When he came home with sandwiches from the deli, she asked him about the calls. He went into the bedroom without saying a word and slammed the door, locking it behind him. She sat on the couch, still as stone, waiting. He returned to the living room twenty minutes later and screamed at her for snooping, saying he had been out with guys from college and didn’t always want her in tow. He needed his space, time away from her, if this could ever work.
“Whose number was that?” she said, shaking.
“One of the guys. You don’t know him.”
“Gabe, I called it,” she said.
He hung his head. “Oh.”
“So?”
“It’s not what you think,” he said, a phrase that never led anywhere good. “It’s the number of a dealer, someone who sells coke. It wasn’t for me, I swear. It was for these guys who were visiting.”
“I heard a girl’s voice,” she said.
“It’s a decoy. It always goes straight to that voice mail; you leave a message and they call you back,” he said. Then he actually began to cry, which she had never seen him do before. “You have to believe me. I don’t want to lose you over something stupid like this.”
Somehow she ended up feeling relieved by his explanation. At least he hadn’t cheated; at least he still loved her. It wasn’t until a week or so later that she considered the fact that Gabe had the number of a cocaine dealer. She didn’t know anything about cocaine, but she knew enough to realize that there was a difference between occasionally trying it at a party, say, and being the guy with the hookup.
She didn’t want to leave him. She just wanted him to change, even as she recognized this as classic child-of-an-alcoholic behavior, even as she could hear her mother’s voice in her head saying the only person you can ever truly change is yourself.
Still, Maggie wanted somehow to jolt him into action, to make him realize that certain parts of him needed transformation, or she’d be forced to go. She remembered nights when she was a little girl. Sometimes, long after dinner and homework and baths were through, they would hear her father’s car pull into the driveway, and her mother would say with a broad smile: “Let’s hide from Daddy.”
Back then, this was Maggie’s favorite game, one of those deliciously rare moments when the grown-ups entered the world of children. But as an adult, she often wondered what all that had been about and imagined that perhaps her mother did it to send her husband a warning: If you keep coming home at any time you choose, smelling like liquor without a decent excuse, someday you will walk through that door and find your family gone.
Kathleen
The ginger tea had steeped now and on the kitchen table were six large buckets of steamed organic waste, ready to be served. Kathleen got a kick out of imagining herself writing in to the BC alumni magazine: Kathleen Kelleher lives in California and is considered the best worm chef on the West Coast. Her most popular dish consists of four hundred banana peels, hold the mold, and fifteen dozen eggshells, lightly toasted, with a soupçon of decomposing apple core.
Later, they would feed the newly hatched worms the first meal of their lives. She had once told Maggie that doing this felt somehow profound. You wanted to welcome them into the world properly. Maggie found all of it revolting. Kathleen understood—hers was not a glamorous way of life, and okay, yes, she could see how it might seem kind of goofy. But she couldn’t help but get caught up in it. Arlo’s passion was contagious.
The worms across the barn from the newborns had filled their containers with droppings now. This afternoon she would have to coax them into the corners of their boxes with sweet rose petals, while Arlo scooped up the results. He would place the droppings in oversize garbage bags and then put the bags in the back of his pickup. Tomorrow they would transport several loads to the edge of the property, where Arlo had set up a makeshift bottling assembly line. They paid high school kids ten dollars an hour to do that part.
When she heard his truck in the driveway, Kathleen strained the tea through a paper towel into two Boston Red Sox mugs and walked toward the back door.
He crossed the stone path and climbed up the steps, holding a bouquet of calla lilies wrapped in brown paper.
“Good morning, my love,” he said, opening the screen door and stepping inside. The dogs clamored in behind him.
“Trade you,” she said. She took the flowers from Arlo and handed him a mug. “These are gorgeous.”
“Aren’t they? One of the moms at this Girl Scout event told me she had a flower shop in town. She’s been using our poop tea on all the merchandise and it’s lived twice as long as normal. So I stopped in to the shop—amazing colors, Kath. You would have loved it.”
He was all fired up from his lecture. She grinned.
Seeing her work, he smiled too. “You’re amazing. You did all this just this morning?”
Arlo was the sort of person who went out of his way to be kind—unlike her family members, who acted as though giving a compliment would cost them too much. And she and Arlo valued the same things. That was important. They both believed in homeopathy and in living a chemical-free life; they both believed in protecting the earth. To most people back home, this was all just a little too far out. But Arlo was on the same page, or perhaps even a chapter or two ahead of her, when it came to such ideas.
On their first date, even though it wasn’t technically advisable, they drove to his place after going for coffee. They watched the news and then had sex on Arlo’s sofa, under a framed Steal Your Face poster. In the morning, he fed her strawberries from his garden. Afterward, despite the poster, Kathleen called Maggie to say that she might be falling in love.
Before Arlo, she had dated and slept with several of the men she met at AA. Which was funny, considering she had been with Paul for more than a decade when they divorced, and couldn’t remember a time when they’d had sex sober. In Boston, a couple of the guys were brand-new to the program and therefore forbidden, but she had done it anyway. One was there on a court order, recently released after three months in prison for a drunken bar fight that left his opponent unconscious. Another was only twenty, the same age as Maggie at the time. Every now and then it all struck Kathleen as wrong, but in the heat of the moment she mostly figured that they were all addicts confronting those demons head-on, and so they deserved a bit of a pass for seeking out pleasure that wasn’t somehow related to booze. (For the same reason, she went through phases of allowing herself to eat whatever she liked—a bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies for dinner, two cinnamon crullers from Dunkin’ Donuts as an afternoon snack.)
Arlo stroked her hair now and said, “We’ve gotta get to work out in the barn soon.”
“Yes.”
“But maybe a little disco nap first? I’m beat.”
“You go ahead up, honey.”
She took the mug back from him and put both cups down on the table.
“Don’t let me sleep longer than fifteen minutes, okay?” he said.
She agreed, kissing him on the cheek before he made his way upstairs. The familiar sound of his feet on the creaking floorboards warmed her.
She sat down at the table. Mabel came over, resting her snout on Kathleen’s thigh.
“Hello, angel,” she said.
A year earlier, the dog had had a tumor in her leg. Mabel was thirteen then. The vet had assumed they would put her down, but Kathleen insisted on surgery. The cost was five thousand dollars, which objectively she could admit was a lot. But it seemed like nothing set against another good year with Mabel.
“Merry Christmas,” Arlo had said when he wrote the check, even though it was only September.
The phone rang.
Kathleen hoped it was the school superintendent from Keystone finally calling back. She momentarily ran over her usual spiel: Sixty percent of the waste in our nation’s landfills is food waste, which never should have gone there in the first place. We feed our worms on such waste—fruit peels, eggshells, grass and yard clippings. Most of our food comes from the c
afeterias of six school systems in the area, and we’d love to make yours number seven.
But when she answered, it was her sister, Clare, at the other end of the line.
“Did you guys know you’re in the current issue of Organic Living magazine?” she said.
“You read Organic Living?” Kathleen asked.
“Joe picked it up at the doctor’s office. He smuggled the copy out in his shorts!”
Kathleen smiled.
“Why didn’t you tell us? Joe’s taping the article in the store window right now.”
Clare sounded happy. In her former job, Kathleen had always thought of her when she advised awkward adolescents that life would get better. For Clare, this had proven true. She had always felt somewhat removed from their relatives, Kathleen thought. They treated her like she was a snob for being inquisitive and bookish. (Even Kathleen herself was guilty of it. She didn’t come around to seeing the beauty of her sister until much later. She realized that maybe she had been jealous of Clare when they were younger, because Clare was the smart one, the one who really didn’t care what anyone else thought. Kathleen wasn’t brave like that until she hit middle age.) Clare and her husband, Joe, were both the brains of non-brainy families. Their business, selling Catholic paraphernalia to priests and grandmothers, was a strange fit for a couple of liberal intellectuals who lived in Jamaica Plain. But they made a killing.
“How’s Ryan?” Kathleen asked now.
“He’s great. He got a second callback for Kiss Me Kate at Wheelock Family Theatre. The rehearsals are in August, so if he gets it, it will completely mess up our plans for Maine.”
“Don’t tell Ann Marie. She’ll accuse you of elder abuse for abandoning Alice there.”
“Oh please. Those two should just run off together and make it official already,” Clare said. “That was mean of me. Joe’s a bad influence. I’m sure we’ll go for at least a week. Maybe more, depending. You and Arlo should join us.”
“I don’t think we can get away,” Kathleen said, and though they both knew there was a lot more to it than that, neither of them elaborated.
“Well, if you change your mind, let me know. We won’t pull up the drawbridge for our allotted month the way the Perfects do.”
They talked about work and about Alice and an old schoolmate of theirs who had gotten married for the seventh time last month.
Then Clare said, “Which reminds me! Ryan told me this funny idea he had for a musical. It would be about different couples at their weddings, and then it would follow them into their marriages. The idea being that the wedding a couple has will predict what their marriage will be like. I think he’s a genius! I know I’m biased. But he’s on to something, right? Think about our three weddings—yours, mine, and Pat’s.”
Patrick and Ann Marie’s had been an over-the-top affair at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, exactly what one might expect from a couple of show-offs like them, pretending at the wealth they wanted so badly. Ann Marie’s dress was pure white lace; the flower girls wore pink tutus. All of their parents’ friends were in attendance, the average guest’s age hovering somewhere around fifty-three. But as far as Clare noticed, Pat and Ann Marie never exchanged a single tender gesture: no handholding as they came off the dance floor, or kissing, unless someone did the hideous fork ding, in which case they’d pucker for the cameras like a couple of hams.
Kathleen and Paul’s wedding was emblematic of their shitty relationship, too, Clare said. They kissed passionately in the church, a fact that irked Alice to no end. They danced like crazy, bodies rubbing up against each other as if no one else were in the room. By ten thirty, they were both drunk. Two friends of Paul’s got into a fistfight in the men’s room. Kathleen tried to break them apart and ended up with blood on her dress. Afterward, she sobbed unabashedly at the head table, and when Clare came to check on her, she grabbed Clare’s wrist and said, “In case you had any money riding on it, I’m pregnant.”
They found this amusing now, proof positive, Kathleen thought, that almost anything could be funny given enough distance, time, and therapy. It grated on her, though, the way that no Kelleher could take a relationship seriously if it wasn’t a marriage. She had been with Arlo for almost as long as she was married to Paul, but her family, even Clare, still thought of Paul as the primary partner of her life. Another lesson for Maggie: The most important choice you can make is the person you reproduce with. You’ll be stuck with him forever, even when you haven’t spoken in twenty years.
Clare and Joe had been married by a friend of theirs in a garden outside Harvard Square, with just Kathleen and Maggie and a few friends as witnesses, and then everyone had gone for a big dinner at Casablanca, with chocolate ganache cake for dessert. Neither of them wanted a honeymoon. They only wanted to spend a week together in their apartment, watching movies and cooking big dinners, which they ate in bed, spread out over old issues of The New Yorker. They spent years of Saturdays in that apartment in the same way, drinking coffee all morning, peaceful, satisfied.
Clare had gotten pregnant almost as an afterthought right around their sixth anniversary, the summer Joe’s dad died. They named their only son Ryan after his paternal grandfather. Ryan was a hoot from the time he was a toddler. He sang and danced—Clare often said proudly that he tapped before he crawled.
Joe had wanted a boy’s boy like Chris or Little Daniel. The whole theater thing had never been part of his plan. Still, he was a trouper about it. He even played the sound tracks to Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon in the store, proclaiming them “almost like the Chieftains if you shove cotton balls in your ears and don’t think about it too much.”
Kathleen adored her brother-in-law, partly because of how much he disliked Alice. For years, he had gritted his teeth like most of them did every time she said something degrading about Clare. Then one Saturday, he wasn’t there at a family dinner. Clare told Kathleen he had been ranting about Alice that morning and she was afraid he might blow. From then on he was required to be around Alice only on important holidays, when absences were inexcusable.
Clare was a good girl by nature, and inclined to suffer in silence forever. But now, because of Joe, when Alice invited them places, they were more likely to claim they were busy than not. Served her mother right, Kathleen thought. For most people, interactions with Alice were like a goddamn hostage situation, but hardly anyone ever said, “No more.”
Kathleen told Clare to tell Ryan she loved his play idea.
“He’s driving over to the shop now,” Clare said. “I wish he was here so you could say hi. He misses you!”
Kathleen knew what this really meant: Clare missed her. She missed her sister too.
“I can’t believe Ryan can drive,” Kathleen said. “God, that makes me feel old. When I moved away he was in third grade.”
“Tell me about it. It totally terrifies me. How did you cope when your kids started? I’m so scared he’ll drive drunk, or get in the car with someone else who’s been drinking.”
They had all driven drunk in the past, some of them more than others. Their kids were probably far less inclined to do so. Well, Ryan, at least.
“The thought of Chris out on the open road still terrifies me, and he’s been driving for twelve years,” Kathleen said. “Maggie never learned to drive for some reason.”
“Oh, right,” Clare said. “Do you think that might have to do with hearing so many stories about the accident? I remember being freaked out to drive because of that.”
They always referred to it that way, just two words, which they all understood: the accident. Patrick and Alice refused to talk about it, but Alice still had the faint scar running down her face. You could see it if you knew where to look.
It happened the winter Kathleen was eleven years old. Clare was nine then, and Patrick only seven.
It had been snowing on and off for days, and all you could hear from inside the house was the crunching sound of tire chains against the road. Alice hated the noise; she said i
t made her teeth hurt. She hated having them underfoot all day too, but it was too cold out to play in the yard.
“Can’t you give me some peace?” she’d say, whenever any of them asked for anything.
At bedtime, Kathleen would whisper to her father that she didn’t want to be alone with Alice, but he would only say, “Be my helper when I’m gone, okay? And know that your mother loves you.”
Alice wasn’t always this way. On the nights when she and Daniel went on dates, she would let them eat ice cream before their grandmother arrived to feed them dinner, and give Kathleen permission to brush her silky dark hair. When they had parties, Kathleen and Clare would get paid a dollar each to ferry the coats upstairs to their parents’ bedroom, and they’d be allowed to stay up until ten, giddily running highballs and Canadian Clubs out to guests in the living room from the bar in the kitchen.
On those nights, Alice laughed more.
She seemed happiest of all during summers in Maine, surrounded by their cousins and aunts and uncles. There, she ran along the beach in her bathing suit, her long legs glistening with oil. Sometimes she would get right down on the cottage floor with them and play blocks or dolls.
But at other times, Alice grew cold and unkind. Kathleen was terrified of her mother’s outbursts, her short temper that seemed to spring from nowhere.
They were in the kitchen that afternoon—Kathleen was doing her homework at the table, Clare was running circles around the room, screaming at the top of her lungs.
Sternly, Alice told her to stop.
She had said she had a headache earlier, going up to her room to rest as she often did before their father got home from work. Some days, she drank whiskey. She thought it made her calm, but in fact it turned her angry, sad. Kathleen could smell it on her breath when Alice picked her up from school. She knew enough to be quiet.
It was three o’clock. Alice was unloading groceries. She had let them sit out all morning, so that the milk dripped with condensation, and the lettuce had begun to droop.
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