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dangerously, in the logging camps.
    I say “more dangerously” because Nils Borkman supervised the logging camps; men were always getting injured there, but were they sometimes “injured” because of their remarks about my mom? One guy or another was always getting hurt at the lumberyard, too—occasionally, I’ll bet it was a guy who was repeating what he’d heard his wife or girlfriend say about my mother. (Her so-called husband hadn’t been in any hurry to marry her; he’d never lived with her, married or not, and
that boy
had no father—those were the remarks made about my mom, I imagine.)
    Grandpa Harry wasn’t a fighting man; I’m guessing that Nils Borkman stuck up for his beloved business partner, and for my mother.
    “He can’t work for six weeks—not with a busted collarbone, Nils,” I’d heard Grandpa Harry say. “Every time you ‘straighten out’ someone, as you put it, we’re stuck payin’ the workers’ compensation!”
    “We can afford the workers’ compensation, Harry—he’ll watch what he says the time next, won’t he?” Nils would say.
    “The ‘next time,’ Nils,” Grandpa Harry would gently correct his old friend.
    In my eyes, my mom was not only a couple of years younger than her mean sister, Muriel; my mother was by far the prettier of the two Marshall girls. It didn’t matter that my mom lacked Muriel’s operatic bosom and booming voice. Mary Marshall Dean was altogether better-proportioned. She was almost Asian-looking to me—not only because she was petite, but because of her almond-shaped face and how strikingly wide open (and far apart) her eyes were, not to mention the acute smallness of her mouth.
    “A jewel,” Richard Abbott had dubbed her, when they were first dating. It became what Richard called her—not “Mary,” just “Jewel.” The name stuck.
    And how long was it, after they were dating, before Richard Abbott discovered that I didn’t have my own library card? (Not long; it was still early in the fall, because the leaves had just begun to change color.)
    My mom had revealed to Richard that I wasn’t much of a reader, and this led to Richard’s discovery that my mother and grandmother were bringing books home from our town library for me to read—or
not
to read, which was usually the case.
    The other books that were brought into my life were hand-me-downs from my meddlesome aunt Muriel; these were mostly romance novels, the ones my crude elder cousin had read and rejected. Occasionally, Cousin Geraldine had expressed her contempt for these romances (or for the main characters) in the margins of the books.
    Gerry—only Aunt Muriel and my grandmother ever called her
Geraldine
—was three years older than I was. In that same fall when Richard Abbott was dating my mom, I was thirteen and Gerry sixteen. Since Gerry was a girl, she wasn’t allowed to attend Favorite River Academy. She was vehemently angry about the “all-boys’ factor” at the private school, because she was bused every school day to Ezra Falls—the nearest public high school to First Sister.
    Some of Gerry’s hatred of boys found its way into the marginalia she contributed to the hand-me-down romance novels; some of her disdain for boy-crazy girls was also vented in the margins of those pages. Whenever I was given a hand-me-down romance novel courtesy of Aunt Muriel, I read Gerry’s comments in the margins immediately. The novels themselves were stultifyingly boring. But to the tiresome description of the heroine’s first kiss, Gerry wrote in the margin: “Kiss me! I’ll make your gums bleed! I’ll make you
piss
yourself!”
    The heroine was a self-congratulatory prig, who would never let her boyfriend touch her breasts—Gerry responded in the margin with: “I would rub your tits
raw
! Just try to stop me!”
    As for the books my mother and grandmother brought home from the First Sister Public Library, they were (at best) adventure novels: seafaring stories, usually with