Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [17]
Maggie clicked through the channels—a Woody Allen movie, a roundtable of political pundits, an infomercial about closet organizers that could change your life for the low, low price of $29.99.
She stopped at the infomercial.
Gabe looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “Really?” he said.
“It’s my hour,” she said. “At one you can switch to baseball.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “It depends on whether I can tear myself away from watching the Storage Saver 5000.”
She grinned. “Now I know what I’m getting you as a housewarming gift when I move in.”
She found infomercials strangely soothing, the way they made it seem as though a piece of plastic might actually eliminate all chaos and uncertainty from your life. She had been watching them since she was a kid, though she never bought anything. Her grandmother seemed to have developed a slight home shopping addiction since her grandfather’s death, a fact that Maggie’s mother and brother found hilarious, while she herself thought it sad.
She imagined Alice and other lonely old ladies and frazzled young housewives and overworked co-eds all around the country watching at this very moment, picking up the phone at the promise of “no more lost shoes, and no more lost hours—instantly get more time with your loved ones, more precious time to do what you want.”
“We should make an effort with my grandmother when we’re in Maine this week,” she said. “Invite her out to dinner with us and really refuse to take no for an answer.”
“Sounds good.”
“I should probably make plans to visit my mom in California soon too. Maybe this fall.”
By then she would know the outcome. She imagined them all sitting around Kathleen’s picnic table, discussing baby names while the sun set over the mountains.
“Absolutely,” Gabe said distractedly.
He and Kathleen didn’t get along as well as Maggie might have liked. Her mother thought Gabe had a lot of growing up to do, and he in turn had no shortage of worm-farm jokes in his arsenal. Maggie sometimes got offended when he mocked her mother’s job, or the fact that her house was always a disaster, even though she herself made similar comments all the time.
“Do you want to come?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. He squeezed her shoulder gently, kneading his fingers into her skin. “But maybe we can stay in a hotel this time.”
A while later, Gabe dropped his magazine onto the floor. He got up to take a shower, kissing her on the forehead when he passed.
“I can’t wait to be at the beach, where a dunk in the ocean is all you need to wash off,” Gabe said as he walked toward the bathroom.
“You know, some people do still bathe in Maine,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, but not me, baby doll.”
“Well no, not you, of course not you.”
He closed the bathroom door and she heard the water start.
Maggie stretched out on the couch and began to read over some draft pages of the novel she was working on. She had vowed to spend at least four hours a day on it in Maine. She had been neglecting her real work lately, and phoning it in somewhat at her day job too.
For the past two years she had been doing background research and writing copy for Till Death Do Us Part, a true-crime cable show about women who murdered their husbands.
Her boss, Mindy, was very relaxed. She didn’t care if they worked from home or in the office as long as they got their stuff done. Maggie went in all the same, afraid that too much time at home alone would make her depressed, or that she’d watch nine hours of television every day and eat the entire contents of her cabinets by lunch.
Maggie enjoyed the job mostly, but some days when she sat around a table with those other bright, creative people, she thought for a moment or two of how they all dreamed of being somewhere else.
Other than her mother, no one in her family mentioned it when she published a short story in a literary journal, even if she told them about it in advance. But when they saw her name in the credits for Till Death, they’d call her immediately.
Her stepmother had been the last