Author(s): Annie Dillard

Fiction

It began when Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met. He was back home in Provincetown after the war. Maytree first saw her on a bicycle. A red scarf, white shirt, skin clean as eggshell, wide eyes and mouth, shorts. She stopped and leaned on a leg to talk to someone on the street. She laughed, and her loveliness caught his breath. In 1940s Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, poet Toby Maytree falls in love with Lou Bigelow at first sight. His slow courtship gradually wins her over, and so begins a love story that lasts decades. Surrounded by bohemian friends, living in Toby's shack on the dunes, the two marry, have a child. But when a friend first comes between them, then unexpectedly propels them back into one another's lives, they must each renegotiate what it means to love.