“How’s Penny?” asked Mary, once she was settled. “How’s Stephen?”
Sam had asked Mary to babysit for Stephen and Penny twice early in the summer, but once she was working and the second time she had plans with Josh. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t always loved babysitting. There was that time, for example, when Penny, who was supposed to be napping, screamed in her crib for twenty-five solid minutes while Stephen made a tic-tac-toe board in red crayon on the kitchen floor and Mary ran between the two of them, not sure who to tend to first. Sam had said not to worry if Penny had trouble settling down for her nap, but this seemed beyond having trouble settling down.
Mary had been at her wit’s end, but when Sam got home from work she had simply popped Penny’s pacifier back in her mouth (Mary had tried that, but Penny had spit it heartily out each time) and had Stephen sit for two minutes in a straight-backed kitchen chair while she sprayed cleaner on the kitchen floor. The crayon had come right off, and Stephen had accepted his punishment uncomplainingly, even stoically. Sam hadn’t even seemed aggravated with Mary for letting things get into such a state.
How did mothers know these things? How did they do it? How was Mary going to be able to do it?
Sam used her forefinger to make the universal symbol for nutso. “It’s the usual at my house,” she said. Sam’s husband worked construction. They lived in a pretty little house that was within walking distance to downtown Ellsworth, and Sam even found time to make gourmet cupcakes that she sold to a bakery on Main Street. Sam was the opposite of Vivienne in almost every way. Sometimes Mary wondered how it was that they were still friends. (“Habit,” Vivienne had said once when Mary asked.)
“How’s the hospital?”
Under the black robe that the customers at A Cut Above put on while they got their hair cut and colored it looked like Sam was still wearing her navy-blue scrubs. She was definitely wearing her nursing clogs, which were also navy blue but had lighter blue flowers all over them. Sam always told Mary she’d make a good nurse. She was calm in a crisis, Sam said, with a good head on her shoulders. Of course, that was before that day with the crayons and the crying.
“Not the best day,” said Sam. “We lost a patient.” Sam had little purple half-moons under her eyes, and her skin looked pale.
“Oh! I’m sorry,” said Mary. She couldn’t imagine what that was like, being around sickness and death all the time. She’d never seen a dead person before; she’d definitely never seen anyone die. She thought Sam was wrong: she’d make a terrible nurse.
“That’s okay,” said Sam. “She was old, and really frail. And then pneumonia got her.” She shrugged. “She was ready. Just yesterday, she told me she was ready. Her kids knew she was ready. Her husband’s been gone for three and a half years. If you ask me, the body hangs on way past the point it should sometimes.”
“Yeah,” said Mary.
“It always takes something out of you, though, you know. Watching a life end.”
Mary was quiet; she didn’t know what to say to that, but she tried to look sympathetic and understanding.
“I tell my husband all the time that when it’s my turn to go he’d better slip me something nice and peaceful and sit there with me. Not that that’s legal in Maine, not even for doctors to do it, but I could tell you stories and stories about how it should be. Man, I could tell you stories.” She rubbed her eyes and studied herself in the mirror and said, “Boy, who’s a downer today? I’m sorry, Mare. I’ll try and shake it.”
“You don’t have to,” said Mary. “I don’t mind.” She thought about the conversation with Charlie in The Cup, the night he’d saved her from Josh, about the accident on his boat not being an accident at all. She thought about the way he’d told her, his fingers tapping on the table in a sort of rhythm. Not panicked. In fact, he’d been calm, like he was telling a story about someone else, someone he didn’t know very well. He’d apologized to her too, just as Sam had now, and Mary had said the same thing to him: I don’t mind. She didn’t; she hadn’t. She thought of it as a sort of honor.
Now, in the salon, she picked up the magazine and flipped through it. There was a whole section on summer reads. The photo showed a few books with beachy covers and women staring out into perfect blue-green oceans. Unrealistic, if you lived in Maine, where the water was too cold to swim in and most of the beaches were rocky and uninviting. People came from forever away to summer here anyway. They lapped up the lobster meat and the blueberries and the glimpses of the ocean through the native firs.
Sam said, “I wonder if these highlights are going to make me look as good as nine hours of straight sleep would.” She pulled the skin under her eyes down with two fingers and made a face. Then she turned to Mary and said, “So, listen. Your mom told me, about you.” She looked significantly toward Mary’s stomach.
Inside, Mary fumed. The news wasn’t Vivienne’s to tell. Mary stared hard at the counter with the hairbrushes and the scissors.
“You okay, kid?” Sam’s voice sounded the way it did when Penny had a fever and Sam was trying to get her to take some Tylenol. Mary felt like Sam was stroking her forehead with her voice.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.”
Sam leaned toward her and lowered her voice. “You sure you’re doing things the way you want to? Anyone pressure you to make choices that weren’t your own?”
“Nobody’s pressuring me,” said Mary. “I’m sure.”
“And the father—?”
“Gone,” said Mary. “Left town.” Mary had heard that Josh had moved out without paying July’s rent, which he was late on anyway. He’d packed up most of his belongings—he’d taken the flat-screen TV, his landlord had said—and he’d disappeared. His boat was gone from the harbor, and his buoys were nowhere to be seen.
“That’s what I thought.” Sam nodded firmly. “That’s what Vivienne said. And that’s—what, a good thing? A bad thing?”
“A good thing,” repeated Mary. She didn’t tell Sam anything else. She didn’t tell her that sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night, startled by an image of Josh with his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t tell Sam that sometimes she thought about what might have happened if Charlie Sargent hadn’t come by at just the right time, and she didn’t tell Sam about the posters in the clinic that showed the pregnant woman with the bruises on her arms. She didn’t tell Sam about the brown paper bag in her closet that Josh had never come back for, and her middle-of-the-night fear that Josh would come looking for her, looking for the baby, looking for the paper bag, and that there’d be nobody around to help her.