But they really found each other freshman year of high school, where they clung together, two outcasts bad at sports, smart no matter how hard they tried to hide it, and only children among big, constantly proliferating families. What’s more, they were minorities: he, Jewish; she, Unitarian, in a community centered on St. Peter’s Catholic Church. Even worse, they both lived in the fancy part of town, which meant—viewed through the narrow scope of Passamaquoddy, Maine—no tires in the front yard, a half bath tucked under the stairs, an air conditioner sticking out a bedroom window, and a dishwasher in the kitchen. She and Sam were a clique of two.
Now she takes another puff and feels even worse. She opens the passenger side window, stuffs the pack back into the carton, and flings the whole thing into the snowbank. Should she feel guilty for littering? Should she feel guilty for corrupting a minor if some kid comes along and pounces on it? Should she feel guilty for starting some other poor soul on the road to disease? She has a better idea. Forget indulging in a social conscience. She’s going to indulge in a hot-fudge sundae with chopped walnuts, melted marshmallows, whipped cream, and a red-dye-maraschino cherry on top. The works.
She drives the half block to Miller’s Drug and backs into the parking space someone else is just vacating. Though the never-repaired squeak in the door announces her arrival, nobody looks up. A couple of toddlers with their harassed and exhausted mothers are sitting at one end of the counter. One child has stirred a dozen straws into his milk shake. A little girl keeps trying to grab them. “Some days …” her mother sighs, mopping up the spills.
“Believe me, I know,” the other mother commiserates.
Annie scowls. You have no idea how lucky you are, she wants to shout. She chooses a stool at the opposite end of the counter. “Drowning your sorrows?” asks Mr. Miller when he takes her order. “This seems to be the day for it.”
“Really?’
He nods. “Agnes Bouchard was in here just two minutes ago and wolfed down two banana splits. Seems old Mrs. Bouchard died …”
“Yes, it was in the paper. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be sorry. Ninety-one years old and as nasty as they come. You can’t imagine what Agnes put up with taking care of her. At her beck and call every second. The old lady used to call and scream at me when her blood pressure medication wasn’t delivered fast enough. As if she was the only customer in Passamaquoddy. As if we offer white-glove service here. Then she goes and dies intestate.” He mops a scattering of sprinkles off the counter. “Without a will.”
“I know what intestate means.” Annie feels the need to defend herself.
“Now all these far-flung relatives are turning up under rocks and demanding their share. Worse than if she’d left her money to her cat, which Agnes had figured she’d do.”
“I hope the banana splits helped,” Annie says.
“Not sure. Though I sent her home with a strawberry milk shake. On the house. It’s a lesson for us all. I’ve already made an appointment with my lawyer to do my own will. Never too early …”
Or too late, thinks Annie.
“Not that you have to worry,” he adds.
“You never know.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Well, on to more cheerful things,” he says. “How is that lovely mother of yours?”
“Great,” Annie says, not bothering to muster up the usual fake enthusiasm and present her unembellished report of Ursula’s overly embellished life. She’s used to this. Over the years, she’s become desensitized, like people with allergies who, given increasingly larger doses of what they’re allergic to, develop tolerance to the very thing that once caused hives. At the start of every school year, “How is your mother?” was the first question each new teacher asked her. Soon enough, Annie would take preemptory action and, before the words were even formed, announce, “My mother is great. Great,” prompting the guidance counselor to send out a memo to staff suggesting they inquire only about Arabella herself. She saw the memo on Miss Cleary’s desk once, along with the words What a sensitive and shy child. Arabella is, alas, so unlike her mother. Even now, all these years later, that alas has—alas—become part of what defines her.
She unfolds the paper napkin in her lap, studies it, pleats it into a fan, then flattens it, her attention clearly and pointedly not on her mother. But Mr. Miller doesn’t notice. “I saw her in that series a while back,” he continues. “She made the rest of the cast look like pikers!” He squirts an extra turret of whipped cream on her sundae and adds a second cherry as—Annie assumes—an homage to Ursula. “Will she be returning to the old sod anytime soon?”
That’s all she needs, Ursula as Angel of Mercy, clad in Dior white, swooping down and seizing center stage, taking over, grabbing all her daughter’s sorrows as her own. The role of a lifetime. The role she’s been playing all of Annie’s life.
When Annie’s father died, Ursula, draped in black, a few sequins bordering her décolletage, rhinestone buckles twinkling on her satin shoes, carried on in such a way you would have thought she was still married to the just-deceased instead of on her fourth spouse. Henry Stevens had served a short sentence as number two, just long enough to produce Ursula’s sole offspring, whom he had nicknamed Annie, deeming the Ursula-mandated Arabella too highfalutin for Passamaquoddy. After the funeral, all the mourners crowded around the sobbing widow, basking in Shalimar and theatrical tragedy while ignoring the daughter, the child who had loved her father and was truly bereaved.
Except for Sam, who never left her side.
Annie shovels the ice cream into her mouth. It tastes like medicine. The chocolate sauce clumps around her tongue. The nuts feel like grit. Can all the pleasures of the world abandon one so abruptly? she wonders. She can’t even commit the sins of cigarettes and sundaes without such forbidden fruit turning into bitter herbs. She slaps ten dollars on the counter and hops off the stool.
“Something wrong?” asks Mr. Miller.
You better believe it. “Not at all,” she lies.
“You aren’t going to finish that?”
“As my mother always said, ‘A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.’ ”
“Guess it paid off for her.” He looks wistful. “Well, tell her we miss her.” He wipes the counter. “And give my best to that husband of yours.”
That husband of hers. Sam. Oh, Sam. Dear Sam.
How will she ever tell Sam?
Chapter Two
How can she ever tell Sam?
Sam, her cherished cohabitant, her coworker, her co-owner, her co-replicator of the Paul Bunyan. Sam, at her side 24/7—except when she’s running errands or sneaking cigarettes or scarfing down sundaes. Or … Her breath catches.
Or going to the doctor.
How she hates it when she hears one celebrity or another call a boyfriend, sweetheart, partner, husband, or wife “my best friend.” Such a cliché, so trite, so tacky, she always notes. A view that doesn’t stop Sam from introducing her as “Annie, my wife and best friend.”
“Wife, yes. Best friend, no,” she informed him. “Rachel owns that title.”