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

Fresh Air Fund the following summer, by which time they’d be legit. As a little girl Bea had believed in angels, but that was more or less because she loved girlie tchotchkes. My Little Pony was over the top, but even as she got older, she kept her fondness for barrettes decorated with sunflowers and bunches of cherries. Her hair was seventeen inches long, measured from the crown to its longest point. (Tracy had the idea, and I measured. I admit, we thought a lot about ourselves and very little about plants on our half-hour lunch breaks.)
    At the ER, there was much commotion, little talk. People either pulled Bea forward by her hand like a child or repeatedly dropped her hand, she couldn’t remember. She knew when she saw him on the grass near the garden that he was dead. She’d seen enough corpses on TV. She had no religious beliefs, so she didn’t think Artigan was anywhere but there, and as she dialed 911, she knew he’d only be on the ground a few minutes longer. So much for their wedding.
    I quit my other job waiting tables at the York Harbor Inn and stepped in full-time to join Tracy at the greenhouse at the end of July, when it became clear Bea wasn’t going to be able to work anymore. It wasn’t just grief, it was morning sickness. She wouldn’t have to borrow a child from Fresh Air to play with on the beach the following summer. Of course she wasn’t going to be able to afford to live in town anymore. She’d only been able to do it because a former college roommate had offered Artigan his cousin’s house for the summer while the estate was being settled. In exchange for gardening and lawn mowing, Artigan and Bea had briefly seemed like everybody else, sitting on the front lawn in the Adirondack chairs, admiring the bobbly headed peonies that dowsed the ground, drinking a G and T in the evening (which, for them, meant eight o’clock). When Bea’s mother and father came to take her home, they stripped the beds and wrote thank-you notes to the family (strangely, using no salutation). They also turned the Adirondack chairs upside down on the front lawn as if they were boats that needed to drain. My aunt and uncle, who had a lot more money than my parents, once had a maid who was intent on showing you that she’d cleaned the rugs, so she put them back upside down. Sometimes the colors were surprisingly bright. Once or twice they were left wrong side up.
    At the Heppendales’ greenhouse, Tracy and I were really the also-rans. I was always tripping over the hose or putting a plant down too hard and cracking the clay pot. She fainted, on a hot August day, loading a ten-pound bag of soil into some old guy’s trunk. After that she made sure to hydrate and wore the big canvas sun hat with the annoying chin strap. She told me later it was weird to have felt the way Artigan might have just before he died. We’d both gone to the funeral, though Bea wasn’t there. It was my second and Tracy’s first. It was a hot day and Mrs. Heppendale hadn’t been there because she’d had an allergic reaction to something she ate the night before. For one reason or another, Mrs. Heppendale was hardly ever anywhere.
    It was the turned-over chairs at Artigan and Bea’s that really stopped Tracy and me when we went over to the house to see if Bea and her parents needed any help. When we got there, though, they’d already left. We pulled up the steep driveway and went in through the back, so we didn’t see the chairs at first, though we did see and read the notes from Bea’s mother and father, with a box of Kleenex weighing down the corner of one and a conch shell as a paperweight over the other, both smack in the middle of the dining room table, bracketed by silver candlesticks. What was going to happen to Bea? She was almost certainly going to be okay, we figured, but that was before we knew about the pregnancy and before scuzzy Winston Bales blabbed that she’d been known to do a little coke. The Zappos boots, in a