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THIRTY-SEVEN

If you want to send an Irish family into joyful overdrive, give birth to a set of twins on the night before Christmas. For the next two days, well-wishers flooded the family room at the hospital to celebrate. It was loud, it was jubilant, and because visitors are welcome from seven in the morning to nine at night, it was nonstop.

That all changed when I got home, and I got to set the rules. Not only was I trying to get my kids and my own life on a schedule but I needed some respite from the hubbub, so I could spend some quality one-on-one time with my immediate family. For the next few weeks, visitations would be by invitation only.

When the twins were five days old, Grandpa Mike came to the house with a tin of Barry’s loose-leaf tea that he has shipped directly from Ireland, along with some scones he baked himself, and a jar of Folláin Irish rhubarb and ginger jam.

He set out a little spread at the kitchen table, brewed the tea, and poured three cups. Grandma Kate might not be here in person, but she would definitely be here in spirit.

“ Slàinte ,” he said, raising his mug.

I tapped my mug to his. “ Slàinte Mhaith ,” I said. “So tell me, old man, how does it feel to be called Great -Grandpa Mike?” I asked him.

Instead of exploding with his usual folksy brand of joy and Irish humor, he looked at me pensively and mulled over the question. Finally, he said. “God’s honest truth, Maggie... I’m afraid to blink.”

His answer caught me by surprise. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“I was born in 1933 in a wee village in County Donegal. I blinked, and I had a wife, a son, and I owned a bar in America. I blinked again, and my Kate was gone, my son was a widower, one of my little granddaughters was a doctor, and the other was a hotshot lawyer making babies of her own. And suddenly, it’s the twenty-first century, another Christmas has rolled around, and I’m a seventy-four-year-old great-grandfather. Like I said, darling, I’m afraid to blink. So think twice before you do.”

I smiled and thanked him for his wise words.

“Not so much wisdom as experience,” he said.

“With a dash of poetry,” I added.

“Well, that comes natural when you’re born in Donegal.”

We spent a glorious hour together, and after he left, I thought about my own tendency to race through life. The ten years since my high school graduation had flown by. When did I marry a surgeon, pop out two kids, and become a hotshot lawyer? Had I paid attention to the moments, or had I been too busy with tomorrow to focus on today?

I sat down at my desk, opened a Word document on my laptop, and started typing.

New Year’s Resolutions for someone who has broken every New Year’s Resolution she ever made:

Don’t blink.

That’s all. Just don’t blink.

But of course I did. No matter how noble my intentions, time refused to slow down, and my life moved on at the pace of a runaway train. The next dozen years became a blur of kids’ birthday parties, school projects, dual tonsillectomies, summer vacations, picnics at Magic Pond, and a dead possum in the attic. My career was filled with glorious triumphs, painful defeats, and the politics of working in a male-dominated system.

Maybe if I had kept a journal, those years leading up to my fortieth birthday would have stayed in sharper focus. But in truth, I was just another working suburban mom. My life was interesting, but hardly worth documenting.

With a few exceptions.

It was a lazy Sunday summer afternoon when my cell phone rang. The caller ID had a 206 area code. It wasn’t one I recognized. I answered cautiously. “Hello?”

The voice on the other end was equally hesitant. “Maggie... it’s Misty.”

The two of us had emailed in the first few months after she moved to LA, but we hadn’t been in touch in years.

“Misty,” I said, genuinely ecstatic to hear from her. “How are you?”

My enthusiasm reopened the door. “Funny you should ask,” she said, sounding like her old self. “For starters, middle age is breathing down my neck. Also, I left my husband, I have a new job, and I moved to New York City.”

“I am so sorry about your marriage, but you moved to New York? I can’t believe it. Deets, girl. I need deets. Tell me everything.”

“No way, bitch,” she said, laughing. “It’s going to take us many hours and multiple bottles of wine to catch up, and we are not going to do it over the fucking phone.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t believe how much I missed your foul mouth. I’ll take the train into the city Saturday, and we’ll have lunch.”

“No. We’ll have dinner, get shit-faced, and you’ll spend the night at my apartment. You missed too many episodes of the Misty Sinclair Soap Opera to catch up over a lousy lunch. Deal?”

“Deal.”

We met in the back room of a tiny French restaurant tucked away on East Eighty-Second Street. I hadn’t seen Misty in sixteen years, and she looked better than she had when she left Heartstone. “You look incredible,” I said.

“Look who’s talking,” she said. “You look fantastic.”

“As long as I hide the stretch marks.”

We’d never been great friends growing up, but that night on Crystal Avenue surrounded by police and emergency vehicles had created a bond that neither of us could forget, and within minutes, we were yakking like two boozy schoolgirls driving down that winding mountain road on our way home from a midnight rave at the Pits.

She’d been right. It took her hours to catch me up. The short version: Four years of waiting tables, lots of acting lessons, and a few acting jobs that didn’t last very long or take her very far.

“And then I met Ross,” she said. “He was a set decorator, and he offered me a job as his assistant, which in show business translates to a lot of late-night sessions without any clothes on, but it was great. He taught me the craft—how to turn each set into the perfect environment for the characters who inhabit them. The furniture, the lamps, the curtains, the art on the walls, the sculptures in the garden—I loved it. I decided to hell with acting. I wanted to be in production—on the other side of the camera. Six months after I met Ross we got married. Turns out he was not only a brilliant decorator; he was also a serial wife beater.

“I gave it a few years, but I’m not cut out to be a battered wife, so one night when he was passed out in a drunken stupor, I went all Lorena Bobbitt on him. I cut off his dick and ran for the hills.”

“Oh my God, you didn’t.”

“Well, not in real life, but I did put it in a script I’ve been working on.” She laughed. “I finally ditched him, found a school in Seattle that would accept me, and got a degree in interior design. I got a job with a great firm that specializes in designing commercial space, and I just moved to their New York office. How about you?”

“Married to a doctor, we have six-year-old twins—a boy and a girl—and I’m an assistant DA for the county.”

“Jesus, Maggie... that sounds like what you’d say if you were a contestant on a game show. Go deep, girl.”

I dug deep. Deeper than I’d gone with anyone but my sister. My hopes, my dreams, my fears, my resentments—I let it all out, and she listened with a passion. No judgment. Just empathy. I had no idea how much I had missed her, needed her, trusted her.

After dinner we went back to her apartment, and we talked into the night. Somewhere around 3:00 a.m., when we finally went to sleep, I realized that Misty Sinclair was the best friend I never knew I had, and I was overjoyed to have her back in my life.