to her. Kate considered all the trendy areas downtown like another city. It took half an hour to get there and Kate preferred her children to visit her at home, which they did occasionally, or they met at a restaurant so no one had to cook. She hadn’t been to Anthony’s apartment either since he got it, and knew it would be a mess. He treated it like a college dorm room. And Claire wasn’t a homemaker either in her tiny studio apartment.
Tammy always went uptown to see her mother and her grandmother. She hated the dishonesty of it, but she didn’t see what choice she had. She’d made a decision long ago. She’d rather be a liar than a pariah or the outcast, as she was afraid she would be if she told the truth.
She had almost told Anthony several times when she was younger, but she wasn’t sure how he would handle it either. They were all very traditional, and lived up to what their mother expected of them. They had never broken with tradition, and no one in the family had ever done anything shocking. Tammy didn’t want to be the one to do that. She loved them too much to be the one to break their hearts. She wondered how her father would have reacted to it, but she had a feeling he wouldn’t have accepted it either.
“Well, I guess it’s tough on her, but your mother will just have to get through another birthday without me,” Stacey teased her and Tammy smiled. She wished it could be different, but she knew it couldn’t. And Stacey was so nice about it, which made it worse.
She called her mother and grandmother before they left for Maine, and told them they could reach her on her cellphone, if they needed to, although cell service was spotty, and there was no phone in the house they rented, which was one of the things they loved about it. No Internet for two weeks. And no TV. They could read and talk to each other at night, or play cards, or Scrabble. It was the perfect vacation for both of them.
Tammy thought her mother sounded tense when she talked to her. She had for several weeks, but she didn’t know what it was about. Kate hadn’t shared Claire’s news yet, nor had she. Claire said she wanted to wait until after the first trimester, when she knew everything was fine, and then she was going to tell Anthony and Tammy, sometime around their mother’s birthday. Kate had asked her not to do it that night, so she could enjoy her birthday without drama. She said that sharing Claire’s shocking news of the baby would spoil the birthday for her, which upset Claire all over again. Claire was about to go to Aspen for three weeks with Reed, and was looking forward to it.
Kate spent two weeks with Bart at Shelter Island every summer. He rented a house there for two months, and invited his children to visit in July if they wanted to. He invited friends to come in August. Kate played hostess for him, and enjoyed it. They had to take a ferry to get there. She liked his friends who came on weekends, and the time they spent there alone. She hadn’t told him about Claire’s baby yet either. She was too embarrassed to do so. It felt like a double failure to her. On Claire’s part to fly in the face of the rules of society, and on her part, to have failed to teach her what the rules were. Having a baby out of wedlock was not good news to Kate or anything she was proud of. It had taken all the pleasure out of having a first grandchild, now it was something she dreaded, and wanted to hide as long as she could, even from Anthony and Tammy. But the secret would be out soon, when the baby started to show, probably by October.
Kate wished Tammy a good trip to Maine when she called, and told her to be careful. She thought it was dangerous for her to go alone. What if a bear came out of the woods, or her canoe or kayak flipped over.
“I’ll be fine,” Tammy said cheerily. “Have fun in Shelter Island with Bart.” But Kate knew there was a falseness to it this year. He had no idea what was troubling her or how upset she was and