Sam had encouraged Maeve’s friendship with Wendy, said she needed to get out of the house more. He had bowling buddies and went fishing and camping with a rep from a paper company he’d known for years. Maeve kept to herself, complained about the bowling wives, most of whom were older than her. She knew moms from Dylan’s school but didn’t like them or their preference for gossip. So, when Wendy started coming around, when Maeve went shopping or to movies with her, Sam said Maeve seemed happier than she had in ages. But when he asked why she never brought guys around or talked about dating, Maeve let on that Wendy liked women. He’d wrinkled his nose, citing his Catholic upbringing and his discomfort with that “lifestyle.”
“She’s not, like, into you, is she?” he’d asked.
Maeve had balked, told him to look around. “I have a husband and two kids. I don’t think I’m exactly her type.” He’d laughed in a way that stung, like the idea that she could be attractive to someone like Wendy was ridiculous.
But she was not about to have a conversation about who Wendy preferred now.
“Forget it,” she said. “Who wants dessert?”
Maeve made a point to have one of the kids with her when she met Wendy for coffee or lunch or at the park. But sometimes they talked on the phone while Sam was at work and the baby napped. She knew what days Wendy had off and would call. Sometimes Wendy would be home. Other times she had to leave a message. Maeve knew Wendy had a girlfriend, Carla, in Freeport, that they’d been dating for less than a year, that she worked for L.L.Bean as a guide. She’d shrugged off that twinge of jealousy by talking about Dylan and Opal, how they were growing, the cute things they did and said. She talked about the house on the cove, what a gift it had been for her and Sam to be able to move in after her grandfather died, how she and Sam had really made it their own, and how much they liked living close to the water. Wendy confided that she was estranged from her parents, that she’d come out to them freshman year of college, and that they couldn’t accept “her choices,” as she put it. “But Carla’s mom is cool, and so is her sister, so they’re kind of like family in some ways.”
They met at the park the following spring. It had been months since they’d seen each other, and Wendy talked about having brunch with Carla’s mom for Easter.
Something about the way she said it boiled Maeve’s blood. “Do you think you two will have kids together, then? Like get inseminated or something?”
She was pushing Opal in the kiddie swing, trying to be nonchalant.
Wendy took a step back. “Why are you being cruel?”
“How is that cruel? You like kids, don’t you? Why else would you be an OB-GYN nurse if you didn’t?” The next words shot out of her. She felt ugly saying them. But wasn’t Wendy rubbing it in? Her relationship with this Carla? “I mean, besides the obvious.”
“Oh, you are not implying that I went into obstetrics and gynecology because I’m a lesbian, right, Maeve? That’s not what you’re saying. Because that would not only be cruel but homophobic and kind of sick. And we’re friends, so that’s not what you’re saying, right?”
Maeve grabbed the swing to stop it and pulled Opal out. The baby reached for Wendy, but she stepped back. “I’m sorry,” Maeve said. “Really. I don’t know why I said that. It’s—” If she admitted what it was, what would that make her? She was losing her mind. “I’m jealous of your relationship with Carla, okay? Is that what you want to hear? And before you get all weird about it, I can be jealous of the time you spend with her because we’re friends, and I don’t want to share you ...” She rolled her eyes. “God, that isnotwhat I’m trying to say. I love Sam, okay?”
Wendy let out a knowing laugh. “Okay, Maeve. You’ve got yourself tied up in knots again. Just like high school. And let me add, since we’re being, you know,straightwith each other ...” She stepped forward and put her arms out to Opal, who fell into them eagerly. “I love kids. I care about women’s health. Carla and I—we’re good, but we’re not great. She’s not the love of my life or anything. And I’m a little jealous of you. I’d like what you have—a home, a family, someone who loves me for me, even a little girl of my own someday.” She rubbed noses with Opal, who threw her head back in a giggle. “Maybe you don’t get lonely, Maeve. But I do.”
Maeve could not begin to tell Wendy about her loneliness, how murky it was, this feeling that she was wading in her own life, staying in the shallows because something scary lurked in the deep end. She’d thought having a second child would round her out and quiet the nagging part that resented being a paper salesman’s dull wife, a part-time office worker, a woman expected to raise perfect children and keep a house running. Opal had made it a little better—how could she not?—but Wendy resurfacing made the other part so much worse. So, yes, she did get lonely. She just couldn’t tell Wendy that without falling into the deep end.
“I’m sorry, Wen. Truly. Can you forgive me? For being a jerk.”
Wendy squeezed Maeve’s hand, her brow knit and sincere. “Always, Maeve. Always.”
They walked hand in hand to Maeve’s car as if the child Wendy held was theirs.
Chapter Twenty-One
1990: Mid-Coast Maine
Molly, first through the tavern door, scraped her boots on the bristle rug, pulled off her stocking hat, and shook pellets of snow onto the wood floor. She pulled up on her bleached blond hair to respike the curls. Her dorm mate, a long-legged girl from Bangor named Shelby, shoved in behind her along with a small group they’d gathered on their bar crawl. The Salty Siren was the fourth stop. A flaking wood sign above the bar in the shape of a mermaid read,Est. 1972 Sailors and Whores Welcome.
One of the joiners, a guy named Chris, whistled. “Wow. This is the definition of dive bar. You guys sure about this? It’s kind of seedy.”
Most of the light in the bar came from green lamps over six pool tables and neon beer signs. The back wall was lined with racks of pool cues and pinball machines and arcade games and bearded bikers and flannel shirts. Empty shot glasses accumulated at the end of the long busy bar, next to jars of pickles and brined eggs. A movie-theater popcorn machine in the corner dumped out a fresh batch into the glass bin.
Molly grinned. Stop number four. It was perfect.
“I can’t believe we’ve never been here,” Shelby said. “I honestly thought we’d been to every bar in town. And don’t be such a baby, Chris. It’s cool.”
Molly’s skin prickled to life.Something wicked this way comes.
Her advisor had grabbed her after class earlier that day. She’d been avoiding him, ignoring his summonses. She knew what he wanted. Academic probation. Again. She had barely eked out a C-average in her first semester, an A- in literature balancing out a D+ in economics. She’d promised her parents over Christmas break that she’d knuckle down, that it was jitters of being away for the first time. But in truth, she couldn’t put her finger on what her problem was. When she was home, she couldn’t wait to get back to college, away from the farmhouse and her parents and Maeve and her perfect little life at the cove. She and Sam had painted every room, pulled down the kitchen wallpaper with the floral ribbons, replaced the linoleum. Worst of all, they painted the shutters blue. The green was gone. It was like they’d erased her grandfather completely. But when she was at school, in the dorm room she shared with Shelby, in the bathroom down the hall that she shared with every girl on her floor, in classrooms she shared with clusters of strangers she didn’t care about, she was pathetically homesick. She missed her mom and her dad and the couch and television and the way she could do nothing, hours and hours of nothing. She missed the porch swing and her dad’s cluttered barn. She missed the honeyed smell of fields in the fall, an oven with cookies baking, fresh sheets on a bed that someone else made for her. She missed those things like a poet, her yearning existing only on paper. In real life, her entire world itched. In real life, she was always looking for an escape hatch into some other place entirely.
“This is awesome,” she said, already buzzed from earlier stops. “It’s like something out of a Stephen King novel. And I think I’m up. You guys see if you can find a table, and I’ll get a couple of pitchers.”
Most people at the bar were men, most of them too old and too crusty to be college kids. At first glance, two women in short denim skirts and tank tops—clothes that didn’t make any sense in the dead of a Maine winter—looked her age but, up close, Molly could see that theywere much older. She wondered if they’d changed into those getups in the bathroom. She made a yuck face, mostly for herself, and squeezed in beside a burly guy with a long broad nose and antlers of hair that made him look like a moose.
“You want a shot?” he asked, pushing one of two amber-colored glasses her way.
