Love in Maine

by Connie Falconeri

  “You always were a bit stuck up, Post. Why don’t you loosen up a bit?”

  “Stop the car, please.”

  “Relax.” Denny shook his head and slowed the car to a stop on the side of the road.

  “You know what, Denny?”

  “No. What?”

  “I think you better just forget you ever saw me, all right?” She pulled the handle on the door and realized that it had auto-locked when he’d accelerated. She couldn’t find the lock button and she tugged harder on the handle.

  “Chill, Post.” He clicked a button in the center console. Something about Denny Fullerton driving a brand-new luxury SUV and painting houses for fun just rubbed her wrong all of a sudden. She got out and held the door open to finish talking to him.

  “I am perfectly chill, Denny. I wanted a summer away from anyone I knew. I had no idea you and Zander and all the guys from your fraternity were going to be here.”

  “Whatever,” he said with no intonation, then turned to look back in the direction they’d been heading. “You coming or going? I’m late.”

  “What a gentleman. You practically kill me with this ridiculous beast of a car and then you tell me I need to lighten up.” She slammed the car door, and he drove off before she’d finished withdrawing her arm.

  Shit.

  Maddie paced back and forth a few times, unsure if she wanted to try to go back to her run or if she was too rattled. She stopped pacing when she heard a rustle in the woods. Hands resting on her hips, she turned slowly, feeling the gaze of another creature. She didn’t see them at first, through the camouflaging shadow and light of the trees. Then the sun caught the mother’s eyes. Two moose, a large female and a young calf, stood frozen in place about twenty feet away from her. Maddie exhaled and let all thought of Zander and Denny and her final year of university and the stupid brute of a man she was falling for who was probably submerged in a dark silent world as she stood on the side of the road. She just stared at those black eyes and then at their ears. The young one twitched a muscle on its neck, but otherwise remained beautifully still.

  She didn’t want to pet them or befriend them or throw a rock to startle them and shoo them away from the dangers of the road. Maddie just wanted to remember every single detail about them, every eyelash, the way the sun made their velvety noses shine, the tender breathing of the small one, the way their shoulders turned in at exactly the same angle.

  Maddie tasted the salt of her tears before she even realized she was crying. Why couldn’t she just be? Why couldn’t she just exist the way these animals did? She felt like such a conniving, demanding, controlling human. She felt like she was in a constant whirl of pushing or pulling or getting or spending. She couldn’t even stand here on the side of the road without thinking about what it meant to be standing here on the side of the road.

  The tears kept coming. The baby moose leaned in closer to its mother. The mother remained perfectly still. Maddie honestly felt like the mother was wordlessly warning her young progeny, “See! See how unhappy they are.”

  Maddie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. A small car was driving too fast around the curve, and she opened her eyes and stepped slowly away from the edge of the road. When she looked back into the woods, the two moose were gone. She decided to walk back into town rather than run.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hank almost forgot to set his valve properly. If he made another mistake like that, he was going to tell his supervisor he was too distracted to work. In the world of deep-sea diving, the man who knew his limits was the man who kept his job. Whenever someone saw another diver behaving erratically or even seeming a little tired, the entire team weighed in. The group decided.

  On the one hand, it was a really solitary profession. There he was, at that moment, very much alone in the freezing, murky depths. On the other hand, he was inextricably woven into a team of people at all times. The gear, the oxygen . . . the surface team. Everyone else had to be trusted with his life through every step of preparation, through the work itself, and through proper withdrawal.

  His team had been called out to do a preliminary inspection job for a wind turbine company. The US was way behind the leaders in this particular alternative energy solution. Countries like Denmark and the UK had been putting both human and financial resources into offshore wind power for over a decade. The US had yet to cut through the political, environmental, and aesthetic quagmire.

  Hank settled into the tasks at hand, measuring the proposed area, providing geological samples of the ocean floor where the future base’s construction units would be installed. His breathing and the strange noises of the deep mingled and worked their usual magic. He had to focus too hard to think about anything else. Being in the deep like this forced Hank to clear his mind of the little splinters of things and deal methodically and carefully with the whole.

  He felt useful. Which was good.

  He felt terribly alone. Which was fine.

  At the end of his shift, Hank drove back to Blake in silence. Oftentimes after a long day in the sea, the radio grated on his nerves. It sounded too loud or too tinny. It sounded fake. And he craved real.

  Or so he thought.

  Hank pulled into the gathering darkness at nine o’clock on Saturday night. He could see the lights coming from Maddie’s window. More accurately, he could see the tiny perimeter of light that escaped through the closed curtains and closed horizontal blinds that Maddie had firmly shut across the window. He sat in the silent truck for a few minutes, staring up at the second floor of his mother’s house.

  He knew Maddie didn’t have any music or earbuds or anything to distract her, so she must have heard his truck pull in. What was he waiting for? For her to run breathless down the stairs, flinging the front door open and falling into his waiting arms?

  He let his head hang forward. He told himself it was a matter of stretching the sore muscles at the back of his neck and shoulders, but it was really shame. He knew Maddie was right. He could pretend that he needed the extra hours at work or that he wanted to help out a colleague, but the fact was obvious. Hank couldn’t stand being around Madison Post. She was too alive, too receptive. She was always “on.”

  He was off.

  Lifting his head and reaching across the seat to grab his backpack, Hank resigned himself to having to keep his distance from anyone who expected him to thrive like that. He was keeping it together. That was enough for now.

  After he opened the car door and shut it, he felt her simmering behind him. He didn’t turn around.

  “I want the coleslaw.”

  Hank turned on his heel and faced her. She was in those demonic pajama bottoms with the waist that folded down and the ribbed white tank top that left that mesmerizing inch of skin visible above her waistband.

  She tugged on the tank top to cover the skin. “Did you hear me? Your mom made that coleslaw for me.”

  He stared at her. Obviously, this had nothing to do with coleslaw.

  “And don’t stand there and try to make this about something other than the coleslaw.”

  “I’ll be right back.” Hank’s voice was raspy from little use.

  She folded her arms and shook her head in irritation.

  He kept walking. On the third wooden step leading up to his door, he stopped. Hank rested the palm of his hand against the gray paint of the clapboard garage. It was like being dragged across a bed of nails on his stomach, but he could do this. He turned back to face her. “Do you want to come hang out? Watch a movie or something?”

  She tightened her crossed arms and lifted her shoulders, folding herself in, away from him.

  “Or not?” he asked.

  He waited for her to answer.

  “Are you trying to be normal?”

  “I guess I am.”

  They stood looking at each other for a while longer.

  “All right. I think I would like that.” Maddie pulled the front door of Janet’s house closed behind her and walked barefoot ac
ross the gravel driveway.

  Hank had turned back, continuing slowly up the steps. “Doesn’t that hurt the bottoms of your feet?” he asked, without looking back.

  “No. My feet are shot. Running. Rowing. Skiing. My toes are a mess. I’ll probably have arthritis by the time I’m twenty-five.”

  Hank slipped his key into the lock and opened the door, letting Maddie pass in before he did. He reached behind her and flipped on all the overhead lights at once. It was really bright, especially after the darkness outside.

  “Sorry, that’s a bit harsh.” He flipped down two of the light switches and the areas in the two far corners of the room fell back into shadow. “I’m going to go change and put my work stuff away. I’ll be right back. Grab yourself a beer in the fridge if you want.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  When Hank came out of his bedroom ten minutes later, Maddie was holding a cold beer and leaning over his drafting table. She had turned the two corner lights back on and was taking her time nosing around all his stuff.

  “Find anything good?”

  “Shit!” she grabbed the beer bottle a split second before it slipped out of her hand and spilled all over his blueprints. “You are so effing quiet. Have you always been like that or is it a military thing?”

  He shrugged. “I guess a little of both. You definitely learn how to make yourself scarce with parents like mine used to be . . . or when someone’s trying to shoot you.”

  She relaxed her hips back against the edge of the tilted work table and held the beer casually with one hand. “You’ve been shot?”

  “No. I’ve been shot at.” He walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out another beer. He popped the top off with the opener Maddie had left on the countertop, then returned the metal device to the drawer where it was supposed to be.

  “Sorry I didn’t put the bottle opener back. I figured I was probably going to use it again fairly soon.”

  “No problem. Just habit. A place for everything, and all that.”

  She took a long, satisfying pull off the beer bottle. Hank stared at the curve of her neck and the rise and fall of her throat. When she finished the sip, she smiled at him. “So, what movies do you have?”

  He came around from the kitchen island and walked over to the big sofa.

  “Have a seat?” He gestured to the blue-denim slipcovered sofa, then went over to the television and grabbed a remote.

  He settled in on the sofa a few feet away from her and swung his feet up onto the big square ottoman that doubled as a coffee table. He reached forward and opened his iPad, made a few swipes across the screen with his fingers, then passed the tablet into her hands. “Here are the movies.”

  She looked down at his spreadsheet with about six hundred movies listed in alphabetical order. “Oh my god. This is like the little box of three-by-five notecards in When Harry Met Sally. You are such a girl.”

  He looked down at his very un-girl-like self, then raised an eyebrow and took a sip of beer without breaking eye contact.

  “Let’s watch Troy. I haven’t seen that in ages.”

  “Cool.” He got up and opened one of the cabinets beneath the television to retrieve a black notebook filled with DVDs.

  Maddie smiled at his totally meticulous level of organization and decided not to dwell on it. She let her eyes meander around his place. The ceiling beams were exposed and painted a bright, cheerful white. A retro fan—kind of aeronautical brushed metal, maybe 1940s or ’50s—spun way up at the pitch of the roof. There were a couple of skylights over the kitchen and a couple over the seating area.

  She looked at the large-scale photographs on either side of the flat-panel television. The whole place was such a contrast to the old-but-good feeling that his mother’s place exuded. Everything here was considered. Clean. Nothing without a purpose.

  “Where’d you get those photographs? What are they?”

  He was slipping the disk into the player and looked up to see where she was looking. “Just water. I took them.” He went back to cueing up the movie.

  She stared at the abstract blues and grays of the pair of photographs. He had taken care with the framing, the wide, black trim painted to a shiny perfection.

  Hank fiddled with a couple more knobs, then walked over to the front door and flipped all the overhead lights off. “Too dark?”

  Maddie slipped deeper into the enormous sofa. “No! This is perfect! No wonder you don’t ever want to go to the movies.” The opening menu was already up on the screen. “This is better than any movie theater.”

  “Thanks. You ready for another beer before I sit back down?”

  She looked over the back of the sofa. “Sure. I’d love one.” Maddie heard the pop of the next beer and let the vision of a naked, sated Brad Pitt fill her field of vision as the movie began playing.

  Hank returned to the sofa and set her second beer on the small trunk that served as a side table next to his side of the couch.

  “Ooh, I love this part!” Maddie cried as Achilles went flying through the air and slayed his opponent.

  Hank looked at her profile in the bright glow of the screen. He marveled at the way Maddie felt everything so completely, how she let the world and all of her experiences and reactions explode like that. Why would anyone do that?

  She shook her head and took the last sip of her first beer, setting the empty bottle on the floor to her left. “I’ll take that other beer now . . .” She extended her hand to him without taking her eyes from the screen. He put the cold glass against the palm of her hand without letting his skin touch hers.

  “Here you go.” Thankfully, she wasn’t trying to be suggestive or teasing with a scrape of her fingers across his.

  “Thanks,” she replied vaguely, her attention entirely focused on the movie.

  She didn’t rattle away like his mother always did, but he could see by the slight nods and turns of her head that Maddie was utterly engaged. Every ten or fifteen minutes she would say something harsh, when something exceeded her patience. “Oh, come on! That is so unrealistic!”

  Hank laughed.

  “What?” She turned to face him. “It is. They didn’t have that technology until at least two hundred years later. That’s like . . . Google-able. Never mind.”

  He stared at her with renewed interest. “What do you know about the technological advances of antiquity?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a classics major.”

  He laughed. “You’re a what?”

  She kept her eyes on the screen. “I. Am. A. Classics. Major.”

  He shook his head.

  “Pause the movie, please,” she said, sounding like she was at the end of her rope.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Pause the movie.”

  He leaned forward and hit the “Pause” button on one of the myriad remotes.

  “What did I say?”

  “You shook your head in that doleful way that made it perfectly clear you think a classics major is some stupid, useless—”

  “You are so defensive. Of course I don’t think that. Epictetus, remember?”

  She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. “I always feel like you’re making fun of me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a lot of the time you are. And my brothers always make me feel sort of . . . frivolous. And I don’t like it.” She kept staring at him.

  “Well,” he moved his beer back and forth at the neck of the bottle, “I’m not those guys. I think it’s cool.”

  “Oh.” Maddie looked down at her lap. “Sorry. I guess I am a little defensive.”

  He held up the remote. “May I?”

  Maddie smiled. “Yes. Please.”

  He pushed the button, and the roar of a crowded Trojan street scene filled the room. They watched the rest of the movie in friendly comfort. When the final credits began to roll, Maddie yawned and stood up. She bent down to pick up the two empty beer bottles she’d set next to the sofa. Hank had to look away b
efore he got caught staring at her round backside. He walked over to the kitchen and then to the door to turn the lights back on.

  Maddie put her two empties into the sink. “Thanks, Hank. That was great.” She walked to where he was standing by the door. She yawned again, then rubbed her upper arms where they had begun to chill. “May I give you a quick kiss good-night before I leave or will that make you uncomfortable?”

  He didn’t know whether he loved or hated her practicality. He’d given her every reason to be cautious, so he couldn’t very well turn around and accuse her of being cautious.

  “Sure.”

  She kept her arms folded in front of her chest and leaned forward on the balls of her feet. Leaning into his neck, she rested her barely parted lips against the smooth, warm skin just above the hem of his T-shirt’s collar. She took a deep inhale, then began to pull away. She dipped in for a quick follow-up peck.

  “Thanks. I’ll see you later. Okay? We’ll be normal, right?”

  “Sure, Maddie. We’ll be normal.” He reached up and put his thick fingers through the strands of chestnut hair that were coming loose from her braid at the nape of her neck. He didn’t pull her against him or dive at her. He just wanted to feel the texture and warmth of her skin there. He stroked that tender part of her neck for a few seconds and watched as her shoulders relaxed and her eyes dipped. Hank pulled his hand away gently. “Thanks for coming over, beautiful.”

  She opened her eyes and stared at him with gentle sweetness. “Thanks for inviting me, handsome.” Then she pulled open his door and let herself out.

  Maddie only made it about halfway down the steps before turning abruptly back. “Hey! I forgot—”

  Hank was standing at the top of the stairs, holding the glass bowl with his mother’s coleslaw.

  “—the coleslaw.”

  She walked back up the steps. “Thanks. I’m starving.”

  She took the bowl and went back to Janet’s house to eat coleslaw in the yellow kitchen and then go up to her bed and wonder about whether or not to open her curtains again. Or if maybe her imagination was a safer option.