"Someone's bugging you?"

"Donna Green, the book-banner. She and her husband retired and built a gigantic McMansion over on Winnipesaukee. She doesn't want a lesbian running her library. I'd rather leave than get fired for some trumped-up reason that covers up h.o.m.ophobia."

"I remember going through that. You're d.a.m.ned either way."

"You are. She's driving off other board members-they can't work with her. Why don't you volunteer for the board?"

"Me? Oh, Dawn, thank you for the compliment. They want respectable people on boards, not gays."

"Jef." Dawn used her nickname for the first time, a sign of warmth that gave Jefferson unexpected pleasure. "I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you are respectable. You're a home owner with roots in the area, people know your parents, you're a realtor, a volunteer coach-how much more respectable could you be?"

"It's hard to forget, you know: getting fired so much, blowing my chance at professional golf, the drinking, al the women."

Dawn was smiling with what looked like affection. "You sound more proud than worried about your sordid past."

She realized Dawn was right and grinned. "I did relish certain parts of being the big bad wolf."

"I'l bet you did," Dawn said with a knowing grin. "I think you're trying to get out of being on the board."

"I'm not much for sitting around listening."

Dawn said nothing. This, thought Jefferson, is how femmes get me into bed. "I'l give it a try," she conceded.

"It would be so terrific to have one more vote. I mean, this woman was livid when she saw my banned-book-week posters. She wanted to burn them."

"If she quits, I get to resign?"

Dawn smiled. "We'l revisit it if and when, okay?"

She shook her head as Dawn changed the subject. "There's Stil water Lake. It's always been too shal ow and mossy for swimming, but it makes canoeing interesting."

She imagined paddling with Dawn to the treed island she could see partway across the lake. But no, she had to get out of the habit of viewing every femme as a potential fling. That wouldn't do in a smal town where you were likely to see the woman the next day at Food Fresh or couldn't borrow a library book without an awkward encounter.

What a b.u.mmer. She was free. She could see whoever she wanted and without guilt. Here was this lovely woman whose eyes, raised at the corners and narrow-lidded, hinted of her Viet-French ancestry.

Jefferson's hands felt so empty these days. She spent parts of her wakeful nights longing to press her body against another woman's, longing to hold her hands and to feel her lips, as she had longed for Ginger, sleeping beside her, but unattainable most of their years together. The need for a lover had an urgency like a powerful spring fever that consumed her. It had always been like this, from Angie on, and during the day her restless vision darted into shadows, searching. She felt like some sort of love missile, on fire herself, seeking heat akin to her own. She was reemerging after Ginger and was bowled over by the raging emotions and urges of a seventeen-year-old. She didn't want to leave the coc.o.o.n of her safe solitude. It's no wonder I drank back then, she thought. Was there no escape from longing?

At the same time she felt worn-out, too old for love games. Her body, once so like an adolescent boy's, was breaking down. Her knees hurt when she walked. Lifting her grandmother's heavy frying pan brought back her golf elbow. She was growing softer and rounder, but early arthritis limited the exercise she could do. She wasn't golfing these days either. Who would want to be courted by someone turning gray in al the wrong places?

Dawn was explaining more about her job. Jefferson was trying to listen, but real y was deciding that she was kidding herself. Being a lover was for kids, yet she felt like a kid. What was up with that? Was it menopause coming on like an enormous fast bal , messing with her hormones so she didn't feel the urge one day and it slammed her the next? Its timing was good, given that she was going to live here, so far from cruise central, where she'd either be prowling every night or completely out of the loop, home moping. She sort of missed the edge cheating gave her. There was no getting away from it. She was stil , when she was switched on, a compulsive lover and a chronic seducer. Ginger had been perfect for her: a permanent chal enge and frustration.

Jefferson lived in hope, always at the ready, seduction refined to something so subtle Ginger could not be offended at Jefferson's overtures. Jefferson waited and tried and went elsewhere, but always came back, burning for Ginger.

The burning had not disappeared; only Ginger was gone. Ginger was the dance of love, always dancing away, Jefferson always in pursuit.

Dawn had grown silent. Jefferson glanced at her. She real y was a pretty woman. Sitting by her side was a pleasure. Dawn looked her way. They smiled. She kissed her fingertips and touched Dawn's cheek again, overcome with a shyness she'd never experienced before.

"Your farm," she said as it came into view, "is picture-perfect." They had pa.s.sed miles of summer corn and now she saw a herd of hefty cattle off in the distance. Herefords, Dawn told her. The two-rail picket fence along the road was a pristine white, and the stone wal by the entrance to the driveway was in perfect shape. As they drove around to the back of the house she noticed that the kitchen garden had rows of lettuce, squash, green beans, strawberries, spinach, and more. The deer fence around it must have been eight feet high. The house glowed white with neat dark blue shutters and clean many-paned windows that looked like originals.

"Dawn," cried a smal woman with rouged-looking tan skin darker than Dawn's.

"Aunt Tuyat." Dawn put her arms, black purse dangling, around her aunt.

"You stay for lunch?"

"We had lunch, Aunty. This is my friend Jefferson."

"Jefferson?" Dawn's aunt seemed to be tasting the name. "How do you do?" She looked at Dawn. "Older friend," she commented, smiling at Jefferson.

"I am very pleased to meet you, Ms.-"

"Cal me Aunty, like Dawn does. Come in, come in."

Dawn whispered, "They never know who's a friend, who's a lover. She thinks you're too old for me."

Fol owing Dawn into the house, Jefferson nodded, even as she admired the slight shimmy in Dawn's walk. Aunty was probably right.

The Northways' kitchen was big. A young boy sat at the table eating from a bowl with a fork.

"My nephew, Tong," Dawn said. The boy smiled and nodded, mouth ful .

A woman very like the one who had greeted them outside entered the room with a tray of empty dishes.

"Mom, meet my friend Jefferson. Is Dad awake?"

"Yes, yes. He is stil awake, finishing his coffee and his cigarette. He wil sleep soon. Go see him."

Mr. Northway was in bed, gaunt, pale, his legs long under a dark green comforter. The room smel ed like rubbing alcohol and was very hot. Her dad had given Dawn her height and then seemed to have run out of the tal gene, as her siblings were shorter. He smiled broadly as Dawn hugged him.

"He smiles al the time," Dawn said as she led Jefferson out a back door. "No matter how bad he feels. He treats my mother like a porcelain dol .

That's their song together, 'China Dol ,' the Grateful Dead song, not the old one. He's a happy man. It's like, he is stil so happy to have gotten through Vietnam alive and to have found something beautiful to bring back from his experience, he's content despite being so sick." Chickens ran up to her, away from her, and under Jefferson's feet. "These are Rhode Island Whites. They're good layers and hardy in the cold, except for their combs. Come on, girls, let us through."

The barn was next, clean and modern. Dawn hugged one of the young men working there. "Another cousin," she explained. "Eric." Once outside, Dawn lowered her voice. "Mom brought over as many of her relatives from Vietnam as were left. Her family worked so hard on the farm with Dad that he was able to expand it. Now that he's so sick, there's plenty of help. Northway Farm doesn't have to sel out to developers like so many of my friends'

parents have."

"This place must be as big as Central Park," Jefferson said. They were headed toward woods that bordered one side of the Northway land. She remembered the tiny s.p.a.ce behind the candy store Angela had lived in with her parents and thought of how far they both had traveled from that first glorious kiss.

"Oh, at least twice that size. Dad and Mom own 1,560 acres and raise corn, soybeans, and hay. They have 110 head of dairy cows and a good-sized herd of sows over across the road."

"That's al the same farm? With a road running through it?"

"Happens al the time." Dawn looked to their right and said, "Race you to the wal ."

Jefferson, with her menopausal weight gain, felt c.u.mbersome running after her. "I used to be faster than that." She was laughing and out of breath, rubbing a st.i.tch in her side.

They stepped over another stone wal , then climbed a hil . She wobbled a little going over, but caught herself before Dawn looked back. That darned arthritis again. Dawn pointed to another farmhouse some distance away along the road that split the farm. There was no mistaking that Dawn loved the place; her eyes shone with that gladness she so often saw in Dawn.

"Dad and my uncles built the other big house. The Vos-Mom's maiden name is Vo-live there. Two of my nieces and nephews are going to col ege, but four want to be farmers. Lan, my oldest cousin, has already bought adjacent land and is working it with Dad's equipment in exchange for her labor here. She wants to get into heritage seeds and sel to restaurants and gourmet shops."

"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 real y want to move to Concord, especial y 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 gra.s.s. "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 al day. Walks the empty cans to the tree stump and target-shoots. Her brothers sold al the family land except where the house stands, mostly to us, and they work at the bal -bearing factory in Laconia to support their families and Dee, al 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 al 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 crabgra.s.s. 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 col ege. 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 wil 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 chil y. In the city, the streets would be bustling; here only a flock of some smal 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 al kindness and concern, Dawn asked, "Jefferson? Are you al 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.

Chapter Thirty-Six.

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 ma.s.saging 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 physical y, 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. Real y. I'm venting," Dawn said, with a sad little smile. She wore a T-shirt with a rainbow that read, Rainbows Are So Ghay.

G.o.d, 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 fal en 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 Hil s, 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.

"d.y.k.es 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 fol ow you out of here."

"And you know what Shannon wil 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 al the others."

"Hey, Dawn, dirty pool. Now get lost while I solve al your problems."