Read Online Enchanted August by Brenda Bowen - Free Book Online

distinctly modern hand, with a fairy-sized plastic wading pool and a Lego all-terrain vehicle. Fairy amenities, she thought.
    She had read about fairy houses before she came up to Maine. They were famous, the websites said, on Monhegan Island, pretty far south of here. Children built them out of twigs and leaves and flowers to invite fairies to visit. She wondered what Bea and Ben would make of them. Bea would build carefully and slowly. She’d decorate her house with flowers. She’d make sure the fairies would have a comfy place to sleep. Then Ben would kick it to pieces.
    She shook her head to dispel the Great Preschool Debacle and all that had followed. I’ll make fairy houses for them both. She looked at how the other houses were made and felt a little foolish that she didn’t know how to do this, and that she was doing it in the first place. But when in Maine . . .
    Four sticks were the four corners of the house. Bea’s had to be just right, so the sticks needed to be broken accurately. It was very different to be breaking sticks without the twins to tell her how to do it. Sitting here on the somewhat damp ground, the sharp smell of the leaves around her, the rustle of the trees in the breeze—such a different swath of nature than on the playground, even when the park was at its most lush.
    None of the twigs she found would do for Bea. She was precise and careful, like her mother. Rose broke another set of twigs, measured, and found them wanting.
    The more she looked around her, the more fairy houses she saw. It was a fairy village. As she wondered who had made them, a crowd of children careened down the boardwalk path. Summer kids. Rose had enough presence of mind to get out of their way. They waved to her as they passed, but they were in too much of a hurry to notice her much. One of the boys pushed another off the path as he ran.
    â€œMorning!” came a cheerful voice behind the kids. The voice belonged to a wrinkly man in his seventies maybe, who was bounding down the walk with the springy legs of someone a lot younger. Is everyone fit here?
    â€œGood morning,” said Rose.
    â€œDon’t overthink it, now. It’s just a fairy house,” said the wrinkly man. And he strode out of sight.
    Fred would tell her that too, she thought, and it would have been funny, before all the crap that happened this summer. She wished he were here instead of writing that next blockbuster. Or that he was writing his next real novel instead of the trash he was writing now. The incredibly lucrative trash.
    Satisfied with the foundation beams at last, Rose situated Bea’s fairy house in a lush patch of moss. Then she looked for bark for the roof.
    At first the thrillers had been a lark, just one more thing that Fred could do. He had a gift for spinning stories. That’s why she’d loved him so much from the start. She’d practically worshipped him, really. He knew everything. He could do anything. And when they were poor—so poor!—in graduate school they had needed each other so much.
    Rose was a poet,
was
being the operative word. She still wrote under her maiden name, Rose Maier, but no one published her anymore. Not that she had been published so much to begin with, but she’d been on track, on that poet’s single-gauge literary track from personal rejections to a sold poem in
Antaeus
to possibly getting a slender volume published by Copper Canyon.
    She placed a piece of birch bark on top of Bea’s fairy house sticks. It was a touch too Flintstoney, so she walked farther into the woods and found a clump of tall, leafy golden flowers. She pinched off a stem, then pulled when it didn’t break easily. Then she set it on top of the fairy house, a kind of flower lantern.
    She never did publish anything else, or complete her Ph.D., which is why she was now in the ranks of the adjuncts. She’d had a book contract at one point. She’d gotten no