The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (34 page)

“She won’t fall asleep; she’ll just climb out again,” Fiona said. “Oh, where is Jesse?”

“Daisy, go look for your brother,” Maggie commanded.

“I can’t; I’m eating.”

“Go anyway. For goodness’ sake, I can’t do everything.”

“Is it my fault he went off with his dumb friends somewhere?” Daisy asked. “I just got started on my sandwich.”

“Now listen, young lady … Ira?”

But Ira and his father had left again for the betting windows. Maggie said, “Oh for—Dorrie, could you please go and hunt Jesse for me?”

“Well, but I am dealing out these here marshmallows,” Dorrie said.

The marshmallows traveled in a perfect, unbroken row the length of their bleacher, like a dotted line. As a result, none of them could sit down. People kept pausing at the far end, meaning to take a seat, but then they saw the
marshmallows and moved on. Maggie sighed. Behind her back, a bugle call floated on the clear, still air, but Maggie, facing the bleachers, went on searching the crowd for Jesse. Then Junie nudged a few of Dorrie’s marshmallows out of line and sat down very suddenly, clutching her parasol with both hands. “Maggie,” she murmured, “I am feeling just so, I don’t know, all at once.…”

“Take a deep breath,” Maggie said briskly. This happened, from time to time. “Remind yourself you’re here as someone else.”

“I believe I’m going to faint,” Junie said, and without warning she swung her spike-heeled sandals up and lay down flat upon the bleacher. The parasol remained in both her hands, rising from her chest as if planted there. Dorrie rushed distractedly around her, trying to retrieve as many marshmallows as possible.

“Daisy, is that your brother up there with those people?” Maggie asked.

Daisy said, “Where?” but Fiona was quicker. She wheeled and said, “It most certainly is.” Then she shrieked, “Jesse Moran! You get your ass on down here!”

Her voice was that stringy, piercing kind. Everybody stared. Maggie said, “Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

“You hear me?” Fiona shrieked, and Leroy started crying in earnest.

“There’s no need to shout, Fiona,” Maggie said.

Fiona said, “What?”

She glared at Maggie, ignoring the squalling baby. It was one of those moments when Maggie just wanted to back up and start over. (She had always felt paralyzed in the presence of an angry woman.) Meanwhile Jesse, who couldn’t have missed hearing his name, began to thread his way toward them. Maggie said, “Oh, here he comes!”

“You’re telling me not to shout at my own husband?” Fiona asked.

She was shouting even now. She had to, over the cries of the baby. Leroy’s face was red, and spikes of damp hair were plastered to her forehead. She looked sort of homely, to be frank. Maggie felt an urge to walk off from this group, pretend they had nothing to do with her; but instead she made her voice go light and she said, “No, I only meant he wasn’t that far from us, you see—”

“You meant nothing of the sort,” Fiona said, squeezing the baby too tightly. “You’re trying to
run
us, just like always; trying to run our lives.”

“No, really, Fiona—”

“What’s up?” Jesse asked breezily, arriving among them.

“Ma and Fiona are having a fight,” Daisy said. She took a dainty nibble from her sandwich.

“We are not!” Maggie cried. “I merely suggested—”

“A fight?” Ira said. “What?”

He and Mr. Moran were all at once standing in the aisle behind Jesse. “What’s going on here?” he asked above Leroy’s cries.

Maggie told him, “Nothing’s going on! For Lord’s sake, all I said was—”

“Can’t you folks be left to your own devices for even a minute?” Ira asked. “And why is Junie lying down like that? How do these things happen so
fast
?”

Unfair, unfair. To hear him talk, you would think they had such scenes every day. You would think that Ira himself was in line for the Nobel Peace Prize. “For your information,” Maggie told him, “I was just standing here minding my own business—”

“You have never once in all the time I’ve known you managed to mind your own business,” Fiona said.

“Now cool it, Fiona,” Jesse said.

“And you!” Fiona screeched, turning on him. “You think this baby is just mine? How come I always get
stuck with her while you go off with your buddies, answer me that!”

“Those weren’t my buddies; they were only—”

“He was drinking with them too,” Daisy murmured, with her eyes on her sandwich.

“Well, big deal,” Jesse told her.

“Drinking from this silver flat kind of bottle that belonged to that girl.”

“So what if I was, Miss Goody-Goody?”

“Now listen,” Ira said. “Let’s just all sit down a minute and get ahold of ourselves. We’re blocking people’s view.”

He sat, setting an example. Then he looked behind him.

“My marshmallows!” Dorrie squawked.

“You can’t leave your marshmallows here, Dorrie. No one has room to sit.”

“You messed up my marshmallows!”

“I believe I’m going to be ill,” Junie said, speaking upward into the spokes of her parasol.

Leroy’s crying had reached the stage where she had to fight for each breath.

Ira stood up again, dusting off the seat of his pants. He said, “Now listen, folks—”

“Will you stop calling us
folks
?” Fiona demanded.

Ira halted, looking startled.

Maggie felt a tug on her sleeve and turned. It was Mr. Moran, who had at some point worked around behind her. He held up a ticket. “What?” she asked.

“I won.”

“Won what?”

“I won that last race! My horse came in first.”

“Oh, the race,” she said. “Well, isn’t that …”

But her attention veered toward Fiona, who was reeling off a list of wrongs that she seemed to have been saving up for Jesse all these months. “…  knew from the
start I’d be a fool to marry you; didn’t I say so? But you were so gung-ho, you and your pacifiers and your Dr. Spock …”

The people in the bleachers behind them were gazing pointedly in different directions, but they sent each other meaningful glances and small, secret smiles. The Morans had turned into spectacles. Maggie couldn’t bear it. She said, “Please! Can’t we just sit down?”

“You and your famous cradle,” Fiona told Jesse, “that you didn’t build one stick of after you promised, you swore to me—”

“I never swore to you! Where do you keep coming up with this cradle business from?”

“You swore on the Bible,” Fiona told him.

“Well, good God Almighty! I mean, maybe it crossed my mind once to build one, but I’d have had to be crazy to go through with it, I can see it now: Dad standing there criticizing every little hammer blow, letting me know what a hopeless clod I am, and you’d be agreeing with him just like always, I bet, by the time I was finished. No way would I let myself in for that!”

“Well, you bought the wood, didn’t you?”

“What wood?”

“You bought those long wooden rods.”

“Rods? For a cradle? I never bought any rods.”

“You mother told me—”

“How would I use rods to build a cradle?”

“Spindles, she told me.”

They both looked at Maggie. Coincidentally, the baby paused just then for a deep, hiccuping breath. A bass voice rumbled over the loudspeaker, announcing that Misappropriation had been scratched.

Ira cleared his throat and said, “Are you talking about doweling rods? Those were mine.”

“Ira, no,” Maggie wailed, because there was still a chance they could smooth things over, if only he wouldn’t insist on spelling out every boring little fact. “They were the spindles for your cradle,” she told Jesse. “You already had the blueprints. Right?”

“What blueprints? All I said was—”

“If I remember correctly,” Ira interrupted in his stuffy way, “those rods were purchased for the drying rack I built on the back porch. You’ve all seen that drying rack.”

“Drying rack,” Fiona said. She continued looking at Maggie.

“Oh, well,” Maggie said, “this cradle business is so silly, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like the dime-store necklace that relatives start quarreling over after the funeral. It’s just a … And besides, Leroy couldn’t even use a cradle anymore! She’s got that nice crib Ira bought.”

Leroy remained quiet, still hiccuping, gazing at Maggie intently.

“I married you for that cradle,” Fiona told Jesse.

“Well, that’s plain ridiculous!” Maggie said. “For a cradle! I never heard such a—”

“Maggie, enough,” Ira said.

She stopped, with her mouth open.

“If you married Jesse for a cradle,” Ira told Fiona, “you were sadly mistaken.”

“Oh, Ira!” Maggie cried.

“Shut up, Maggie. She had no business telling you that,” Ira said to Fiona. “It’s Maggie’s weakness: She believes it’s all right to alter people’s lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them.”

“That’s not one bit true,” Maggie said.

“But the fact is,” Ira told Fiona calmly, “Jesse is not capable
of following through with
anything
, not even a simple cradle. He’s got some lack; I know he’s my son, but he’s got some lack, and you might as well face up to it. He’s not a persevering kind of person. He lost that job of his a month ago and he hangs out every day with his pals instead of looking for work.”

Maggie and Fiona, together, said, “What?”

“They found out he wasn’t a high-school graduate,” Ira told them. And then, as an afterthought: “He’s seeing another girl too.”

Jesse said, “What are you talking about? That girl is just a friend.”

“I don’t know her name,” Ira said, “but she belongs to a rock group called Babies in Trouble.”

“We’re just good friends, I tell you! That girl is Dave’s girl!”

Fiona seemed to be made of china. Her face was dead white and still; her pupils were black pinpoints.

“If you knew this all along,” Maggie demanded of Ira, “why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t feel right about it. I for one don’t hold with changing people’s worlds around,” Ira said. And then (just as Maggie was getting ready to hate him) his face sagged and he dropped wearily onto the bleacher. “I shouldn’t have done it now, either,” he said.

He had dislodged a whole section of marshmallows, but Dorrie, who could be sensitive to atmospheres, merely bent in silence to collect them.

Fiona held out her palm. “Give me the keys,” she told Jesse.

“Huh?”

“The keys to the van. Hand them over.”

“Where are you going?” Jesse asked her.

“I don’t know! How would I know? I just have to get out of here.”

“Fiona, I only ever talked to that girl because she didn’t think I was some kind of clod like everyone else seems to do. You’ve got to believe me, Fiona.”

“The keys,” Fiona said.

Ira said, “Let her have them, Jesse.”

“But—”

“We’ll take a bus.”

Jesse reached into the rear pocket of his jeans. He brought out a cluster of keys attached to a miniature black rubber gym shoe. “So will you be at the house? Or what,” he said.

“I have no idea,” Fiona told him, and she snapped the keys out of his grasp.

“Well, where will you be? At your sister’s?”

“Anywhere. None of your business.
I
don’t know where. I just want to get on with my life,” she said.

And she hoisted the baby higher on her hip and stalked off, leaving behind the diaper bag and the stroller and her paper plate of lunch with the potato salad turning a pathetic shade of ivory.

“She’ll come around,” Maggie told Jesse. Then she said, “I will never forgive you for this, Ira Moran.”

She felt another tug on her sleeve and she turned. Ira’s father was still holding up his ticket. “I was right to buy that tip sheet,” he said. “What does Ira know about tip sheets?”

“Nothing,” Maggie said furiously, and she started rewrapping Fiona’s sandwich.

All around her she heard murmuring, like ripples widening across a pond:

“What’d he say?”

“Tip sheet.”

“What’d she say?”

“Nothing.”

“She did say something, I saw her lips move.”

“She said, ‘Nothing.’ ”

“But I thought I saw—”

Maggie straightened and faced the rows of people on the bleachers. “I said, ‘Nothing,’ is what I said,” she called out clearly.

Somebody sucked in a breath. They all looked elsewhere.

It was amazing, Ira often said, how people fooled themselves into believing what they wanted to. (How Maggie fooled herself, he meant.) He said it when Maggie threatened to sue the Police Department that time they charged Jesse with Drunk and Disorderly. He said it when she swore that Spin the Cat sounded better than the Beatles. And he said it again when she refused to accept that Fiona was gone for good.

That evening after the races Maggie sat up late with Jesse, pretending to be knitting although she ripped out as much as she added. Jesse drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Can’t you sit still for once?” Maggie asked him, and then she said, “Maybe you should try calling her sister again.”

“I already tried three times, for God’s sake. They must be just letting it ring.”

“Maybe you should go in person.”

“That would be worse,” Jesse said. “Pounding on the door while they hid inside and listened. I bet they’d be laughing and looking over at each other and making these goggly eyes.”

“They wouldn’t do that!”

“I guess I’ll take the van back to Dave,” Jesse said.

He rose to leave. Maggie didn’t try to stop him, because she figured he was secretly going to the sister’s place after all.

The van had been parked out front when they returned from Pimlico. For one relieved moment, everyone assumed Fiona was in the house. And the keys were on top of the bookcase just inside the door, where the family always left keys and stray gloves and notes saying when they’d be back. But there wasn’t any note from Fiona. In the room she shared with Jesse, the unmade bed had a frozen look. Every hillock of the sheets appeared to have hardened. In Maggie’s and Ira’s room the crib was empty and desolate. However, this couldn’t be a permanent absence. Nothing was packed; nothing was missing. Even Fiona’s toilet articles still sat on the bureau in their travel case. “See there?” Maggie told Jesse, because he was worried too, she could tell; and she pointed to the travel case. “Oh. Right,” he said, reassured. She crossed the hall to the bathroom and found the usual fleet of rubber ducks and tugboats. “
You
people,” she said happily. Emerging, passing Jesse’s room once more, she found him standing in front of the bureau with his eyes half shut and his nose buried deep in Fiona’s soapbox. She understood him perfectly. Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures, even; didn’t she know that?