Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [56]
Outside the window, something darted across the lawn, catching her eye. Her chest tightened. Her hand locked tight around the knife. She knew exactly who was out there.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said out loud.
She stormed outside, just in time to see the blasted baby rabbit eat a hunk out of one of her beautiful pink roses.
“No! Out! Out!” she said, stomping toward the creature like a maniac, waving the knife in the air. He perked up his ears, and looked straight at her. The nerve!
Alice rushed toward him, scrunching up her face, pointing the knife. A moment later, he darted under a hedge and into the woods.
“That’s it,” she yelled after him. “This means war!”
Her heart pounded, but she felt a bit silly now, standing alone in the yard with a steak knife, shouting at no one. She straightened up, smoothed her blouse, and went back inside to finish making lunch.
Maggie
Maggie had been standing in front of Gabe’s building like a pathetic crazy person for twenty minutes. A cab came by with its light on and she hailed it, beginning to cry softly, admitting defeat. She told the driver her address and almost said, “I’m pregnant,” as a way of explaining her tears, but that seemed a bit much.
She wanted to believe that she was overreacting. She didn’t want the problem to be Gabe. Or, if it was Gabe, she wanted him to do something so big she couldn’t let it go by—not just lying about being out with friends or buying drugs, but lying about another woman. Not just grabbing her uncomfortably by the shoulders, but actually slapping her across the face.
She had been waiting and waiting, and now perhaps that thing had come. He didn’t want her to move in, and didn’t seem to care whether that meant they were over. She was pregnant with his child and she was alone. What a dick. What a chronically avoidant, immature asshole. And what kind of freak was she that a tiny part of her was already regretting how she’d acted, wishing she had said, “Okay, fine, we won’t live together,” so that they could go to Maine tomorrow and fall in love again. They’d been trying to make this work for two years, even though it was sometimes hard.
As her mother had put it when Maggie called her crying after one of their fights: “I know you want to be married and settled, but give it up. You can’t make chicken soup from chicken shit.”
Kathleen was forever saying things like that, things that probably made some sense in theory, but were not in the least bit helpful when it came to actually living your life. She kept handwritten AA mantras on Post-it notes stuck to her fridge and printed on coffee mugs and tea towels all around her kitchen: One Day at a Time. Live and Let Live. To Thine Own Self Be True.
In her less charitable moments, Maggie thought that her mother had really just replaced one addiction with another: the pride and the self-righteousness of sobriety instead of the rush and release of alcoholism. But then she would remember moments from childhood: her mother passing out on the front lawn after a cousin’s wedding; her parents, drunk on margaritas at the cottage in Maine, laughing and singing and then usually fighting until after midnight, letting Maggie stay up (or, more likely, forgetting about her), which thrilled her, and scared her too.
After Kathleen joined AA, she started doing a lot of yoga. She also began concocting herbal remedies—calendula and witch hazel for Chris’s acne, ground-up nettle leaves and plum oil for Maggie’s allergies. Never have two adolescents coveted Noxzema and Benadryl so much.
Kathleen gave Maggie a dream catcher as a sixteenth birthday gift, and it was all Maggie could do not to tell her how stupid and clichéd this was. The same year, her cousin Patty got a car for her birthday, and she didn’t even have her permit yet. Maggie was jealous, and then immediately guilty—her mother might have gotten her a Camry, too, if she could afford it. Maggie made herself feel so lousy about the situation that she decided not to get her license