Good Harbor (3 page)

It just isn’t the same with men. Why is that? she wondered.

“You okay?” Buddy asked.

“Fine.”

A black Lab raced past them and leapt three feet into the air to catch a Frisbee.
“Next dog, I want a German shepherd,” she said firmly.

“And I bet you already have a name picked out.”

“Maurice.”

“Really?” Buddy said. “After Kirchel, I figured it would be Wolfie. Or Amadeus.”

“Maurice Sendak introduced me to Mozart in the first place. I think it’s only fitting.”

“Couldn’t we call him Max?” Buddy asked. “I sure am going to feel silly hollering
‘Moe-ree-eece.’”

“You’ll get used to it.”

On Monday morning, Buddy didn’t go fishing, even though the weather was fine. He read
the paper until Kathleen left for work. He walked her to the car, opened the door,
and waved as she pulled away.

Kathleen watched him in her rearview mirror.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and then shook her head, realizing that she meant it as
a prayer. “No atheists in foxholes,” she muttered, turning on
Morning Edition
, hoping that they might run one of Dr. Truman’s commentaries that day. As qualified
as Dr. Cooperman might be, Jane Truman had the reputation as the best breast surgeon
in Boston — maybe in the whole country. She was also a local celebrity, thanks to
her occasional two-minute radio essays about her patients, her colleagues, and her
little girl.

When she got to school, Kathleen sat down in the little office beside the teachers’
lounge and called Dr. Truman’s office. She was told, very politely, even kindly, that
Dr. Truman was booked solid until September. She locked the door to the teachers’
bathroom and wept, trying not to make any noise.

The gym teacher, Fiona Kent, was waiting for her when she finally emerged, and within
a few hours, the whole school knew the whole story, right down to the details of her
phone call to Dr. Truman. After the third-period bell, Madge Feeney marched into the
library, where Kathleen was staring out a window.

“Don’t you worry, dee-ah,” said Madge, who had grown up in South Boston and still
drove all the way down there for mass every Sunday. “My niece, Ellen, works in that
Dr. Truman’s office.” Madge shook her head sadly, sighed, and said, “You know, my
ma had it, too.”

As the day wore on, Kathleen heard that refrain again and again. Like a parade of
cats with dead mice in their teeth, five teachers, two aides, and a lunch lady came
to the library and laid the tale of their mother’s, sister’s, cousin’s, best friend’s
breast cancer at her feet. As though she didn’t have Pat’s story, her own sister.
Good thing I don’t have a daughter, she thought.

At noon, Madge’s niece left a message: Kathleen should bring her mammogram and test
results to Dr. Truman’s office the following Monday morning.

“Oh, Kath, that’s so great,” Buddy said when she called to relay the news. He cleared
his throat, and the noise on the other end of the phone was muffled. Kathleen never
knew what to say when Buddy got choked up.

After school, Kathleen stopped at the town library. But when she got to the 600s,
half the titles on breast cancer were already gone. I guess someone else got bad news
this week, she thought, and wondered about all the other women who had stood in the
same spot, hearts racing, hands shaking.

Even so, there were plenty of books left to choose from. She took three, worrying,
as she checked them out, about where to hide them. She didn’t want Buddy stumbling
across
What to Do If the Doctor Says It’s Cancer, The Breast Cancer Guidebook
, and
Survivors: Ten First-Person Accounts by Women Who Beat Breast Cancer.
But Kathleen found she couldn’t look at the books without starting to sweat and returned
them a few days later, unopened.

She and Buddy decided to keep the appointment with Dr. Cooperman, who seemed as competent
and reassuring as a thirty-year-old surgeon could be. But every night that week, Kathleen
dreamed she could feel the cancer pushing from the inside of her breast, threatening
to break out of her skin. She took to adding a jigger of brandy to her bedtime herbal
tea. In the morning when Buddy asked how she had slept, Kathleen would say, “Like
a baby.” What she thought but didn’t say was “Like the dead.”

JOYCE’S ROUTINE HAD
turned into a secret rut. She dropped Nina off at school, cruised through the Dunkin’
Donuts drive-through for coffee, and mentally scanned her to-do list: the kitchen
cabinets needed washing and fresh liners, she had to measure the windows for blinds,
and all the walls needed paint. Every morning she vowed that as soon as she reached
Gloucester, she would get to work.

But most days, once she’d made the hour-long drive to the house, she collapsed in
an orange beanbag chair she had rescued from a neighbor’s trash heap and read magazines
until it was time to pick Nina up from school. One Monday she stripped the paper off
the shelves, imagining Mary Loquasto picking the green teacup pattern to match the
appliances. Another day, she vacuumed the crawl space in the attic. But those were
exceptions.

She promised herself, over and over, to get off her butt. She should be finishing
the articles that were still due. She ought to make more of an effort to talk to Frank,
who was preoccupied and consumed by the goings-on at Meekon, the most recent start-up
software company on his long, high-tech résumé. Rumors of a Japanese takeover were
flying again, and it was all he could talk about. Which made it hard for her to pay
attention.

Every day, she got out of bed resolved to make serious headway on the house, spend
a little time at her desk, fix a good dinner, keep her cool with her increasingly
surly twelve-year-old daughter, and have a real heart-to-heart with Frank. But every
day turned out pretty much the same as the day before. By the time Joyce crossed the
bridge and saw the fisherman sign welcoming her to Gloucester, her good intentions
had evaporated. She ended up in the beanbag, staring at the wallpaper until it was
time to drive home in a guilty funk that lasted until bedtime.

Joyce finally got herself to Ferguson’s Decorating Center to buy scrapers, brushes,
and paint. On the way to the cash register, two gallons of Linen White cutting narrow
grooves into her palms, she caught sight of the color charts. “No more white,” she
muttered.

This was, she knew, an extremely unoriginal urge. Everyone in Belmont already had
a red dining room or a green den. She walked over to the Benjamin Moore display, which
looked like an altar to the Greek goddess of the rainbow; Joyce tried to remember
her name. Maybe she could tell me which one of these ten thousand shades of green
would make my avocado refrigerator look retro and chic. Joyce grabbed a handful of
color strips and walked out, leaving the cans of white paint like offerings to Iris
(that was her name!), messenger of Olympus.

Driving back to Belmont, Joyce spread the samples on the passenger seat and nearly
swerved off the road while reaching for Calvin Klein’s Forested. Maybe that would
help. Or not. Joyce frowned at herself in the rearview mirror.

“I’ll call Francesca!” she crowed a moment later, smacking the steering wheel triumphantly.
Francesca Albano was a soccer mom who had hosted a parents’ team meeting the previous
fall. Touring Francesca’s enormous house, Joyce felt as if she’d been trapped inside
the interior decorator’s infomercial. But her jaw had dropped in pure admiration of
the kitchen. Who would have thought that bright blue and gold were a good combination
for anything but cheerleader uniforms?

At the dinner table, her announcement of the decision to call Francesca was met with
stares.

“Mom, are you okay?” said Nina.

“Yeah, Joyce,” Frank chimed in. “Maybe you ought to lie down or something.”

“Why?” asked Joyce. “I think it’s a great idea.”

“You wouldn’t even let me paint my room light yellow, remember?” Nina said, twirling
a strand from her long, dark ponytail.

“Isn’t there a clause about Linen White in our prenup?” Frank teased.

Joyce was getting annoyed. “I’m simply admitting my inadequacy here.”

“I still think we ought to take your temperature,” Frank said lightly.

“Don’t tease Mom,” said Nina, suddenly rushing to her mother’s defense.

“It’s okay, honey,” said Joyce.

“No, it’s not,” Nina said, a hysterical catch in her voice and tears in her eyes.
“He’s so mean to you.”

“Nina,” Frank warned, “knock it off.”

“Really, Nina, he’s just kidding around,” said Joyce.

“Now you’re ganging up on me.”

“That is not true,” Frank said, emphasizing each word. “And your behavior is not acceptable,
young lady.”

“You hate me,” Nina screamed. She ran for her room.

“Let it go,” said Joyce. “There is no point in arguing when she gets like this. She
can’t help it.”

“She has to learn to control herself, and you shouldn’t undermine me like that in
front of her.” Frank got up and headed for the computer. Joyce cleared the table and
brooded. Life with Nina was a minute-by-minute drama, and Frank’s anger only made
it worse. There was no predicting her daughter’s behavior, and no consoling her confused,
abandoned husband.

Nina had been such a daddy’s girl as a toddler, and all the way through grade school
they had spent part of every weekend in the park, just the two of them. First swings
and slides, then balls and bats, then soccer. They had private jokes. They quoted
lines from
The Simpsons
at each other. Or they used to.

Not anymore. As hard as Nina was on Joyce, she was ten times pricklier around Frank.
Everything he said or did seemed to drive her crazy.

Frank is grieving, Joyce thought, and he doesn’t even know it. She started the dishes,
remembering when this had been a sweet spot in her day. Nina would perch on the countertop
and squeeze dishwashing liquid on the sponge while Frank read a chapter from one of
the
Narnia
books. Could that really have been last fall?

There was no more reading aloud. No more spontaneous hugs, not even any TV couch time.
Nina’s life revolved around her friends and soccer, a game that made Joyce go limp
with boredom.

I guess I’m grieving, too.

As she rinsed the last pot, she heard Frank yell to Nina through her closed door,
“Are you doing your homework in there?”

Frank still thought there was a strategy for avoiding the thunderstorms of Hurricane
Nina, but Joyce was beginning to suspect that there was no way through the next few
years without getting drenched every few hours. Maybe that’s why I’m up in Gloucester
so much, she thought, as she looked up Francesca’s phone number and muttered, “Duh,
as my daughter would say.”

Francesca was all that Joyce remembered, breezing into the Gloucester house later
that week. Joyce followed her hot-pink linen pantsuit from one room to the next and
felt her modest vacation home morph into a tacky double-wide trailer.

In the kitchen, Francesca stopped and in a near whisper said, “Well, at least they
didn’t leave you with orange linoleum and yellow countertops. I’ve seen much worse.”

Joyce felt both murderously defensive about Mrs. Loquasto’s taste and mortified at
her association with it. “Coffee?” she offered.

“No thanks,” Francesca said, and opened an enormous book of color samples on the counter.
She flipped straight past the greens to a page of dark purples and explained that
in “situations like this” it was better to go for contrast.

Joyce’s face betrayed her. “Purple is neutral,” Francesca reassured her. “Besides,
someone as interesting and artistic as yourself should have an interesting and artistic
home,” she said, snipping out swatches named Pretty Putty, Golden Light, Bluish, and
Lemon Crème and laying them beside Summer Aubergine, which Joyce continued to eye
with suspicion.

“Buy a quart and just paint a swatch. Live with it for a while,” Francesca said. “If
it still doesn’t work for you, call me.”

Joyce waved as Francesca backed her sleek black Saab out of the driveway. She walked
over to the Madonna, whose gray concrete arms reached down toward last year’s withered
mums. “I like being told that I’m interesting and artistic,” she said to the statue,
and pinched its solid cheek. “Don’t you?”