which is now legal in Tennessee. You just can’t have any of the good stuff in it. So we do raise it for the oil, but also for, you know, humankind. It’s the most profitable crop we’ve ever had. Primo weed, believe me.”
Jill was dumbfounded to realize that Maggie was a drug dealer. “You always did have a green thumb,” she said gamely.
“I’ll prove it to you when the kids go to bed.”
Maggie made a pork loin for dinner, which Helen avoided eating as soon as she found out what it was. She had made a private vow to become a vegetarian like her dad as soon as they got back to Atlanta. The idea of one day eating Queen Margaret was too awful to consider.
“It’d be like eating Peepers,” she told Kendall when they were in bed.
“Queen Margaret’s not a pet.”
“But don’t you love her? She’s so cute.”
“She’s not always going to be cute. She’ll gain about two pounds a day, and pretty soon she’ll be a huge old hog, and there’s absolutely no point in keeping her unless you intend to breed her, which I guess is possible if she wins the grand championship. Also”—she paused—“they’re disgusting.”
“What do you mean?”
“They shit on everything. In their food, in their water. You have to clean it out every day. Anyway, they eat dogs in China.”
“They do not.”
“Yes, they do.”
“That’s so totally gross.”
“I bet our moms are downstairs getting high,” said Kendall.
“You’re kidding.”
“My mom’s a pothead.”
Helen was scandalized. She had always thought that Aunt Maggie was so much cooler than her own parents, but imagining her mother on drugs was unsettling.
“I think I’ll go to sleep now,” she said.
* * *
—
WHILE TIM CAUGHT UP on paperwork, Maggie offered Jill a brownie.
“I’m dieting,” Jill said.
“It’s low cal and not that kind of brownie.”
“Oh.” She took a bite. A small one. “It’s even delicious.” Another bite.
“I’ve already patented the brand name for the day it’s legal here: ‘Maggie’s Magical Edibles.’ ”
“You’ll make a fortune, if you don’t go to prison first,” Jill said.
“Let’s go out and look at the stars.”
Jill followed her sister out to the field behind the house, where Maggie had planted peonies for the television show. The moon wasn’t up yet, but the light from the stars was so intense that Jill could see her shadow. They lay in the grass in a clearing surrounded by sheltering sycamores, with spectral trunks that caught the starshine. It was perfect and marvelous.
“It’s like the world would be if Martha Stewart were God,” Jill said.
Maggie laughed. “That’s the brownie talking.”
They stared into the sky. Jill felt the stars weighing down on her, physically pressing her body into the earth, the smells of nature wrapping around her like smoke from a campfire, and the ground melting away so she was just afloat in the universe. “The Milky Way,” she said dreamily. “It’s been so long. Years, since I saw it. Camp DeSoto! Remember the stars when we’d sit out on the dock after dinner?”
Maggie pointed out the planets and the constellations she knew best. Jill only knew Orion and the Big Dipper, but Maggie had so many more in her head. “The last time I saw stars like this was when Henry took us on that crazy trip out west,” said Jill. “Oh! Is that a shooting star?”
“It’s a satellite,” said Maggie. “No, wait, I think it’s the International Space Station.”
“Whoa!” said Jill.
“Whoa!” Maggie said, imitating her sister. “You sound like a real stoner.”
Jill started laughing as well. She pretended to be even more stoned than she was, which sent them both into gales of hilarity.
The spell was broken when Jill’s phone rang. It was Henry.
“I’m all right,” he said, in a voice that seemed oddly slowed down.
“You’re what?”
“All right,” he said.
“But I didn’t ask,” said Jill, who was still caught in the delirious mood she had been in when Henry called. She cast a mischievous look at Maggie. “I didn’t ask, ‘How are you?’ ”
“You sound a little strange,” Henry said.
“I am strange,” she said. “At this moment, I’m really strange.”
Maggie could scarcely keep herself from howling.
“I guess you haven’t been listening to the news,” Henry said.
“God, the news, no. I’m sitting outside with Maggie looking at the stars, and we’re both really stoned. She knows all the stars, it’s so amazing. And Mars, you can really see, like, how red it is.”
In their entire married life, Jill had never expressed interest in drugs of any sort. Nor was she even much of a drinker.