Mary

Mary, Nora, and Giulia were at Nora's beach shack in Greenport for the weekend. Sunday night. End of August. Out on the deck. Even this far from the city, way out on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island, even this close to the water, the night was thick. The bugs were bad. Giulia and Nora were in their cotton nightgowns already, Mary in her underwear and a t-shirt, all three of them lying back in wooden deck chairs, held in the navy-blue can vas slings. Three bottles of Chardonnay - two empty, one three-quarters gone - stood at the foot of the chairs. It was late enough that someone could have said, I'm going to bed now, but no one did. And then Mary dropped her cigarette butt into an empty wine bottle and said, "If you guys promise to keep your mouths shut, I'll tell you something you're not supposed to know."

"Promise," Giulia said.

"You can't breathe a micro-syllable of this to anyone. I swear, tell nobody, or you're both dead meat."

Nora stretched, showed the pale undersides of her sunburnt arms, wound her white hair into a long rope and twisted it into a chignon. "Come on," she said, yawning, "tell."

"It's about Natassia." Mary used the tip of a fresh cigarette to go after a mosquito.

Giulia was rubbing coconut-butter lotion into the burn on the tops of her thighs. "Your sweet baby girl Natassia?"

"Baby girl, my ass. Out of nowhere, I find out she's got this guy, this boyfriend."

Sitting there in her big t-shirt, her legs folded into an impossible knot, brass chains around her ankles and a feather hanging from one earlobe, smoking, Mary looked more like a kid sneaking a cigarette than she looked like anyone's mother, let alone a tall fifteen-year-old's. Giulia laughed out loud. "Ma-ry! Of course she's got a boyfriend. She's fifteen. Clever. Beautiful. Think what you were doing when you were -"

"Let me finish, please. This boyfriend - this schmuck - he's shtupping her. Regularly."

Nora's hands stopped twisting her hair. She turned her full attention to Mary.

"She's really doing it?" Giulia whispered. "Already? You know that for sure?"

"I found condoms in her backpack. A huge box, half-empty."

"What did you say to her?"

"I said, 'What are these for?'"

"And she said?"

"I'm her mother. She told me the bullshit you tell your mother. 'I met this totally great guy, I'm in love.'" Mary had the cigarette up close in her face, biting down hard on the cuticles around her gnawed thumbnail.

"So, was she mad at you for going through her backpack?" Giulia asked.

Mary spit out a bit of fingernail. "You always do that."

"What?"

"You always -" Mary started, but then Nora interrupted, and since Nora was a therapist, everyone always paid attention to her questions. "What do you know about this boy?"

"He's no boy, Nora. He's a man."

Nora's hands let her coiled hair fall. "Who is he?"

"That's where baby-girl Natassia is being a sneaky little bitch, just like me. She won't tell me anything about him, not even his name. She calls him The Boyfriend. Or the B.F., for short. All she'll tell me is that he's the stars and the moon and so, so in love with her-"

"You feel he's older?"

"I don't feel it, Nora, I know it. I found stuff in her drawers, notes he wrote. He has old-man handwriting. Middle-aged-man handwriting." Mary smashed her cigarette against the lip of the bottle. She felt Giulia looking at her. "Yes, Giulia, I go through her drawers. Mothers do that."

"I'm not saying a thing."

"Mary." Nora was insistent for information. "Mary, what did he write?"

"I almost puked. It was all this intimate, predatory stuff."

"Like what?"

"In one...