One Year (41 page)

P
at stood in the hallway outside of his mother's hospital room, hands in the pockets of his pants, a frown on his face. He was working up his courage to finally make peace with Mary Bernadette Fitzgibbon.

The conversation he had shared with his father over soup and sandwiches had changed him. Well, as he had told Grace, the conversation, the unsettling knowledge of his father's loneliness, the fact of his mother's heart attack, and the good example of his wife. He had told his father that all you could ask of anyone was that she do her best. Well, maybe his mother
had
done her best by her son, and God knew she wasn't the sort to do anything by halves. Mary Bernadette made the effort, you could say that much about her.

Still, Pat hesitated to enter his mother's room. He just wasn't sure that he had the stomach to talk to her honestly about their relationship. He also wasn't sure that it would be the right thing to do at this late date. The woman was old. She was sick. He had no desire to hasten the death of his children's grandmother. Well, he could only hope that he would know what to do when the moment for speaking arrived. Pat took a fortifying breath and knocked on his mother's door before going inside.

“Mom. How are you this morning?” he asked. He noted that she had applied her usual lipstick and powder and took that as a good sign.

“As well as can be expected,” she replied. “I can't complain.”

“Good. I mean, it's good you're not in pain or anything. Are you?”

“No.”

Pat lowered himself into the chair by her bedside. “I need to tell you something, Mom,” he said, before he could lose his nerve. “It's not easy for me to say. I know we . . . I know we don't get along, but I do love you. I just wanted you to know that.”

Mary Bernadette nodded. “Thank you, Pat.”

Now, he took his courage in both hands. “But I felt abandoned by you, Mom. Unwanted. As a kid, I mean. I always felt . . . I always felt that I was a disappointment to you. I always felt that I could never live up to the image of my older brother. Of William.”

His mother said nothing in reply but looked down at her hands, folded in her lap.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” Pat went on, “but I had to say something. There have been too many years of silence. I won't bring it up again. I promise.”

Pat felt close to tears. He hoped he hadn't made things worse between them. His mother looked up at him now. He thought he saw a glimmer of a tear in her eye, too, but he couldn't be sure.

“I'm sorry you felt that way,” she said quietly. “Abandoned. Unwanted. A disappointment. It must have been very hard for you.”

All he could do was nod.

“I did care, Pat,” Mary Bernadette went on. “I do care, more than you know. You're my son. My only son.”

She reached for his hand. Pat hesitated for a moment before giving it to her. He couldn't recall the last time his mother had touched him. Her hand felt bony. The skin felt dry. His mother was old and time was passing. He was her only son.

To expect more from his mother simply wasn't fair. If she wasn't the mother he might have chosen, so be it. He had had it better than a lot of people. There were worse wounds than the ones that had been inflicted by Mary Bernadette Fitzgibbon.

An aide came into the room then, bearing a tray of food. “Lunchtime,” he announced brightly as he placed the tray on the moveable table at Mary Bernadette's bedside. When the aide had gone, Pat let go of his mother's hand and removed the plastic lid from the tray. He grimaced.

“How about I get you some real food, Mom,” he said.

Mary Bernadette sighed as if, Pat thought, a very large and cumbersome burden had been lifted from her shoulders. “That would be an act of great kindness. A ham and cheese sandwich and a real cup of tea would be heaven.”

“You got it.”

Pat replaced the lid on the tray and turned to leave.

“And make sure they use real mayonnaise on the sandwich,” his mother called out in her famously imperious voice. “Not that dreadful substitute some people find acceptable. And no artificial sweetener for the tea.”

Pat looked back. For half a moment he wondered if his mother should be eating something as fatty as mayonnaise after having suffered a heart attack. And then he laughed. What Mary Bernadette wanted, Mary Bernadette would have. “Real mayonnaise it is,” he said.

P
J and Alexis sat in their car in the parking lot outside the office of Roz Clinton, Certified Marriage Counselor. Her stomach was in knots. PJ was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. They both sighed at the same time.

“Ready?” PJ asked, turning to her.

Alexis thought she had never seen him look more serious and determined. It gave her hope. She nodded. So much was at stake. Alexis said a silent prayer for her marriage and for the child she and her husband were bringing into the world.

They got out of the car, and hand in hand they went inside the small building in Waterville that also housed the offices of an acupuncturist and a homeopathic healer. Roz Clinton's office was on the second floor. She opened the door on the first knock.

“Welcome,” she said. “PJ and Alexis? Call me Roz.”

According to the biography on her website, Roz Clinton was seventy-three. One of the reasons Alexis had chosen her was because of PJ's close relationship with his grandmother. She thought he might feel more comfortable opening up to an older person. If he would open up at all, and that was still to be seen.

Roz Clinton led them inside and asked them each to take a seat on the couch. She sat in a big, squishy-pillowed chair facing them. Alexis noted that her clothing—a flowing top in a paisley pattern and a many-tiered skirt that came to her ankles—was unlike anything Mary Bernadette would ever wear. In her ears she wore large hoops. Her necklace was a string of irregularly shaped turquoise beads. There was a ring on every finger of both hands.
A benevolent Being on her throne,
Alexis thought.

“Is this your first time meeting with a counselor?” Roz asked. Her voice was warm and pleasant. Her smile was reassuring.

PJ cleared his throat and nodded. Alexis burst out crying, and PJ put his arm around her.

Roz handed her a box of tissues.

“Have a good cry, my dear,” she said kindly. “I find that it always helps me.”

M
egan was sitting at the table in the Wilson House along with her fellow board members, waiting for the Great Man to arrive. She did not join in any of the desultory conversations going on around her. Her thoughts were enough to keep her occupied.

The truth was that Megan was disappointed that the fact of potential new donors to the OWHA hadn't met with more enthusiasm. Leonard, at least, was excited. Richard, however, was hesitant to commit his support. For some reason the idea of several private people funding the future growth of the OWHA disconcerted him. “Not that I think what you're proposing is all that unusual,” he had told Megan. “Just that it sounds—risky.” To which Megan had replied, “Any riskier than being beholden to one domineering man with a vision completely at odds with ours?” Still, Richard hesitated.

Neal was less wary than Richard but not 100 percent sure it was the way to go. He seemed almost physically repulsed by Wynston Meadows, but that extreme antipathy wasn't enough to override his need for further assurance that Megan's proposal had a good chance of succeeding. He wanted, he said, to know more about the donors and what other projects they had funded.

Megan speculated that Jeannette's suspicious reaction to her proposed scheme was a result of her lack of experience in the wider world. Apart from her work for the church and the OWHA, Jeannette's life had been solely dedicated to the care of her family. “What if they all turn out to be like Mr. Meadows?” she had asked Megan. “Then we'll really be in trouble.” The fact that every potential donor had made it a requirement of their support that Meadows be gone from the OWHA didn't seem to count with her.

As for Anne, well, Megan didn't really understand Anne's reluctance to accept her proposal as viable. Perhaps she was simply under too much strain with running the store, caring for her husband, and putting up with the disruptions to the usually smooth workings of the OWHA to invest energy in what she saw as a long shot.

But what did it matter if in the end Joyce, Wallace, and perhaps Norma refused to abandon their adherence to Wynston Meadows, in spite of the promise of money unencumbered by ridiculous demands and bad behavior?

Richard shook his head. “I've sent Meadows three texts in the last twenty minutes and no reply to any of them.”

“The man is busy.”

“We're all busy, Wallace,” Leonard countered. “But not too busy to send a text or an e-mail explaining our absence at a meeting.”

“This is ridiculous,” Neal said. “I'm calling this meeting to order.”

After Leonard had presented his report, a difficult bit of old business was addressed. Wynston Meadows's latest suggestion was that the tiny gift shop housed in one of the eighteenth-century additions to the Wilson House carry baseball caps with the name of the town across the front. The idea had met with protest from all but Joyce and Wallace. Even Norma had found the gumption to point out that the kinds of items the gift shop carried were of an entirely more sophisticated nature—biographies of past American worthies, small notebooks made with good hand-crafted paper, exact replicas of period jewelry, reproductions of recipe books kept by colonial housewives.

“And how does any of that precious stuff get the name of our town out there?” Meadows had argued. “How does any of that market Oliver's Well? I think we should do T-shirts as well as baseball caps. Commission a cartoon of a guy in seventeenth-century clothes tumbling into a well, something to really catch people's attention.”

Megan had said a silent prayer of thanks that Mary Bernadette wasn't in the room to hear this blasphemy.

“Can anyone at this table really be in favor of selling this sort of tourist nonsense in our shop?” Leonard demanded now.

Joyce, without the Great Man's presence to prevent her from speaking her mind, admitted that the idea of T-shirts depicting an early settler falling into a well was a bit over the top.

“It's ludicrous,” Neal said forcefully.

“But almost everyone wears baseball caps and T-shirts,” Wallace argued. “They would make us a lot of money.”

“At what cost?” Leonard demanded. “The cost of our dignity? We'd be the laughingstock among our colleagues nationwide.”

Wallace then suggested that the issue be tabled once again until all members were present for a vote. “After all,” he said, “it was Mr. Meadows's idea. It wouldn't be right to take a vote without him.” The others agreed. Megan could barely hide her annoyance. Not even the threat of gimmicky merchandise could instill the courage to resist the whims of the Great Man.

After the meeting, Megan found herself walking out to the parking lot with Neal.

“Why do you think Meadows didn't let us know he wouldn't be at the meeting today?” he asked her.

“He enjoys playing with people, Neal. It's a power thing.”

“Yes. And he probably feels he's beyond accountability at this point in his life.”

“Mary Bernadette would say that he'll be held accountable on the Day of Judgment.”

“Do you think she really believes that?”

“Yes, Neal,” Megan said. “I think that she does. And I sincerely hope that she's right.”

M
ary Bernadette was sitting in the chair by the bed. She had already taken two turns around the hall, and though she felt a bit tired, she felt stronger than she had in days. It was only her thoughts that were troubling her. The things that Pat had said to her.... She had badly wanted to press the call button to bring a nurse along, anything to stop having to listen to the words coming out of her son's mouth. But she had resisted the temptation to turn away from him. Pat was only repeating one of the truths her dream had revealed to her. She had failed her family.

Dear, sweet William! Mary Bernadette had long assumed that Pat and Grace had found out about her firstborn at some point. People could be dreadful gossips, and there
was
the fact of the headstone in Oliver's Well Memorial Cemetery. But until the conversation with Pat she had never considered the possibility that her husband might have shared the story with his children. But indeed, he might have done so.

Poor Pat, she thought now. He had flinched when he had taken her hand. She was sorry for that. She had held her grief for her lost son closer to her heart than she had held the son who had survived. It was true, wasn't it, that in some ways she, too, had died when William died.

“Knock knock.”

It was Grace. Mary Bernadette cleared her throat. “Good afternoon,” she said.

“Hi, Mom. How about another walk around the floor?”

“Yes. I have to regain my strength. There's so much I have to do. . . .” She took her daughter's arm and they began their parade up and down the hallway.

“Is Banshee well fed?” she asked, for what she knew was the hundredth time since she had been brought to the hospital. “You know she likes her food in her special bowls, one for the wet and one for the dry. And her water changed twice a day.”

“Yes,” Grace said. “She's being treated like the Queen of Sheba. Though she does miss you, Mom. That's clear.”

“And that Mercy hasn't torn apart the couch, has she?”

Grace laughed. “Since when does she chew on the furniture?”

“There's a first for everything.”

“I assure you the couch is intact. Though sometimes I wish that it wasn't. Really, Mom, it's like sitting on a concrete bench, and the armchairs aren't much better.”

Mary Bernadette widened her eyes. “I never noticed such a thing.”

“You wouldn't! Anyway, I've just talked to the doctor and he says you should be out of here in a day or two.”

Mary Bernadette crossed herself. “Thanks be to God!”

“And thanks be to your doctors and nurses, too.”

“And,” Mary Bernadette added, “thanks be to my family.”