Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [21]
Arlo could take or leave the dogs, but they had a policy of indulging each other’s passions, no matter what. Hence the fact that she lived on a worm farm, and had once allowed herself to be filmed having sex while a concert recording of “Sugar Magnolia” played in the background.
Her ex-husband, Paul, was allergic to dogs. That should have been a sign right there. After the divorce, she adopted a retired greyhound named Daisy, who nobody liked, poor thing. (“I know how you feel,” Kathleen would tell her when Alice came over and turned up her nose.) She had had at least one dog—more often two or three—ever since. The dogs were partly responsible for keeping her sane. The relationship she had with them was pure joy. No ulterior motives, no spite, just love and care and kindness, exactly the emotions she wanted to cultivate.
Kathleen rose from her bed now and went into the bathroom to pee. On the other side of the closed door, two wide mouths hung open, eager to start their day. It was almost ten. Arlo always let her sleep as late as she wanted, perhaps for his own well-being more than hers. She was definitely not a morning person. Lately she had been having trouble getting to sleep at night. She was stressed about the farm and all the extra work they’d taken on. And, even more than usual, she was worried about Maggie and the way the Kellehers were treating her.
Maggie and Gabe were driving to Maine to join Alice tomorrow. Kathleen often wondered why her daughter felt such a sense of belonging and trust when it came to their relatives. She herself felt nothing of the sort, especially now that her father was gone. She loved her family, in that way that you have to love your family. But it saddened her to see Maggie let down by them, over and over again. The latest was that obnoxious phone call from Ann Marie. Kathleen couldn’t get it out of her head.
She made her way downstairs with the dogs underfoot. In the kitchen, she opened the back door, and they bolted out to begin their daily ritual of eating bluebells and terrorizing innocent butterflies. Kathleen stood in the doorway for a moment, as she did most mornings, taking it all in—the view of the mountains, the border of giant oak trees far off in the distance, their gorgeous flower beds (proof positive that their products really worked), the vegetable patch, and the two red barns separated by a swath of green, green grass. If you drove for a few minutes, you were in the heart of a vineyard, with grapevines in every direction.
Two dry drunks in wine country! That was how Arlo had described them to the group at their first Sonoma Valley AA meeting. Everyone laughed, since they too were part of that strange contradiction.
They had met ten years back at a meeting in Cambridge. He invited her to go for coffee and she said yes, despite the fact that he wasn’t at all her type. Arlo was an aging hippie with shaggy silver hair who had spent his early thirties following the Grateful Dead. He had once revealed in a meeting that before he joined AA in 1990, it wasn’t uncommon for him to down a bottle of whiskey and smoke three joints in a single day. He had never really had a job, outside of coffee shops and bars. Despite having gone through her own ugly addiction to alcohol, Kathleen was still on some level judgmental of drug addicts. And her father had always hated hippies.
But Arlo had been sober for four years when they first went out. He made her laugh. They both enjoyed meditation, though Kathleen thought he was more indulgent about it—it was all very let the sun shine in with him, whereas for her it was about staying rational and trying not to turn into her mother. She liked