Maggie
“Was that you I saw in the Mustang earlier today?” he says. He whistles. “I’d kill for that car.”
She nods. “It was, um, my brother’s.”
Nancy adjusts the baby’s small knit blanket and looks somber.
“Leave it to that kid.” Phil yawns. “He was smart not to bring it around here. I would have hotwired it and been long gone.” He chuckles.
“I didn’t know he had a Mustang.” Nancy frowns. The baby has a fistful of her long hair. “Ouchie,” she says, and looks at him, and the baby smiles and makes a gurgling sound.
“I’m not surprised,” Phil says. “It suits him. I mean, it suits you too, Maggie.” He waves to the baby, then turns and sees Bridget coming. “Ah, here she is.”
He marches over to her and leans down for a kiss. Maggie smiles, her speculation confirmed. “Did you know those two were an item?” Maggie whispers.
Nancy laughs. “Please. Red Maple gossip travels at the speed of light, but we’re all protective of one another, too.”
Phil and Bridget wave, and they stroll toward the main lodge. “They’re so darn cute,” Maggie says. She turns to Nancy and touches her Maggie necklace. She remembers a line from The Velveteen Rabbit: all the pink rubbed off his nose where the Boy had kissed him.
Nancy looks down at the baby, and Maggie thinks maybe the baby’s eyes look like Chip’s, but she can’t be sure. She was never good at that. Her hands shake. But the joy she feels looking down at him. Goodness. Pure goodness.
“You know, Maggie, I wanted to come see you and your parents so many times,” Nancy says.
“I had to respect what he said, what he told all of us he wanted, but I wanted to tell you all how much…” She can barely speak.
“How much he meant.” She wipes her face and adjusts the visor of the stroller again.
“He showed up at this place like a, I don’t know, a firecracker.
” She points to the flower beds by the barn.
“I used to see him pulling weeds, and I thought, that guy’s cute, and then all of a sudden, he was working with me, teaching ballroom dancing and calling numbers at bingo and judging the canoe races on the lake.
He was everywhere.” She sniffles. “Everyone adored him. I’m sure you knew that.
I loved him—in a way that I honestly haven’t been able to recover from. ”
Maggie nods. “I’m sorry. He was our light.”
“You look just like him. Do you know that?”
Maggie smiles. “I’ve heard it once or twice.”
“I hope he’s happy he came here.” That Nancy describes him in the present tense touches Maggie, as if in death he can still experience things.
“I think so.” She looks down at the baby, and Nancy watches her.
Maggie doesn’t know the etiquette for how you ask something like this.
It seems rude to assume, but when the baby looks at her, she can almost hear her brother telling her life goes on.
She crouches down and touches his cheek.
Life does, even when one is shortchanged.
“Look at you,” Maggie whispers to the baby, and she’s overcome.