The State We're In: Maine Stories Read Online Free PDF

were so many women at the party wearing hats? Was Aunt Sophie serious in what she was suddenly saying about Bryce and Nathaniel intending to hook up with the man who’d been peeing against a tree? I turned to see Nathaniel cupping his hand around a match to light a cigarette, and Bryce stretching, slowly lowering his hands down his thighs to his knees, then lower, bending further. Was it a kind of preening, or just a postdrive stretch? A puff of smoke went up in the air. I wanted to be that smoke. To disappear. Instead, I listened from afar to my own voice as I lied about my affection for the cat. I let go of her arm. She brushed her hand lightly down my long hair I was too stupid to know was attractive to men, though later I practiced tossing it in front of a mirror. Aunt Sophie’s heels were higher than anyone else’s I’d seen—certainly higher than mine—but she walked briskly, with confidence. How did a person have confidence if they didn’t believe in the future? I wondered. In an hour or so, Aunt Sophie would be placing the little metal baskets inside her blouse, seeming to be having a good time, shocking people but making them laugh.
    It was a rocky road to death, full of bumps and obstacles, with low-hanging branches that would slap you in the face if you didn’t duck, and there was always the danger that the underside of the car might sink deeply into a pothole and bottom out, leaving us all stranded. You could call for help, but how to describe where we were, surrounded by trees that blocked out the sun, an anonymous place at the end of an unpaved road, where man pissed on nature and puffed carcinogens into the air, sending up smoke signals to mix with the clouds.
    The Boyfriend knew how to blow smoke rings. It was amazing for a few seconds until he stopped pursing his lips, silently puffing out the message of the day, and of every day: O, O, O.

ADIRONDACK CHAIRS
    A fter Artigan’s death, Bea was afraid to weed the garden. Artigan had not died from the yellow jacket bites—though he was horribly allergic—but because as his shovel split their in-ground nest and they swarmed up as the first and last golden tornado he’d ever see, he fell backward over the stone wall and hit his head on a tree stump. Artigan had been doing some gardening for summer people who were not yet occupying their house. The blood was congealing when Bea arrived in the Heppendales’ truck to pick him up. She worked at the greenhouse, where there’d been a big run on lemon verbena. She and Tracy (who’d once worked at a vineyard in Sonoma) had come up with the idea that the greenhouse could offer a free wine tasting with music and gardening information. There was a tip jar, and they were a little embarrassed that people left so much.
    I worked at the greenhouse, too, but I never had any bright ideas. The Heppendales raised my friends’ hourly wage and agreed that, yes, they should offer the back building for weddings. Alex Heppendale ordered Bea and Tracy new gardening boots from Zappos, along with a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate each for another pair of shoes. By July, when word had spread about the cocktails and gardening advice, business had almost doubled. Chilean chardonnay, supercold, in real glasses, with hors d’oeuvres and Mr. Heppendale and his daughter Alex (a Princeton graduate) circulating and offering tips about gardening . . . people in town went mad for it, as well as people from away. Mrs. Heppendale bought flouncy dresses and meant to attend, but found that, Friday after Friday, she had a headache.
    On Saturdays, Artigan also worked at the greenhouse, tending the suddenly popular, slightly strange herbs and repotting orchids. Had he not died, he and Bea were going to test out the back building for their own wedding at the end of August. They’d already been a couple long enough for him to teach her to drive, for her to break his texting addiction, for them to consider sponsoring a child from the