Free The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer by Anne Tyler, Monica McInerney

Talk about stripping the curtains off! It was Serena who’d told Maggie that marriage was not a Rock Hudson–Doris Day movie. It was Serena who’d said that motherhood was much too hard and, when you got right down to it, perhaps not worth the effort. Now this: to have your husband die. It made Maggie nervous, although she knew it wasn’t catching.
    She frowned into the mirror and caught sight of the squinched blue chicory flower lolling above one ear. She plucked it off and dropped it in the wastebasket. Serena hadn’t mentioned it—sure proof of her distracted state of mind.
    “At first I wondered, ‘How are we going to do this?’ ” Serena said. “ ‘How will the two of us manage?’ Then I saw that it was only me who would manage. Max was just assuming that I would see him through it. Did the tax people threaten to audit us; did the car need a new transmission? That was
my
affair; Max had left it all behind him. He’d be dead by the time the audit rolled around, and he didn’t have any further use for a car. Really it’s laughable, when you stop to think. Isn’t there some warning about your wishes coming true? ‘Be careful what you set your heart on’—isn’t there some such warning? Here I’d vowed since I was a child that I wouldn’t be dependent on a man. You’d never find
me
waiting around for some man to give me the time of day! I wanted a husband who’d dote on me and stick to me like glue, andthat’s exactly what I got. Exactly. Max hanging on to the sight of me and following me with his eyes around the room. When he had to go to the hospital finally, he begged me not to leave him and so I stayed there day and night. But I started feeling mad at him. I remembered how I’d always been after him to exercise and take better care of his health, and he’d said exercise was nothing but a fad. Claimed jogging gave people coronaries. To hear him talk, the sidewalks were just littered with the piled-up corpses of joggers. I’d look at him in his bed and I’d say, ‘Well, which do you prefer, Max: sudden death in a snazzy red warm-up suit or lying here stuck full of needles and tubes?’ I said that, right out loud! I acted horrible to him.”
    “Oh, well,” Maggie said unhappily, “I’m sure you didn’t intend—”
    “I intended every word,” Serena said. “Why do you always have to gloss things over, Maggie? I acted horrible. Then he died.”
    “Oh, dear,” Maggie said.
    “It was nighttime, Wednesday night. I felt someone had lifted a weight off my chest, and I went home and slept twelve hours straight. Then Thursday Linda came down from New Jersey and that was nice; her and our son-in-law and the kids. But I kept feeling I ought to be doing something. There was something I was forgetting. I ought to be over at the hospital; that was it. I felt so restless. It was like that trick we used to try as children, remember? Where we’d stand in a doorway and press the backs of both hands against the frame and then when we stepped forward our hands floated up on their own as if all that pressure had been, oh, stored for future use; operating retroactively. And then Linda’s kids started teasing the cat. They dressed the cat in their teddy bear’s pajamas and Linda didn’t even notice. She’s never keptthem properly in line. Max and I used to bite our tongues not to point that out. Anytime they’d come we wouldn’t say a word but we’d give each other this look across the room: just trade a look, you know how you do? And all at once I had no one to trade looks with. It was the first I’d understood that I’d truly lost him.”
    She drew her tail of hair over one shoulder and examined it. The skin beneath her eyes was shiny. In fact, she was crying, but she didn’t seem to realize that. “So I drank a whole bottle of wine,” she said, “and then I phoned everyone I ever used to know, all the friends we had when Max and I were courting. You, and Sissy Parton, and the Barley