Jamie pushed back her chair.
“We do need to be going.”
“At least let me wrap you up something for supper,” Grandma Chastain said.
Jamie thought about how much work they had to do and how good it would be not to have to cook.
“Okay, Grandma,” she said.
MATT WAS IN the car when she came out, the engine running and his hands gripping the steering wheel. Jamie placed the leftovers in the backseat and got in beside Matt.
“You could have waited for me,” she said.
“If I’d stayed any longer I’d of said some things you wouldn’t want me to,” Matt said, “and not just to Linda. Your mother and grandma need to keep their advice to themselves.”
“They just care about me,” Jamie said, “about us.”
They drove back to the house in silence and worked until dusk. As Jamie cleaned the blinds she heard Matt’s hammer tapping above as if he was nailing her shut inside the house. She thought about the rattlesnake, how it could easily have bitten Matt, and remembered twelve years earlier, when her mother and Mr. Jenkins, the elementary school principal, appeared at the classroom door.
“Your daddy’s been hurt,” her mother said. Charlton was outside waiting in the logging truck, and they drove the fifteen miles to the county hospital. Her father had been driving a skid loader that morning. It had rained the night before and the machine had turned over on a ridge. His hand was shattered in two places, and there was nerve damage as well. Jamie remembered stepping into the white room with her mother and seeing her father in the bed, a morphine drip jabbed into his arm like a fang. If that skidder had turned over one more time you’d be looking at a dead man, her father had told them. Charlton had quit high school and worked full-time cutting pulpwood to make sure food was on the table that winter. Her father eventually got a job as a night watchman, a job, unlike cutting pulpwood, a man needed only one good hand to do.
“I GET SCARED for you, for us,” Jamie said that night as they lay in bed. “Sometimes I wish we’d never had the chance to buy this place.”
“You don’t mean that,” Matt said. “This place is the best thing that might ever happen to us. How many chances do young folks get to own a house on a lake? If we hadn’t seen Old Man Watson’s sign before the real-estate agents did, they’d have razed the house and sold the lot alone to some Floridian at twice what we paid.”
“I know that,” Jamie said, “but I can’t help being scared for you. It’s just like things have been too easy for us. Look at Charlton. Him and Linda have been married ten years and they’re still in a trailer. Linda says good luck follows us around like a dog that needs petting all the time. She thinks you and me getting this house is just one more piece of luck.”
“Well, the next time she says that you tell her anybody with no better sense than to have three kids the first five years she’s married can’t expect to have much money left for a down payment on a house, especially with a skidder to pay off as well.”
Matt turned his head toward her. She could feel the stir of his breath.
“Linda’s just jealous,” he said, “that and she’s still pissed off Charlton’s paying me percentage. Linda best be worrying about her own self. She’s got troubles enough at home without stirring up troubles for other people.”
“You mean Charlton’s drinking?”
“Yeah. Every morning this week he’s reeked of alcohol, and it ain’t his aftershave. The money they waste on whiskey and her on makeup and fancy hairdos could help make a down payment, not to mention that Bronco when they already had a perfectly good car. Damn, Jamie, they got three vehicles and only two people to drive them.”
Matt placed his hand on the back of Jamie’s head, letting his fingers run through her cropped hair, hair shorter than his. His voice softened.
“You make your own luck,” Matt said. “Some will say we’re lucky when you’re working in a dentist’s office and I’m a shift supervisor in a plant, like we hadn’t been planning that very life since we were juniors in high school. They’ll forget they stayed at home nights and watched TV instead of taking classes at Tech. They’ll forget how we worked near full-time jobs in high school and saved that money when they wasted theirs on new trucks and fancy clothes.”
“I know that,” Jamie said. “But I get so tired of people acting resentful because we’re doing well. It even happens at the café. Why can’t they all be like Charlton, just happy for us?”
“Because it reminds them they’re too lazy and undisciplined to do it themselves,” Matt said. “People like that will pull you down with them if you give them the chance, but we’re not going to let them do that to us.”
Matt moved his hand slowly down her spine, letting it rest in the small of the back.
“It’s time to sleep, baby,” he said.
Soon Matt’s breathing became slow and regular. He shifted in the bed and his hand slipped free from her back. First, get the house fixed up, she told herself as she let her weariness and the sound of tree frogs and crickets carry her toward sleep.
TWO MORE WEEKS passed, and it was almost time for Jamie to turn the calendar nailed by the kitchen door. She knew soon the leaves would start to turn. Frost would whiten the grass and she and Matt would sleep under piles of quilts Grandma Alexander had sewn. They’d sleep under a roof that no longer leaked. After Charlton picked up Matt, Jamie caulked the back room, the room that would someday be a nursery. As she filled in cracks she envisioned the lake house when it was completely renovated — the walls bright with fresh paint, all the leaks plugged, a porcelain tub and toilet, master bedroom built onto the back. Jamie imagined summer nights when children slept as she and Matt walked hand in hand down to the pier, undressing each other to share again the unburdening of water.
Everything but the back room’s ceiling had been caulked when she stopped at one-thirty to eat lunch and change into her waitress’s uniform. She was closing the front door when she heard a vehicle bumping down through the woods to the house. In a few moments she saw her father’s truck, behind the windshield his distraught face. At that moment something gave inside her, as if her bones had succumbed to the weight of the flesh they carried. The sky and woods and lake seemed suddenly farther away, as if a space had been cleared that held only her. She closed her hand around the key in her palm and held it so tight her knuckles whitened. Her father kicked the cab door open with his boot.
“It’s bad,” he said, “real bad.” He didn’t cut off the engine or get out from behind the wheel. “Linda and Matt and your momma are already at the hospital.”
She didn’t understand, not at first. She tried to picture a situation where her mother and Linda and Matt could have been hurt together — a car wreck, or fire — something she could frame and make sense of.
“Momma and Linda are hurt too?” Jamie finally asked.
“No,” her father said, “just Charlton.” His voice cracked. “They’re going to have to take your brother’s leg off, baby.”
Jamie understood then, and at that moment she felt many things, including relief that it wasn’t Matt.
WHEN THEY ENTERED the waiting room, her mother and Linda sat on a long green couch. Matt sat opposite them in a blue plastic chair. Dried blood stained his work shirt and jeans. He stood up, his face pale and haggard as he embraced her. Jamie smelled the blood as she rested her head against his chest.
“We were cleaning limbs,” Matt said, “and the saw jumped back and dug into his leg till it got to bone. I made a tourniquet with my belt, but he still like to have bled to death.” Matt paused. “Charlton shouldn’t have been running that saw. He’d been drinking.”