you can drive around in circles. I don’t know, we might have to find you a phone book to sit on, but I can have you driving in a couple of weeks if you want.”
Connie was surprised at herself as she said, “Okay, if you don’t mind. I’d really like to get out more. Just do my own shopping, take the kids places, go and see my cousin.”
“So tomorrow at four I’ll come and we can start. We’ll put the baby in the back seat. Deal?”
Connie smiled. “Deal.” He stuck out his hand and they shook, the little boy between them. It was an oddly comforting gesture. “Jeez,” he said, looking down, “you have the littlest hands of any girl I ever knew.” He opened his big fist and there it was, lying on his palm as though, Connie thought, it was displayed on a pillow. She pulled her hand away and thrust it deep into the pocket of her shorts.
“Tomorrow,” Joey said, as he let himself out the back door.
When he was gone Connie hung all the coffee cups on their hooks in the cabinet, and then took Joseph upstairs for his nap. In the upstairs hallway she stood on tiptoe to look at herself in the mirror. All the mirrors were hung at Tommy’s height, so that the bottom half of her own face, her mouth and chin, were always invisible. She thought perhaps she should get her hair cut. “I’m staying right here,” she said to herself, only half aloud, and wondered as she went downstairs what it would be like to know how to drive, to go wherever you wanted to go whenever you wanted to go there.
7
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING MAGGIE WAS sitting on the front steps when her aunt Celeste arrived. Damien had collected cicadas in a shoe box, surrounding them with tiny tufts of grass and a collection of sticks, and now he wanted to name them. Once he had used up Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Mickey, Donald and Pluto, he had come to Maggie for help. The two of them argued; she suggested some girls’ names and Damien was sure that all cicadas were boys. When Celeste pulled up in front of the house in her red car, the one with the pleated silver fins, Damien appealed to her for support. She took one look at the bugs, their iridescent backs gleaming in the sun, their squat bullet bodies motionless amid the grass and sticks, and said, “Those are male animals.” Then she opened the screen door and let herself in. Maggie left Damien talking to the bugs and went inside.
Celeste was not really Maggie’s aunt, but her mother’s first cousin and closest friend; the two women had been like sisters growing up, the only sister Connie was likely to get, the closest person to her as she grew older. Celeste came once a week in the summer, when business was slow. She brought a shopping bag filled with clothes and costume jewelry for her cousin Connie (“poor Connie,” she always said with a sigh) and play makeup for Maggie, which Connie took away and hid on the top shelf of her closet, between the douche bag and the copy of Tropic of Cancer. “This is the new you,” Celeste would announce, pulling Capri pants and a blouse with low ruffled shoulders out of the bag. Then she would force Connie to put on the clothes and a pair of hoop earrings and walk around the living room until they both would laugh so hard Celeste would cry, “I’m going to pee myself,” and run off to the bathroom, little rivulets of mascara running into the lines around her eyes. Maggie never saw her mother wear the clothes Celeste brought after the first time she tried them on; they stayed in her bottom drawer, smelling of sizing. They were not Scanlan clothes.
“What do you think, Mag?” Connie said, twirling around on her tiny feet, forgetting herself.
“I don’t know,” Maggie said glumly, which was half the truth, the other half being that Connie looked lovely in an odd, eccentric way, like a Gypsy princess.
“Oh, don’t be such an old woman,” her mother said. “Ce, come here. Your goddaughter disapproves of me.”
“Oh my God,” Celeste said, smoothing down her skirt as she returned from the bathroom. “My poor bladder. You girls.”
Celeste was the only person Maggie knew who was divorced. She had gotten married the year before Connie and Tommy, to a school friend of