Interstitial #5
When she leans with her back to the window, legs out across the back seat, spent, Leo puts his big, funny, square, offensive-to-some-but-not-to-her head in Mae’s lap.
He’s spent too. She strokes his cheek and closes her eyes.
Then she snaps them open because in all the excitement she has forgotten to check the status of Kara’s flight on her phone.
The plane landed nineteen minutes ago.
She takes one more swipe at her face, removes Leo’s head from her lap, lays it on the seat of the car, and opens the car door
just enough so that she can squeeze out and Leo can’t. She scans the crowd exiting the baggage claim area and sees a familiar
woman wearing a blue flowered sundress and carrying a light blue shoulder bag. Kara! Kara has cut her dark blond hair since
the wedding. It was longer and wavier then; now it falls to her shoulders, and it’s blown stick straight. Minimal makeup,
clear skin, a familiar smile, with a space between her two front teeth that would have been corrected if she’d grown up like
the Shipman girls.
Mae steps into Kara’s arms and they hug. It’s a long hug, a hug of friendship and comfort, and now Leo, at least, knows one
of Mae’s secrets: She doesn’t hate Kara. She actively likes Kara. Kara likes her. Kara and Mae are friends. Don’t tell anyone, Leo. But also, tell everyone, because Mae is an adult, and she’s allowed to make her own decisions, separate from her sisters.
She is allowed to choose her own friends.
“I’m so happy to see you, Mae,” Kara says. “Have you been crying?”
“I’m so happy to see you,” says Mae, ignoring the question. It’s not like Kara has never seen her cry before—Kara saw the Shipman family during the
darkest of their days. She’s seen them all cry and snipe at each other and laugh maniacally and sit quietly, all energy drained
from them—but there’s something humiliating about crying now, more than two years later, in the arrivals area of Terminal
B. She tries to pull herself together and says, “Oh! Let me introduce you to Leo. Kara, Leo. Leo, Kara.” Leo, exhausted now,
accepts this visitor amiably (good boy, Leo).
Kara hesitates.
“Is your door locked?” asks Mae. She presses the button on the key.
It’s unlocked, but Kara is still standing there.
“You’re not scared of dogs, are you?” Would she have had reason to know this?
The last beloved Shipman family dog, Coco, had died when Mae was a junior in college, and she hadn’t been replaced, so there had been no dog around during Theresa’s illness.
Is Kara one of those people who assumes all pit bulls are evil?
Mae will have to set her straight on that.
Kara will love Leo once she gets to know him!
Wait until she sees him roll over and play dead; wait until she sees how he can spin on command.
He can’t do those things yet, but Mae is going to teach him.
“Your father didn’t tell you?” asks Kara.
“Tell me what?”
“I can’t believe he didn’t tell you. I’m allergic to dogs.”
“Ohhh,” says Mae. “No! No. Really?” How could her father have neglected this piece of information when he saw not one but
two dogs in the house?
“Really and truly. I can take medicine, but . . . it’s not ideal.”
“Shit,” says Mae. “I’m so sorry. What do we do? Natalie’s dog is at the house.” She thinks of Cinnamon’s copious shedding.
She found a golden tumbleweed in her sneaker just before she left; you could knit a sweater from what Natalie swept up from
the sunroom yesterday.
Kara shrugs. “I’ll pick up some antihistamines and hope for the best. Should we put this in the trunk?” She indicates her
bag.
“No,” says Mae. The trunk is where the rest of her life lives. “I’ll squeeze it in back with Leo.” She takes Kara’s bag from
her and wedges it in the back footwell, under the pile of pillows and blankets.
Kara slides into the passenger seat and cracks the window. Mae hears her sisters’ voices in her head. If you’re allergic to dogs, don’t come! they would say. Go back to Lenox! Better yet, go back to Ohio! But Mae doesn’t want Kara to go back. She wants her right here.
They’re off! They pass Logan’s long-term parking options and the giant white cross that sits atop Orient Heights; they pass budget hotels and strip malls galore.
If there are few beaches as pretty as the ones you get on the Seacoast, thinks Mae, there are few drives as un-pretty as the route to get there from the airport.
They are comfortably silent for the first part of the ride.
“How was the visit with your mom?” Mae asks as they merge onto Route 1.
“Not great,” says Kara. “It was her birthday, that’s why I went out—but it’s never great.”
“I’m sorry,” says Mae. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. We have a lot of baggage, the two of us, and we spend most of our time tiptoeing around it, pretending
everything is okay.” Mae knows the barest outlines of Kara’s story—single mom; alcoholic, absent dad; free school lunches;
a scholarship to study nursing at Ohio State, where she maintained a 4.0 and graduated with distinction. But of course Mae
doesn’t know how that felt, what Kara’s life looked like from the inside. “It’s exhausting. Honestly, she needs to do something
about her drinking, but I couldn’t bring that up on her birthday.”
Mae and her sisters have been so well cared for, so carefully tended, like hothouse flowers, their biggest complaint being—what?
A curfew earlier than they thought was fair? Having to share a bathroom? She’s embarrassed for them, thinking about how they
must look to Kara. She wants to put her hand over the ache in Kara’s heart.
“I’m sorry,” Mae says again.
“It’s okay. It is what it is. I’m happy you all had some time with just your dad, and now I’m really happy to be here. I can’t
wait to see the house.”
“I can’t believe you’ve never seen it.”
“Your dad and I only reconnected in September, remember?” Mae hears Natalie’s voice in her head, calling reconnected a euphemism. (Be quiet, Natalie.) “He came out here a couple of times over the winter, to check on it, get it ready for renters. I never asked to come. I
thought maybe it was a place he needed to go to think about your mom.”
They’re making their way past the shopping centers, the gas stations, the iconic hulk of Kowloon Restaurant.
“How’d it go when he told you all about selling? From your point of view?”
“Well,” says Mae carefully. “Natalie and I are more upset than Jordan. You know her, Miss Practicality. She sees how it makes
financial sense. Natalie and I want to keep it forever. And I—” She almost starts to cry anew, thinking about the little dream
she had of living in the house indefinitely. “I’m sad,” she says finally. “Yeah, I’m sad about it, for sure.”
“I’m sorry,” says Kara. She squeezes Mae’s hand. After a beat she asks, “Are they blaming me?” Mae doesn’t want to lie, so
she pretends to be very busy checking the GPS and remains silent, but they’ve left Route 1 and they’re traveling north on
the highway, so there’s nothing to check. “I know they are,” says Kara. “I get it. It’s all part of the package.”
“I’m sorry,” says Mae.
“Don’t be. I’ll be fine. I’m tough! I’ve handled worse.” Kara turns her face toward the window, and her blown-out hair swings.
Softly, like she’s just telling the outside world, she says, “Much worse.”
To give Kara the full experience Mae exits the highway in Salisbury, and before long they’re crossing the causeway leading to Hampton, with water on both sides of them, and then, finally, into Hampton proper, with the sandy beaches to their right.
They may as well be on a whole different planet from where they started their journey.
Mae lowers the back right window enough to let Leo stick his snout out, and Kara lowers hers too.
Kara can’t get enough of it. She squeals at the wide sandy beach, points out the people on the deck of Bernie’s, the stands
selling fried dough, the cat walking on a leash. Even The Wall that hides a section of Hampton Beach from the road delights
her, especially when Mae tells her that this is where you’ll find the biggest number of surfers on any given morning.
“But this beach is nothing,” says Mae, even though this beach is definitely not nothing. “Wait until you see our beach.” Jenness
won’t be their beach after this summer! Probably not even after this week! Someone will put in an offer at the open house;
that’s how things go in today’s market.
Everything is so sad, to Mae. The mom holding the hand of a little girl to cross the street is sad, because someday that mom
will be gone and the little girl might be living out of her car, training dogs for a living. The young couple with their arms
slung across each other’s shoulders is sad, because they might break up tomorrow, and one or the other will have a broken
heart, because breakups are rarely mutual. The old lady in a wheelchair, being pushed by a man in a hat who’s bending over
the woman, saying something that’s making them both laugh—sad! They may be laughing, but it’s still sad.
Kara must have caught something in Mae’s expression because she says, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry about the house.”
“It’s not just the house,” says Mae, before she can check herself.
Kara’s face, turned toward her, is so full of kindness and concern. The crosswalk empties, and Mae drives on. Should she tell
Kara? If she unburdens herself, will she feel better or worse?
“What is it? You can talk to me.” Kara’s hands, folded in her lap, are so familiar to Mae—except for the simple gold wedding band she now wears; of course that’s a change.
Mae can see Kara’s hands holding a cup of water so Theresa could drink from it, pulling the bedsheets taut, shaking pills into Mae’s hand so Mae could help her mother swallow them.
Checking Theresa’s pulse, checking her temperature, checking on all of them.