Chapter Thirty-Four.

Jefferson was learning that love is a hard habit to break.

"No matter how much I try to stay open to being with someone else, when I remember Ginger, there's no way."

Shannon, with her high energy and need to please, was helping her get the bottom sc.u.m and algae off the Runabout. Jefferson's parents had been there so little the past several years that Jarvy hadn't taken his usual loving care of it. She had the engine in town being overhauled.

The day was glorious: blue lake, blue sky, mel ow sun, smooth mahogany. She was learning, in sobriety, that her good emotions could be overwhelming, and the bad now had blunted edges. This spring was long and lovely.

"You could have any woman in the world-even Xena-with your looks and a house by the lake. You're nuts."

She examined the kid. Shannon wore black canvas sneakers with holes at the smal and great toes, camo cutoffs, and yet another Xena T-shirt with its sleeves ripped off. The bleached tufts of her hair were pointing every which way. She looked like she'd barely survived a major battle with something much bigger than herself: a hurricane, a bear, deep depression. Her eyes were big in her pale face, her cheeks as sunken as if she'd lost her teeth. Her lips were badly chapped, and her roots were growing out a dul brown.

Jefferson had been listening to Mozart, but Shannon said she needed a beat to work and changed the station to rock.

"You mean I could have Dawn."

Not looking her way, Shannon said, "I think she's stayed so far because you moved here."

"Shannon, you have Dawn on the brain." She wondered if her lack of interest in Dawn was Dawn's very availability. Playing hard-to-get wasn't Dawn's style.

"I wish that's what was on my brain."

She pushed up the sleeve of her purple, white, and gold hoodie and poked at the boat's joints with a screwdriver to make sure the wood was firm and not rotting. Without the Zoloft, hearing Shannon's troubles would put her in a bad s.p.a.ce. "Shannon Wiley," she said.

Shannon stood up to stretch, grimacing as if pain was moving through her back. Eyes downcast, she apologized. "I've bugged Dawn and Yolanda about this so much. I have to talk to somebody else or I'l go nuts."

"Want more iced tea?"

Shannon held out her plastic gla.s.s and Jefferson fil ed it from the pitcher. The ice cubes were almost melted and had stopped their conking sounds.

She sprayed some cleaner on the hul and waited for Shannon to open up. The woman wasn't that much younger than she was, yet treated Jefferson like an elder. Of course, Shannon acted like a teenager, with her crush, her bicycle, her perpetual joblessness, and her gamin looks. Jefferson vowed to listen and not advise. She didn't know much more than Shannon did about how to live life.

"What's going on? You look shook-up." Maybe younger than a teen, she thought. Shannon looked like a little boy, lower lip wobbly, trying to be brave and hold back tears.

"I got a letter from the National Guard. They're cal ing me back. I'm scared they'l send me to Iraq. I can't go to Iraq. Or Afghanistan. I'l die from the heat alone, never mind, you know, the bombs and stuff. It gets up to a hundred thirty degrees in Iraq-can people survive in that heat? I don't know where the heck Afghanistan is."

"There's no way out?"

Shannon sounded very adult as she explained. "They're not letting much of anybody leave the service, whether or not their enlistment terms are up.

They could get me over there and keep me for fifteen months, eight years-if I lived that long. I was active-duty in 199899, and then I was in the National Guard for three years. The army wrote me a few months ago about transferring from the Individual Ready Reserve to the National Guard or reserve. They made me think I wouldn't go to Iraq if I did that. I didn't know what to do. What could I do? I didn't know if they were twisting my arm to volunteer. I stayed in the IRR because I'd be out in June. None of my old army pals knew which way to turn either."

"My brain is spinning. I didn't know there was something besides the guard and the regular reserves."

"The IRR is, like, different. We don't do a regular schedule of training. We're not paid like reservists. But we can get recal ed in an emergency because we stil have that reserve-duty commitment. I heard at least two thousand IRRs transferred to either the army reserve or the National Guard. I'l bet you the ones who went for it wil go over too." Shannon sat on the edge of the dock and covered her face with her hands. "I am so scared."

"Would your back keep you out?"

"What the f.u.c.k? There's nothing wrong with my back."

Jefferson wasn't going to argue. She'd seen it often enough: athletes so used to living with their pain that they didn't even notice it was there. What could she say to Shannon? She'd never been much at coming up with solutions to other people's problems or comforting them. It wasn't that she didn't care-or was it? Was she learning to care more, post-alcohol? Maybe she did care about this kid. Wel , like they said in the program, fake it til you make it. She scrubbed at another spot of mildew. "Not everyone goes, do they?"

"Check. Thousands of soldiers kil ed since 2003."

"Oh, boy."

The kid was crying now. "What would you do?"

She thought careful y. What would she do? "Back when I was your age I was drinking a lot. I would have pretended to myself that it was no big deal, gone over there, and stayed drunk as much as I could. Now, though, I can't imagine being able to pul it off. I'd see if my parents' old friends could pul any strings. They know a lot of people, including retired army and Washington insiders."

"My parents don't know anybody. My dad got early layoff as a machinist at a furnace factory and my mom works in a card shop at the big mal . They didn't want me to go into the service, but I thought I could meet some gay girls there. Pipsborough isn't exactly Northampton."

"So did you?"

Shannon was scrubbing the hul with wide, fast swipes, grinning despite the tears drying on her face. She snuffled. "Sure, loads of them. I was seeing a girl while I was stil in boot camp. It got better from there." She dipped her rag in a bucket and wiped her nose with her sleeve. "I'd have to leave my cat with my folks. He wouldn't understand why I left him." She shook her head. "I guess the army wouldn't care that he's my dependent."

"What about tel ing them you're gay?"

"That only matters in peacetime, unless they catch you. This gives them a chance to kil us."

"You're kidding me, right?" She raked her fingers through her hair.

"Hel , no." Shannon looked shocked, as if everyone should know the deal with gay soldiers. "Each queer they send over means some straight boy doesn't have to go. And if I tel them, then I might have a less-than-honorable discharge."

"So you think there's more of a chance you'l go."

"I know they're stil kicking some of us out, but at the rate the enemy's blowing up soldiers? I think we'l al go."

"Have you thought about Canada?"

"I don't much want to live up there. But I got my cat's papers from the vet in case. It was one thing when Vietnam draft dodgers went north. Canada's not taking in AWOL Americans this time around."

She wondered what Dawn's father would say to this dilemma, given his il ness, his daughter's disability, and his marriage to the enemy. "I don't know what to say, Shannon. It kind of sounds like you signed a contract you can't renege on."

Shannon hung her head like one of Jefferson's kids in trouble for daydreaming in the outfield. "Not while I'm alive."

"Hey, you could meet the love of your life over there."

Shannon's face was solemn, but her eyes looked as if she was savoring that imagined meeting, and soon her deep dimples began to show like little shadows on her cheeks. "With my luck she'd be Iraqi and her fundamentalist brother would catch us in bed."

"Or you'd be with her when your company is attacked."

"I can't believe we're over there at al . I wouldn't hesitate to go if they were landing at Hampton Beach."

What did this youngster want from her? Maybe nothing. What could she give her? Maybe nothing.

Shannon stood, rag dipping. "Listen," she said with her brawny New Hampshire accent. "If I disappear, to wherever, would you do me a favor?"

Here it came.

Shannon Wiley had a desperate look. "Would you look after my cat? And Dawn?"

Jefferson thought she could see the conflict flashing like a danger signal in her eyes. Would Jefferson steal Dawn? Of course not, Jefferson thought.

She and Dawn Northway talked as she and Ginger never had, even in the beginning. The words, like storms of memory, that she'd never shared with anyone, poured out of her: the women, her grandparents, drinking, her bare-bones career...

She drew them al for Dawn with words. She never knew she had such a need to talk to someone. Not even with Lily Ann had she opened up this much. Something about Dawn, the feeling of Dawn, some gladness of spirit, relaxed Jefferson. Was it because they weren't lovers? She wanted Dawn to know everything about her, bad and good, before-before what? Becoming lovers? Before losing her to someone else? Before she lost her because of her terrible confessions? Before she lost the impulse to lay herself bare? Yes and no. It was because she had that same gladness of spirit. Dawn knew how to be happy. She liked being happy. Nothing had crushed that spirit.

She never felt ashamed when she shared stuff with Dawn, nor did Dawn ever blanch. Dawn responded with stories of her own, mild in comparison though they were. She might even, Jefferson suspected by the flush of Dawn's face and the quick cascade of her words, be turned on by Jefferson's l.u.s.tiest escapades.

And then there were the other stories. Jefferson's and Dawn's: Jefferson's sports failures and triumphs; how Dawn's father rescued her mother's family, risking everything himself. How her mother and father fel in love at first sight, she cowering in her hooch, shielding her younger siblings with her body, he appal ed by orders to shoot everyone and fol owing the family down the tunnel in the floor of their home. Dawn said she expected the same for herself. It was as if her parents recognized each other from some forever time ago when they were locked together in some way. One day Dawn confessed that she'd had the same feeling the night Jefferson walked into that church bas.e.m.e.nt, and she fol owed it with a quick joke about having a gene for underground love.

Dawn said she hoped that confiding in Jefferson wouldn't chase her off. She told Jefferson how much she valued their friendship and companionship above al else in her life. She asked for nothing more, would accept nothing more. Jefferson admitted that sometimes she'd gone with women because she didn't know how to say no. Dawn was looking for love, not kindness; a soul mate, not s.e.x. If it turned out right between them, if Jefferson came to feel as she did, they'd know because they would combust in pa.s.sion, there would be no mistaking it. Meanwhile, Jefferson, for once in her life, was content to wait. Talking was proving to be as gratifying as physical seduction.

"Shannon," she began to caution, then remembered that when she was Shannon's age, everything felt this important. Shannon wanted her to keep anyone from horning in on Dawn. She could see how she had fooled herself into thinking she could control anything now that she watched Shannon make the same thinking error. "Does Dawn need looking after?"

"Everybody needs looking after."

It wasn't her place to open Shannon's eyes to her ulterior motive. She wanted her to know she had no designs on Dawn. Who knew what life would bring while Shannon was away? It was very possible she wouldn't come back, or would come back missing limbs, crazed by heat and violence and fear, needing care herself. Did lesbians have a way to help their own veterans? She'd never thought of this before. Wasn't Shannon real y asking Jefferson to take care of, to save PFC Shannon Wiley? She shook her head. Most of her adult life had been about taking care of women. Right now Jefferson, final y sleeping through some nights and eating better, was numero uno for Jefferson.

"I can be her friend," she told Shannon. "And yours." She thrust with her putty knife to emphasize what she was saying. "But I'm n.o.body's mother and I have fewer answers every day."

Shannon gave her a wide-eyed look, like she knew Jefferson did have the answers and was withholding them. "If anything happened to Dawn,"

Shannon explained, "I might as wel go over there and let them do me in so I don't end up doing it al myself."

When Jefferson was alone again, thinking about young Shannon, she felt like she'd learned nothing in her whole life and al of a sudden she was expected to be this expert on everything. Didn't it show that she was al hol ow? Shouldn't she be able to at least come up with a way to think things through? Why? She'd never thought anything through in her life. Her decision to leave the city itself had been nothing more than a reaction to Ginger's il ness, maybe a belated reaction to 9/11. She was always running from pain. How smart was that? Pain hadn't beaten her yet. Her spirit was as strong as Dawn's and always would be.

"Don't try to escape the pain, Shannon," was al she'd been able to advise, gesturing to the lake with the knife. "It's like trying to drain the lake dry."

Chapter Thirty-Five.

On Jefferson's forty-ninth birthday in August when she had no prospective buyers or new listings, and to celebrate her first house sale, she went with Dawn to see her parents' farm. As she drove, Dawn pointed out her personal landmarks and told funny stories about each. They skirted Lake Winnipesaukee south, then headed west for another twenty minutes, climbing and descending the twisting roads, bouncing over frost heaves, coming suddenly on wide-open views of meadows and the mountains beyond. Dawn exclaimed at the purplish red clover and the light blue yarrow flowers.

Occasional y they came to an intersection that boasted a predictably white church and an out-of-business gas station with the original red pumps or an open general store/postoffice/video-rental shop, also white, often peeling. Large grayed houses offered living rooms and front porches converted to antique shops or junk heaps. Between intersections the houses were rare and usual y white, sometimes red or cedar shingled.

Dawn drove without haste. Jefferson, fighting to stay awake after another night of insomnia, asked questions. It occurred to her that she seldom got to know women in this way. Pil ow talk had always been her style. She missed the touching and dipping in and out of a woman, interrupting life stories with lovemaking.

Women loved to tel their stories and Dawn Northway was no different. That was one of her appeals: despite everything that attracted Jefferson to Dawn-her sunny energy, her prized Asian heritage, the way she would give a sudden shout and leap to a tree limb, then climb and grin back down at her friends, her pa.s.sion for women's basketbal -the woman was a regular femme. She shopped at the mal s and primped before going out; she could whip up a tasty stir-fry and folded her laundry in thirds, patting it even.

Jefferson's phys ed background made her sensitive to the way people moved. It hadn't taken her long to notice that Dawn's left leg was less flexible than her right. Dawn didn't so much limp as have a slight hitch to her step. This seemed like a good time to ask whether she had been injured.

"No," Dawn answered. "Agent Orange touched al of us in one way or another. One of my sisters had spina bifida. She died seven years ago because her urinary tract was malformed and there was not much they could do surgical y. My brother is slightly mental y r.e.t.a.r.ded, but he can do farm work. Mom had three miscarriages. The chemical can make babies more p.r.o.ne to infection, and that's what I had, a bone infection. They had to remove some of the bone. My left leg is shorter than the right and the leg didn't develop like it should. They said I almost died. Carrying this leg around helps me remember how lucky I am to be alive, despite Agent Orange. Both Mom and Dad were exposed to it. Mom has scars on her hands and back, and Dad has leukemia.

She whistled and touched Dawn's cheek lightly with her knuckles. "Yet you're always laughing. Couldn't have been much fun for a little girl. Or a big girl."

"Years of exercise regimes right into my teens. But I showed them. I downhil ski, I water-ski, and two years ago I learned to s...o...b..ard. Some day I'l get a wetsuit and drive over to the sh.o.r.e to surf. Read my blog. It's the first place I've been able talk about it."

"I don't think I could read it. Blogs make me feel like I'm reading people's diaries. Tel me why such an active person went into library work?"

"Oh, it's exciting! I've always read a lot and I think reading is the cure for al il s in this society. Look at the prejudice against gays. It comes from lack of education. If we could get books about us into the schools and libraries it could be our era of enlightenment, Jefferson."

"That simple, is it?"

"No, it's not simple at al , but it can be done." Dawn emphasized her point with a gentle touch on Jefferson's leg. "My first job was as a worker bee in the NYC Public Library. I was only a page so I had a lot of public contact, and I saw al sorts of kids looking for books about themselves."

"You were in the city?"

"I got my master's from the School of Information and Library Science at Pratt. I interned at the Yorkvil e Branch of the New York Public Library. It was between Second and Third avenues."

"I know it."

"Do you?" Dawn gave a buoyant little laugh. "Everyone around here seems to think I made up this fairy tale about living in New York or else why wouldn't I stil be there?"

"Good question."

Dawn looked over at her. "Why aren't you?"

She thought for a moment of a way to say it al in a nutshel . "I've only known the city and our summer place. The city stopped working for me. I needed to start fresh, to leave some things behind." She paused to see if she wanted to share more, but, no, talking about Ginger wasn't in her game plan today. "I feel more alive here now than I do in the city, though when I was younger, I felt more alive there." She checked herself for the truth of this and found she felt exactly that way. "And why didn't you stay?"

"Oh," she said, with that openness of hers that made Jefferson feel like she could trust her in everything. "My parents paid the tuition on the condition that I come back here when there was an opening I liked. They don't exactly grow on trees, smal -town library jobs. So it didn't happen for a while. We tend to stay til we retire." Dawn laughed again. Jefferson noticed that her blue eyes appeared streaked with light. "And on our wages, we don't retire young, us stuffy old librarians."

Jefferson laughed with her, al too aware that she was guilty of imposing the stuffy stereotype on fun-loving Dawn. She spotted a foal huddling near its mother.

Dawn cried, "Cute," and, in her chatty way, launched into yet another anecdote about growing up on the farm, this one having to do with a kitten who thought a foal was his mother.

"I haven't laughed this much in years," Jefferson admitted. How could she not respond to such open expressions of joy?

"I have to say," Dawn replied, "you're easy."

Laughing yet again, she said, "Tel me about working in the city. It must have been different for you, after," she spread her arms to indicate the farm, "this." She found herself missing the city or maybe missing her coaching days. She stil had her national credentials. She'd have to think about getting back into it here in New Hampshire.

"In the city? I worked up from the circulation desk to col ections development," Dawn said as they rol ed past a col apsed barn. "I did materials selection, programming, bibliographic instruction, community outreach, and helped patrons with the Internet. The volume of users and shortage of staff made me feel like a production worker in a factory. I got to know a few patrons, and I stil get together with some of the staff when I go to library- a.s.sociation conferences and when I go to the city. Surviving that crazy busy job gave me the confidence to know I could run a rural library, even a smal , underfunded one. It seems like I work al the time now, going to meetings at night to keep the town's goodwil , fil ing in for volunteers who don't show up, but I love my job." Dawn laughed again. "If I move to Concord I'd work as much, but get paid better. And I'd be away from this board, or at least from the b.i.t.c.h on wheels."