Charlie settled himself in his chair and said, “It’s just that, sometimes you send everybody away and then you look around and wonder why you’re so lonely. You ever do that?”
She nodded. Did she ever. She brought the cookies into the kitchen, which was toward the back of the house and looked out over a small, untended garden. When she returned she took a seat on the edge of the couch and then, after a moment, sat all the way back. She looked around the room. It was simple and spare, with none of the ornate clutter and figurines that Vivienne favored. There was a single photograph resting on the table next to the couch—a beautiful woman who looked just like Eliza with her arms around a little girl. Eliza and her mother, clearly. Hanging on the wall behind the recliner was a photograph of what Mary guessed to be Eliza and her family: besides Eliza there was a man with thick white-blond hair and two little girls, maybe ten and eight.
Charlie closed his eyes, and Mary thought he might have gone to sleep, so she just sat there, looking at her hands and occasionally up at the TV. She didn’t mind sitting there. It was peaceful in the living room; there was a clock ticking somewhere. The television was on but the volume was turned down low: it was some cop show that Mary didn’t recognize, and a man and woman were speaking urgently to each other. While Mary watched, the woman started crying. The TV was much smaller than Josh’s TV. Then, after a few moments, Charlie started talking, although his eyes remained closed.
“Tell me some gossip,” Charlie finally said. “Who’s loading up now?”
“Oh,” said Mary. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t really know.” Loading up meant hauling a lot. With Josh gone she didn’t keep track of the hauling—the people who came into The Cup weren’t talking about it, that was for sure. If she tried she could maybe scare up some summer-person gossip, but she didn’t think that was what Charlie was after. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
“It’s all right.” He lifted a hand and let it fall back down to the recliner; his eyes were still closed. “Doesn’t really matter to me anymore anyway.” He didn’t say that in a self-pitying way, the way Vivienne might have said something like that; it was just a fact. Then he said, “How’s that baby you’re growing? You taking good care, now?”
“I am,” she said. She tried not to think about August 3rd, ten o’clock in the morning.
“Good,” said Charlie. “Good.”
Mary put a hand on her belly, where it was starting to jut out a little bit. She’d always been very thin—too thin—so to her it seemed very noticeable, this addition to her shape. She’d taken to wearing loose shirts, and she put her apron on the second she walked into work. She thought of the peach-sized bundle of nerves and cells, veins and organs, with the big alien head.
And then the next thing she knew she was blubbering like she herself was the baby. She swiped her arm across her nose and hiccuped, but she couldn’t stop, she just kept crying.
Charlie Sargent turned his head toward her and sat up a little bit and said, “Oh, now, Mary. Hey, now.” He made a motion like he wanted to comfort her, leaning toward her. She didn’t want him to bother himself getting out of the chair, so she shook her head and tried to talk. But she found she couldn’t; she just blubbered on.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. He rested his head back in the chair, like he was giving her privacy to collect herself.
“I know,” she managed. “I know you didn’t mean to upset me. I’m sorry.” She snorted ungracefully.
“Nothing you have to be sorry about in front of me.” She nodded, grateful, and then he said, “There’s Kleenex in the kitchen. Bring the whole box, why don’t you.”
She knew that because she’d seen the tissues when she’d gone to put the lobster cookies down. Charlie’s kitchen was small and extremely tidy. There was a dish drainer with two plates drying in it. It sort of made her heart break, those two plates in the drainer, they seemed so lonely and brave. In the center of the table was a vase of cut flowers. A dish towel hung from the oven handles, its corners lined up with each other. When she came back from the kitchen his eyes were closed again and she thought about tiptoeing out the door, but then he said, “You okay? Can I do something for you?”
She thought, For me? He was the sick one. She said, “No. Thank you.” She waited a minute and then common sense and manners kicked in. She said, “Can I do anything for you?”
She expected him to give her the same answers she’d given him but instead he said, “You know what you can do for me?”
“What?” she said. “I can do something for you, I can do whatever.” I mean, brain cancer. The least she could do was help the man out.
“Just—just sit there for a little bit, will you? Just sit right there where you were sitting and talk to me.”
Mary sat. “That’s what you want me to do? That’s all?”
“That’s all. Make yourself comfortable.”
Mary sat all the way back on the couch. Then she took off her shoes and tucked her legs underneath her. Charlie opened one eye and smiled and said, “That’s more like it. Now, just talk.”
She hesitated. “About anything in particular?”
“Nope, just whatever’s on your mind. I like the sound of your voice. It relaxes me, makes me feel peaceful.”
So Mary talked. She told him all sorts of things, things she’d never told anyone. She told him how sometimes she woke up in the night and the future felt like a big dark hole she might actually fall into. She told him that when she imagined the baby, imagined caring for it and loving it and having it love her back, sometimes she felt terrified and she broke out in a sweat. She told him sometimes she got scared Little Harbor was the only place she’d ever see in her life. She felt herself gearing up to cry again and pulled another tissue out of the box and got it ready.
She told him that she didn’t know how to be a good mother.
Charlie said, “Course you do. You’ll know how when the time comes, anyway, if you don’t know it now.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Nobody ever showed me how.”
He sat with that for a moment and then he said, “My wife, Joanie, was the best mother you ever saw, and her mother didn’t exactly show her.”
“So, how’d she know what to do?”
“She learned by doing. Boy, the way she loved Eliza, it was something else. When she died, I wondered how I’d ever do right by Eliza without her.”
“But you did.”
“Lots of times I figured it would have been better if I’d been the one who died.”
“Oh,” said Mary. “Don’t say that, please don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”
“It wasn’t fair to Eliza, to lose a mom like that. Just when she needed her the most. But she’s been okay. She’s tough, Eliza. A fighter.”
Then Mary told him about Vivienne’s friend Sam. “She’s a good mother, I watch her all the time. She works hard, she’s a nurse, and then sometimes after she’s done being a nurse she works other shifts taking care of really sick people in their homes.”
“That’s a real hero,” Charlie said. “Someone like that. Where’s she do that kind of work, now?”