Beggar of Love (35 page)

“I think it’s better. The more land that’s available to wildlife, the more they can thrive.”

“You’re a closet liberal, Buck,” she teased him, kicking back in her recliner and locking her fingers behind her head.

“I can’t think of anything more truly conservative than conserving nature,” he said, with that winning smile. “It’s a shame we have to depend on the government to protect so much of it.” He had Star on her back in his arms and was scratching her tummy, but now he looked sad. “You don’t know where to devote your energies or who to send money to. So much is needed. A cure for cancer would be a priority for me right now.”

“Don’t you think Serena will make it?”

“Serena’s been making it for about ten years now. I think the cancer is catching up with her.”

“You think she’s going to—”

He nodded and lifted Lionel. Star spat and wriggled free. “The cancer has spread.”

What had people said to her when Ginger was sick? “I’m really sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“What can I do?”

Buck laughed quietly. “You’re doing it, coming into the business with me. I never wanted a big firm, but I do need a second agent.”

She bowed. “At your service.”

“And I like your lack of ambition.”

His words startled her. “I do want to make sales, Buck.”

Buck put a hand up. “I know, but you don’t want to develop every parcel of lakefront. Some agents are so money hungry they’re blind to the consequences of their greed. I see the realty business as a service, not a get-rich-quick scheme, although it’s been good to us. Putting a big chunk of land like the Kents’ into the Trust’s hands is better for our bottom line than ten gated developments that destroy the reasons people want to live here.”

“I don’t need to get filthy rich,” she assured him. “But I am going to have some cat-food bills to pay now.” She rattled a box of treats. Lionel looked up and the other kittens came running. “Whoops. That was a bad move. Here, go ahead and give them some, Buck.”

Unlike most guys, Buck didn’t claim more than his share of space, but she could not imagine living, sleeping, with—oh, ugh, facial hair, and all the rest. She thought, how could you, Ginger?

Buck was talking about a commercial building in town that he had listed, and the kittens were tumbling over one another on the kitchen floor. When her cell phone rang she expected it to be for Buck, but it was her mother.

“Ginger’s brothers are here, at the apartment,” Emmy said.

“What are they doing there?”

“They want her things.”

She’d put off going through Ginger’s closet. It was too painful. “Did they say where they’re moving them to?”

Emmy consulted with them and she heard Kevin reply, “Home. To our parents’ apartment.”

“Let me talk to him, Emmy.”

Kevin was the one who gave Ginger the roughest time about living with a girl. What did the family want with Ginger’s possessions? There were lesbian books and photos of them together. “Kevin,” she complained, “I’d like to keep a few items.”

“Calm down. They want something to remember her by.”

“I’m trying to remember what’s what. Leave the books, okay? Hers and mine are all mixed in,” she lied. “And there’s a box of photos, nothing your parents would want.”

“Where’s the urn?”

“The urn?”

“With my sister’s ashes. Mom and Dad at least want to bury her ashes.”

“Kevin, Ginger wrote the family that she wanted her ashes scattered here at the lake. I already went out in the boat and did that.”

The line was silent for a long moment. She could imagine Kevin struggling with his hot temper. “Tell your mother where everything is, okay? I need to get this done before five.”

“It’s the things in the guest-room closet, isn’t it, Amelia?”

She didn’t want to sound desperate to her mother and named a few other items. “You can buy a new toaster, Emmy,” she said to her mother’s protests. “I’ll buy you a new microwave. It’s Ginger’s and it’s very old. Give them my number here and my e-mail address in case they need to get hold of me.” She knew she was trying to avoid cutting the last ties. “Don’t let them take—” She listed a few items they had bought together or she had bought for Ginger.

“They’re starting to pack things. I need to go, Amelia.”

“Give my contact information to Joseph, not the older one, not Kevin.” She wished it had been Joseph she’d talked to. He’d been closer to Ginger and more sensitive than Kevin. He’d once given Jefferson a framed sketch he’d done from a photograph of Ginger dancing. She’d never felt more accepted by the family than at that moment.

“Everything all right?” Buck asked when she ended the call.

She’d never said anything to him about being gay. Surely he’d figured it out. Would she lose his mentorship, her job, if she was open? “I lost someone I love too, Buck,” she said, waiting to see if he preferred not to know.

“It was the woman you mentioned—Ginger? Is that why you left the city?”

“Staying on alone,” she explained. “The person leaves her marks everywhere. Your home, your block, your friends’ houses, your favorite restaurant. Like echoes coming back from someplace you can never reach again.”

“Did Ginger die?”

“Yes. Here, at the cottage.”

Buck’s face was full of sympathy. “I’m really sorry. How long had you been…friends?”

“Something like thirty years.”

Almost whispering, Buck said, “Us too.”

That made her eyes smart with tears. She turned away and got the carton of milk from the refrigerator.

“Not for me, thanks,” Buck said. “I need to pick up some Kytril from the pharmacy and get home with it. The old nausea med stopped working.”

She nodded, still unable to speak. She wasn’t the only one not having fun. The cats scattered when Buck stood. He held out his arms and looked at her. They hugged quickly, tight.

“See you at the office,” Buck said as he replaced the chair, scraping its rubber casters against the linoleum. He let himself out.

She stood in the kitchen swallowing her tears. It was always like this. Suddenly she’d find herself howling in protest and pain, having no memory of a transition from not thinking about Ginger to full-throttle hurting, usually late at night, with nothing to distract her. Bent double once more with the agony of loss, she let the tears out. Some day she would stop crying. Some day she would move on. Doze stared at her, then came timidly and rubbed against her ankle. She felt a smile break through her tears, along with an exhilarating swell of love. What could she learn about love from six kittens? Adopting them, wanting to care for them, being loved was the best decision she’d ever made.

Dawn, who in the city would be called a sporty femme, sat slightly inside the wide, dark doorway of her garage. If someone had asked Jefferson what a sporty, or tomboy, femme was, she would have mentioned girls’ softball and basketball and power tools. She would have described a woman not afraid of a challenge, who could also fold clothes neatly, cook well, and make a butchy woman feel powerful even as she gave over her power to the sporty femme.

“What’s this one going to be?” asked Jefferson.

Dawn was whittling with an old green Girl Scout jackknife. She held the carving up and laughed. “A bird. Doesn’t look like much, does it? I’m trying to get the wood to curve as smooth as a woman’s hip.”

Jefferson raised one eyebrow, but Dawn didn’t notice. Although Dawn’s conversation was not without sexual references, she hadn’t expected her to say something that sounded so butchy. This rural Amerasian librarian was so unique that she was fascinated.

It was a mostly sunny day. Every now and then a dark cloud blocked the light enough that Dawn set the bird down. Jefferson couldn’t help but wonder if country femmes seemed butchier than city femmes because they had to be more self-reliant. Once she would have checked this notion out, but these days she was about as interested as that wooden bird would be. Her life had a certain skeletal feeling right now that both scared and comforted her. Without the complications of juggling relationships, she felt free, but she had no clue about how to live unencumbered, with only herself to consider. These new friends, like this cheerful tomboy femme—she hadn’t built much history with them, had no commitment to them, hadn’t made love with them. She was still a free agent.

Her cell rang. She popped her Bluetooth headset into her ear and retreated to the side of the garage. It was someone rescheduling an appointment to look at a house.

“Shannon Wiley!” Dawn said when the stringy, shambling surfer-dude dyke strode into view, pushing her bike. The sun followed Shannon, who wore a silver-and-blue Xena T-shirt.

“I got a flat a block from here,” her visitor said, pulling a small tool kit from the saddle bags and flipping the bike onto its handlebars. “Here.” Shannon took a bunch of forget-me-nots from a pocket inside her jacket and handed it to Dawn, cheeks dimpling in an obvious struggle not to smile too widely.

While the flowers weren’t a blatant courting gesture, they were more than what most friends would do. Instead of accepting them, Dawn lifted her black hair, with its strands of gray, up from her eyes, and said, “Would you fill the jelly jar on the shelf over the sink and stick them in it? I’m feeling too lazy to get up.”

Shannon always did what Dawn told her to and had the jar of flowers by her feet in seconds, then walked to the other side of the driveway and rolled a tree stump over to her bike, sat down, and started fiddling with the flat tire. Dawn looked at the flowers and shook her head, smiling at Jefferson. She held out her hands, one with the bird, one empty, as if to say, “What can I do?”

To get past her awkwardness about Dawn making a co-conspirator of her, Jefferson asked, “Where’d you get all these stumps? There must be a dozen.”

“When I moved here, the back lot was full of them. It’d been logged off decades ago, from the looks of it. I hired a little backhoe and dug them out. The next year, when they were dry, I used my chain saw to flatten the bottoms. I like them for sitting and for chopping wood, for drying flowers, for sawhorses, to look at.”

Jefferson had never met anyone like Dawn, so feminine yet unafraid of guys’ work. “And you learned to operate a backhoe where?”

“My dad has one at the farm,” Dawn replied, intensely sanding a bump on the bird’s tail.

Shannon said, “Geeze, my father won’t let me near his circular saw, much less heavy equipment.”

“I was the eldest. I got to teach the boys when they came along.”

“Are all country girls like you?” Jefferson asked Dawn.

“Why? Do you need a couple?”

“A couple of country girls?” Jefferson asked, trying to pass herself off as an innocent.

Someone laughed, and Dawn looked up under her glasses at Jefferson with a smile. “I was offering tree stumps.”

When Jefferson said thanks anyway, Dawn tried Shannon. “How about you?”

Jefferson realized her hands were hot and glanced around. Who was setting off her desire alarm? It had to be Dawn. She stuffed her hands in her hoodie pocket. Dawn? Really? She wasn’t ready for this.

Shannon was saying, “I have real sawhorses and real lawn chairs, thank you very much.”

“How can you fit all that in that cabin you’re renting?” Dawn asked, an edgy sharpness to her teasing. She wondered if they were exes.

Shannon looked down. Was she embarrassed about where she lived? “My landlady lets me have space in the old barn.”

A cloud bumped the sunlight. The day was both cool and not cool, kind of indecisive, the way spring could be. Shannon was following Dawn’s hands as they whittled. The poor kid might start drooling if she was deprived of those hands another minute.

“Killer carving,” Shannon said. “Can I see it?”

“Not till I’m done.”

“I can live with that,” Shannon quickly said, pursing her lips and nodding, while obviously thinking the opposite.

They sat in silence while Dawn gently carved shavings from the bird’s breast. Now and then Jefferson cupped a hand underneath and caught them. They smelled like something from her past; she couldn’t name what. She could see Shannon’s attraction to those delicate yet sure hands. But a librarian? Maybe the stereotype put her off, but as much as she liked Dawn, she couldn’t think of her as a lover. The truth was, she didn’t think of anyone as a lover. That part of her was still dormant.

Shannon’s hair, Jefferson thought, must really get noticed in conservative Pipsborough. Shannon had told her she’d moved back to the lake from Nashua less than a year ago. Jefferson suspected you could be a little weird in a town that size, but not here. If Shannon stayed in Pipsborough with long brown hair for the rest of her life, she wouldn’t live down the impression of wildness her current do gave. Here or anywhere on Saturday Lake. Lake people seemed to have a memory for anything different, unless you were actually from the lakes, like Dawn, who had told her that her family had a farm over near Stillwater Lake. She’d promised to drive Jefferson out to see the farm and Jefferson was curious, but very leery of getting closer. She could feel Dawn’s interest coming off her like waves of warmth from a woodstove. Dawn wasn’t interested in Shannon, the one who wanted her. She smiled: lesbians were the same everywhere.