The State We're In: Maine Stories Read Free

takeout for BLT, which always leaked out of the container, though neither Raleigh nor she could ever figure out how that happened every time.
    “My parents were married on the beach in Nantucket,” Angie said. “There was a string quartet, with my cousin playing cello and worried all the time about sand blowing into it, apparently. I was inside Mom. I was attending as a fetus.”
    “I never want to get married,” Zelda said. “Quote me on that if I say I’m engaged.”
    “I will,” Angie said. “I think we should both skip the whole marriage thing and hope we turn into lesbians.”
    “Ugh,” Zelda said.
    “Maybe I’ll give Uncle Raleigh a break and head back early,” Jocelyn said. “He’s really been supernice to me, especially considering how oppressed he is.”
    “Maybe you can marry us before you go. People do it with just some certificate they get over the Internet, anyway.” Angie grabbed Zelda’s hand. Zelda pulled her hand back. “Say, ‘I marry you, I hereby marry you. You are now married,’ ” she said.
    “What is that country where you can say, ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you’ and it’s true?” Jocelyn said.
    “You made that up,” Angie said.
    “No, really. It’s true.”
    “Because NPR said it, or something?” Zelda said, taking Angie’s hand. “Oh, darling, NPR says we’re divorced!” she said.
    Jocelyn laughed and toed a little wet sand toward them. It was their ritual: they’d send some wet sand in the other’s direction, sand like instantly appearing wrinkles, or like a pug dog’s scruff. Angie’s mother had two pugs. They snorted all night and kept everyone awake. Angie could do a very funny imitation of everyone: her distraught mother, talking to the dogs; her father, throwing them out in the middle of the night; the pugs, snorting.
    “Okay, well, you ace it with your story about flowers in the sky, your ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ story,” Zelda said. She hated for people to go. She always said something to keep them. She toed another bit of wet sand in Jocelyn’s direction. It looked like shit. That was what it looked like, wet and more brown than gray.
    *  *  *
    She drove through the parking lot of the hospital, but didn’t go in. She turned on the radio and heard that rain and thunder were predicted later, and also the next day. Maybe it would rain out her uncle’s golf game.
    She almost forgot the pizza, it was such a stupid thing to do—eating another dinner at almost ten o’clock at night. She made a U-turn and pulled into the parking lot, but she wasn’t the only person who’d forgotten. The owner’s son was sponging off tables, saying that nobody’d phoned in an order. She wondered if she should just ask for a small plain pizza and get points with her aunt, but she decided no—her aunt could really do without a pizza. She bought a ginger ale in a bottle that exploded all over her when she unscrewed the cap. “Shit!” she said, which brought the owner to the counter. His son shrugged, acknowledging what had happened, but making no comment. “So what’s this? Did you shake the bottle?” Mister Rogers said. It wasn’t his real name, it was his nickname, behind his back, because he always said “Beautiful day” to adults, and T. G. had pointed out that Mister Rogers said, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” Or, at least, the guy who imitated him on the old Saturday Night Live did.
    She shook her head. A question like that didn’t even deserve a response. The guys did that, sometimes. Would she do it? A girl?
    Then came the very loud sound of shattering glass. She ducked, thinking a car was coming in right through the front windows. Mister Rogers and his son ducked, too, and the sponge flew across the room. Mister Rogers quickly got out of his crouch and ran toward the door.
    There stood Ms. Nementhal. In a halter top and blue Bermuda shorts, Ms. Nementhal was wincing, her arms clasping her shoulders,