Strout leaves it ambiguous or uncertain whether or not there's been incest in "Ship in a Bottle." A surface reading would render a "no" answer, but Strout includes a passage that could be read one way or another.
First, it's important to review the relationships between the characters. Anita had a first husband Ted, who left her after their daughter, Julie, was born. Anita remarried to a man named Jim, and together they had Winnie. Julie is 21 and Winnie, the person through whose eyes the story is told, is only 11. She is just beginning to understand adult life—and there is much she still doesn't grasp. Julie, of course, is Jim's stepdaughter.
After Bruce leave Julie at the altar, Julie asks Winnie if she knows whether Anita's extreme reaction to Bruce for breaking the engagement is about "sex." We learn that Winnie nods, but doesn't really understand. Julie then...
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says:
She can't stand that I had sex with him.
The "him" is ambiguous. Is Julie taking about Bruce or Jim? A surface reading would say Bruce, but then Anita says Julie would be a "common slut" if she lived with Bruce unmarried. Does she have reason to believe that Julie is, to her mind, a "common slut"? It could be that Anita, who is not the most forward of thinkers, blames Julie for incest and accused her of being a slut because of it.
Julie also tells Winnie to lie to their mother: "Just lie your head off."
All this being said, the incest idea is so nebulous a reading that it could be easy to be accused of "reading into the text" if one made it. It is possible there was incest, especially as Julie is a stepdaughter and also because it seems odd to think that Anita couldn't "stand" that Julie had sex with her fiancé, but the safer reading is simply that Anita got angry with Julie when she confided in her that she was having sex with Bruce. At that point, Anita told Julie she was a slut, an accusation she hurls again when Bruce wants them to live together. Julie, in this reading, decides to leave, not because of sexual abuse, but because she just can't stand the thought of living any longer with her mother. The only way to confirm incest, which I have to say I find a very interesting and hardly impossible idea, would be if there were some mention of it in another of the stories.
What happens in "Ship in a Bottle" that is of the greatest thematic and plot concern is that Julie and Bruce don't get married. This is a great shock to Julie and her Uncle gives both her and her mother "pills" to calm them down and put them to sleep. These "pills" are undoubtedly sleeping pills or tranquilizers.