Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan
Author:J. Courtney Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307595126
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-06-01T00:00:00+00:00
They had lunch at a rest stop in Massachusetts. Maggie was almost positive she had been there with her family dozens of times, though all Massachusetts rest stops looked identical when you didn’t drive, so who knew? These places always had the same antiseptic smell, the same bored-looking employees, the same manicured parking lot and service station. They were ugly landmarks that seemed incongruous compared to New York City behind and Cape Neddick ahead.
They ate gigantic slices of pizza and watched the people streaming in and out. Maggie thought of the baby inside her, though it was hard to imagine as an actual person. She had visited a website that pregnant mothers were gaga about, on which, each week, you got to see what kind of fruit or vegetable your child most closely resembled: Your baby is a chickpea, she had read two weeks earlier, and then just a few days ago, Your baby is a walnut.
They finished eating, and Maggie promptly threw up for the fourth time in two days. She wondered why they called it morning sickness if it could hit you at any hour.
Back in the car, Rhiannon asked, “Will it just be you and your grandmother in the house in Maine?”
“Yes,” Maggie said. “Actually, each of us in a separate house, but on the same property.”
“That sounds cozy.”
Maggie grinned. “I know, right? We have a big Irish Catholic family, so I guess in theory we need a lot of room.”
“I like that you call yourselves Irish. Why do Americans always want so badly to be from somewhere else?” Rhiannon asked.
Maybe she had a point. Maggie’s grandparents and Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat were particularly obsessed, but the whole Kelleher family was crazy about Ireland, including Maggie herself. The music, the history, the dancing, the sad stories from the past. Her mother had once been this way, too, but now she made fun of the rest of them for it.
They all wore claddagh rings instead of wedding bands. Ann Marie and Pat slept in a bed with a headboard that had the words HIMSELF and HERSELF carved in the soft wood above where they lay their respective heads, and a shamrock in between.
Her cousins Patty and Fiona had been forced to take step dancing lessons as kids. They competed at the Stonehill Irish Festival every summer. Patty wore her gillies around the cottage in Maine, laced halfway up her calves, an absurd bathing suit accompaniment that nonetheless made Maggie burn with jealousy.
Since she had grown up in the suburbs of Boston, Maggie’s friends from childhood were all Irish, too, so that it wasn’t until her first March in Ohio that she realized not everyone wore head-to-toe green and ate corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day.
Pat and Ann Marie and their kids made regular trips to Ireland—Patty always mailed Maggie Aero bars and other local candies, which had melted completely by the time they arrived in Massachusetts. On those visits, Uncle Pat had unearthed various distant cousins who lived in County Kerry.
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