Mary on that long-gone medallion and Mary on this billboard had
exactly the same look, the one that made you feel guilty of
thinking impure thoughts even when all you were thinking about
was a peanut-butter sandwich. Beneath Mary, the sign said
'Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Homeless Won't You
Help Us?'
Hey there, Mary, what's the story.
More than one voice this time; many voices, girls' voices, chanting
ghost voices. There were ordinary miracles; there were also
ordinary ghosts. You found these things out as you got older.
'What's wrong with you?' She knew that voice as well as she did
the eyebrow-and-dimple look. Bill's I'm-only-pretending-to-be-
pissed tone of voice, the one that meant he really was pissed, at
least a little.
'Nothing.' She gave him the best smile she could manage.
'You really don't seem like yourself Maybe you shouldn't have
slept on the plane.
'You're probably right,' she said, and not just to be agreeable,
either. After all, how many women got a second honeymoon on
Captiva Island for their twenty-fifth anniversary? Round trip on a
chartered Learjet? Ten days at one of those places where your
money was no good (at least until MasterCard coughed up the bill
at the end of the month) and if you wanted a massage a big
Swedish babe would come and pummel you in your six-room
beach house?
Things had been different at the start. Bill, whom she'd first met at
a crosstown high-school dance and then met again at college three
years later (another ordinarv miracle), had begun their married life
working as a janitor, because there were no openings in the
computer industry. It was 1973, and computers were essentially
going nowhere and they were living in a grotty place in Revere,
not on the beach but close to it, and all night people kept going up
the stairs to buy drugs from the two sallow creatures who lived in
the apartment above them and listened endlessly to dopey records
from the sixties. Carol used to lie awake waiting for the shouting to
start, thinking, We won't ever get out of here, we'll grow old and
die within earshot of Cream and Blue Cheer and the fucking
Dodgem cars down on the beach.
Bill, exhausted at the end of his shift, would sleep through the
noise, lying on his side, sometimes with one hand on her hip. And
when it wasn't there she often put it there, especially if the
creatures upstairs were arguing with their customers. Bill was all
she had. Her parents had practically disowned her when she
married him. He was a Catholic, but the wrong sort of Catholic.
Gram had asked why she wanted to go with that boy when anyone
could tell he was shanty; how could she fall for all his foolish talk,
why did she want to break her father's heart. And what could she
say?
It was a long distance from that place in Revere to a private jet
