Kristie
Kristie has been waiting tables for so long—lunch shifts, dinner shifts, cocktail hours, marathon doubles—that she finds a surprising comfort innotwaiting tables, in the ease and order of working at Renys. She spends an hour or two at the beginning of each shift stocking shelves, mainly in the grocery section, or straightening children’s pajamas in the clothing section. The people she works with, mostly women, all middle-aged or older, all locals, are friendly but not too friendly. This, Kristie is learning, is the way of true Mainers, and the attitude suits her. She comes to think of the women collectively as “the Renys.” The Renys have teenaged children or adult children and young grandchildren; they have husbands who haul lobster traps out of Rockland or Rockport or Owls Head, or who work construction or for plumbing companies. They’re not afraid to comment to one another about summer people and their attitudes, but, by gosh, they’ll wrap their jars ofblueberry preserves in enough paper at the checkout so that they can be sure nothing will break on the way back to their waterfront homes.
The best part about getting to know the Renys is that one of them, Elaine, lives on Marine, just three streets over from Kristie’s apartment. She offers to drive Kristie home when they work the same shift, sparing her the hassle of the public bus.
Kristie wonders what it would be like to be a Reny. She finds herself imagining being married to Danny, living in their own little house in Rockland, working long, peaceful hours stocking shelves. In her walks around the downtown area she has even picked out her favorite street, Summer Street, and her favorite house, a little yellow Cape with a square of garden that Danny could go to town on. The yard is crying out for a low stone wall.
According to the online pregnancy calculator her baby will be born at the very end of February, or maybe early March. This baby will be a Pisces: empathetic, mystical, romantic. Sheila was a Pisces, and the connection gives Kristie comfort. Kristie is a Scorpio: passionate, stubborn, resourceful.
How cold will it be in Maine in late February? Kristie shivers just thinking about it. Although she is coming around to rocky coast over miles of spun-sugar sand, she doesn’t really like the cold. That’s why she stayed so long in Miami Beach; that’s why she couldn’t wait to get the heck out of Altoona in the first place. Will their yellow Cape be well heated? Kristie hopes so. It is always there that the fantasy stops, because in order to live in a bungalow with Danny and a child she’ll have to actually tell Danny that she’s having a baby.
On a Wednesday toward the middle of July Elaine offers Kristie a ride home. The lobsterman’s children are drawing with chalk on the street. As soon as she closes the door of Elaine’s car her phone rings.
“Hi!” says a friendly, unfamiliar voice. “Kristie?”
“Yes. This is Kristie.”
“It’s Sierra!”
“I’m sorry,” says Kristie. “I don’t know anyone named Sierra.”
“I’m calling to see how I can help you today by helping you consolidate and begin to pay off your debt.”
Oh, no. No. She shouldn’t have answered. She remembers the woman in the billing office:I’m sorry, sweetie. You can run, but you can’t hide. They’ll find you eventually.She wants to hang up; she wants to throw the phone into the harbor. She never should have taken the call: she knows better than to answer an unfamiliar number. She has grown careless.
“Kristie?” says Sierra. “My goal is to get you in a better financial situation. Not to judge or implicate you. In fact, if you’d like, I can be an ear for you. I can listen to your story.” Kristie can tell Sierra is reading from a script because she trips over the wordimplicate.
“Well, Sierra,” says Kristie. “Do I have a story for you.”
In third grade, right after Sheila and Kristie moved to Altoona, Kristie made a best friend by the name of Twyla Ambrose. Twyla had recently broken up with her former best friend, Nelly Friedman, and she took Kristie under her considerably expansive wing almost immediately.
Sheila was working long hours as a legal assistant at Goldstein, Heslop, Steele, Clapper, Oswalt and Smith. Twyla’s father, Ken, owned a small fleet of dry cleaners in Altoona; her mother, Helen, took care of the house, Twyla, and Twyla’s little brother, Zachary. Each morning Helen did Twyla’s hair in two French braids with a perfectly even part. When Kristie spent the night at Twyla’s, which she was invited to do nearly every weekend, the girls watchedSabrina the Teenage Witchin the rec room and Helen brought them giant bowls of buttered popcorn made in a pot on the stove and not in the microwave.While the girls took over the rec room, Helen and Ken sat next to each other on the wraparound couch in the living room, eating vanilla fudge twirl ice cream out of matching whitebowls and watching television. When Kristie walked upstairs to use the bathroom—it wasn’t until 2005 that the Ambroses added a three-quarter bath to the lower level—she’d peek at Twyla’s parents and report back to Twyla what they were watching (usuallyWho Wants to Be a Millionaire).
Twyla didn’t care. “They. Are. So. Boring,” said Twyla. “That’s all they ever do.”
“Yeah,” said Kristie. “Boring.” To her, though, it seemed exotic. Two parents sitting on a couch side by side, there when you went to bed at night, there when you woke up in the mornings. On the mornings after sleepovers, after they’d eaten pancakes, Helen Ambrose would French braid Kristie’s hair too, apologizing if she was pulling too tight. But it never felt too tight to Kristie. (Sheila had to leave for work right after Kristie climbed on the school bus, and she never had time to do anything with Kristie’s hair.)
It was one of many injustices, some big, some small, that Kristie would never, ever tell her mother about, because her mother was tired, and because she was always working so hard, and because her feet hurt at the end of the day from the office shoes she wore, and sometimes she missed the teacher conferences, and sometimes they ran out of bread so there was no toast in the morning, and because it was clear that she was trying her best.
Anytime Kristie asked about her father, Sheila’s answer was always the same:We don’t need to talk about him. We don’t need him at all. We have each other!This was the answer in second grade, in third, in fourth and fifth and sixth.
In seventh grade they were assigned a family genealogy project. Kristie got a pit in her stomach as the teacher was reading out the assignment. Of course she wasn’t the only person in the entire grade with an unconventional family. Bolin Jeffries had been adopted as a one-year-old from China; Sarah Popperdam had two moms and no dad; Myles Furtada was conceived from a sperm donor. But this was all public knowledge and each of these kids knew their personal origin story. Kristie didn’t know hers.
Twyla turned her project in a day early. It was done on a hunter-green poster board, with a cutout of a big brown tree pasted in the center. Every branch of the tree had a name on it, and each of the names was accompanied by a small photograph. Kristie hadn’t started hers. She’d been reluctant to broach it with her mother. When she did:
“You put ‘deceased’ for father,” said Sheila. “You know that.”
“What about the rest of that side?”
“Leave it blank.”
“All of it?”
“All of it. But look! I have identical twins on my side, my cousins once removed. That’s something interesting you can add!”
“Were you in love with my father?” Kristie asked, her frustration making her bold.
Sheila looked at her long and hard; even in her tender youth Kristie could tell this was a question Sheila had been bracing for during Kristie’s whole life. “I thought I was,” said Sheila. “I mean, yes, I was. But I was young and naive, and I didn’t understand back then that love isn’t enough. You need more than love, sweetheart. You need to be smart, and resourceful, and in charge of your own destiny.”
