she said without turning around, “you finish my coffee before you do one more thing.”
Patrick, still smiling widely, picked the cup back up and began carefully topping it with frothed milk, looking up at Mae as he did so. “Welcome,” he said. “Kenneth has been assuring me you’d turn up sooner or later. Said you couldn’t hold out against the best coffee in town.”
“It is that,” Barbara agreed. “Make Mae one—she’ll be needing it.” Her tone was casual, as though she and Mae ran into each other here every day of the week, but she turned and smiled at Mae, leaning back against the counter. Her hair, in two gray braids, hung over her shoulders; she wore, as she always did, a full floral apron over shapeless polyester pants and a high school sweatshirt—baseball, because it was spring. She looked exactly as she always had, and Mae felt an enormous loosening inside of her, an untying of knots she had not known were tied, as she walked straight into her mother’s outstretched arms.
As they stepped apart, with Mae hanging on for just a half second longer than Barbara, Patrick handed Barbara a thick mug, filled not quite to the brim. “I think, if I am not mistaken, that I have already made Mae at least one coffee,” he said. “Am I wrong in thinking that the young woman who’s already been in here twice this morning works for you?”
Of course. Nothing went without comment in Merinac. Not your coffee, not your groceries, not your decision to try running or subscribe to The New Yorker, which had once made Kenneth a topic of discussion all over town. It was a little ironic, then, that it was Kenneth’s husband who was heading up this morning’s gossip brigade, but as much as it pushed Mae’s old Merinac buttons, she held in the snippy response that rose to her lips and smiled back instead.
“Yes,” she said, mindful of Amanda’s reaction to the word “nanny.” “I brought someone to help me with the kids.”
To her surprise, her mother and Patrick nodded. “Probably smart,” Barbara said as she picked up her mug carefully, using both hands, and turned away. Greeting over, then, and it was time for Mae to fall into line beside her mother. This coffee shop, with its two gay proprietors and its lattes, should have felt like Mae territory, but it was Barbara who was at home here. Barbara’s affections were unpredictable and, once set, unchangeable, and she did not care what other people thought. It was why she always clicked with Jay on her rare visits to New York, where she refused to make the slightest alteration in her appearance to fit in with her surroundings. They shared that rebel quality.
You just couldn’t ever be sure if she might choose today to rebel against you. Still, even with the nagging worry in the back of Mae’s mind about how Kenneth would greet her, even with the coffee grapevine in full swing, finding Barbara in this atmosphere made Mae feel like things might be going her way.
Patrick didn’t leave her in doubt about Kenneth for very long. “You can wait for that third latte,” he said. “I’m getting Kenneth. I know, I know, you guys have lost touch. We’re fixing that. Right now.” He disappeared into one of the two doors behind the counter, this one clearly leading to the lobby of the bed-and-breakfast. “I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder. “I know you won’t go anywhere without your coffee.”
“He seems like a nice guy,” Mae said to her mother as she followed her to a pair of armchairs. The guy she would have wanted for Kenneth, once she had realized, almost before she had been old enough to have the thought, that Kenneth was not for her.
“He is. Good to have Kenneth back in town, too.” Her mother pointed to the chair across from hers, which she took a little stiffly. “Sit. He’ll be a minute. Kenneth’s father has been sick. Alzheimer’s. You know all this?”
Mae shook her head. She didn’t need to pretend with Barbara, who never wondered why other people did things.
“Well, he’s helping his mom, and he sees a lot of his sister and her family, too. Nice.”
Mae’s sense of connection disappeared. She knew where this was going. For so long, her mother had supported her choices, but lately Barbara had begun to ask just how long Mae intended to stay in New York—as though the city were