Interstitial #6
Mae shakes her head. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s not a big deal. I’m having some money troubles. It’s so boring.” She hears
her voice catch, and she swallows down the accompanying lump. She will not cry again, and she will not elaborate. But then
what will she do? What is your plan? as Jordan would say. Jordan likes there to always be a plan.
“Can you tell your sisters or your father? Can they help you?”
“No. Maybe.”
“I think you should.”
They are entering Rye and the scenery takes over the conversation for a moment. “Welcome to paradise,” Mae says.
“Wow,” says Kara. “I mean. Wow. This is even prettier than I imagined.” Mae feels proud, like she created the scene herself,
as the road curves and curves again and the magnificent mansions come into view, and across the street from them, the endless
expanse of ocean, just a small froth of whitecaps, a single gull flying above, a runner moving along the rock-bordered path.
It’s a picture-perfect summer day.
They pass the beach parking lot, and Summer Sessions, and The Carriage House, and, as they’re about to pull into the driveway,
Kara says, “Talk to your family, Mae. If there’s anything my work has taught me, it’s don’t waste time keeping things to yourself
that people can help you with.”
What really ruined things in Boulder for Mae was the same thing that Theresa had kindly called Mae’s “willingness to see only
the best in people.” More roughly translated, her naivete.
“You’re always so happy,” a guy she’d dated in college said to her once. “I don’t get it.”
“What’s not to be happy about?” asked Mae. “I mean, look.” They were seniors at the University of Vermont, and Mae lived with
three roommates in a third-floor apartment on South Willard. The view downhill to Lake Champlain, with the Adirondacks in
the distance, was stunning. They were about to embark on their own, which was exciting, but for the time being, they were
still dependent enough on their parents to keep real-life troubles at bay, which was comforting. Really, what wasn’t there to be happy about?
Of the three Shipman girls, Mae had a reputation as the “most chill.” Within her friend group at Lenox Memorial she was known
as the one to whom others could bring their problems because her own were so light that they barely registered on the scale.
She was the diplomat, the mediator, the calm in the chaos.
Mae and the college boyfriend did not last past the holiday break of senior year, and anyway, soon after graduation, Mae and
her friend Alice moved to Boulder, to begin their young adult lives. It was a natural progression from Church Street to Pearl
Street, from the Green Mountains to the Flatirons, from vodka tonics at Nectar’s to margaritas at the Rio.
She got a job working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the many institutes that call Boulder
home. She put her degree in environmental science to excellent use. She spent most of what she made on rent, on ski weekends
at Keystone and Copper, on cocktails and dinners out and life in general. Four and a half years went by, easy peasy. She got
her second tattoo, a mountain, on her hip, to go with the infinity sign she got on her ankle in college.
Then Theresa got sick. Toward the end Mae took a leave of absence from her job and went home to Lenox.
While she was gone, Alice got a job at a tech start-up in the Bay Area and began plotting her move farther west. Mae should come!
They’d take San Francisco by storm! They’d get millionaires to buy them drinks until they invented something that turned them into millionaires themselves!
But Theresa got sicker and sicker, and was one day gone.
How could this be? How could life feel so different almost overnight? Since college Mae had seen her parents only three times
a year on average: on her annual visit to the beach house; when she returned to Lenox at Christmas; and the one time each
year her parents flew out to Colorado. This usually happened in springtime, during the Massachusetts school break, when their
home state was a mud pit formed from melting snow or driving rain but the sun was shining in Boulder and the hiking trails
were dry and open for business. She was an adult now, launched, a separate being from her family. How could the absence of
someone she hadn’t seen on a daily basis for years hurt like this, every single day, multiple times a day?
Mae didn’t have the energy a move with Alice to San Francisco would require. Where her joy had been, her zest for life, there
was now only a void; where purpose, a gaping uncertainty. Alice left for San Francisco without her.
Mae, unable to afford the rent for their apartment on her own, knew she had to advertise for a roommate. She kept putting
off this task, not wanting to share her grief with a stranger. She started to eat through the meager savings she’d accumulated,
not just on rent, but on burritos, on the tattoo of a shooting star she got at Ink It from a man named Tony. A couple of roommates
came and went, but nobody was dependable, everybody was transitory.
Each time she talked to her sisters she was astonished at the speed with which they seemed to be processing the loss of their mother. They were sad, yes, even devastated, but they were also busy, and being busy was a blessing. Their lives were ordered, their futures clear.
She began to resent the fact that her sisters had had more time with Theresa than she had. They were further along in their
adult lives when she died, while Mae still felt like a baby. Theresa had seen them all the way through their twenties while
Mae was stuck, unmoored, untended to, in what nobody told you was one of the most difficult and most confusing decades.
Why didn’t Mae stay busy? Natalie suggested. Get a second job! Join a club!
“Like, a knitting club?” Mae was incredulous that her sister would suggest this.
“I was thinking more like rock climbing.”
Mae did the opposite. She quit her job, the one with the health insurance and the government wage that, if not high, was at
least steady.
“Sounds like self-sabotage to me,” said Jordan.
“Maybe it is,” said Mae, challengingly.
It seemed so effortless for everyone else, including her sisters, to acquire the accoutrements of adulthood—pajama sets, espresso
makers, responsibility—seemingly without doubt or suffering. As a kid she’d thought (if she’d thought about grown-ups at all)
that this happened naturally. But now she saw that there is a series of arduous steps you must climb, one by one, and that
she missed a few. She had stumbled on the staircase, and she wasn’t sure how to right herself.
Stillness hurt the most, so she moved. She went on hikes: Green Mountain. Doudy Draw. Chautauqua to the Arch. It was beautiful
up there, of course, but also lonely. With such unfiltered views Mae felt small and a little bit scared.
Alice met someone out in San Francisco; in short order, really very quickly, she was engaged.
Thankfully she chose as her bridesmaids her sister, her future sister-in-law, and her best friend from high school, saving Mae the tremendous expense of bridal party membership.
But she couldn’t say no to the bachelorette party in Nashville, nor the destination wedding weekend in Savannah, both of which required hundreds of dollars in plane fare and hotels.
The allure of Afterpay became too strong to resist.
She went back to Ink It for another tattoo: the one of her mother’s handwriting on her wrist.
While Tony was tattooing her they got to talking. Tony had an extra bedroom in his place in Gunbarrel, an older condo off
Twin Lakes Road, he was looking to fill. He’d give Mae a rent reduction if she worked the front desk at the tattoo parlor
two nights a week. She was living off the fumes of her savings; she gave notice on the apartment she used to share with Alice
and headed for Gunbarrel.
“Don’t start sleeping with him,” said Jordan when Mae called to report this development. “It could get messy.”
Mae said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” (She was already sleeping with Tony.) She’d need more than two nights of employment,
though. She started delivering for Uber Eats. She added in one night as a barback on Pearl Street. By the one-year anniversary
of Theresa’s death she was officially part of the gig economy—overemployed and underinsured.
Then a friend of a friend told her about a dog care and training center that was looking for a dog walker. The guy’s name
was Hal Miller; the place was called Dog On It. (Mae wasn’t sure about the name, but okay. She’d call. She loved dogs!)
Hal was not what she expected a dog trainer, or a person named Hal, to look like.
She’d expected—from the name, but also from a certain gravelly character to his voice—a weathered man close to her father’s age, one of those old-timers you sometimes see in Colorado, wearing an old Rockies hat and muttering about what the city was like in the eighties, before the trust-funders came in.
But Hal was not so much older than Mae! Thirty-four, he told her.
He looked even younger, with a baby face and an almost obscene amount of hair, or so said Tony when he met Hal.
(Tony had started balding at twenty-two so he shaved his head religiously and tattooed a snake above his eyebrow to draw attention away from his hairline.)
Hal was actually quite famous in the Boulder dog world. He was always fully booked for private training sessions at least
a month out. He had worked for a long time at a variety of shelters, taking in dogs from all over, and almost nothing fazed
him. His demeanor was calm and professorial. Also somehow sexy.
Hal was sparing with the details of his personal life, although Mae knew that he’d been married and that he and his ex-wife
shared custody of their four-year-old son, who lived most of the year with his mother in Denver. Hal had retained custody