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family men with good reputations, the kind of men that Barbara wanted to depend on someday, the kind that would never leave her stranded. She admired them for that and told them so and then it turned out that they weren’t that happy after all, that their wives had changed after they’d gotten married, that they were lonely, wistful, unappreciated.
    Barbara had appreciated them. She couldn’t help it. She’d been so grateful they were protecting her from roof leaks and power failures, and they’d been so grateful she’d noticed that they were good at things, and then they’d moved in and one day she noticed that they didn’t know that much after all, that they made mistakes on ordinary things, and that scared her, and she had to let them go. Look at what had happened to her mother; one mistake in marriage and she still couldn’t hold her head up in public, still spent all her time hiding in the house, taking care of the man who’d let her down.
    Matthew was standing now, staring at the jack as if he were trying to learn it by looking at it. He’d been so competent back in Ohio, telling her not to worry about a thing, he’d take care of it all. He’d looked so solid there in his blue work shirt with Ferguson Plumbing embroidered right on the shirt, not on a patch. Barbara had relaxed a little just because there wasn’t a patch, because his name was a permanent part of the shirt, not just ironed on, not something that might peel off with wear.
    First he put in her new copper pipes and her leaks stopped, and she was grateful. Then he came back and put in her new shower head and her shower pressure went up, and she told him he was wonderful. But then he came back again and didn’t charge her for putting a new stopper in the bathtub, and he fixed the plug on her lamp and cleared out her clogged gutter and told her that her dogwood needed potassium to bloom. And Barbara surrendered, helpless under the full force of his competence.
    Matthew caught his finger in the jack handle and swore again, and Barbara remembered everything she’d risked for him, remembered the day she’d gone by Lois’s beauty parlor and seen Lois come to the door with a customer, heard her say “Bank Slut” loudly, sounding the way Barbara’s mother used to, her voice fat with contempt. Barbara felt annoyed now with Lois. Lois should have been relieved when Barbara had taken Matthew off her hands. “Let the Bank Slut have him,” Lois should have said. “He’s worthless at changing tires.” Really, Barbara couldn’t see why Lois was upset at all. All she’d lost was Matthew.
    A Peachstate Cable truck came toward them and pulled off the road. The man who got out—medium height, nothing special, nothing awful, just a man—said, “Need some help?” like he didn’t care, and Matthew did one of those macho things where he said, “No, just this damn jack,” which really meant “God, yes, but I’m going to hate your guts if you can do this when I can’t.”
    Of course, the cable man could. Barbara moved to the edge of the road and watched as he flipped the pieces of the jack together and pumped the back of the car off the ground as if it were nothing. He had good shoulders, steady hands, thick dark hair. She grew calmer just watching him, and when he looked up and met her eyes—he had nice dark eyes—she smiled, grateful to be relieved.
    Matthew said, “Get off the damn road, Barbara. You’re going to get hit by a car.”
    The cable man stood up and nodded to Barbara. His overalls had “Randy” embroidered on a patch over the breast pocket. Randy was a good name. It sounded skilled. Randys worked with their hands. How had she ever found a plumber named Matthew?
    Randy said, “Got a spare?”
    Matthew fussed with the trunk. “I’m a plumber,” he told Randy, with a fake laugh. “Never use jacks.”
    Well, why not? He drove cars. He should know jacks. Excuses.
    Randy pulled out the spare. “It’s flat,” he said, and