Mary’s body recovered quickly from the birth, the way teenage bodies do, and she was back to her old slip of a self in no time at all. (“Not fair,” said Vivienne, but she was making googly eyes at Patrick while she said it.)
Daphne and Andi permitted Mary to bring Patrick Charles to The Cup during the slow midwinter days, and, if all went well, they were going to allow the same thing when things picked up.
“It’ll get better, come summer,” said Daphne a minimum of four times a day.
“No question,” agreed Andi.
Trap Day came in April, and the boats filled the harbor once again. Then Memorial Day arrived, and the summer people started to come back, and then it was June, and then the season was in full swing.
“I told you it would happen,” said Daphne.
“I told you,” said Andi.
Patrick grew too big to stay in his little car seat, so Daphne bought a Pack ’n Play for him and Andi stocked it with toys and he played in there making his lovely little baby noises and giving the customers something to smile at. Often the customers thought he was Andi and Daphne’s baby, and Mary didn’t mind that.
When Vivienne wasn’t working at A Cut Above she came and took Patrick for walks by the harbor to look at the boats, or fed him little spoonfuls of the mushed-up organic food that Andi and Daphne insisted he eat. Vivienne remembered a surprising amount about babies and there were certain times when only she could quiet Patrick—she did a little rocking thing with him over one shoulder that was pure magic.
This is not to say things were not difficult for Mary sometimes. No matter how much help she had she was still a young, single mother who never had enough money and who always felt the great weight of responsibility pressing down on her slender shoulders and who sometimes got really scared about the future and who sometimes cried in the dark hours of the morning when Patrick had gone back to sleep and she hadn’t. But she was managing.
Sometimes Mary jumped when the door to the café opened, especially if she was in charge on her own, remembering the time Josh had come in and Charlie Sargent had saved her.
Mary thought about Charlie Sargent a lot, at the most unexpected times, and in some way she felt that Patrick, although he was a fatherless boy with four mothers, had a real and true father guiding him along, and ushering Mary into this unexpected adulthood she’d found herself in. Mary Brown wasn’t religious and she didn’t believe in any god, but sometimes she directed into the universe a message of gratitude for all she’d been given, and that could have been considered a prayer.
And maybe—who knew?—someday the door would open and somebody would walk into the café who would smile at Mary and cause a particular thump in her chest, and her universe would tilt, but she had loads of time for that, and maybe she didn’t need that at all. Anyway, for now she had everything she needed, and then some.
———
When Charlie Sargent had been gone for six months and Zoe and Evie were well settled into the school year and their activities and Rob was hard at work Eliza saw a flyer on a bulletin board at the Barton Public Library advertising for hospice volunteers. Cell phones were not permitted in the Barton Public Library, but Eliza took hers out anyway and surreptitiously snapped a photo of the flyer. The librarian behind the reference desk shot her a disapproving look, but Eliza just smiled and tucked her phone back into her bag.
It took Eliza over a month to make the call. Then, after she did, it took her six weeks to complete the mandatory thirty hours of training. By the time she had done so it was almost summer all over again and she was busy organizing the girls’ camps and activities and making sure Rob had plenty of time to travel back and forth to the property in Naples, Maine, where he was in the middle of overseeing construction of Nadine Edwards’s summer home, which was exactly five hundred square feet larger than Cabot Lodge, and whose patio placement required no filling in for the slope of the land.
So it wasn’t until September that Eliza was able to dedicate the required five to eight hours a week to her hospice volunteer duties.
She held the hand of an eighty-four-year-old pancreatic cancer patient while the light went out of her eyes. She sat by the bedside of a seventy-eight-year-old man suffering from Parkinson’s who could hardly swallow. She helped record the childhood memories of a sixty-one-year-old man whose liver transplant had failed and who wasn’t eligible for another. She gave primary caregivers a break to run errands or cook dinner or even sit in a café with a book for half an hour and know that their loved ones were not alone.
Eliza wasn’t the medical expert in any of these cases—she deferred to the hospice nurses, as her training had dictated, and she never mentioned her time in medical school. The deaths she saw in other people’s homes were not the first she’d seen, of course, but she realized that she was seeing them now through a different lens, and that some were awful, and some were peaceful, and that the best two things people could have at the end of their lives were a say in how it all went down and somebody to be with them so that they were not alone, so that they were not afraid of the dark.
By then Deirdre was busy starting work on the next EANY gala. Even though Brock had eventually agreed that Deirdre could look into adopting an East African baby, Deirdre had decided that she could help more children by helping all the children. That’s what she told the world, but privately she told Eliza that she didn’t think she had it in her, to start from scratch again with the diapers, the middle-of-the-night wake-ups, the teething. She sort of felt (she whispered) like Brock had called her bluff.
“I don’t know how you do it,” said Deirdre every time she and Eliza got together, about the hospice work. “I don’t know how you can be around all of that sadness when you don’t need to.”
“It just feels like the right place to be,” said Eliza. It was hard to explain to anyone, so she didn’t really try, but if she had to condense it into a single word she would have said that it felt like homage.
The Barnes’s newish dog—found, of course, by Evie—was a brown-haired, crooked-eared mix named Jupiter whose scraggly little body contained so many different breeds it was really difficult to pick out even one. Jupiter was in training to be a hospice paws volunteer. He was enthusiastic and he was trying really hard, but he had a little work to do in the patience category before he was ready to take his act on the road. He’d get there, said the trainer. He obviously had the heart for it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS