Kathleen continued, “And I’m worried Chris is floundering.”
“I’m sorry,” Ann Marie said, and she genuinely felt it. “I’ll tell Little Daniel to give him a call. They should talk more, maybe have a beer sometime. Or lunch! Lunch would be good.”
“Thanks,” Kathleen said.
“It sounds like you have a lot on your plate,” Ann Marie said. “I’ll handle Alice, don’t worry.”
She cancelled her plans for late June and arranged to head to Maine on the twentieth, her frustration rising as she made each call, every single excuse. She normally sat for her grandkids on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, until Patty or Josh got home. Now they’d have to find a sitter.
Her sister Tricia sounded annoyed when she shared the news: “I thought you were taking Ma to her appointment on the twenty-second,” she said.
“If you do it this one time, I’ll take the next three,” Ann Marie said. “And I’ll do all the runs for her medicine until I leave.”
She wanted to call Kathleen and say, “By the way, I have my own mother to think about too.” But of course she wouldn’t do that.
It wasn’t that Ann Marie minded caring for Alice; she didn’t. She was brought up to believe that you looked after your elders, no matter if they sometimes tried your patience or weren’t exactly who you expected them to be. No one was exactly what anyone else expected.
She genuinely enjoyed spending time with Alice, though her mother-in-law could be a handful. For all her good manners, Alice occasionally behaved atrociously in public: She wrapped up dinner rolls and butter pats in a napkin and smuggled them out of nice restaurants, as if she were a pauper. Recently, while they were having lunch at Papa Razzi, Ann Marie had returned from the ladies’ room to see her stuffing a saltshaker into her purse.
Ann Marie was forever afraid of ticking Alice off, since her mood could change on a dime. Though for the most part, they had fun together, getting their hair done, driving into Boston to shop. Alice was an interesting woman; her daughters never seemed to appreciate this. She followed the news and read lots of books and always had an opinion on the latest PBS series. She reminded Ann Marie of herself in this way—they had both come from humble beginnings and made something of themselves. Ann Marie’s own mother, God bless her, just sat in front of the tube all day, every day, watching some faraway bishop say Mass over and over on a loop. She had always been a caretaker: From the time Ann Marie was six years old, there was some bachelor uncle or down-on-his-luck second cousin living with them. Her mother never said no to anyone. Now she was morbidly obese and diabetic, two facts that filled Ann Marie with shame.
Alice had stayed lovely and petite. Without ever telling anyone as much, Ann Marie considered her a sort of role model in the looks department. She met with her personal trainer, Raul, three times a week. And she and Pat walked six miles on the track behind Newton North High School every Sunday after church.
Alice came to dinner at their house on Sunday nights. Ann Marie made sure to send her flowers from Little Daniel on her birthday and Mother’s Day. (The girls were good about handling those things themselves.) Pat took care of the taxes and the insurance on the property in Maine, and he looked after the place during the winters—driving up every so often to make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen, or that trees hadn’t fallen during a storm. No doubt, the Maine property would be passed down to them when the time came. And then they would be able to go up to the beach for the whole summer, uninterrupted.
Clare and Kathleen didn’t appreciate the place anyway.
Her own sisters were Cape Cod people. Early in her marriage, Ann Marie had resented the fact that Pat’s family’s house in Maine kept her away from them all summer, but over the years she had come to love Cape Neddick. Besides, her sisters always had to rent.
And her children were devoted to Maine now—they wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. They each had their favorite beach and lobster shack (Fiona and Little Daniel loved Barnacle Billy’s. Patty and Josh and the grandkids liked Brown’s.) They had their traditions. The kids always drove out to the twenty-four-hour L.L. Bean store in Freeport at eleven at night, and climbed up the giant two-story hiking boot out front, just for fun. In the early morning hours, they fished for bass off Popham Beach in a boat owned by one of Pat’s clients. They went to a Portland Sea Dogs game, and Little Daniel brought his glove along to catch foul balls. Even now, they still devoted one night every summer to sitting in the car eating cold chicken sandwiches and watching grizzly bear cubs climb into the Dumpsters behind Ruby’s Market. This always gave Ann Marie a little scare, though Patrick said his own father had taken him on foot when he was a boy, and it was perfectly safe.
Next spring, Little Daniel would get married at the Cliff House in Ogunquit, as Patty had. (His fiancée, Regina, had been hesitant, citing the cost, but Ann Marie made it known that Pat insisted on paying.)
Ann Marie imagined a time in the future when she and Pat would replace Alice and Daniel in the big house, while next door in the cottage her children and grandchildren slept, safe and sound.
A couple days passed, and Ann Marie got used to the idea of heading to Maine early, even a bit excited. She had never been anywhere by herself for so long. Life had been rather heavy lately, between Fiona’s news and Little Daniel’s horrifying mishap at work, which she could hardly bring herself to think about. Some time away might do her good.
She wasn’t leaving for three more weeks, but she had already started making a mental list of what to pack: the good beach chair and umbrella and a bag full of sunblock and magazines, and the sweater she had started knitting for Maisy with a pony grazing on the front. She’d be looking after her mother-in-law, no doubt. And there were plenty of wedding chores she could tackle for Regina while she was there. This wasn’t a vacation. But still, hopefully she’d get to spend at least some time relaxing by the ocean.
Pat had to stay behind and work, but it was only ten days. In July, he and the Brewers would join her, as planned. She imagined greeting Steve Brewer at the cottage door with a pitcher of iced tea.
“You were so sweet to come up here by yourself and be with your mother-in-law,” he’d say. “Can’t really picture Linda doing that.”
She would wave the idea away, saying, “Oh my gosh, it’s nothing. Come on inside.”
Alice
On Sunday morning after Mass, Alice sat out on the screen porch and sipped a Bloody Mary while she waited for her laundry to dry. She stayed very still, keeping her eyes peeled for the rotten rabbits.
She had put a two-foot wire fence around her garden and the rabbits had simply dug right under it. She had gathered human hair from the local barbershop and spread it in the dirt, and they had continued undeterred. She had sprinkled the plants with ground pepper, which rabbits apparently detested, and they had chewed away as if it were honey glaze. A woman in line at the nursery in York had said that the only real way to get rid of them was cayenne pepper mixed with water. The clerk had piped up that that tore up their bellies and was awfully cruel, but now Alice thought she might have to try it. She refused to feel bad about this, since those creatures were nothing but rats with cotton-ball tails. They had gotten two of her tomato plants and the green beans. She’d be damned if they were going to get the best of her summer flowers too. And so, she kept a careful watch.
It was Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of the season. In town the streets were bustling with hopeful tourists, peeking into shops that had just opened and dipping their toes into the still frigid sea. But here on Briarwood Road, it was as quiet as it had been a month ago when Alice arrived, still wearing her winter coat.
Up here, most days she didn’t see anyone from noon onward unless she drove out to the Shop ’n Save on Route 1 or walked up the road to Ruby’s Market, where she could get a whole jug of wine for five dollars. (Rotgut, her son, Patrick, had pronounced the stuff after taking one sip, but Alice thought it was fine.) On occasion, she went to Ruby’s even
if she didn’t need anything, just to make conversation with Ruby and Mort, the elderly couple who owned the place. Their favorite topic was how disappointing young people were nowadays, and Alice had plenty to say about that.
Ruby and Mort were real Mainers, salt of the earth. Everyone in the southern part of the state knew them, and they knew everyone. They were pleasant enough to Alice, unlike some. The Kellehers would always be considered outsiders here. Six decades of summers meant nothing to the locals. Occasionally Alice might be driving along and someone, recognizing her face, might give her a hearty wave. Then his eyes would land on her Massachusetts license plate, and the arm would drop.
Ruby was only twenty-nine when Alice first met her back in the forties, and she had struck Alice as old even then. Almost sixty years later, she and her husband still opened the doors each morning at seven. Mort still stocked the high shelves with canned peas and corn and paper towels. He had always worn a flannel shirt over dungarees, still did. In the fall, he went moose hunting—they’d eat the spoils all winter, selling the best cuts of meat right there in the market. Ruby washed the whole store with bleach every morning. She baked brownies and hermits and cookies, and wrapped each one in blue cellophane, putting the lot of them in a basket by the register. Ever since their kids moved out, they had had a cocker spaniel named Myrtle. When one Myrtle died, another nearly identical Myrtle popped up in her place.
Alice envied Ruby and Mort, still having each other. When she visited them, she liked to imagine that no time had passed, even though she knew old age was creeping in, in ways that were manageable, if annoying. She had trouble remembering the names of women at her golf club and the priests at her new church. She could picture the wallpaper that had hung in her childhood bedroom, but she no longer recalled the titles of books she had read three months ago. She was eighty-three years old, and hadn’t had a real health problem to speak of in her life, though she had seen so many specialists in the past few years—one for her sight, another for her hearing, another still for her crummy knees—that every time she had an appointment, she’d joke to Ann Marie, “I’m off on yet another date with a handsome young doctor.” She was what they called a lucky one, which meant that she got to watch every person she loved—her parents, all four of her brothers, her husband—grow old and die, without even the luxury of a little senility to dull the pain.
Alice’s mother had been a lucky one too. She had lived to be ninety-six. Each morning in those last, dark years of life, her mother would dress in a good skirt and flats, and read the Globe, circling the names of the dead men and women she knew, from grade school, from the neighborhood, from church—her peers and first loves and even friends of her children, who were, impossibly, somewhere around seventy years old. (Alice’s father, dead more than twenty years by then, had always referred to the obituaries as the Irish sports page.) Near the end, her mind began to slip. She would show up to the funeral parlor in Upham’s Corner and forget which wake she had come for, so she’d stop into each of them. Some mornings she would go there without even looking at the paper, reasoning that she was bound to know someone being buried that day, so she ought to go down to Kearney Brothers and pay her respects. When she finally died, hers was one of the smallest funerals Alice had ever seen—only Alice’s brothers and their kids and grandkids, Patrick and Ann Marie and their brood, Clare and Joe, Kathleen and Maggie. She didn’t have a single friend on earth to see her off. She had outlived them all.
At Alice’s house in Canton, junk mail still arrived addressed to Daniel. It amazed her how a person’s death had no impact on these practical matters. The bank statements and pay stubs and old report cards he had filed so neatly in his basement office didn’t vanish into the ether as she wished they would. Nor did the plaque he had received from the insurance company when he retired, or the framed picture of President Kennedy, both of which he had hung in a place of honor over his desk. All of it remained, a constant reminder: He existed, then he didn’t. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess.
There were parts of living alone that she hadn’t gotten used to, probably never would, even though her husband had been dead nearly ten years. She would never learn to cook for one—she still poured the whole box of spaghetti into the pot, or made a five-pound roast that took hours to brown up, with onions and potatoes and carrots and turnips in the pan, despite the fact that she didn’t care for vegetables.
She would never get used to the quiet that settled in gently, pleasantly once the kids were gone, and then with a ferocity after Daniel. They were married for forty-nine years, and every day of it, much as she loved him, Alice wished he would shut the hell up. He read the headlines of The Boston Globe out loud over breakfast. He sang “The Wild Colonial Boy” and “Molly Malone” in the shower. He whistled as he raked the lawn, and bellowed into the phone when the grandkids called, telling them the same jokes he had told his own children decades earlier: A three-legged dog walks into a saloon, hobbles up to the bartender, and says, “I’m lookin’ for the man who shot my paw.”
Or: Well, Chrissy, I’m afraid your grandmother’s Irish Alzheimer’s has gotten quite advanced—she’s forgotten everything but her grudges.
Now she missed that joyful way he had, especially in summertime, when she was up here at the beach.
Alice took a sip of her Bloody Mary, taking care not to let the condensation drip onto her blouse. That was another thing she hadn’t gotten used to: dressing down in play clothes, like old ladies were supposed to. She never changed after Mass. Today she wore white linen slacks with a white shell, a black short-sleeved silk jacket, and sandals. She still put on a full face of makeup every morning, same as she had when she was nineteen and working at the law firm in downtown Boston. She still wore her hair in a straight bob, and colored it black. (Her daughter Clare had once commented in front of company that it was a miracle how Alice’s hair had actually gotten darker as she aged, instead of turning gray like everyone else’s.)
No one, not a soul, knew exactly how old she was. Her children loved to say that one of these days they would sneak a peek at her driver’s license, but none of them had ever dared, as far as she knew.
As a girl, she had watched the old women of Dorchester, with their thin hair and their housecoats, and vowed that she would never become such a frump. She hadn’t. But now she looked at her three granddaughters—none of them much older than thirty—and realized with alarm that she felt the same way about them. They were slobs. When they came to Maine later in the summer, they would trounce around the property in sweatpants and bikini tops, letting their little bellies flop out. They’d tie their hair back while it was still wet, and never put on so much as a coat of lipstick. Ann Marie said that it was the beach that brought this out in them. But Alice could never be sure. Maybe it was true of Ann Marie and Pat’s two daughters, Patty and Fiona, but if she came upon her granddaughter Maggie eating Sunday brunch at a café in Manhattan, she was willing to bet money on the same damp ponytail and cut-off jeans Maggie traipsed around in up here. Both Patty and Maggie had inherited the Dolan leg from Daniel’s mother’s side—thick, shapeless stumps that were as wide at the calf as they were at the knee. Fiona, the one who cared the least about her looks, had been Alice’s only lucky granddaughter, possessing the long, lean legs of a Brennan woman.
Through the open door that led into the house, she heard the dryer buzzing into the off position. Alice emptied her glass and then went to the laundry room.
The AM radio was playing, though she didn’t remember turning it on. A young-sounding fellow whose voice she rather liked was interviewing a professor about post-traumatic stress disorder among the soldiers coming back from Iraq.
“It’s more important than we can possibly say to get it out, to talk to someone,” the professor said. He cited a study.
Alice shook her head. It was all the rage now to talk, talk, talk, though she couldn’t see how talking about real tragedy did much good. What would her brothers have to say abo
ut it? Probably that those boys ought to man up and shut up, though now she’d never know for sure.
Her daughter Kathleen had once said that the fellas who came back from World War II might have been saved if only they had been allowed to tell a professional about what they had seen. But that’s not how they were making men back then, and so you ended up with an entire generation of sad secret-keepers and angry drunks. Alice thought that sounded more like Kathleen’s cohorts than her own. A cousin Kathleen was fond of from Daniel’s side, Bobby Kelly, had returned from Vietnam to a party full of balloons and ice cream, looking like Errol Flynn in uniform, and then, two days later, shot his wife and himself to death.
What Kathleen never seemed to understand was that World War II was a different sort of war. Everyone was a part of it, every last boy you knew. Now, when Alice asked her grandchildren if any of their old schoolmates were fighting in Iraq, they all said no in an incredulous sort of way, as if she were an idiot to even ask. When she was young, there was a sense of pride among so many of the boys, a sense of duty and honor. They wanted to serve their country. They wanted to fight.
When Alice’s brothers came home on leave, they were always trying to set her up with their buddies from the army and the navy. Alice went along with it, though she never took those boys seriously. She had no interest in settling down with any of them.
Back then, people said she was beautiful. They complimented her narrow waist and long legs. She had bright blue eyes, fair skin, and dark hair that reached halfway down her back. She wanted to be Veronica Lake—adored by all for her beauty, her art, her general joie de vivre. She believed that she deserved better. That she, Alice Brennan, was one of the most special young women out there, just waiting for someone to take notice.
The six Brennan children had grown up more or less poor, but they could always be certain of having a roof over their heads and a bit of food on the table. Then, when they were teenagers, the Depression hit. Their father’s job with the police force came and went and came and went and came and went again. He alternated between working long hours, terrified of the certain lean period to come, and being at home, unemployed, angry, and drunk. He had often spoken to them harshly, especially when he was drinking, and he had hit them as kids, Timmy and Michael always getting the worst of it. Alice remembered bruises, blood. Before they were born, there had been a baby named Declan. One night, their father fell asleep with the infant in bed beside him. At some point, he unknowingly rolled over onto the child and smothered him. He was devastated. “Never the same,” their aunt Rose had said. He blamed himself, and perhaps as a sort of penance or protection, he never bonded with another one of his children.
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