Love in Maine

by Connie Falconeri

Hank spent the final hour of the drive home silently convincing himself that Maddie had fallen in love with him in that damned tent, and that he was going to have to spend the rest of the summer trying to avoid her and, more importantly, any of the feelings she stirred up in him.

  By the time they pulled into the driveway in Blake, Hank practically dove out of the car. Maddie pulled the blue backpack out and lifted it onto one shoulder, easy as you please.

  “Do you want me to help you unload the stuff?” Maddie asked. Neutral.

  He was already untying the cords from the canoe. He might as well have been welding the most complicated rigging at fifty fathoms for all the attention he was giving the mundane task. “No. I’m good.”

  “Okay.”

  Here we go, Hank thought. The thank-you-for-the-most-wonderful-weekend-of-my-life speech. He looked up finally, feeling her still standing there waiting for him to say good-bye or something. He supposed he could look at her while she spilled her heart to him.

  But she didn’t do that at all.

  He would always look back on that moment as one of his greatest lapses into solipsistic egomania: He was the one who was in danger, not Maddie. He was the one who was going to crack apart if this progressed any further. She was light as a feather. Whole. Normal. She just smiled that small, satisfied smile and turned toward the back door of his mother’s house.

  “Have a good week, Hank,” she said, raising one hand in a half-hearted wave and keeping her back to him. “I’ll see you around.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Hank almost slammed his forehead against the prow of the canoe where it extended near his face. Several times. Hard.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid man.

  Instead, he took a deep breath and found a small thread of comfort in breaking down the camping equipment and putting everything away with the precision and exactitude that always made everything else seem bearable. Maddie’s blasé departure was what he had been secretly hoping for, wasn’t it? No big deal. Just a cigar and all that.

  Just to be sure, he kept his distance. When he got to work the next morning, he signed up for two extra shifts so one of his co-workers could go to his grandmother’s ninetieth birthday over in Wiscasset.

  “You stockpiling hours to go on a vacation or something?”

  “Nah, just nothing else going on, so might as well make the extra cash, right?”

  “I guess.” Ned Pendleton was a single, ill-tempered former Marine. He always tried to make jokes about how Hank was an Army grunt and too bad he couldn’t make it into the real military.

  Hank ignored him.

  The week improved the longer Hank was away from Maddie. He didn’t risk going into his mother’s kitchen to steal a few sodas; he went straight from his apartment to his job and back again, grateful that his seven o’clock morning departure was a few hours after Maddie left to start her shift down at Phil’s.

  By Thursday afternoon, he was feeling almost even-keeled. So they’d rolled around in a tent. So what? He shook his head and smiled at his own maudlin stupidity. It didn’t need to be anything more than that.

  Hank was in the locker room getting out of his deep-sea gear when Ned poked his head around the wall from the shower area.

  “Hey, Gilbertson, you want to go grab a beer? You look like you’re finally over your little snit of the week.”

  What a tool. Hank should have punched the bastard in the face, but it seemed lame to punch someone for being right.

  “Sure. Why the hell not?”

  Ned pulled back behind the wall to finish drying off, but kept talking. “Have you seen that new collegiate piece of ass working at Phil’s yet?”

  Hank reconsidered the punch. Sometimes being right was even more of a reason to knock someone’s head off. He ground his teeth together.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen her, asshole. She’s renting the guest room at my mother’s house.”

  A low wolf whistle came from behind the white tile. “You mean to tell me you got that flat stomach and those perky tits right upstairs, and you haven’t done anything about it?”

  Hank slammed the metal locker door and finished buttoning up his shorts. He leaned into the part of the room where Ned was standing so he could see his face. “Go drink your beer alone, dickwad.”

  “Testy! Testy!” Ned called out as Hank left the building, the jerk’s mocking laugh fading behind him.

  It was about half past eight on Thursday night when Hank pulled into his driveway. He killed the engine and sat in the truck for a few minutes. The light was on in his mother’s living room, and he could see the silhouettes of his mom and Maddie reading or talking through the old embroidered sheers. Before he realized how long he’d been sitting there, he saw the silhouette of his mother rise from the sofa and wave to him.

  Shit.

  She opened the front door and called to him. “Hey, sweetheart! I haven’t seen you all week. Want some supper?”

  He opened the car door and flipped his keys around his index finger. Busy man of affairs and all that. What a tool.

  “No. I’ve got some stuff to catch up on.” His eyes darted to the back of Maddie’s head—perfectly still, not turning to look at him—diffused through the gauzy curtain.

  “Oh. Okay, then.” His mom was trying not to sound disappointed. “Do you have plans this weekend? Do you want to go to the movies again tomorrow night?” She spoke quickly, before he got away.

  “Sorry, can’t. I have to work a couple of extra shifts this weekend.” He thought he saw Maddie’s shoulders lower a tiny bit—from relief or frustration, he had no idea. He didn’t want to know.

  “Okay, then.” His mom tilted her head slightly. “You okay, honey?”

  He puffed up his chest and tossed the keys a little higher. “All good, Mom. All good.” He turned and took the wooden steps two at a time and was relieved to feel the pressure of his mother’s concerned gaze leave him when he shut the door to his apartment.

  He was screwed. There was no way he could go on living in his mother’s garage no matter how much space she gave him. He needed to get on with his own life, and that was never going to happen with her concerned questions waiting for him every time he pulled into the driveway. Coming back to Blake—trying to be normal—had always been a temporary solution. To help him reintegrate or some damn thing. Meeting Maddie was making it worse.

  Everybody talked about what it was like to go back to “normal life” after all those years in the military. He was dealing. He had been dealing just fine before Madison Post showed up. Now he was starting to feel all fractured again. He hadn’t seen the kind of action he knew other grunts from his class had run into, in Somalia and Afghanistan and every other fucked up place on earth. The fact that he’d probably killed more people than all those guys combined was another story altogether.

  Maddie’s shoulders relaxed all the way when she heard the door to his apartment close. What the hell was a grown man doing living with his mother anyway? He needed to get his own place. And stop driving Maddie insane with all his around-but-never-around nearness. She didn’t know if what they had started was just a fling or if it was going to lead to anything, but all of his special-ops-evacuation-stealth-invisibility-maneuvering was turning their whole fun time together into something tawdry and regrettable. Maddie was beginning to feel like maybe, on some level, he was the innocent and she was the hussy after all. One way or another, they were going to have to have it out; there was no way either of them could go on like this indefinitely.

  Maddie closed her eyes and tried to compose herself when Janet came back into the living room. She immediately shoved her nose into the nearest book on the coffee table.

  Janet locked the front door and turned slowly to face Maddie. “What happened on that canoe trip, Maddie?”

  Maddie’s heart began to hammer, and a light sheen of sweat bristled on the back of her neck from the spurt of adrenaline. Janet had become a friend. Maddie really believed that she wasn’t asking as Hank’s moth
er, but as a concerned friend. But Janet was always going to be Hank’s mother first. Always would be.

  “I thought we had a good time,” Maddie said.

  Janet sat back down on the sofa, but at the edge, not like she was going to settle back into her book, the two of them drifting back into the friendly silence that had come to define their evenings together.

  “Maddie?”

  Pulling her lips tight between her teeth, Maddie did her best to answer. “Mm-hmm?” She kept looking at her book.

  The silence spread, slow and cold, through the room.

  Finally, Maddie looked up and met the older woman’s questioning eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Janet asked.

  Oh, Jesus. She was asking Maddie if she was okay? Take. Take. Take. That’s what her brother Jimmy always accused her of. Maddie felt the shame of how she had selfishly pushed things forward with this woman’s beloved son, and couldn’t look at Janet anymore. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, sweetie. What do you have to be sorry about?”

  Maddie couldn’t breathe. “This is wrong. Because you’re his mom. And I know you sort of thought it might be sweet if we, you know, got together or whatever, like when we were at the movies and it was all fun, but—” She was talking too fast, the words were coming out against her will. She continued in a frantic whisper, worried that Hank was up at his window listening to her strange, guiltless confession. “But he acted like he wanted to just have fun. I mean, oh gosh, this is horribly weird, and I’m sorry, but we didn’t have sex, just for the record, and I thought, well he made me think, that it was just fun and games, and then he changed and became all silent and moody again, and now I feel like I’ve done something selfish that has triggered something angry or unhappy in him and I wasn’t trying to be selfish—for once!—and it turns out I might as well just revert to type if I’m going to end up in the same place of feeling like everyone thinks I am just this selfish . . . bitch.”

  Janet kept staring at her, but in a caring, listening way rather than in that questioning way she’d been looking at her before. “Are you done?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Maddie made an attempt at a little laugh but it came out wrong, and she reached up to her eye to wipe the moisture that she hadn’t realized was there. She pretended she was just exercised, as her grandmother would say.

  “This is when I am so grateful that I don’t drink anymore,” Janet said. “I mean, if I was drunk right now, I would have missed all of this. But I can see you, Maddie. And I have always been able to see Henry, even through the fog of alcohol, I could always read him. I think that’s why he had to get away. Who wants to be known and observed like that? It’s too much sometimes.”

  Maddie nodded.

  Janet continued. “Well, it’s none of my business. I promised Hank that if he moved in over the garage, I would never ask him a single word about where he was going or what he was doing.” She sat up a little straighter. “And I said he wasn’t to ask me any of those types of questions about my private life, either.”

  Maddie’s eyebrows lifted. “Really?”

  “You don’t have to look so surprised. I have someone I like to see sometimes, but it’s a little complicated, as they say these days, so we’re pretty quiet about the whole thing. And I certainly wouldn’t want his mother asking me what I’m doing with him.”

  Maddie smiled her gratitude. “Thanks.”

  “I wasn’t ever going to judge you or anything. I can see now that neither of you are trying to be hurtful.”

  “Ha!” Maddie laughed once. “Yeah, not on purpose, at least. Sins of omission and commission, right?”

  Janet smiled. “There’s a reason they’re both sins, don’t you think? Because we feel bad afterwards, whether we meant to or not. Or, at least, I hope we feel bad after. Otherwise, we’re really in trouble.”

  “You’re a really good person, Janet. How did I get so lucky to find you?”

  Janet stood up and turned off the light next to the sofa. “Some things are just meant to be, I guess.”

  “Thanks again for the talk.”

  Janet paused at the bottom of the stairs, then turned her face to Maddie. “Don’t be too hard on him.”

  Maddie exhaled. “I’ll try. Seeing as I’m so much bigger and stronger than he is.”

  Janet smiled at the irony. “Good-night, Maddie.”

  “Good-night, Janet.”

  The next day, Maddie’s new best friend at work, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Sharon, was bemoaning the fact that she and her husband never got to go out anymore.

  “I’ll babysit for you,” Maddie said.

  “Oh, I can’t afford a sitter.”

  “You don’t have to pay me. I’ll think of something nice you can do for me. Give me a manicure or something. I’m crap at that. Let me do the babysitting. I feel like such a waste of space when I’m not at work.”

  Sharon stared at her.

  “What?” Maddie looked up to meet her eyes. The two of them were sitting in one of the back booths cleaning all the condiments before the weekend closing.

  “Why aren’t you out on a date?”

  “With whom?” Maddie laughed.

  “With any of the nine hundred guys who’ve been coming in here the past two weeks checking out your short shorts!”

  “They have not!”

  “Oh, cut it out. It’s me, Sharon, remember? I know what it’s like to have long firm legs and like the feel of a man’s eyes on them. Cough it up. Who’s the guy?”

  Maddie’s stomach fell. “Who’s what guy?”

  “The guy you must be thinking about to ignore all those other guys.”

  “Who says I’m ignoring anyone?”

  Sharon rolled her eyes, then stared at Maddie with wide-eyed meaning. “I heard you tell that guy Ned that you were a lesbian!”

  They both started laughing. When she’d calmed down enough to talk, Maddie stammered, “With him as the only alternative? I probably am!”

  The infectious laughter spread between them, and Maddie felt good for the first time in a week, the carefree kind of good that was her usual default. None of that broody Hank Gilbertson crap weighing her down.

  “Just let me watch your kids, and you go get all dolled up and surprise that cute husband of yours.”

  “He is pretty cute, isn’t he?”

  Cute was an understatement; Sharon’s husband was superhot. He came in for coffee every morning after dropping the kids off at day care. Left twenty minutes later after reading the paper and blowing Sharon a kiss. He worked at Bath Iron Works, and they’d just bought the house of their dreams, a run-down Victorian over near Janet’s house.

  “Come on, admit it. You want to go to the movies, then make out with him in the parking lot.”

  “You are such a bad influence, Madison Post!”

  “That she is.” The deep voice came from the front of the diner, and Maddie’s head swung around so fast she almost pulled a muscle in her neck. She leapt up from the table and ran into the open arms of the tall, handsome man by the door.

  “Jimmy! You jerk!” She hugged him and didn’t let go for a long time.

  “Hey. You okay? Let me look at you . . .” He held her chin between his index finger and thumb. “What’s going on? Ready to come home?”

  She leaned her face into his palm and closed her eyes. He smelled like home. Like the laundry detergent they’d all grown up using and Ivory soap and family.

  A few seconds passed, and she stood up straight. “No. I’m not going to lose this bet!” she whispered, then poked him in the chest. When she was done poking him, she straightened the Windsor knot of his Hermès tie and pulled his hand into hers, tugging him down the length of the restaurant to introduce him to Sharon.

  “James Post, this is Sharon MacKenzie. Sharon, this is my pain-in-the-ass brother Jimmy.”

  Sharon looked momentarily disappointed, then stood up and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Jimmy. What brings you to Bl
ake?”

  He pulled Maddie close and draped one arm possessively around her shoulders. “Had to see how H-R-H was surviving.”

  Sharon cocked an eyebrow. “H-R-H?”

  “Her royal highness,” Jimmy said.

  “Not literally!” Maddie laughed. “It’s just a hideous nickname my brothers use to torment me.”

  “Oh.” Sharon looked from Maddie to Jimmy and back to Maddie. “I get it. I thought he might be the guy who was keeping you from the rest of the guys.” Sharon smiled and sat back down at the booth to finish with the condiment bottles.

  Jimmy widened his eyes to question Maddie. “Guy?”

  “Don’t even think about it!”

  “Okay! I won’t pry. Want to go out for dinner, Mad?” Jimmy asked.

  “I can’t. I just offered to babysit for Sharon while she goes on a much-needed date with her husband.”

  “Why don’t the four of us go out?” Jimmy asked, trying to be inclusive.

  Sharon stared at the man standing there in front of her, who looked like he’d just walked off an Italian menswear fashion runway. She read People magazine. She knew Prada when she saw it. Which had been never, in real life, until right now.

  “I’m not sure—” Sharon answered slowly.

  Jimmy interrupted Sharon with a quick lift of his chin. “Come on. It will be fun. We can go to the big hotel over in Wiscasset, then I can leave straight from there—”

  Maddie pinched him hard on the side of his stomach before he finished that sentence with the fact that his private jet was in the Wiscasset private airfield, waiting for a call from him to start the engines.

  “Ow, what was that for?” Jimmy asked.

  “Just stop being so bossy!” Maddie replied. “Sharon is going out with her husband. I am babysitting. You are leaving.”

  “Wow. Some welcome wagon. I was up at the Universal Paper factory—”

  “Enough!” Maddie knew all about Universal Paper, and every other factory in Maine that her family owned. “Get out of here. I’m fine—” She pulled away from him and threw her arms wide. “As you can see.”

  “All right. I’ll tell Mom and Dad I saw you, and you are the same loose cannon you always were—”