20
The first thing Katherine saw upon entering the kitchen Saturday morning was the message Mary Alice positioned precisely so that it would be the first thing her sister would see when she walked in. Written on a pale pink index card clipped to the end of a stiff wire attached to a plastic, flat-bottomed apple—a strange but ingenious contraption Mary Alice had been given by a student years ago—the note hovered right there above the breakfast table, in midair if you squinted. In Mary Alice’s perfect script it read: Kathy, left for the picnic, won’t be home until dark. Lunch is from 11:30–2:30. Left you a ticket. Beneath that, M.A.
Katherine unclipped the note and behind it found a small red ticket that read: ADMIT ONE. She smiled at the simplicity of it all, the honor system of using a ticket one could acquire almost anywhere to exchange for a filling, hot meal, complete with a dessert she’d already seen and quietly craved for the past day. Like so many markers of a small town, it was the sort of experience that simply couldn’t be scaled up. No such event could be as relaxed in a big city, let alone as good of a deal, and she smiled at the thought of it being tried at her church in Atlanta; how expensive it would all be, how mismanaged and frustrating. Most visitors would consider it a facsimile of a small-town gathering, but only she and the others who knew better would see an event devoid of all the charm of the real thing. Lunch tickets would probably be digital, she thought, laughing at the thought of Eric Carlye being told what a QR code is. Hell, she barely knew what they were herself.
Planning on taking advantage of the free meal, she settled on coffee for breakfast and made an entire pot for herself. When she opened the cabinet, she was confronted with two options: a big red tub and the bag half its size that cost three times as much, the specialty bag she bought by habit at the grocery store her first morning in town. Her hand hovered in front of the bag, and then, realizing there would be no one in the house to show off to, moved to the left and grabbed the tub.
Hours later, as she was in Mary Alice’s bathroom getting ready to leave for lunch, she heard a buzz coming from another room. It was the trill of a standard ring, not the custom guitar strumming she’d programmed for Jonathan’s calls, and she hopped up to catch it before it was sent to the abyss of her voicemail, which she always hated, even back when they were on tapes.
“Hello, this is Katherine,” she said, after cocking her head at the New York City area code.
The deep, worried voice on the other end was dry-mouthed and quiet. “Hi, Aunt Kathy.”
“Oh,” she said, sitting on the foot of the bed so thoughtlessly she almost expected to fall on the floor. “How are you doing? Is everything all right? Is Jonathan OK? Where are you?” Confronted with silence, she kept going. “Michael? Are you there?”
When lunch was ready to be served, the number of picnic visitors was at its peak. Children ran between groups of adults, colorful and sometimes sparkling shards from their confetti-filled eggs inevitably finding their way into the plastic cups of beer. People played carnival betting games, spending a dollar for the privilege to win whatever prize a big wheel happened to land on. And Father Warren roamed the grounds, welcoming parishioners he knew well and visitors he couldn’t place if he tried with the same glacier-cold, impossibly soft handshake. For all the groaning that preceded it—the old-timers thought it was a day for children and many young adults felt that it was an outdated event for old-timers—the magic of the picnic was that nearly all who attended ended up having a fantastic time despite their sour expectations. It’s easy to imagine some lone passerby driving near the church grounds and mulling over a stop, worried they’d be perceived as an unwelcome outsider, only to be drawn in by the kinds of warm smiles and laughter that could only be interpreted as invitations. The picnic really was the best of Billington, but more than that, it was the promise of what it should always be.
Gerald was the fifth in line, and Ellie blushed as he approached her table with a ticket. “You must be hungry,” she said, her eyes darting to the side as though merely speaking to him was breaking some sort of rule. But when he leaned over to kiss her, she didn’t even flinch.
“I’m very hungry,” he said. When she slapped his chest with a laugh, the kitchen erupted with childish “ooohs.”
“Can’t you take a day off?” Debbie said, flinging a spoonful of beans onto what would be Gerald’s plate. “Everyone saw you with your hands all over each other at Carlye’s last night.”
“We did not have our hands all over each other,” Gerald said, following the plate as it went down the line. “She was a perfect lady. I just had my hands all over her.”
The way everyone laughed, really laughed, nearly brought Ellie to tears. Surrounded by such unquestioned and judgment-free delight, she felt all the worry she’d been weighed down with for months up and vanish, almost as if it had never been there at all. Of course Ellie and Gerald being together wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. They made more sense as a couple than just about anyone or anything in this town.
The buffet line ended with Mary Alice, who was dishing out slices of pie with such calm that no one would have believed there had been a scene, or even a mess, in this very room just a few hours before. “Dessert?” she asked, holding up a paper plate on which exactly one-eighth of one store-bought cherry pie was placed.
Gerald squinted at the oozing, flaky triangle and then looked back up at Mary Alice with the puppy eyes of a child begging for one more gift on Christmas. Mary Alice couldn’t deny that everything, from the plate to the slice to Ellie herself, looked positively diminutive next to this man, who’d been big and charming for as long as she’d known him, and she scoffed at his less-than-subtle—almost Dickensian—plea for more, as well as her own decision to give in when dropping another slice beside it on the same plate. “To think I bent the rules for you,” she said, a glimmer of a smile forcing its way in. “But don’t start thinking this has anything to do with you going with my best friend. I just didn’t want to listen to you whine.”
By a quarter of one, the buffet line was a conveyor belt with no off switch. Tickets were taken, people chose their meat, and Margaret and Dottie dolloped a spoonful of each side in the appropriate molded reservoirs before Mary Alice gave them exactly one slice of pie. The work became monotonous and quieter, with the women working on autopilot as they finally approached the exhaustion that had mysteriously eluded them since waking long before the sun rose. That’s why Maria didn’t even register the man when he said he didn’t care which meat; she just scooped up a pile of chopped brisket and sent his plate down the line, where beans, coleslaw, and potato salad were plopped alongside without Margaret and Dottie so much as looking up. Mary Alice may not have recognized him herself had he not called her Mom, which he did in a whisper just loud enough to bring the entire operation to a stop almost instantly.
She dropped the pie without saying a word, but Michael didn’t flinch. The first person to gasp was Dottie. Then Margaret. Both came close to screaming, but were just too exhausted from the toll of a day in food service to put in the effort. Josie, on dish duty beside Ellie, recognized the man from the parking lot but wasn’t sure what she was witnessing. Something was clearly wrong, it was impossible not to notice, and she imagined this must be what it felt like for birds who sensed an earthquake hours before it hit. For a few seconds there was complete silence. Even the one person who had every reason to scream didn’t; she just walked up to Michael slowly, not even looking at Mary Alice, whose gaze went back and forth between her son and her best friend with the steady beat of a resting heart.
In the face, Michael looked more like his mother than his father, with the same big, close-together eyes, slightly upturned nose, slightly downturned mouth, and wavy brown hair falling to his shoulders in that casual movie star way. He was just as thin as Samuel was, with the toned arms of a former gym rat who eventually decided it wasn’t worth all the effort. He was tall and he was handsome, by far the best-looking ghost anyone in the hall had ever seen, not to mention one of the most unnerving.
“Michael,” Ellie finally said. Her voice, gentle and nervous, shook his focus away from Mary Alice’s unreadable face. “Is that you?”
“Hi, Mrs. Hall,” he said. “It’s me.”
She collapsed into a hug, covering his back with dishwater and soap. It was the best and worst hug either of them had ever been a part of, a sudden jerk from one body into another, squeezed more than held, but with a sort of tightness that could only mean love, like she’d pulled him out of a frozen river and needed to give him every bit of her body heat. She hugged him like she was saving his life, and like Kenny had just lost his again. Kenny. The thought of him made Ellie push Michael away, startling everyone in the room. She shook her head and wiped her face, not that it would stop the tears, and looked at Mary Alice, whose hand still floated between them as though she hadn’t noticed the pie had fallen long, long ago.
“What did you do?” Ellie said before turning her gaze to Mary Alice. “What did both of you do?”
Mary Alice moved her lips, but no words came out. She swayed in slow motion, trying to find out if she’d died yet or was merely about to. Michael looked from Ellie to his mother, as though she was the only one with answers. “Why did you do this to me?” Ellie said, a clearer question, the question she meant all along.
“I didn’t,” Mary Alice said.
“You didn’t? You didn’t? What do you mean, you didn’t? If you didn’t, then what am I looking at? Who is this if you didn’t?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Mary Alice said, the tears finally falling. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. You have no idea what happened that night, you don’t. Let me—”
“You told me he was dead. I mourned him with you. All of us did.” She pointed at Michael, her skin now crawling. How had she hugged him like a son, when he was a liar just like his mother? “But you’re right here. Breathing just like me. Did you tell her to lie? Was this all your idea?”
“I never wanted to lie,” he said. “I just left.”
“So it was you,” Ellie said, turning back to Mary Alice with eyes that almost glowed with heat. “You let me believe it. You let all of us believe it.”
“It was never meant to happen like this. It was never meant to happen at all!”
Ellie could have asked every question in the world in that moment, but instead she walked out the side door and marched to her car. For the rest of her life, she thought, there wouldn’t be enough answers. So why bother asking? No. She was done with questions. Just like she was done with Mary Alice Roth.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” Michael whispered, briefly making eye contact with Josie, who couldn’t stop staring. He left the hall through the main entrance and marched toward his car. If anyone recognized him as Michael Roth out there on the grass, where word of the incident hadn’t yet spread, they didn’t say anything. It was too nice of a day, with too many other things to see, too many other places to look.
But back inside, surrounded by piercing stares that made her feel the worst kind of shame and regret, Mary Alice ran out the side door and stopped on the edge of the lawn, where the grass met the gravel. She saw Ellie’s car go straight through the intersection at the church, and then a small SUV she didn’t recognize peel into a hard left. Just minutes ago they were both in her grasp, and now she’d gone and lost them all over again.