Beggar of Love (40 page)

“To each her own.” Jefferson imagined the land covered with snow, the isolation of winters. Where she’d grown up in Dutchess at least had movies, local theater, concerts, and the train into the city. Here there were cows.

“Dad didn’t have to marry my mother and bring her here. He didn’t have to make a new home for her family. My father is quite a guy, Jefferson. He kept on being a hero even back in the States. I don’t really want to move to Concord, especially with him so sick.”

“Then why go?”

Dawn made a 180-degree turn and pointed to a distant house in a clump of trees. Jefferson could make out a yard littered with cars stripped of tires, an old refrigerator, and other large refuse. Some tethered goats worked the grass. “That’s where I came out. In that half-wrecked manufactured home you can see back in the woods. Her name is Dee Buchman. She sits out on that back porch drinking beer all day. Walks the empty cans to the tree stump and target-shoots. Her brothers sold all the family land except where the house stands, mostly to us, and they work at the ball-bearing factory in Laconia to support their families and Dee, all living in that house along with their mother, who’s in her nineties now. Her brothers probably blame themselves for their little sister Dee being gay. They fooled around with her when they were all kids.”

Jefferson could picture herself in that woman’s shoes, surrounded by her cats and a dog and a goat, always ready to bring someone out with her touch, her hands. She’d seen homes like that before, on rides around New Hampshire: old couches and folding chairs lining the sagging porches, antique pickup trucks gutted and rusting, always a goat munching tufts of crabgrass. You saw pictures of the South looking like that, but not of New Hampshire. These run-down homesteads were hidden alongside narrow roads tourists didn’t frequent. Penniless, as exhausted as the land on their family plot, generations stayed on penniless, bitter, ambitionless, the whole clan drunk.

“She won’t talk to me,” Dawn said. “Or look at me, ever since I broke up with her when I went to college. What a character she is. Her hands were rough from farm work, but she always had a row of girlie tools on her kitchen table: hand lotions, nail clippers, little scissors, ceramic files, buffers, cuticle pushers—lined up like references. Since then I’ve seen her in town with one woman or another. She’s there for the straight women who want a break from roadhouse boyfriends or old-hat husbands. Maybe, some day, one of them will stick with her, show her a better life.” She looked at Jefferson, sadness—no, tragedy—in her eyes. “I knew there was no place good for me with her.”

“Hey,” she said. “That’s pretty amazing.”

“What?”

“To know what you needed before you started. I’m impressed.”

“Oh, Jefferson.” Dawn opened her arms as if to hug her. “How could anyone not know?”

She shrugged. “I stumbled along, tripping into jobs and relationships.”

“Until now?”

She surveyed the farmland, thinking how grateful she was to have been born where and who she had been. “I knew I needed a change.”

“Exactly,” Dawn said. “But how do you know what change is best?”

The sky had clouded over and she felt chilly. In the city, the streets would be bustling; here only a flock of some small dark birds seemed to have business outdoors. It was a moment so low that Ginger’s betrayals, both leaving and dying, felt like newly sharpened blades. She felt like screaming, but of course never would. Instead she covered the lower half of her face with a hand and squeezed her eyes shut.

Her tone all kindness and concern, Dawn asked, “Jefferson? Are you all right?”

How easy it would be to turn to Dawn, put her arms around her, and submerge herself in the woman. What was stopping her now, when she so needed the comfort? The honesty and kindness of this woman left her incredulous. She didn’t know a lesbian could be this unguarded and unfettered. Now that she’d found Dawn, she wanted to keep her in her life.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m trying to answer you, but how can I when I’m guessing at the answers myself?”

“But to move here—that was a big decision. How did you make it?”

She smiled, turning to Dawn. “I put on my ruby running shoes, clicked my heels together three times, and said, ‘There’s no place like home.’ And here I was.”

Dawn shook her head, smiling too, and, as they walked, sometimes running off to see a wildflower, sometimes leaping at a tree limb as if to climb, and leading Jefferson to highbush blueberries, the last of the raspberries and gooseberries, which she’d never tasted before.

Jefferson parked outside the Pipsborough General Store, which was also the only gas station in town. Shannon worked there part-time. Dawn Northway’s car, a red Subaru with a bike rack on the back and a ski rack on the top, was out on the street next to a pile of red, gold, and brown leaves instead of in the lot, as if she’d been in a hurry.

There was no sign of either woman in the front of the store. A CD player was set to repeat Macy Gray’s song “I Try,” and it boomed out the door. From the back she could hear what sounded like boxes and crates being slammed one on top of another. She hesitated at a bin of cut-rate tools and gizmos in the kind of plastic packages that required an engineering degree to open and was deciding that she should leave when she heard Shannon say, “Then maybe I should go wherever the Guard sends me if you don’t want me around.”

She could hear Dawn’s low, kind voice answer. “That’s not what I said, Shannon.”

Before Jefferson could leave, Dawn came out of the back room, her cheeks pink.

“Jefferson,” Dawn cried, a big smile erasing her troubled expression.

She could see now that Dawn had been crying. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Shannon,” Dawn whispered, leading her outside. She was massaging her forearm as if it was sore. “I try to be her friend. She asked me to stop by to help her figure out what to do about the Guard.”

She’d never seen Dawn rattled. “Did she hurt you?”

“No! I keep hurting her.” Dawn obviously saw the puzzled look on her face. “I’m not interested, Jefferson. I only want to be friends, not lovers.”

“Did she force herself on you?”

“No. Nothing like that. Not physically, but she won’t accept my disinterest and keeps threatening to hurt herself. I don’t know what to do.”

“Okay. I know this is none of my business. Believe me, I don’t want to make it my business.” The thought scared her. She’d come to the lake for peace. “I’m trying to be a go-along-to-get-along kind of person.”

“I’m not trying to involve you. Really. I’m venting,” Dawn said, with a sad little smile. She wore a T-shirt with a rainbow that read, Rainbows Are So Ghay.

God, she thought. I don’t even know how to be a good friend. She knew what she’d do had Dawn been a lover or an ex-lover, but they were friends—and she’d fallen in love with Dawn’s family. She dropped by the farm perhaps more often than she should. Dawn, in the safe context of her family, had become her confidante, as had, for some subjects, Dawn’s bedridden dad, a soft-spoken guy and a good listener. He told her about the lakes region, the history of the Northways and the Hills, his mother’s people. He knew everyone but the newcomers. He told her stories of the houses and merchants. She consulted him about keeping up her house and who was the best boat mechanic, the most honest car-repair shop. She felt protective toward his daughter.

“Dykes get ridiculously messed up,” she told Dawn, thinking, except you. “Let me talk to her.”

“Would you?”

She shook her head. “Either that, or I follow you out of here.”

“And you know what Shannon will think if you do that.”

“I thought life with Ginger was complicated,” she joked, giving Dawn a fast hug.

Dawn laughed, the sadness erased from her eyes. “Ginger and what’s-her-name, and who’s-a-madig, and this one and that one and all the others.”

“Hey, Dawn, dirty pool. Now get lost while I solve all your problems.”

Jefferson headed back into the store. Shannon came barreling from the back rolling a full dolly at top speed.

“Whoa,” she said, stepping out of the way.

Shannon swerved to miss her, slammed into an end-cap display of boxed cereal, flung up her arms to protect herself from flying boxes of Life, and turned red. “Oh, bummer, you heard what we said, didn’t you?”

“I barely got here.”

“What’s wrong with me? I mean, look at me. They all say I’m so adorable, but they don’t want me loving them. Am I really that awful?”

A man came in the store and went to fix a cup of coffee.

Shannon whispered with a desperate earnestness, “I never tried anything with Dawn from the get-go. Never. I only loved her. Love her. Dawn said it nicely, but she basically told me I’m in her psychic space and should get a life.” She went to ring up the sale, head down, dejection in her walk. Jefferson picked cereal boxes out of the aisle.

“Catch anything, Jim?” she asked.

“More trout than I can eat. Want one for your supper?”

Shannon’s voice brightened. “That would be super. I don’t have an appetite and I’m getting tired of sardine sandwiches.”

Macy Gray’s wistful, exciting voice repeated her combination love song and dirge, the music fanning a useless flame in Jefferson.

Shannon, feet shuffling a little to the music, turned to Jefferson. “And you’re not out selling houses because?”

“On my way,” she said, and looked at her watch. “I had some time to kill and thought I’d grace you with my presence.”

The fisherman came in with a trout on a hook. Shannon wrapped it in a brown paper bag, then a plastic bag, and slipped it to the back of the dairy cooler. She came out yawning. “I hope I can remember to take that home. Man, I’ve got to get some sleep. I forget what I’m doing in the middle of doing it.”

“Are you working a lot?”

“Not enough,” Shannon said, turning out an empty pocket. “I’m having a heck of a time sleeping.”

“That’s not helping.”

Shannon protested. “It’s not all about Dawn. It’s the National Guard thing. When I do fall asleep I dream of hundreds of little bombs falling from fighter jets and I can’t find my cat to grab her and run.”

The phone rang. Shannon gave the store’s closing time to the caller.

Partly because Jefferson wanted to know and partly to change the subject, she asked, “Hey, how do you cook a trout anyway?”

Shannon and the fisherman, who’d been making a phone call outside, tripped over each other telling her their favorite recipes, and she faithfully wrote them down. When the guy left, Shannon was all enthusiasm. “We can have a fish fry. You want to have it at your place? Not that I’m inviting myself over, of course.”

A group of kids invaded the store, and Shannon loped back to the register to ring up caramel apples. Jefferson wandered the aisles, letting the memories of the place as it had been forty-odd years ago move through her mind. When the children left, she led Shannon around the store.

“What happened to the post office? There was a little window right here and a woman who took the postcards I mailed to my girlfriend back in Dutchess.”

“I remember the post office too,” Shannon said with a heavy sigh. “My aunt and uncle lived in Pipsborough, and they let me open the box and pull out their mail.”

“Fancy boxes too,” said Jefferson. “Brass, with an eagle.”

“And sun rays. Remember that?”

“My dad and I would walk from the cottage. He’d get cigarettes and I got penny candy. And a cap gun once a summer if he was feeling good.”

Shannon smiled, looking at the floor. “This store had the best water guns.”

“I remember,” Jefferson said with a laugh. “I couldn’t wait to get home to fill it. I climbed down to the stream outside.” She pointed out a window to where water ran toward the lake.

“And got soaked? I did that too. Man oh man, I miss being a kid. Remember how we got all summer off?” Shannon’s face changed, her shoulders drooped. She shook her head. “I should have stuck to water pistols.”

“You learned to shoot in the Guard?”

“No, my dad taught me. We used to go out in the woods. He’d pin a paper target to a tree and we’d have contests between us two. I hit the bull’s-eye my first try and got pretty consistent. Do you shoot?”

“No. Never appealed to me. I was more into contact sports.”

“Right. Gym teacher.” Shannon stopped and held a half-full case of Starburst candies in one hand. “Or are you talking about the other contact sports?”

She grinned. Was Shannon actually starting to relax that tense, stringy self of hers? “You’re right. I’d rather do those too.”

Shannon’s eyes flashed in a too-familiar way. The woman was sizing her up as a lover, wasn’t she? That was pretty desperate. They were clearly both attracted to the Dawns and Gingers of the world.

“I’m staying away from that sort of thing. I’ve made some bad decisions in my life,” she told Shannon.

Shannon quickly reached to pack the candy into a counter display. Jefferson caught the one that dropped.

“You couldn’t actually call them decisions sometimes. My heart would up its rate and I’d be off on the chase again.”