Excerpt from "The Stuff that Never Happened" by Maddie Dawson
Chapter One
2005
I started crying at Crisenti’s yesterday, over by the frozen foods. This was not cinematic, attractive weeping either; it was full-frontal, nose-running, eyes-streaming near-blubbering. I had to pull my cart over to the side of the meat case while I searched through the lint in my coat pocket for a tissue.
I could not begin to tell you why this happened now, except to say that it’s February in New Hampshire, which if you ask me might be reason enough to break down. It’s been six months since Nicky went off to college and Sophie got married, and somehow on an ordinary Monday afternoon at the supermarket, it all caught up with me. I’d made it through Christmas all right, and the first anniversary of my mother’s death, and then through the season’s first eighteen snowstorms— and suddenly I was crying about all of it: how life is never going to be the same as it was when the children were home, and how Grant has never forgiven me for stuff that happened twenty-six years ago, and how I have somehow gotten to be almost fifty years old and all I have to show for it is a bunch of picture books.
Picture books! That makes them sound dignified, like art perhaps. But I’m talking board books—the kind with animals dressed up like people. Pigs in dresses! An aardvark who wears plaid scarves! I’ve just finished illustrating a book about a mama squirrel trying to get her babies to go to bed. And you know the weird part, the thing that Grant would never believe? I love this mother squirrel. I love the fact that I painted her wearing a yellow workout suit and that when she was nestled on her little couch reading to her babies, she looked radiantly happy in a very non-rodent way.
Remembering that, I had to put my hand over my mouth so the sobs wouldn’t escape.
“Mrs. McKay?” said the boy behind the meat counter. Not a boy— he’s a man, really. He was one of Sophie’s friends. He had been at our house dozens of times over the years, one of the hordes of young people who were always there playing basketball in the driveway, skating on the pond, eating dinner, even sleeping over. He had the lead in the school play the year Sophie was a sophomore. Brad, that’s his name. Brad Simeon.
And because young people should not have to see the older generation falling apart and guess what’s in store for themselves, I straightened myself up out of the collapsed-crazy-lady position.
He smiled, wanted to know if I was okay. Perhaps the pork chops weren’t to my satisfaction?
I looked down at the package of two thin, gray pork chops I was holding in my hand and actually laughed. Do they see a lot of that in grocery stores—people breaking down in tears of disappointment over the meat products? I said they were just fine, perfectly wonderful, and then he asked how Sophie was getting along, and regaining my footing, I launched automatically into my proud motherly spiel: Oh, she’s just fine! Married, yes, and living in New York, and pregnant now, actually. Did he know? Yes, I’m going to be a grandmother. Why, thank you—no, I don’t feel old enough to be a grandmother, but in our family, we reproduce young, ha-ha.
And Nicky?
Mother spiel number two: Oh, so happy at the university! Doing winter hiking just now, and yes, still playing hockey—can barely get that boy to open a book, he’s so busy with the other things (I don’t say we suspect girls, drinking, and drugs) but he’ll learn. Just hope he doesn’t get kicked out before he figures out he’s there to get an education! I gave a good imitation of my whattaya-gonna-do laugh. Just then, thank goodness, Brad’s boss called him back to the ground beef machine, and he shrugged and smiled and slipped back into that little brightly lit, glassed-in room they have for the meat guys. “Tell Professor McKay hello,” he said as he left, but by then he was turned the other way, so when my eyes filled up with tears again, he didn’t have to see.
Excerpted from "The Stuff That Never Happened" by Maddie Dawson.
Copyright © 2010 by Maddie Dawson.
Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
