“You know that’s not true,” Edie hissed. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
He sighed, and his back softened slightly. “I don’t know how to do the right thing here. You’ve put me in an impossible position. I don’t even know what the right thing is.” He was whispering now, too, at least. Though Edie didn’t doubt that anyone in the room who wished to follow the conversation could.
“You go home,” Edie said. “In a few weeks, you pick me up from Quarantine. That’s what you do.”
“That’s not what will happen and you know it,” Jesse said. “You trust these people. Why? What have they done to deserve that from you?”
“Nothing,” Edie said. “I just feel like this is the right thing to do.” What she actually felt, saying this, was absurd. She had always scorned people who made statements like this: claims about their gut, their instincts. And what she felt, the impulse she’d acted on, it wasn’t even anything so sophisticated as an act of the gut. She’d simply acted, thoughtlessly. And for some reason, she didn’t regret it.
“Or maybe this is about me,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Maybe you want rid of me so bad you’re willing to risk your life.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “No, that’s not it at all.” She hugged him as fiercely as she could, one-armed, awkward. “I love you, Jesse,” she said, and she found that she meant it—she did love him—he was a good and flawed man who had given her a reason to keep living when she’d despaired of ever finding one. “I do.”
“I have a feeling, too,” Jesse said. “You know it? I have a feeling that we do this, and we never see each other again. That’s what I think. You and I split up, and that’s the end.”
“No,” she repeated. She rubbed her nose against the back of his neck, left-right, in refutation. “No.” She slid her hand forward, grasping the zipper of his microsuit, and worked it down as quietly as she could, though the noise was still humiliatingly loud in the little room, and Jesse jolted from the surprise of it. Still, though, she proceeded, his zipper, then hers, and he rolled onto his back, and she climbed atop him and leaned forward and whispered “No” into his ear again. The air in the shed was hot and close, the nearest person maybe half a dozen paces away, but she needed with all her heart to tell him this loving lie, and to make herself believe it, and so she said “No” again, this time in his other ear, and they moved quickly together, and Edie’s insides rang with the unexpected thrill of it, the audacity of it, and in this way they said goodbye to each other for good.
For now, Edie amended, lying beside him, catching her breath. Goodbye. For now.
Fourteen
Some Sunday mornings, when most of the villagers were gathered at Town Hall for the church service, June and Roz stayed home and had their own sacred ritual. Once a month, they cut each other’s hair.
Well, June cut Roz’s. When June’s frizzy curls crept past her shoulders, she’d take a turn on the stool as Roz snip-snip-snipped. But that was an easy job, one blunt pass across the length, no trick to it. Took only five or ten minutes. Roz’s hair, on the other hand, was straight and fine, and she, unlike June, was particular about the cut. She liked a kind of fade (the best June could manage without electric clippers) from crown to nape, then some longer layers on top and in the front. Utilitarian without being outright severe. It took a lot of work and skill to give Roz her signature look, and it struck them both as funny that June was the one who seemed, with her halo of feminine fluff, to be the half of the couple who made an effort.
But it was a pleasure, cutting Roz’s hair. A little music on the crank-charged Lily Pad—June had an extensive cache of digital audio files, though she found herself returning again and again to country singers from a long-gone age: Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Tammy Wynette—a pot of their daily dose of Salt tea, the window open to catch a breeze, weather permitting. They had their most important conversations this way, with June’s fingers running along Roz’s scalp, measuring, comparing lengths, and the whisk of the scissors just audible over the soundtrack of steel guitar and fiddle. This Sunday, June was talking her way around the situation with the OLE group, and what had happened to Leeda and Miles. Rambling, really. She’d said a lot of this before, but Roz was listening carefully anyway, offering affirmations in the right places, and the princes were snoring amiably at their feet.
“There are the rare people, like my daddy was, who live their beliefs. Crazy people, usually. Like Daddy. He was brilliant but crazy. He gave up his vestment, his whole way of life, and moved out here, because he thought it was the right thing to do.”
“So did your mother,” Roz said.
“But she wasn’t crazy.” June combed Roz’s bangs up, tweezed them between her right forefinger and middle finger, and did some expert quick cuts with the scissors pointed at the sprigs of hair. She was good at this. She took pride in it. “Mom went along with it. I guess that’s a kind of crazy. But it wasn’t her vision.”
“All right,” Roz said. “I’m following.”
“Daddy was a good kind of crazy. Useful. Then there’s the bad kind of crazy, like the fundamentalists, but those are two sides of a coin. Anyway, the ones who actually live what they believe are the rarest.”
“Thank goodness,” Roz said.
June laughed. “Yes, maybe so. The rest of us in the middle—what we think and do’s trickier. We’re trickier. We trick ourselves. We convince ourselves that we’re living according to our beliefs when we aren’t. Or we change our beliefs so they line up with how we live. Or we don’t believe anything.”
“Or don’t give it any thought one way or the other.”
“Oh, sure,” said June. “Which is maybe the same thing as not believing.” She swatted Roz’s shoulder. “Stop drinking for a minute. You’re moving your head too much.”
“Garsh, sorry.”
“Take me. I’m not like Daddy. I don’t have that kind of genius, and I don’t have that kind of crazy. I’m out here because I was raised out here. I don’t kid myself that I’d have been a crusader if Mama and Daddy had given me a life in-zone the way they could have.”
“Well,” Roz said, “I give you more credit than you give yourself, then.”
“You shouldn’t,” June said. “What I’m saying is, I don’t hold it against them, the Zoners. How they live. There’s a gift in not getting. You’re never asked to give it up. You don’t have to decide if you’re going to live with your hypocrisy or make a sacrifice that no one else around you’s willing to make, just as a symbol. That’s what we’re up against.” She combed her fingers down Roz’s neck, grazing gently, thoughtful. “I never saw myself winning those people over with just a sad story. But I thought our sad story might make them trust our good intentions long enough to get us to the next step.”