedroom. A full kitchen set, complete with pots and pans, and teensy boxes of Cheerios and Tide.
She sometimes sat with a cup of tea and stared in amazement at her creation for half an hour, or longer. By the time she completed the project, she couldn’t bear to give the dollhouse away to the children, who would treat it like just another toy. When her granddaughter, Maisy, visited and brushed her grubby fingers against the white bedroom rug in the dollhouse, Ann Marie—known for her patience, especially with youngsters—had said in a rush, “Wash your hands first!” Afterward she felt silly, but it wasn’t such a ridiculous request.
The kids teased her about her new pastime, everyone but Little Daniel’s fiancée, Regina, who said she thought the dollhouse was beautiful. Regina was a sweet girl. She had been baptized and confirmed at Gate of Heaven in Southie, the same as Ann Marie. Of course, she had to be nice, since she was an outsider wanting into this family. Ann Marie knew how that went.
She had had plenty of hobbies before—scrapbooking and flower arranging and even quilting for a while. But nothing had ever grabbed her heart like the dollhouse. When she was growing up, her mother had run a motley household, with people in and out all the time, women from the neighborhood always clustered around the table playing cards, drinking whiskey, smoking cigarettes, filling the kitchen with gray clouds of cigarette smoke. They talked loudly over one another. Most of their sons were derelicts, bound for prison. If they were smart, like a few of her cousins had been, they became cops. Once in a blue moon, one of them made it to the mayor’s office or city hall. Those ones were remembered the longest, them and the criminals. (The Bulger family—perhaps the most famous in the neighborhood—had raised one of each, a major politician and a crime boss.)
Ann Marie’s own brother, Brendan, had gotten caught up in it all. They called him a mobster in the newspaper, but it seemed an overblown word. He was only a baby, doing what he was told. They said he had helped Whitey Bulger murder a man, and maybe it was true. But when Ann Marie thought of him, all she could envision was a boy in short pants, sitting in the grass at Castle Island, with Boston Harbor stretched out in front of him, and the gray buildings of Southie behind. In her memory, he was eating a hot dog from Sullivan’s, his very favorite treat. His face was smeared with ketchup.
No one had heard from Brendan in twenty years now, at least as far as she knew.
From a young age, Ann Marie had vowed to marry someone from outside of Southie, someone with a bit of money in his pocket. She wanted to create a life with order and beauty to it. She was the first in her family to go to college, putting herself through St. Mary’s in the hope that she might find a nice Irish boy from Notre Dame. Patrick was exactly what she had wished for, and when she met him she worked hard to make him see that he needed her, that it was time to say good-bye to all the other girls.
When her mother met the Kellehers, she said they were lace curtain snobs as far as she was concerned, but Ann Marie ignored her.
Until recently, she thought she had done well. But the uncertainty of raising three children could wear on her, even now—especially now. When she thought about that unpleasant business with Little Daniel and his last job, when she thought about Fiona, she wondered if she was somehow to blame for all of it.
Where were her children at this moment? Were they wearing seat belts? Did they still believe in God? Did they understand not only how to keep house, but why? Had she done enough? Could a mother ever do enough?
She padded down the hall, careful not to make a sound as she passed by the door at the top of the stairs, even though she knew Pat could sleep through a tornado.
They hadn’t shared a bedroom since Fiona went off to college ten years earlier. At first, it had been a temporary thing: his snoring kept her up nights, and she wanted a break. But time passed and it felt comfortable, really, to be able to spread out, to not have to elbow him every hour and tell him to roll over onto his side. They went on that way, neither of them ever suggesting that they return to sharing a bed.
Ann Marie had seen an entire episode of Oprah devoted to the topic: What happens when a couple starts sleeping in separate bedrooms? But it didn’t bother her. That part of their marriage was done, that was all. She still loved her husband. They had a beautiful home and three wonderful children. They got along fine and had loads of friends to socialize with, and they never fought. That was better than a lot of people could say.
No one knew about the sleeping arrangements. They still slept together when the kids came home, though there had been one embarrassing incident when Fiona brought a couple of friends from Trinity for Thanksgiving, and found the bed in the guest room rumpled and unmade. Ann Marie improvised, and told them that she had spent a night in there the week before, when Pat had a bad cold.
“He insisted, so I wouldn’t catch it,” she said in a rush. “I can’t believe I forgot to change the sheets.”
“Watch it, lady, you’re really starting to slip,” Fiona said jokingly, suspecting nothing.
In the kitchen, Ann Marie flipped on the overhead light and ground up some coffee beans that a client of Pat’s had sent as part of a gift basket. She shook them into the coffeemaker, taking in the rich scent. She added water from the pitcher in the fridge.
She had pulled out her collection of Belleek china yesterday and set the tea service on the counter, in preparation for a tea party with little Maisy tomorrow. Ann Marie would bake scones, and tell her granddaughter about the village in Ireland where the dishes and the teapot were made—each of them creamy white, and etched with elegant shamrocks. She ran her finger over the stack of saucers.
She sat at the table, where she had left her list of chores the night before, as she did every night, with one column for her (Defrost lamb for P., pick up prescriptions, get the pool guy to come look at the filter) and one for Pat (Send money to Little Daniel, get your oil checked?, pay water bill).
She flipped the list over now and realized what it was: the country club newsletter, reminding them to weigh in on new admissions.
“Rats, rats,” she said. The deadline was tomorrow and they had almost forgotten. She made a silent vow to write only in notebooks from now on.
At the top of the page were the words: The individuals listed below and their families have been proposed for membership. The Admissions Committee and the Board of Governors invite your comments, which will be held in confidence.
Her eyes scanned the list: William and Karen Eaves she did not know. Tom and Susan Devine she had met once or twice, but she didn’t have any information about whether they’d make good members for the club.
She and Pat had sponsored the Brewers that past summer. They were longtime neighbors of theirs who had more recently become friends. Ann Marie had been amazed at some of the comments people sent in anonymously. Someone said Linda Brewer’s bathing suit had been too tight at the Prospec
tives Picnic. Someone else said she took too much from the buffet. They got in anyway. Ann Marie and her husband had been members since 1987: no one would dare challenge a nomination of Pat’s.
It had been his idea to invite the Brewers along to Maine. Usually they brought George and Laney Dwyer for the Fourth of July week, but this year they were off to a family wedding so Pat and Ann Marie had to search for a backup plan for the first half of the trip. (The second week, Patty would be there with Josh and the kids, and then Ann Marie and Pat would leave and Patty’s brood would have a week on their own. For the last week of the month, Ann Marie would drive up every two or three days to check on Alice until Clare and Joe arrived in August.)
“Why don’t you guys go by yourselves? Have a romantic getaway before your grandchildren arrive and shatter the peace and quiet,” Patty had said when Ann Marie told her the Dwyers couldn’t make it.
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” Ann Marie said. “We’re by ourselves all the time.”
She had planned to ask her sister Susan, even though Susan’s husband, Sean, was a real know-it-all, and Pat resented him because he never offered to pay for dinner, always doing that awkward, labored wallet reach, unfolding every bill as though he were in slow motion, until Pat couldn’t stand it anymore and just said, “This one’s on me, bud.”
Susan always made sure to let Ann Marie know that Sean’s plumbing business brought in plenty of cash. Since she was so intent on bragging about it, it seemed that he could at least pay for dinner every once in a while.
Anyway, Pat returned from work one night in May and said, “I saw Steve Brewer at lunch and I asked if he and Linda wanted to join us for Maine. He said he’d have to check with her, but it sounded great to him.”
“Oh, well, imagine a man checking with his wife before making a major decision,” she said.
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