Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [64]
When she heard his truck in the driveway, Kathleen strained the tea through a paper towel into two Boston Red Sox mugs and walked toward the back door.
He crossed the stone path and climbed up the steps, holding a bouquet of calla lilies wrapped in brown paper.
“Good morning, my love,” he said, opening the screen door and stepping inside. The dogs clamored in behind him.
“Trade you,” she said. She took the flowers from Arlo and handed him a mug. “These are gorgeous.”
“Aren’t they? One of the moms at this Girl Scout event told me she had a flower shop in town. She’s been using our poop tea on all the merchandise and it’s lived twice as long as normal. So I stopped in to the shop—amazing colors, Kath. You would have loved it.”
He was all fired up from his lecture. She grinned.
Seeing her work, he smiled too. “You’re amazing. You did all this just this morning?”
Arlo was the sort of person who went out of his way to be kind—unlike her family members, who acted as though giving a compliment would cost them too much. And she and Arlo valued the same things. That was important. They both believed in homeopathy and in living a chemical-free life; they both believed in protecting the earth. To most people back home, this was all just a little too far out. But Arlo was on the same page, or perhaps even a chapter or two ahead of her, when it came to such ideas.
On their first date, even though it wasn’t technically advisable, they drove to his place after going for coffee. They watched the news and then had sex on Arlo’s sofa, under a framed Steal Your Face poster. In the morning, he fed her strawberries from his garden. Afterward, despite the poster, Kathleen called Maggie to say that she might be falling in love.
Before Arlo, she had dated and slept with several of the men she met at AA. Which was funny, considering she had been with Paul for more than a decade when they divorced, and couldn’t remember a time when they’d had sex sober. In Boston, a couple of the guys were brand-new to the program and therefore forbidden, but she had done it anyway. One was there on a court order, recently released after three months in prison for a drunken bar fight that left his opponent unconscious. Another was only twenty, the same age as Maggie at the time. Every now and then it all struck Kathleen as wrong, but in the heat of the moment she mostly figured that they were all addicts confronting those demons head-on, and so they deserved a bit of a pass for seeking out pleasure that wasn’t somehow related to booze. (For the same reason, she went through phases of allowing herself to eat whatever she liked—a bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies for dinner, two cinnamon crullers from Dunkin’ Donuts as an afternoon snack.)
Arlo stroked her hair now and said, “We’ve gotta get to work out in the barn soon.”
“Yes.”
“But maybe a little disco nap first? I’m beat.”
“You go ahead up, honey.”
She took the mug back from him and put both cups down on the table.
“Don’t let me sleep longer than fifteen minutes, okay?” he said.
She agreed, kissing him on the cheek before he made his way upstairs. The familiar sound of his feet on the creaking floorboards warmed her.
She sat down at the table. Mabel came over, resting her snout on Kathleen’s thigh.
“Hello, angel,” she said.
A year earlier, the dog had had a tumor in her leg. Mabel was thirteen then. The vet had assumed they would put her down, but Kathleen insisted on surgery. The cost was five thousand dollars, which objectively she could admit was a lot. But it seemed like nothing set against another good year with Mabel.
“Merry Christmas,” Arlo had said when he wrote the check, even though it was only September.
The phone rang.
Kathleen hoped it was the school superintendent from Keystone finally calling back. She momentarily ran over her usual spiel: Sixty percent of the waste in our nation’s landfills is food waste, which never should have gone there in the