chose between you and them, he’d choose you every time. He already did it when it mattered.”
“And what if my daughter has to choose between me and them, Cece? It’s not as simple as Cinderella anymore.”
“Hey, honey,” Celeste said. “This isn’t like you. You having your friend, or what? The curse upon you? You and me, we always were on the same schedule.”
Maggie heard her mother laugh, high and a little shaky, and saw Celeste smooth her hair.
“I wish,” Connie said, with an odd shrillness in her voice.
“Oh, shit,” Celeste said, stopping and looking down at her cousin. “Not again. Can’t you count?” Maggie wondered what they were talking about, and as she looked down at her mother her eyes began to brim with tears, for no reason she could figure out except that her mother was crying, too.
8
ON THE FOURTH DAY OF THEIR ANNUAL trip to the beach, the Scanlan women had their photograph taken at Cap’n Jim’s restaurant. Maggie knew that as surely as her grandmother would disapprove of her bathing suit, and her cousin Teresa would get sunburned so badly she would smell like Noxzema for a month, on the fourth day they would have their picture taken to testify that they were having a wonderful time and were part of a supremely happy family.
While the photographer set up his tripod, Maggie looked around to see what he would see: Monica laughing, her hair shining in the lights; Teresa, who was the same age as Maggie, her eyes pale blue as eucalyptus mints, her face a little vacant; and the twins, a matching patina of pale pink over their faces and arms, staring down self-consciously at their shrimp cocktails. Mary Frances had gone to the ladies’ room to freshen her lipstick, which had come off on the rim of her whiskey-sour glass. The picture would cost five dollars, and when it was sent to her at home, Mary Frances would put it in the silver frame that held last year’s picture. Maggie had taken the velvet back off that frame one day, and had found seven photographs of the group, starting back when she was six years old, her lips drawn down in an awkward smile to hide the fact that her two front teeth were missing. Monica was eleven in that first picture, and looked, Maggie had been sad to see, much as she looked today, except that there had been the glint of her braces. On Monica, even braces looked good, as if she had jewelry on her teeth.
“Congratulations, Maggie,” Monica said now, readjusting the bow holding back her hair. “My father says that your mother is going to have another baby.” Monica made the word “another” last a long, long time.
“So what?” Maggie said.
“Really? When? Ooooh,” said Teresa, picking up the last shrimp with her stubby freckled fingers. “I hope it’s a girl this time.”
They were eating by a plate-glass window in the restaurant. It was actually a refurbished tugboat, big and square, with graceless utilitarian lines, which picked diners up at 6:00 and 8:30 from a pier on the bay side of the town of South Beach and sailed along the shore while they ate. Mary Frances took the girls to dinner at Cap’n Jim’s each year because she assumed they liked the novelty of it, and each year they mimed excitement and delight, convinced that it was Mary Frances’s favorite restaurant. In fact after years of Friday night meatless suppers, Mary Frances hated fish, and she had no stomach for the sea; she usually ate little and drank a good deal. Maggie was like her in this; she usually drank so much soda during these meals that she had to go to the bathroom at least twice, each time thinking of what happened after she flushed the toilet this far from land.
“What are you girls giggling about?” Mary Frances said pleasantly as she came back to the table, although the only one giggling was Teresa. Mary Frances sat down in the middle, between Monica and Maggie, and the photographer fiddled with some dials on his camera. “What a handsome group,” he said, and Mary Frances smiled, and the shutter clicked. “All sisters, I presume,” he said, and Mary Frances laughed, and the shutter clicked again. It was the same photographer as always, wearing a captain’s hat and smoking a cigar. He said the same things every year.
They had spent the day on the beach, where the sound of the sea and the