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Georgia highway and watched Matthew fumble with the jack, flipping metal parts back and forth, clearly having no idea of how the thing worked. The tension made her lips thin and her neck tight. He’d deceived her. This was not her fault, she’d been careful this time. They’d been together for five months, and he’d done everything beautifully up till now. Even on the trip from Ohio to Florida, she’d admired the way he’d driven with such careless skill, one wrist draped over the wheel, the elbow of his other arm propped on the window edge. He’d looked as if he owned the road, and now he couldn’t work his own jack. Barbara sat down on the rear bumper of the Pontiac and thought about the duplicity of people and the slipperiness of life.
    Living in Tibbett had been hard enough even before Matthew’s wife Lois had started calling her the Bank Slut. Tibbett wasn’t the kind of place that let mistakes go unnoticed, something Barbara had known early from hearing her mother and father talk about everyone in town. “Cheat,” her father would say. “Whore,” her mother would add. “Liar.” “Fool.” “Bum.” Barbara knew that everybody in Tibbett judged everybody else because her mother told her so. “People watch,” she’d told Barbara. “They watch and they talk behind their curtains. You be careful how you act.” Barbara had felt sorry for them, scared for all the people who were out there—the troublemakers, the sluts, the drunks—although she’d always felt safe herself, tucked behind her father’s good name.
    Then her father had gone bankrupt when she was a senior in high school, and she’d been left out in the open. “I just got some bad breaks,” her father had told her then. “Made a few mistakes. Don’t worry, people forget.” But Barbara had known those were just excuses. People didn’t forget. Her father had told her that her life would be all right because she was a Niedemeyer, and then he screwed up and it wasn’t, and she hadn’t been safe since.
    Matthew exhaled loudly and said, “You could help some here,” and Barbara ignored him. How could she help? He was just like her father, turning to her mother and saying, “You’ll have to go to work now.” She could remember her mother’s face, the shock and the shame and the anger. Her mother hadn’t known how to work. Barbara did, she’d made sure of that, she was never going to depend on a man for money, she was never going to look like her mother had that day. But money didn’t protect you from life, you needed a man for that, somebody who had a good name and basic skills. Somebody not like her father. And now, not like Matthew.
    Matthew swore and Barbara seethed. It wasn’t as if she’d asked him to split an atom, for heaven’s sake. He should have known how to work his own jack; this was his fault.
    It was all their faults really. They’d come to the house to fix her roof (that was Gil) or her electricity (Louis) or her plumbing (Matthew), and she’d been truly grateful that they knew so much. It wasn’t that Barbara wasn’t competent; she was head teller at the First National Bank at only twenty-eight after all, and that hadn’t been easy, walking in there straight out of high school, saying she was Barbara Niedemeyer, watching people act like they didn’t know the name, like they thought she was just anybody’s daughter. No, it was that life held so many pitfalls for a woman, so many uncertainties, and these were men who were certain. “I can patch that right up for you,” Gil had said. “But the next time you have that roof done, you tell them to tear it off, not roof over it.” “You need a bigger box,” Louis had said. “Running this kind of load off that old box, you’ll have trouble in no time.” And Matthew had been the same—“Copper pipe, definitely,” he’d said. “Wouldn’t want somebody as pretty as you to get lead poisoning”—they’d all been the same, all happily married, solid