“He’ll be bringing home his beer-drinking cronies and they’ll all sit around and talk dick talk and you’ll be left with the wives listening to what miniseries they’re watching that week.”
“Maybe I’ll start watching … oh, dear, no I won’t. Hell. You can still love someone and be different from them. At least, I think not to try is horrible. Not to at least give it a chance.”
“You’ll wind up pregnant.”
“So what? What the heck other sort of way should I want to be, seeing as how I’m in love with him?”
“And you’ll get fat …”
“So I’ll get fat. Christ! At my age there’s no better reason to get fat. At least I’ll be a real person with my own life. You know, you have all these great friends in town who adore you and they all love to have you around, and yeah, sure, of course, you’re beautiful and amusing and who wouldn’t want you around, but they all go home at night to their own places, their own homes. They close the door and there they are, together with their own lives. And where do you go? I mean, don’t you ever want to find someone you can build something with? Instead of … of … of clandestinely screwing around with your sister’s ex-husband?”
And of course, Zinnie stood just at that moment in the doorway with an ashen face.
“Thank you,” Carmela narrowed her eyes and leered at Claire as one would expect a snake to leer. “Thank you very much miss better-than-everyone-else and God forbid you might forget to preach it to them because you’ve just ruined not one but two afternoons.”
Mary and Stan steamrolled through the doorway, pushing Zinnie aside, thrusting plastic bags full of groceries at all of them. Claire got busy right away and then so did Carmela. They buried themselves in cabinets and put away soup cans and dog biscuits and sponges and Jello. Mary just kept handing them things and they just kept on putting away. Stan saw his chance and left and Mary stood there grumbling with her cereal boxes. “Well, Zinnie,” she said, “are you going to just stand there like a lump on a log or are you going to pitch in and help?”
“I was just thinking,” Zinnie drawled, “about the time we all went to visit Carmela and Arnold in their new home in Bayside—”
“Put that ice cream in the freezer before it melts,” Mary said to Claire. “Now what’s the Mayor barking at?”
“And just as we were leaving—boy, it’s funny because I can remember it like it was yesterday—just as we were leaving and I was the last one out and it was so dark on that porch and Daddy was honking to hurry up and I went to kiss Arnold good-bye, did you know he stuck his whole tongue down my throat?”
Right then the kitchen went still and they all looked at Zinnie. “I mean, I was just a teenager—” she started to say, but she didn’t finish, because Mary’s hand shot out from across the room and whacked her smack across the face.
“And another thing!” Mary’s strong voice roared at the three of them. “If the three of ye go after each other like cats, like blessed enemies, for pity’s sake, where will you be when your father and I are gone? What will you do, stand paces apart above my casket? I ask you.”
“Ma—”
“Don’t interrupt me, I’ll be through when I’m through. What did we go and have the lot of you for, if it was only to argue and bicker and hate yourselves till you’re green in the faces and wrinkled with lines running this way from jealousy and that way from envy. And all these years I thought when you’d be grown you’d start to care for each other and I would be able to take a backseat and relax, only no, no, it sure won’t be like that for a while!”
There the three women stood, their heads hung in adult supplication. Nothing had changed. She would mention her casket and they would all fall to pieces and promise to be good wee lassies once again. Until next time.
“Mary?”
“What is it, Stan? Can’t you go back out and bring the dog in? He’s driving me mad.”
“Is Michaelaen in here?”
“Sure I thought he’s with you!”
“He’s out on the lawn, Dad.”
“He’s not.”
“Yes, I saw him.”
“Well, he isn’t there now.”
“Glory be.”
They went out quickly, each of them taking off in separate directions. Michaelaen wasn’t under the porch. He wasn’t in the garage. He wasn’t in anyone’s car, a favorite place of his to be, just sitting in someone’s car pretending he was going somewhere. He was, it became terrifyingly clear, missing.
Zinnie stood in the middle of the lawn and shouted his name, again and again, again and again. Her teeth began to chatter.
“Oh God, it’s all my fault,” Claire came outside after rechecking the house. “It’s all my fault.”
“Shut up,” Carmela told her. “And shut the dog up.”