Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [42]
She had put a two-foot wire fence around her garden and the rabbits had simply dug right under it. She had gathered human hair from the local barbershop and spread it in the dirt, and they had continued undeterred. She had sprinkled the plants with ground pepper, which rabbits apparently detested, and they had chewed away as if it were honey glaze. A woman in line at the nursery in York had said that the only real way to get rid of them was cayenne pepper mixed with water. The clerk had piped up that that tore up their bellies and was awfully cruel, but now Alice thought she might have to try it. She refused to feel bad about this, since those creatures were nothing but rats with cotton-ball tails. They had gotten two of her tomato plants and the green beans. She’d be damned if they were going to get the best of her summer flowers too. And so, she kept a careful watch.
It was Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of the season. In town the streets were bustling with hopeful tourists, peeking into shops that had just opened and dipping their toes into the still frigid sea. But here on Briarwood Road, it was as quiet as it had been a month ago when Alice arrived, still wearing her winter coat.
Up here, most days she didn’t see anyone from noon onward unless she drove out to the Shop ’n Save on Route 1 or walked up the road to Ruby’s Market, where she could get a whole jug of wine for five dollars. (Rotgut, her son, Patrick, had pronounced the stuff after taking one sip, but Alice thought it was fine.) On occasion, she went to Ruby’s even if she didn’t need anything, just to make conversation with Ruby and Mort, the elderly couple who owned the place. Their favorite topic was how disappointing young people were nowadays, and Alice had plenty to say about that.
Ruby and Mort were real Mainers, salt of the earth. Everyone in the southern part of the state knew them, and they knew everyone. They were pleasant enough to Alice, unlike some. The Kellehers would always be considered outsiders here. Six decades of summers meant nothing to the locals. Occasionally Alice might be driving along and someone, recognizing her face, might give her a hearty wave. Then his eyes would land on her Massachusetts license plate, and the arm would drop.
Ruby was only twenty-nine when Alice first met her back in the forties, and she had struck Alice as old even then. Almost sixty years later, she and her husband still opened the doors each morning at seven. Mort still stocked the high shelves with canned peas and corn and paper towels. He had always worn a flannel shirt over dungarees, still did. In the fall, he went moose hunting—they’d eat the spoils all winter, selling the best cuts of meat right there in the market. Ruby washed the whole store with bleach every morning. She baked brownies and hermits and cookies, and wrapped each one in blue cellophane, putting the lot of them in a basket by the register. Ever since their kids moved out, they had had a cocker spaniel named Myrtle. When one Myrtle died, another nearly identical Myrtle popped up in her place.
Alice envied Ruby and Mort, still having each other. When she visited them, she liked to imagine that no time had passed, even though she knew old age was creeping in, in ways that were manageable, if annoying. She had trouble remembering the names of women at her golf club and the priests at her new church. She could picture the wallpaper that had hung in her childhood bedroom, but she no longer recalled the titles of books she had read three months ago. She was eighty-three years old, and hadn’t had a real health problem to speak of in her life, though she had seen so many specialists in the past few years—one for her sight, another for her hearing, another still for her crummy knees—that every time she had an appointment, she’d joke to Ann Marie, “I’m off on yet another date with a handsome young doctor.” She was what they called a lucky one, which meant