Maggie nodded. “Are they coming to Maine this summer?”
“No one tells me a thing,” Alice said grumpily, then, “As far as I know, yes, they’ll be here in August as usual.”
Father Donnelly returned with two miniature paper cups full of tartar sauce.
“Oh, thanks, Father, you’re a doll,” Alice said. She gave him her brightest smile. She always was at her best around good-looking men. Maggie thought of her grandfather: even when he was young, he was never particularly handsome. She had seen old pictures. The women in his family came up thick and freckly. The men were spindly, pale. She wondered why Alice had picked him. Surely someone so vain would have been disappointed by such a plain-looking husband.
“Will you lead us in grace, Father?” Alice asked.
Maggie glanced around at the other patrons in their shorts and sandals and flimsy plastic lobster bibs. Grace? Really?
“I’d be honored,” he said. To Maggie’s horror, he extended his arms. They all joined hands.
Luckily, he spoke fast: “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bountiful hands through Christ our Lord, Amen.”
They dropped hands. He immediately turned to Maggie and said, “So how long will you be visiting?”
She shrugged, glad that was over, at least. “Not sure. A few days, maybe.”
“Is that all?” Alice asked. “I thought it was two weeks.”
“Well, my plans changed, as you know, and I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do.”
“She broke up with her boyfriend,” Alice said happily. “She’s hiding out.”
Maggie laughed, because it was sort of true, and because laughing was really the only alternative to getting pissed off at the comment. Besides, it was nice in a way, to pretend for a moment that the breakup was the worst of her worries.
“I can’t think of a better place for it,” he said. He bit into his lobster roll, leaving a speck of mayo on his bottom lip. To Maggie’s great amazement, Alice reached over and wiped it off.
“Thanks,” he said.
Maggie wished she could stop time then and there, just to be able to call her mother and report on this immediately.
“When do you have to get back to work?” he asked.
“Technically I’m only on vacation these next two weeks, but my boss doesn’t care if we work from home as long as we show our faces in the office, say, once a month.”
Though I do have to be back in New York by July eighth for my next gynecological visit. You see, Father, I’m knocked up.
“That sounds like quite a job,” the priest said.
“It is nice. Though I pretty much always go into the office anyway.”
“What kind of work is it?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a TV show, um, a crime show,” she said. Talking to priests was incredibly weird. Every word you uttered had to be filtered twice through an appropriate censor. You could basically talk safely about Care Bears, Jesus, or the weather, and that was it. “I’m a fiction writer, too, though.”
“Oh, I know; your grandmother’s told me all about it,” he said.
She had? Maggie felt so touched she might cry, and then she was immediately annoyed at herself: Why were her own affections so easily won? It wasn’t really such a grand gesture on Alice’s part.
“I think it’s fascinating you’re a writer,” he said. “I dabble in fiction myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I used to write lots of short stories. I still write them once in a while. Though the fact of it is, I’m too thin-skinned for your line of work.”
“Thin-skinned!” Alice said. “I don’t think so. You should see him with the sick parishioners, Maggie. He’s a saint.”
“Sainthood aside, it’s true,” he said. “I submitted two or three stories to The New Yorker and I got these form letters back. They really bummed me out. I knew The New Yorker was a long shot, but all my hard work, and then a form letter? I didn’t write again for months. And I sure as heck never submitted anything.”
“Ah yes, I’m very familiar with the form letters,” Maggie said.
“I could picture myself going crazy, gluing them all over the walls of the rectory, scaring the other priests.”
“I once considered decoupaging a table with mine.”
He laughed, a real, deep belly laugh. His smile was warm. There was something almost old-fashioned about his looks. Or maybe classic was a better word.
Perhaps she’d underestimated him. He seemed friendly and genuine, though she reminded herself that now would be an especially inconvenient time to fall in love with a Catholic priest.
“You write such lovely sermons, though,” Alice said.
“Yes, and not a one has ever been called derivative or stale or not quite plumped up.”
Maggie grimaced. “They said all that, huh?”
“Yup. That was the only non–form letter I got.”
“Never mind those ninnies. What did Gabe do is what I want to know,” Alice said, dragging out the words. She was a champion subject changer and apparently she was bored.
“He made promises he couldn’t keep,” Maggie said.
“He wouldn’t give you a ring!” Alice said proudly, like she had just guessed the correct answer in Double Jeopardy.
“Ha, no,” Maggie said. And though it was by all means the wrong crowd for talk of cohabitation, she continued, “We were supposed to move in together and at the last minute he changed his mind.”
Alice’s face crumpled. She looked genuinely injured. “That little—,” she started, then, looking over at the priest and perhaps deciding to tone down her language, “What a rat.”
“I thought you were going to say we shouldn’t be living together before marriage anyway,” Maggie said.
“Oh, pish posh,” Alice said. “I think it’s essential! You have to get to know a person. And that city is so expensive, why not have a roommate? As long as you’d be sleeping in different bedrooms.”
Had she meant that last part as a joke? Maggie couldn’t be sure.
“A lot of girls in my generation married a man just because he was going off to war,” Alice said. “They hardly knew those fellas to begin with, let alone what they became once they returned. And most of us went straight from our parents’ houses to our husbands’. We never got the chance to live alone until we were decrepit old ladies. Young people are smarter now. Although I think you all get love backward.”
“How so?” Maggie asked.
“You all seem to think that you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect that the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on.”
Maggie looked over at Father Donnelly.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t she?” he said, giving Alice’s arm a friendly squeeze. “I keep telling her she should get a TV talk show.”
“Is that what you did, Grandma?” Maggie asked, holding her breath, remembering Alice’s closed-offness at dinner with Rhiannon the night before.
Alice looked thoughtful. “I suppose so, yes, to some extent.” That was all she could give, but that was enough. She switched the topic then, to a news item she had read about the inventor of Silly Putty.
Maggie sat back and listened, feeling more content than she had in weeks. This was exactly what she had come for, one of those Alice interactions that was actually fun, that made her feel welcome. She considered staying longer—the cottage would sit empty for the rest of June otherwise. And perhaps there would be more lunches like this, and time to write and to plan. Her child could grow in the salty sea air, under a roof where generations before had spent their happiest summers.
She looked out over the water. “I love it here,” she said.
“So do I,” said Father Donnelly. “I can’t imagine why anyone lives anywhere else.”
>
“Did you grow up in Maine?” Maggie asked.
“Yes, further north. In a village about three hours toward Bangor.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It was a simple, no-frills kind of house,” he said. “No TV or anything like that.”
“His parents were in the Church too,” Alice said. “His father is a deacon.”
Maggie started to romanticize his childhood: a log cabin in the woods, a young boy reading the Bible by a crackling fire.
“Naturally, my brothers and I raised Cain,” he said with a smile. “We would speed down these long country roads and bash people’s mailboxes with baseball bats.”
Maggie wanted to know how on earth he had gone from that to becoming a priest, but it seemed rude to ask.
“Sounds like my three,” Alice said. “Did they put me through the ringer! Especially Patrick and Kathleen. Clare was the quiet one. But sometimes the quiet ones are the wildest, and you never even suspect. I know she smoked like a chimney in high school. Always out the bedroom window. She ruined my white curtains!”
Maggie had heard all the stories of late-night parties at the house in Canton when her grandparents were away, and the time her mother and Uncle Patrick were pulled over with two open beers in their hands. There was the incident of Daniel tossing and turning one night and deciding to take a late walk around the block to cure his restlessness—as soon as he made it to the front lawn, he heard a noise from above and saw a boy climbing the trellis toward Kathleen’s open window. She was guiding him in whispers, as if she herself knew the route well: “Step to the right, now over toward the left.” Then there was the time Uncle Patrick drove back drunk all the way from Cape Cod at midnight, pulled into the driveway, and promptly plowed Daniel’s new Cadillac straight through the garage door. (To this day, whenever the story came up, he maintained that in that light, the door had looked open.) It sometimes seemed to her that previous generations had had more opportunities to mess up big and still bounce back. Whereas Maggie had always felt like one misstep, and she would be ruined.
“We torture our parents,” Father Donnelly said. “But then we get older and wiser and we give them the adoration they deserve. At least, we ought to.”
Alice beamed. “I’d like to meet your folks one day. They really raised you right.”
The conversation wound on, and Maggie tuned out for a few moments, watching a toddler and his father launch a toy sailboat at the edge of the bay. When she tuned back in, it was because she heard her name. Somehow they had arrived at the topic of the cottage schedule.
“Maggie’s mother, Kathleen, gets June, but you won’t be seeing her because she hates me,” Alice said.
“Grandma!” Maggie said. “She does not! She lives all the way across the country, that’s all.”
Father Donnelly grinned. “Well, Maggie, if you have the whole of June set aside for your mother and her kin, I don’t see why you wouldn’t stay all month. It seems like the perfect place to get your writing done.”
Was he flirting? No, that was ridiculous. He probably had old ladies and young ones all over town imagining that he was desperately in love with them. For some, she thought, the priest was the ultimate sex symbol: a really consistent, kind man, who was always happy to see you or to listen to your worries. Completely unthreatening, yet vaguely sexual, his vow of chastity serving the opposite of its intended purpose in that way, making everyone think about sex.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” she said.
“Well, that’s good,” Alice said. “You’ll stay! I’m glad.”
History had shown that when Alice was kind, she would soon be something entirely different. But right at this moment, she wanted Maggie here, needed her, maybe.
They took the back roads toward home. A ways out of town the houses got shabbier, closer together, and every so often there was a trailer wedged between two trees. In front of one little house, Maggie saw a man and a teenage boy sawing at what remained of the trunk of an old pine. It looked like they were sculpting a giant squirrel.
Alice swiveled her head, gesturing toward them. “Year-rounders,” she said, and shrugged her shoulders like, What can you do?
The houses eventually gave way to a field of wildflowers on the far side of a low stone wall. Off in the distance stood a stately red barn and a roofless silo that had been struck by lightning the summer Maggie turned ten.
Soon the two-lane street became a narrow dirt road. There were no streetlights here, only a wall of pine trees on either side that nearly blocked out the sun. She wondered if the locals realized how beautiful it was, or if they were immune. In New York, icons faded into the background most of the time—then one day you’d look up and notice the Empire State Building and it would take your breath away.
They drove until they came to the turnoff for Route 1, and there they sped up, joining the motorists rushing in both directions. Suddenly the world changed. The trees vanished. Two bright yellow lines popped out against black tar. Here the quaint and the garish were entwined in a decades-old wrestling match, so that the stately Ogunquit Playhouse with its forest-green marquee and white clapboard walls was offset by a strip of neon motels with pools out front, enclosed by chain-link fences. There was a massive liquor store, a place selling homemade quilts, Flo’s hot dog stand, and a junk shop with tables out front, which were crowded with hundreds of glass bottles. At night, a wooden box by the curb said, BOTTLES, $2 EA., PLEASE OBSERVE THE HONOR SYSTEM.
They took another turn, and a few minutes later they had arrived at the fork where Perkins Cove met Shore Road.
“Shall we walk in the Cove for a bit?” Alice said. “I don’t feel quite ready to go home.”
The place had once been a quiet fishing village, but now the lobstermen unloading their traps on the docks were outnumbered by tourists waiting in line at the old-fashioned ice cream shop and buying magnets and candles and trinkets in the gift stores. Maggie bought a giant box of saltwater taffy to mail to Kathleen and a necklace made of pure blue sea glass for Alice.
They ambled toward the entrance to the Marginal Way, chatting as they went. When they reached the mile-long path that wove through the shoreline cliffs, Alice said to the priest, “Way back when, this was just a stretch of dirt for farmers to walk their cattle on. Then some nice local bought it and dedicated it to the town, and the path was built. That happened the year after we got here. There was a big to-do.”
“Were you there?” Maggie asked.
Alice shook her head. “It sounds silly now, but I was tired, I’d been up all night with a baby. I think your grandfather went, though.”
They hardly said a word to one another as they walked the path, humbled by the natural beauty. You couldn’t come here and not be absorbed by it. Off to the left on the other side of a fence stood stately homes with big front porches and Adirondack chairs on the lawns. To the right there was nothing but the pounding surf below, crashing against the rocks, the tide swaying back and forth like a dance. It made you feel as though you were a part of something more important than just you. Like even if there was no God there was always the ocean—before you and after you, breathing in and out for all eternity.
Maggie and Gabe had walked the Marginal one night last summer. It was darker than any night she could remember. There were so many stars. A Jimmy Buffett song drifted out to the path from the poolside bar of a resort in the distance, and they danced to the sound, laughing and singing along. Part of her wished she had never brought him here.
Alice’s knees were sore by the time they reached Ogunquit Beach, so instead of turning back on foot, they hopped one of the trolleys that puttered around town. The last time Maggie had ridden one was when Pat and Ann Marie rented the entire Ogunquit fleet for her cousin Patty’s wedding. Maggie thought now of Patty’s husband, Josh. He was a sweet guy, and he had been so happy on that day. “I just married my best friend and my dream girl,” he had said when they pulled away from the church, as if he simply could
not believe his own good fortune.
When they got back into the car, for the first time in three days, Maggie didn’t bother to look at her phone.
• • •
After sunset, she walked the beach in front of the cottage alone. In the city, Maggie almost forgot about stars; you could hardly see them against the glow of the streetlights. But here there seemed to be millions, sparkling everywhere she looked. Her grandfather had made a big show of pointing out constellations to them when they were kids—the Three Sisters, the Four Leaf Clover, the Big Dipper, Maggie’s Pigtail, and Fiona’s Big Toe. She couldn’t recall when she had realized that half the names were made up.
The night air was chilly. Maggie pulled her sweatshirt tight around her shoulders.
She was really going to do this, and do it alone. It felt exhilarating and terrifying. She walked faster. Soon she had passed a dilapidated jetty. The jetty was a mile and a half from the cottage. Had she really walked that far? The Kelleher children rarely went to the public beach on the other side, but Maggie kept walking now. It was low tide, and all around her feet were nests of seaweed full of tiny shells. She picked one up, rubbed it between her fingers.
Up ahead there was a lifeguard’s chair. At the height of the season, two tanned and toned teenage locals (always a guy and a girl, who you could only assume were sleeping together) sat there in the afternoons in their red bathing suits, occasionally looking up from their conversation to blow their whistles at some kid who had swum out too far. As adolescents, Maggie and Patty had worshipped the lifeguards from a distance, and sometimes after dinner they would climb up into the chair and look out over the ocean, silently pretending to be two gorgeous beach creatures with perfect thighs.
Maggie walked toward the chair. At its splintering bottom, she climbed the ladder slowly, one rung at a time, until she had reached the top. The wind whipped against her face, blowing her hair back. She listened to the waves, feeling like nothing could ever get to her as long as she had this to come home to.
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