Read Maine for Free Online Page B

they canoed through Penobscot Bay while loons serenaded them from the shore; they watched fireworks in a field in Kennebunkport, sitting on an itchy blanket in a crowd of families sitting on itchy blankets of their own. They brought a picnic dinner—turkey sandwiches, cheese and crackers, a thick slice of chocolate cake, and a bottle of wine. Children ran here and there, shaking glow sticks in the darkness, eating Popsicles that melted too fast and dribbled red, white, and blue down their chins. When the display started, a young father near them lifted his excited daughter up onto his shoulders, while his wife consoled a fearful younger brother, bribing him with a whoopee pie.
    “That’ll be us someday,” Gabe had said. She had felt joyful at the thought.
    They always seemed to do better outside of their everyday environment, as if away from the stresses and distractions of New York life, they were suddenly able to imagine themselves as different people.
    In Maine last summer, Gabe had patched the screens on the cottage and helped install an air conditioner in her grandmother’s house next door. He had taken her grandmother’s photo, falling in love with Alice as people outside the family often did, taking notice of her beauty and her charm, not sensing the iciness that lay beneath. The picture—a stunning portrait in which Alice looked like an old movie star, with a highball glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other—was taped to Gabe’s refrigerator, along with dozens of others he had snapped. It was slightly disconcerting, meeting her grandmother’s gaze every time she went to get an orange, or milk for her tea.
    When Gabe finally emerged from the bedroom, sleepy-eyed and gorgeous in just his boxers, Maggie blurted out, “I wish we were leaving today.”
    “I wish I didn’t have to work tomorrow morning,” he said, coming toward her, wrapping his arms low around her waist, sending a current through her, even though he had done it a million times before. “Should I blow off the assignment so we can leave sooner?”
    She felt a nervous twinge when he said it, in spite of herself. He hadn’t had a job in weeks.
    “Nah,” she said, trying to sound breezy. “We’ll wait. Anyway, this is pretty nice, too, having a quiet morning here together.”
    A while later, she led him back into the bedroom, and placed his open duffel bag on the bed. They filled it with his swim trunks and T-shirts, sunblock and books they both wanted to read. Maggie’s whole body felt filled up with light, as it always did when things were good between them. At the same time, she felt a trace of trepidation: when they hadn’t fought in a while, there was the chance that a big one was coming, and she needed him in a good place for the news she was about to deliver. So she tried to step around problems, tried not to agitate, as he said she tended to do.
    Maggie found three sundresses hanging in the closet, left over from the previous summer. She put two of them in the bag, but left the third on its hanger.
    “You want to take that to your place?” he asked.
    She shrugged. “Only to bring it back here in two months?”
    “By then, summer will be two-thirds over,” he said.
    In August, when the lease was up, his dopey roommate, Cunningham, would be moving out and Maggie would move in.
    Gabe had asked her in the middle of May, not long after she found out she was pregnant. They were having an argument, which had started off as a discussion about marriage: He thought it was a stupid, outdated institution. She halfway agreed, but also thought people said that only when they hadn’t met the right person yet.
    “When are you going to start believing in us, huh?” he asked, in a wounded tone of voice that made her all but forget about the fights they had had, the lies he had told. Maybe they had finally turned a corner.
    “I’m one hundred percent committed,” he said. “I’ve even been thinking about asking you to move