Track 35 Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!
Track 35
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!
Maggie
As Maggie made her way from Ocean Beach to Bay Harbor, her anger toward Matt grew with each tequila-fueled step. She was certain he had been withholding the truth from her—that the bartender was the lifeguard, and the lifeguard was her father. He had to have known. Why didn’t he tell her? Was there something sinister about her father’s side of the family? Did she come from a long line of ax murderers or something? She knew she was being irrational, but she just felt so confused and betrayed.
The words Matt spoke when she entered his house that first night— You can trust me —echoed in her mind, making her even more furious that she had let him in. It was further proof that the high shelf was where she should remain. On top of being hangry, she had never felt so double-crossed in her life.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Jason urged, wrapping his arm around her to offer solace. She wiggled away.
“I can’t right now,” she said in her typical “Maggie will console herself” fashion. And yes, she was fully aware that she had let Matt console her the other night. She became angrier still.
They arrived at the Bay Beach to a setting that, in other circumstances, would have warmed their small-town hearts. Everyone was cozied up on a sea of blankets and beach chairs. The Great South Bay was glistening in the background, and Amanda Seyfried and Stellan Skarsg?rd were glistening on the big screen. It was the scene in Mamma Mia! where they were trying to determine Amanda’s paternity.
The absurdity of their timing was only matched by the absurdity of the circumstances.
“ Are you my father?” Seyfreid asks.
“ Yes, I think so, yes ,” Skarsg?rd replies.
“What comes next?” Seyfried asks.
“Good question!” Jason joked.
Maggie didn’t find it funny. She instructed him to wait in the back as she navigated her way through the crowd, carefully avoiding blankets and limbs. From that point in the movie, she knew she had less than a minute until the crowd would burst into song. Mamma Mia! came out her senior year of high school and she couldn’t count the times she’d seen it. She had played the soundtrack in the shop so often after school that her father forbade her doing so ever again.
She found Matt up front, asleep next to Dylan. People were waving their hands at her, and she looked down to see the film playing across her chest.
“Ugh,” she mumbled as she scrunched down onto their blanket.
“He’s sleeping,” Dylan said, stating the obvious.
“I don’t care.”
She shook his shoulder, and he opened his eyes. She didn’t wait for him to get his bearings.
“Why didn’t you tell me that the bartender was my father?”
The crowd united in song.
Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight.
Won’t somebody help me chase the shadows away?
“Not here,” Matt managed, above the Greek chorus.
The three of them slithered through the crowd, picking up Jason on the way out. No one spoke till they got to Matt’s house.
As soon as they were safely inside his bedroom, Maggie repeated the question.
“Why didn’t you tell me that the bartender was my father?”
“Because you were already soured on Beatrix. If I told you that the bartender was your father, I worried you would have been on the first ferry out. Plus, I was following your lead. You were looking for your mother.”
“Her mother?” Dylan asked.
They both shushed her. She took a step back. Jason whispered in her ear, “Beatrix is Maggie’s birth mother.”
“Oh my God!” Dylan said, before repeating it again in a tempered volume. “Oh my God.”
“You told me to trust you and you lied to me,” Maggie continued.
“I didn’t lie. You read that chapter in the book and didn’t say a thing. I wasn’t about to force him on you.”
Now Jason looked confused. Dylan grabbed the copy of On Fire Island from Matt’s shelf, tapped on the cover, and handed it to him.
“C’mon, Maggie. You didn’t ask me one question about him,” Matt continued.
“What question should I have asked?”
“The obvious one—do you know who my father is?”
“OK, Matt. I didn’t know you needed so much direction. Do you know who my father is?”
“Yes.”
“Then who?!”
“Chase Logan. The lifeguard turned bartender at the Salty Pelican—ergo why I was worried he would hit on you.”
“Ergo?” said Maggie, at a loss for a comeback.
“Yuck,” said Dylan. They all turned her way for an explanation.
“The yuck was about him hitting on her. Chase Logan gets a bad rap, but he’s not a bad person. Really. He once saved my dog from drowning in the ocean.”
“So, I’m not from a family of ax murderers?”
“No!” Dylan laughed.
Maggie sat on the bottom bunk and put her head in her hands. Matt swiftly took a seat beside her and wrapped his arm around her.
“I’m sorry. I swear you can trust me. I thought I was doing what was best for you. I’ll never withhold anything from you again.”
She leaned right into him and cried, realizing, beyond all of it, that there was no part of her that had accepted she would never see this man again.
“Now what do I do?” she asked, unsure of what she was even referring to.
Jason knelt in front of her, placing his hands on her knees.
“What do you want to do?” he asked kindly.
Maggie quickly saw that she was leaning, more like burying herself, into Matt. She sat straight up. Matt, suddenly aware of the awkwardness too, stood up as if the bed were on fire while Dylan looked straight through him, as presumably only she could.
To put it mildly, the dynamics were strange.
“What do you think I should do?” Maggie asked Jason, pulling herself together.
“You came here to meet your mother; I think you should meet your mother.”
“I did meet her.”
“But she doesn’t know that,” Dylan piped in. “Can I tell you something, Maggie?”
“Sure.”
“My mother walked out on me when I was little. She never really wanted me—never gave much thought to the fact that she had a daughter. Beatrix has been thinking about you every day for thirty years. I think you’d be lucky to have her.”
“But there’s so much to unravel,” Maggie cried.
“Not really. I never got the chance to tell anyone but Dylan that you were leaving. We can figure the rest out,” Matt assured her. “How about we get through the wedding fake dating, if that’s OK with you, Jason, and we can tell Bea on Sunday?”
“Jason?” Maggie conferred.
“It’s fine, as long as no one asks me to outwardly lie.”
“Jason is an ethics professor,” Maggie added.
They all nodded in agreement.
As they did, the bedroom door burst open, and Jake stood towering in the doorway. Dylan and Matt jumped, as if they forgot they were adults who could come and go as they pleased. It was amusing.
“What are you guys doing here?”
“Just talking, Daddy,” Dylan said, with extra sweetness.
“OK, don’t tell your mother I was here, Matt. I need some peace and quiet. I still haven’t written my vows.”
He shut the door and quickly opened it again, staring Jason down.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Jason, Maggie’s, um, brother.”
“Oh.” Jake held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Jason. Feel free to come to the wedding tomorrow; there’s plenty of room.” He turned to Matt and added, “We got a bunch of Covid cancellations. Your mother is going to be redoing those tables up until we walk down the gangplank.” He winked.
Once he was out of earshot, they all pointed to the ethics professor and laughed. He laughed too.
Oh, what a tangled web they’d woven.