Chapter 43
NOW: MAGGIE
Diana was annoyed, Maggie could tell. She couldn’t blame her; a lot of things had happened in quick succession to make her stressed.
First the run-in with Mary. After she’d left, Maggie had been a tangle of nerves, her mind trying to dispute and squash old habits and thought patterns.
Diana had wanted to stay, but she’d also gotten an “SOS Fireblight” text from her staff, and it turned out the problem was not under control.
The only consolation was that the place of origin was not in fact Maggie’s corner of the orchard.
But that meant little to nothing in the grand scheme of things.
And now, the very dinner at which they were supposed to talk to both Maya and Lily had been crashed by none other than the McAvoys themselves.
Maggie watched the tension in Diana’s shoulders as she worked at the grill. Lifting her head for a moment, Diana turned to everyone and said, “Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes! Feel free to grab some drinks and get comfortable, of course there’s plenty of cider.”
Maggie decided a drink was absolutely necessary.
Considering how much of a proper church woman Mary was being, she wasn’t about to let on in front of her husband and daughter that she had already expressed her displeasure at her daughter’s friendships.
Friendships, which now Maggie was fully convinced were more than that, judging by the nervous energy she could practically see rolling off Mary’s daughter, Hanna.
She made it to the cooler where both Evan and Mary stood.
“Good to see you Maggie, I heard from Mary you were back in town,” Evan said, always warm and genuine.
“Yeah, bought a house and everything. Good to see you too!” Maggie said a little too forcefully. She really needed that drink.
“I was saying to Mary it might be nice for you to get together with her and Emmy sometime, you remember Megan Jacobs, right? She and her husband live right in the next town over. Mary spends a lot of time with her still,” Evan said as he bent down and pulled out two bottles of cider.
“Ugh, no cider for me,” Mary said almost scornfully, and before Evan could bend down to put one of the ciders back Maggie gestured towards him.
“I’ll take it, and yeah, I guess it would be great to catch up with you and Em, Mary. So good to hear you two still spend so much time together,” Maggie said, turning and raising an eyebrow at Mary, who refused to meet her eye.
“Yes well, friendships are great, but we do have our boundaries,” Mary said, plucking a hard seltzer from the cooler and walking off. Evan looked both confused and then apologetic before following his wife. Maggie opened her cider and took a long pull before walking over to Diana.
“Hey,” she said. They hadn’t really spoken since Mary’s interruption the day before.
“Hey,” Diana said, suddenly seeming engrossed in moving a bunch of peppers around on the grill.
“So I know today was supposed to be the day, but—”
“I get it, let’s not do it with Mary here, and I get that yesterday sucked.” Diana let out a breath that told Maggie she was trying to contain her emotions.
“Look, it doesn’t mean I am not going to tell Maya okay? Damien needs to talk to her as well.”
Diana turned to her slightly and said, “Okay, but when? Because you know I feel like I have been lying to my own daughter, and I’ve waited years Maggie, and I want to be patient, but I also, fuck, I feel like I am so close to having you.”
“You have me, okay? You have me, I am yours and this,” Maggie gestured between the two of them, “is ours. I have my shit, I promise you I am working on it. We will tell them. I promise,” Maggie reassured her.
She could tell Diana had heard her, but her lover’s eyes were now watching the girls and Mary McAvoy, looking ready to pounce.
Diana said quite loudly, “Dinner is ready if y’all will take your seats.”
Diana sat at the head of the table, while Lily sat close to her mother with Maya and then Maggie on one side, and Hanna and her parents on the other.
Maggie played with her food and tried to eat, but really there was a reason why she was the cook in the relationship.
Diana and Mary had mostly been carrying the dinner small talk, but they’d found themselves in an uncomfortable silence.
Maggie was just about to cheers Lily for her birthday when Hanna spoke up.
“Mom, Dad I’m bi.”
Maggie looked up at her in surprise. It looked like someone was coming out at this dinner after all. The table was silent and Maggie watched as Hanna’s face flamed red.
“I’m sorry?” Mary McAvoy choked out, and Maggie felt a pit form in her stomach, knowing this was Mary’s worst nightmare.
Diana raised her glass and then said, “Good for you kid.”
Hanna continued, addressing her mother. “I am bisexual. I like—men and women, and more?” The table was silent. Maggie was surprised Mary’s head hadn’t exploded at the “more”.
After a few beats, Maggie heard Maya speak up next to her. “Um, I’m pan, pansexual,” her daughter announced at the table. Maggie still couldn’t get over the confidence with which her daughter always said those words.
“All of the above, right on! I myself have been dabbling in my fluidity again recently,” Diana said from the end of the table, and Maggie determinedly didn’t meet her eyes.
“I’m very gay,” Lily also announced proudly, picking up her bottle of cider and clinking bottles with Diana, and then turned to do so with Maya.
Maya burst into laughter. Which was contagious because so did Lily, then Diana and then eventually, Hanna. While Maggie could feel a tension still building, there was also one that the laughter seemed to be alleviating.
“Well then, congratulations ladies, but I already knew about you kiddo,” Diana said, and this time Maggie turned to look at her and watched her take Lily’s hand into her own.
“Came out to me and my sister back in—what was it? Seventh? Eighth grade? We took her out to celebrate,” she continued calmly.
Maggie chanced a glance at Mary, who had a red face and a set jaw. She was looking down at her plate as if lost for what the appropriate next move would be. But apparently they weren’t done.
“Um, and Lily, I’m dating Lily, and Maya. I’m dating both Lily and Maya. We are together. The three of us.”
Maggie turned to her daughter, who was beaming across the table at Hanna.
Diana was the first to break the silence again.
“Triads are poly on hard mode, but y’all are young.
” She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and Maggie supposed that to someone like Diana, it was.
She had her weird situationship with Jay, for crying out loud.
Maggie had read up on the comet formation but nothing else, and now wished she had, or at least had skimmed the whole “triad” business.
“Hanna,” Mary said, and Maggie saw she’d looked up and had glassy eyes.
“Yeah, Mom,” Hanna said.
“So, you’re, so you’re interested in girls? But Jeff—” Mary was clearly flustered but Hanna cut her off at the mention of what Maggie assumed was an ex-boyfriend.
“Boys, girls, and well, I’m bisexual.”
Mary tried again, her lower lip trembling as she spoke. “Okay, and so, what, the three of you are—together?”
Maggie watched as Hanna turned to look at Lily and then Maya, and nodded.
Mary scoffed and then let out a sarcastic laugh. “Is this real?”
“Yes Mom, I’m moving with them to Providence, they’re who I am living with.”
“I knew based on your chart you’d be a U-Hauler,” Diana said to her daughter and once again, Maggie was amazed at how she could remain calm.
Pansexuality was one thing, but poly? Another layer on top of everything else already making Maya’s life harder?
Besides, Maggie had just wrapped her head around Diana’s relationship with Jay.
“You can’t, I mean, come on, is this why you are holding off on med school? To play out some fantasy?”
Maggie watched Mary break Hanna’s heart in real time. “It’s not a fantasy, Mom.”
“Well then, what is it? I thought you had a plan, and now your plan is—-is that why you brought us here, to tell us all together?”
Maggie turned to look at Maya, who still seemingly only had eyes for Hanna. She was about to say something to her when she heard Evan McAvoy’s voice, a rarity. “Mary, I think it’d be best to—”
“I’m just trying to understand. My daughter got into Tufts, she volunteered at our church, she got good grades, graduated summa cum laude for crying out loud, was going to med school, and then all of the sudden?
She starts hanging out at the ‘Do-Whatever-You-Want and Live-However-You-Want Orchard’ and telling me she is bisexual—okay, but this?
” Maggie watched as Mary gestured towards her daughter and then Lila and Maya.
“Going to forgo med school to live in, what? A brothel—”
Maggie heard Evan step in again, and then the table became a bunch of indistinguishable words and voices. Maggie found herself trying to keep up, trying to subdue the raw wounds Mary had just reopened the day before.
“Maggie?” Her name cut through her spinning thoughts and she looked up to find Mary looking at her. “Are you not going to say anything?”
Maggie had a lot of things to say but also didn’t know what to say.
She was trying to process the flood of emotions surrounding her own shit, the reawakened fear for the well being of her daughter, the anger at Mary talking to her own daughter the way she was, and the need to still tell Maya about her and Diana.
She didn’t know what to say, except the one thing that she always knew to be true.
“I love my daughter,” she said and was disgusted with how weak her voice sounded.
Because Mary looked at her as if to say, Did you know and if so, why didn’t you say anything yesterday?
Maggie added, “But sure, this is surprising.”