Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi

show no hard feelings about her getting remarried. Also, Father O’Malley wasn’t available any other afternoon over the Memorial Day weekend.
    She takes a last puff of her cigarette and tosses it out the window. “Ronnie doesn’t like my smoking.”
    “No?” Patty Ann screws up her nose. “Ronnie.”
    She won’t point out that if it weren’t for Patty Ann, she probably wouldn’t be marrying Ronnie McCloskey later today, a few hours after they get back from the cemetery. She might never have picked up the phone to ask him for help with the oven. After Patty Ann ran off to Las Vegas to get married, she was just too tired with trying to make everything work on her own.
    “That’s enough, Patty Ann. I am lucky to have Ronnie.”
    “Nothing to me,” Patty Ann says, reaching over to turn the dial up on the radio. “I won’t ever have to live with him.”
    Blue skies, only you for me
    Only youuuu…
    The streets of Los Angeles roll by, the jacarandas in full bloom. She would watch the wings on this car before Patty Ann ran off, day after day, as it pulled up in front of the house and Lee honked. She’d say to Patty Ann: Hmm. What has wings and honks? A duck. But Patty Ann would gather up her sweater and books and rush out. The Dodge has started to take on a rusty look since, and now there’s the baby sitting up front with Patty Ann—while Lee is off picking up a few dollars here or there, anything but a decent day’s work.
    Someday Patty Ann will go to Vassar with her aunt Jeanne, Michael used to say. Or any college she wants. My smart girl.
    She couldn’t have tied Patty Ann up inside the house, though. She couldn’t pick the cost of tuition at Vassar off a lemon tree. If only she’d called Ronnie sooner. Maybe he would have fixed more than her stove. Maybe he would have fixed her oldest daughter also. It will be such a relief, not having to do all this on her own anymore.
    “The jacarandas throw the whole city into a purple haze,” she says.
    Patty Ann laughs. “Purple haze, Mom?”
    The baby—Kennedy, Patty Ann named him, like some sort of joke—sneezes, and a stream of snot rolls from his little nose. It glides freely, spooling into the down of his upper lip, into the sweet of his mouth. Patty Ann looks over at him, and suddenly the car is lurching toward the curb. Her daughter jumps out, short skirt pulling against her thigh, just a bit plumper than it was in high school, runs to the metal-weave garbage can on the street corner, and vomits.
    Her heart sinks. And then, because this should be a joyous thing but there’s no way it can be, her heart sinks a little further.
    When Patty Ann slides back into the car, she hands her the hankie she used for Kennedy, neatly folded over the wet spot. “How long?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “How long?”
    “I don’t know. Five weeks.”
    “Does he know?”
    “Of course.”
    “And?”
    “And Lee’s fine with it. We’re both fine with it. We’re happy!”
    But her daughter sounds anything but happy. At the christening, Lee and Patty Ann told everyone they had the baby cause President Kennedy had put married men with children on the very bottom of the call-up list for the draft and LBJ hadn’t changed at least that yet. But Patty Ann’s tone turned from triumphant to defensive soon after. A second baby can’t be good news when they can barely keep the first one in disposable diapers. And forget using cloth—Patty Ann and Lee’s tiny bungalow, in Venice, doesn’t have a washing machine. Patty Ann and Lee’s tiny bungalow doesn’t have anything.
    With Ronnie moving in his leather living room set, she can give them the sofa. She can give them the Melmac plates and rocking chair also. Too bad Ronnie’s apartment doesn’t have its own washing machine. She could have given them that, too. Ronnie wouldn’t have minded. Ronnie is generous to a fault.
    “You know,” she says, “what’s done is done. But there are things you can do