Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [25]
Her phone vibrated on the counter. A text from Arlo: A success! Heading home!
He was always revved up after one of his presentations. He liked the school-aged kids the best, since there was no other segment of the population who appreciated conversation about feces and slimy worms quite so much. They called him Mister Worm Poop. On the occasions when Kathleen went with him, he’d introduce her to the crowd as Ms. Worm Poop. Arlo usually brought a couple thousand worms along each time he spoke to a crowd, which sounded like a lot, but amounted to only two pounds’ worth. The children screeched with delight as, one by one, they got to dig their hands into the bins full of slithering creatures.
Kathleen was terribly proud of him. How many people had a vision and actually saw it through? The business was the perfect reflection of their relationship. Arlo was a dreamer, an optimist, a big-picture guy. And Kathleen was a realist—she told it like it was. Together, they just worked.
She smiled now, and thought briefly of changing out of her drawstring pajama pants and Trinity T-shirt into something sort of sexy to surprise him, but what was the point? He had seen her naked a thousand times and she had seen him. She was pushing sixty, and he had passed it four years ago. The jig was up. That was what she appreciated about her sex life with Arlo—the refreshing feeling of not giving a damn. Not out of apathy but out of comfort. He was the easiest man she’d ever been with, sexually speaking. She knew it had lots to do with his warmth and kindness, but another part of it was a function of age. You stopped caring so much about every last lump and bump at some point, you just flat-out refused to suck in your gut while you were trying to have an orgasm. At least she did.
She had spent years worrying about what men thought of the way she looked. These days the only person whose opinion on the matter really touched her was her mother. Alice had a pathological need to discuss everyone’s weight.
Kathleen had last seen her at Christmas, five months earlier.
“You’re looking good, you’ve lost a few,” Alice had said then.
Kathleen hated the fact that she felt pleased by this. “We’ve been taking a lot of hikes in the mountains. Our place backs right onto the foothills. Remember those pictures I sent you?”
It irked her that her mother had never visited. The only ones who had were Maggie and Clare.
“That’s good,” Alice had replied. “Make sure to keep it up now. Winter always makes everyone want to stay inside and get fat.”
“I live in California,” Kathleen said.
“So? They don’t have winter there?”
“No, not really.”
“Anyway, keep hiking.”
It was a special kind of curse, having a beautiful mother, when you yourself were just average. Alice had gotten a reputation in the neighborhood when Kathleen and Pat and Clare were kids for being rather odd because she ran around the block several times every morning in a tennis dress and trench coat. Twenty years later, this would be called jogging. Alice was still careful about her figure, and she never let Kathleen forget those thirty pounds she’d gained after her own two kids. She had gotten more active when she met Arlo, but her love of sweets and cheeses kept her plump.
“You have such a pretty face,” Alice would say. Or, before Arlo came along, “I can say this because I’m your mother. You might find it easier to meet a nice fella without that enormous gut.”
Kathleen had felt tremendous amounts of guilt for leaving Massachusetts, but most of the time she was glad to be free. Here, no one based their knowledge of her on what she had done thirty years ago. No one made her feel guilty for missing a family party, or tried to tell her that by declaring herself an alcoholic she was only looking for attention. People in the organic gardening world and at AA treated her with such respect and even admiration that she almost felt like an imposter.
Kathleen didn’t like the person she became when she was around the Kellehers. She reverted to