Chapter 17
MARY CATHERINE
Diane wanted to meet later in the week.
She said it the way people said things when they'd been waiting a while and had the grace not to show it.
We talked for twenty minutes on the phone with the Atlantic moving below the pier and the pelican somewhere off to my left doing its Sunday things.
By the end of it, I had an appointment at her gallery on upper King Street and a strange new feeling in my chest that I eventually identified as momentum.
Forward momentum. Mine. Pointed somewhere I had chosen.
I sat on the bench for a while after and let it settle.
Then, I drove back to Wentworth Street.
The studio looked different in the full light of Sunday morning than it had in the city-glow dark of the night before—smaller, more ordinary, the sofa visibly battered, the hot plate optimistic rather than charming.
The canvases were still everywhere, and they were still good, I could still see that, but they also looked like what they were: years of work done in private that had never been asked to be anything more than private.
That was about to change. The thought was terrifying and correct in equal measure, which I was beginning to understand was how the right things felt.
I made a second coffee and sat on the floor with my back against the sofa—Brock's impression still in the cushions, which I noticed and did not make anything of. I opened my sketchbook to the drawing I'd made on the pier.
The two figures on East Bay Street.
I looked at it for a long time. Then, I turned to a fresh page and started to work properly, not the freestyle automatic drawing of the pier but real work, intentional—loose studies of the pieces I had finished, thinking about how they read together, whether they told a story as a body of work or just as individual paintings.
This was the part I had never done. The curation. The stepping back far enough to see the whole shape of five years of solitary making.
By the time I'd filled six pages with notes and thumbnail sketches and the beginnings of an organizational logic, I had something that looked, cautiously, like a show.
Not a finished one. Not a certain one. But the skeleton of something that could become one, if I was willing to do the work of taking it apart and rebuilding it with an audience in mind.
I had never made anything with an audience in mind.
The idea was more exciting than it was frightening, which surprised me.
I needed groceries.
That was the practical reality of Sunday morning. The ordinary forward motion of a person who had decided to keep going. I texted Colleen while I was still sitting in the studio, nothing elaborate, just: I'm okay. Really okay. Talk soon.
She responded within a minute: I believe you. Call me when you're ready.
That was Colleen. No pressure, no extraction attempt, just the door held open.
I drove to the grocery store on the edge of the peninsula—the big one, the kind that had everything.
I found a parking space and sat for a moment in the car with the engine off and thought about what I actually needed.
Not what was on a list. What I actually needed, in the refrigerator of a studio I was going to be living in for the foreseeable future, for a woman who was figuring out what she liked to eat when she wasn't shopping for a household.
The question was smaller than it sounded. But it was also the kind of question I had rarely had occasion to ask.
I got out of the car.
It was the olive oil that did it.
I was in the specialty foods aisle reaching for a bottle of something I'd always wanted to try but never bought because it seemed extravagant, when I heard Colleen's laugh.
Not the careful version of Colleen's laugh. The real one—the low, unguarded one she kept for people she trusted completely, the one I had heard maybe a dozen times in my life and always recognized immediately, the way you recognized a rare bird by its specific call.
I went still with the olive oil in my hand.
She was two aisles over. I could see her through the gap in the shelving—not well, just fragments: the familiar angle of her shoulder, the dark of her hair. And next to her, someone else. A woman. Shorter than Colleen, red-haired, a laugh of her own running underneath Colleen's. And they were—
I watched through the gap in the shelving and felt the pieces of something arrange themselves into a picture I realized I had been holding in fragments for years.
Colleen's hand was at the small of the other woman's back.
Not a friend's hand. The hand of someone who knew the geography of another person and moved through it without thinking—easy, proprietary, tender.
The red-haired woman said something I couldn't hear and tilted her face up toward my sister.
Colleen smiled down at her in a way I had never seen Colleen smile at anyone.
I set the olive oil quietly in my basket.
I stood very still for a moment.
Then, I did the accounting I should have done years ago, probably, if I hadn't been so occupied with the performance of my own life that I'd missed the performance of hers.
Thirty-two years old and single, in a family that asked about it constantly.
The careful deflection. The parental attention she received and endured.
The thing in her face that lived beneath the surface of the events of yesterday—older, heavier, a struggle of her own.
The way she'd looked at me in the bride's room, in the way that meant she was giving me something real: whatever you're thinking, you can tell me.
Whatever you're thinking, you can tell me.
Had she been talking to me? Or had she been talking to both of us?
I turned the corner of the aisle.
Colleen saw me before I'd taken three steps. The smile went—not to fear, exactly, but to something braced. Ready. The expression of a person who had spent years waiting for a moment and was now watching it arrive and couldn't quite tell yet if it was catastrophe or relief.
The red-haired woman looked from Colleen to me and went carefully neutral.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi," Colleen said. One word, all the weight of thirty-two years in it.
I looked at them both. At my sister's hand, which had gone still at her side. At the careful, watchful face of this woman who clearly loved her, who had the look of someone who had learned to wait in doorways and not require an introduction until one was offered.
"I'm Mary Catherine," I said, to the red-haired woman. "Colleen's sister."
Something in the woman's shoulders dropped a fraction. "I know," she said. "I'm Nora. Nora Bridges. I’ve—she's told me about you."
I looked at Colleen. "You have a whole life I haven't met."
It wasn't an accusation. I meant it exactly the way it came out—with wonder in it, and something like grief, and underneath both of those something that was just love, the uncomplicated kind that didn't require anything of its object except that it exist.
Colleen's jaw worked. “Cat—”
"Don't," I said. "Don't apologize. Not to me.
" I took a step toward her and put my free arm around her and held on for a moment—the grocery basket dangling, the olive oil inside it, the specialty foods aisle of a Sunday grocery store, which was not where either of us would have scripted this.
"I just—I'm glad she makes you laugh like that.
I've been waiting to hear you laugh like that for years and didn't know what I was waiting for. "
Colleen's arm came around me and held tight and she let out one breath that had been held a very long time.
Nora, with the tact of a person who'd navigated careful spaces before, developed a sudden interest in a display of imported crackers nearby.
I pulled back. Colleen's eyes were bright. Mine probably were, too.
"How long?" I said.
"Two years." A pause. "Together. Longer that I—" She stopped. "It's not—I haven't hidden her on purpose, exactly. I've been—"
"Waiting to see how the land lay," I said.
"Something like that."
I thought about our mother with her handkerchief and her architecture of love, the one that meant settled and safe and recognizable.
I thought about Sunday Mass and the nine o'clock pew and all the conversations that would need to happen in kitchens over time.
I thought about the Donovan family and the weight it put on its daughters, the texture of its expectations, the love inside them that was real and also sometimes a cage.
I thought about my painting studio and a man I had known for one day who had asked me what I wanted like it was the only question that mattered.
"She's going to struggle with it," I said. "Mama."
"I know."
"And Daddy will go quiet for longer than three days."
"I know that, too."
"But they love you," I said. "That part isn't conditional. I really don't think it is." I held her gaze. "And I'm on your side. Whatever you need. However this goes."
Colleen looked at me the way she'd looked at me in the bride's room and something in her face went young and relieved in a way it hadn't been in years.
"You sound different," she said.
"I feel different."
"Since yesterday."
"Since yesterday," I agreed.
She was dressed for Mass—I could tell by the dress, the one she wore for nine o'clock, dark blue, the small gold cross at her throat. Still had some time before it started. She confirmed it when I asked.
"Nora's going to take the groceries home," she said. "I'll head over from here."
I looked at her. "How bad do you think it'll be?"
She considered this with the honesty of someone who'd been managing our parents longer than I had.
"Mama will have the posture. You know the one—plumb line, chin up, nobody sees her crack in public.
That'll hold through Mass and coffee hour.
" A pause. "Mrs. Hannigan will say something she thinks is sympathetic and isn't. Father Doyle will be kind and careful because he always is.
Daddy will shake hands with people and not say much.
" She adjusted the strap of her bag. "They'll get through it.
This city has been absorbing Saturday scandals since before the Revolution.
Give it two weeks and it becomes the story people tell with a glass of wine. "
"And after that? When they're home?"
Colleen's expression went quieter. "That's the harder part. That's when it's just them and the kitchen and no audience." She met my eyes. "I'll check on them."
"Thank you," I said.
She glanced at my basket, the careful provisions of a woman setting up a life. "Are you—are you really okay? Truly?"
"Truly," I said. "I have a meeting with a gallery owner in a few days. I have a studio and a car and I know what I want for the first time in my life."
Colleen blinked. "The gallery owner."
"I called her back."
She stared at me. Then she turned and looked at Nora, who had turned back from the crackers with an expression of polite attention. "She called the gallery owner back," Colleen said, like she was reporting something significant to a person she debriefed after important events.
Nora looked at me with warm, assessing eyes. "Good," she said simply. Like she knew exactly what that meant and had been hoping for it.
I liked her immediately.
We walked the rest of the store together, the three of us, and the ordinary Sunday motion of it—the cart and the list and the small domestic negotiations of which pasta and whether to get the good bread—felt like something new.
Not the performance of family. The real thing, moving through a grocery store, the land of it shifting under all our feet, all of us finding our footing.
In the parking lot, Colleen hugged me again, longer this time.
"Thank you," she said against my shoulder. "For yesterday. For—all of it."
"You held the door open," I said. "I just finally walked through."
I drove back to Wentworth Street with the groceries, and I thought about two women holding a world of unsaid things between them for years, and I thought about the courage it took to say them, and I thought about the word brave that Colleen had used once about a woman arriving somewhere new with nothing but a decision already made.
There were so many kinds of brave.
I was learning them, one at a time.
Wow.