Once Upon a Lie (3 page)

“Order a pizza?” Maeve asked.

The look of joy on Rebecca’s face at this news was out of proportion to the simple idea of a pizza for dinner. The girls had made it known that they hated most everything Maeve cooked, mostly because every meal was accompanied by two vegetables. She had learned to turn a deaf ear to their protestations, but after putting in a full day at the shop, sometimes it was hard.

“You played great today,” Maeve said.

“Thanks.”

“Homework?”

Rebecca looked at her. “What do you think?”

Rebecca was in the homestretch, giving it all she had in order to get her GPA to where she wanted it to be, and where she wanted it to be was Vassar-ready. Maeve tried not to think about the tuition that went along with a Vassar education, hoping that Cal had been as good with his money as he claimed he had been, socking it away and making dividends that would get their oldest—the more ambitious of the two—to where she wanted to go.

He told her not to worry, but worrying was second nature to her. Her daughters knew that better than anyone.

Maeve kicked off her shoes and went to the sink, dealing with a pile of dishes left over from breakfast. She was surprised when Rebecca asked her how the wake was, queries into Maeve’s well-being or activities never really being part of any conversation with her teens. Was it true what people told her about a college-bound kid? Would Rebecca really start to come around and maybe like Maeve just in time to leave? Maeve found the whole concept depressing, as if her entire life revolved around hoping for the day when her daughters would see her as a comrade and not as an adversary. She hoped she was around when the day finally came. “It was a wake. With a bunch of Irish people. You know the drill,” she said. She thought back to her mother’s wake, the one that she really didn’t understand or want to be at, the old Irish ladies clucking over her, promising to take care of her, some of them—the widows—eyeing Jack as if he were a rib roast on sale at the local butcher. He had never remarried, and none of them came through on their promises.

Maeve had been seven, the memories of her beautiful mother laid out in a stylish off-price suit that she remembered her buying in Brooklyn one fall Saturday, the casket open only from the waist up. Maeve remembered telling her father that the shoes her mother wore matched her suit perfectly and should be displayed, but his only response had been to smile sadly before breaking out into heart-wrenching sobs that no one should have had to hear, let alone a little girl who pleaded with the body in the casket to wake up.

“But I’m sure Grandpa had a great time,” Rebecca said, showing a flash of the sense of humor she had inherited from her grandfather. “He loves wakes. Especially the ones with the open caskets.”

“He loves any time he can get out of Buena del Sol,” Maeve said, a little tingle, fear, traveling up her spine. How far did he actually get the last time he left the facility? And where had he gone?

“Sean seemed nice,” Rebecca said.

Maeve focused her attention on a wineglass with a smudge of lipstick on the rim. “Yeah,” she said, as noncommittal as she could sound. Water sloshed over the edge of the glass and onto her dress. The last time they had all been together had been for the Donovans’ annual Fourth of July party a few months earlier, held under a huge white tent in the backyard of their Fieldston manse, the girls unwilling participants in the extended Conlon-Donovan reindeer games. Maeve had managed to beg off on this invitation year after year, but this year, Dolores Donovan had gotten crafty and sent an invitation directly to Jack, who had informed Maeve that they all were going because he would need a ride.

She thought back to the day they went.

“Why do you want to go, Dad?” Maeve had asked, not relishing the thought of seeing her cousin—really, her childhood tormentor—host a grand party for two hundred.

Jack had listed the reasons. “Free lobster. Good whiskey.” He had hesitated before offering the last reason, the only one that made Maeve acquiesce, even though she wasn’t sure it was the best one. “And apparently, there’s a rumor going around that I’ve lost my marbles, and I can’t have that. I’ve got to show everyone that I’m still the same Jack Conlon, witty raconteur and all-around smart guy.”

So they went, Maeve second-guessing her decision the minute they walked through the door. Heather had been particularly miserable, as the keg was closely guarded by a waiter in a crisp white shirt and black pants, while Rebecca, good-natured firstborn that she was, made the best of it, bringing a summer AP assignment and availing herself of the quiet of Sean’s wood-paneled library. Jack had been in rare form, hitting the bar hard and regaling the kids of Maeve’s cousins with stories of his derring-do on the police department, stories that were only half-true, most of which had been perpetrated by someone else. Maeve had kept her distance from both Dolores and Sean, spending time with Dolores’s sister, Margie, someone Maeve remembered from the neighborhood as being one of the nicer Haggertys and the one least likely to throw an unnecessary barb her way, the Haggerty sharp tongues being their stock-in-trade.

Margie was the one Fidelma Haggerty had pinned her hopes on, the one she hoped would go into the convent and forever be the link between the Haggerty family and the kingdom of God. Margie, an avowed atheist and, as it turned out, lesbian, had other ideas, joining the Peace Corps instead and setting out for remote parts of Africa that Maeve hadn’t even heard of. Maeve, a few years older, was long gone when she left and hadn’t seen her since they were kids, each trying to avoid her own kind of trouble. For Maeve, it was Sean. For Margie, it was her own father, a drunk and a malcontent. It wasn’t until Margie sat down next to her under the grand white tent at a table sparkling with little votives that Maeve realized how little she knew of Margie but how much she remembered liking her.

Margie was well into her second or third glass of beer by the time Maeve sat down, her eyes shining. “I thought I could avoid this by planning a side trip to Egypt, but the revolutions put an end to that.”

Maeve did a visual around the room and located Jack talking to some of his old cronies from the neighborhood, people that the Donovans probably invited to parties so that they could show just how far they had come from the old neighborhood to the south. “Not having fun?” she asked.

Margie ran a hand through spiky black hair. “Remember
Sesame Street
? ‘One of these things is not like the others’? I think that may apply,” she said, clinking her glass against Maeve’s. “And to think that my wife actually wanted to come to this.” Maeve wasn’t sure which of them she was referring to; neither of them belonged. She had never felt comfortable among the Donovans, neither the blue-collar ones they’d been nor the upper-middle-class ones they had become. “To say that I have been a disappointment to my family would be an understatement.”

And apparently, there was no love lost between Dolores and Margie. “I always tell my sister that she can have all this money, send her kids to the best schools, but she’ll never have class,” Margie said, draining her beer. “Marrying a nitwit didn’t help.” She let out a soft belch. “Sorry. I know he’s your cousin.”

Maeve waved it off. “Not a problem. ‘Nitwit’ is being kind.” She kept her eyes trained on her youngest and the keg. Her peripheral vision held Sean, who was glad-handing the men in the room, being the big
macher,
as her one employee, Jo, liked to say, his Rolex dangling from his wrist and catching sunlight. He caught her looking and gave her a sly wink followed by a thumbs-up in Heather’s direction. The gesture made her freeze.

Margie was talking, but Maeve caught only part of what she was saying. “I always felt like the guy had a cruel streak. I guess that makes him well suited to Wall Street,” she said.

“That’s what my father always says.” Maeve turned, spotting Sean making his way toward Heather.

“My sister will overlook a lot for money. My parents, too.” She waved around the tent. “This would have sent my dad over the edge. To be the big guy in the neighborhood, even if the money wasn’t really his? That would have made him so proud,” she said, her voice tinged with disgust. “Too bad he died right after they got engaged. He didn’t get to see all of this.”

Maeve remained silent.

Margie’s diction was getting a little fuzzy. She smiled at Maeve. “We were a couple of terrors, huh?”

“You and me?” Maeve asked.

“Yeah,” she said. Maeve wondered just how much Margie had had to drink, because she had been anything but a terror. Maeve had been good and obedient and hadn’t said a word unless spoken to. “I can’t count how many times you ended up in the emergency room. You were kinda clumsy, right?”

“I guess you could say that,” Maeve said, for lack of a better response. “Clumsy” was an adjective that Maeve wore with considerable unease.

“My mother never thought your dad was doing a good enough job of looking after you.”

Maeve bristled at that. “Oh, really?” she said, fixing Margie with a withering look. “And just what did your mother think that my father should have been doing better?” Maeve remembered the Haggertys—Fidelma and Marty—and didn’t think either of them would have won a Parent of the Year award.

Margie drew back, just sober enough to realize that she had really touched a nerve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You just always seemed kind of sad.”

“I lost my mother when I was seven. You would have been sad, too,” Maeve said, and then flashed on the hard, cold face of Fidelma Haggerty and thought Or maybe not.

She left out the part where Sean Donovan, Margie’s brother-in-law and Maeve’s sometime childhood babysitter, had pummeled her to the ground one day, “wrestling” being his favorite form of entertainment, dislocating her shoulder. He’d popped it back into place before Jack had come home from doing a day tour at the precinct nearby, the memory of the pain making the adult Maeve wince. Or the part where he’d pushed her down a slide at the playground with such force that she had tumbled head over feet, getting a huge bump on her forehead that had turned the colors of the rainbow before finally fading.

Clumsy?
Hardly.
Sad?
Very much so.

Margie pointed at Maeve’s glass before heading back to the bar. “Want another one?”

Maeve looked down at her half a glass of Chardonnay and decided it would be best if she didn’t push it. One unhappy drunk at a Fourth of July party was enough. Two? That was trouble. She stood, ready to gather her daughters, her father, her wits. They were leaving.

Before Margie walked away, Maeve asked her the question she should have been asking herself. “If you hate being here, why did you come?”

Margie took a look around the room, her eyes settling on her mother seated a few tables away, on her face the unhappy, pinched look that Maeve remembered her having thirty years before. “Oh, you know. Family loyalty and all that.” She looked at Maeve over the top of her cup, held aloft. “And you?”

Maeve’s eyes settled on Jack. “I guess it’s the same. My dad really wanted to come,” she said, unable to keep the disbelief out of her voice.

Margie laughed, a tinkling, mirthful sound that brought Maeve back to their childhood. “You’re a good daughter, Maeve. So we’ve got that in common.” She hoisted her glass high, as if to toast. “Maybe more, but we’ll never know,” she said, “because something tells me I’ll never see you again.”

Maeve started to speak, but before she could follow up with Margie, she was gone, the keg her destination, lost in the throngs assembled around it.

She grabbed her purse from the back of the chair and gave a wave to Heather. “Find your sister,” she mouthed.

“Divorce suits you, Mavy,” came the voice from behind her, making the hair on her neck stand at attention. The arm around her waist, the finger pinching too hard through her linen top, it was textbook Sean and his maneuvers, every attempted show of “affection” tinged with cruelty and just a touch of pain.

“Only my father is allowed to call me ‘Mavy,’” she reminded him, pushing her chair under the table.

He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “And me, of course,” he said.

He was a bully and always had been, and she hated herself for seizing up when he was around. Let it go, she told herself. Move on. But she couldn’t. Not when there were family gatherings to attend and no excuse in the world that she could give Jack as to why they couldn’t go and eat lobster and shrimp under the stars of an exclusive Bronx enclave, watching fireworks as they exploded overhead. She saw later on, much later, that she was in control. They didn’t have to go. But Jack wanted to be here, and she was always the good daughter, the one who couldn’t not let him have those short-lived memories of being among his family in his eightieth year. So she came, letting him experience the love of the extended family, giving him the chance to show them that he hadn’t “lost his marbles,” carefully nursing her Chardonnay, giving a wide berth to her hosts.

“The girls are beautiful,” he said, his face close to hers.

“I know,” she said. “And if you touch one hair on either of their heads, I will—”

He cut her off, laughing. “Don’t push it, Maeve. Just have a good time.” He ran a hand down her back. “You never did know how to have fun.”

I’m an adult now, she reminded herself. There’s no reason to fear him, she intoned mentally. But she felt the way she had all those years ago and more than that, angry at herself for letting herself be manipulated into doing things she didn’t want to do. Back then, it was one thing, but now, she had control. She stood silently and waited for him to lose interest in her, something he eventually did, seeing Dolores trying to get his attention. He slithered off, but not before giving her a chaste peck on the cheek in a way that almost made her imagine that she had dreamed everything. A kiss between cousins. Family affection.

She watched him slide past Heather, a hand lingering on her back just long enough to make his point, but not long enough to arouse suspicion in anyone else. If it rested much longer, she might have snapped, but as always with Sean, she was never entirely sure of what she had seen or what had just happened. The end result of being in Sean’s sights? An inability to discern truth from fiction.