Barbed Wire

A woman acts a certain way when she’s in love. I know, because I remember how Joan took to me before we married. Now I see it again, only this time it ain’t my doing, because in the morning when I go to kiss her and she pulls away from me, I know there’s something bad smothering us, bad like the morning fog that clouds a perfectly good view of Balsam Mountain.

“Let’s go out to eat tonight,” I say. I follow Joan into the kitchen and reach out my hand to touch her shoulder.

“We can’t afford to,” she says, and bends away so my hand can’t reach her. “Not when we’ve got food in the refrigerator.”

I tell her we’ve been eating store-bought food going on two weeks, but she don’t budge. “Maybe this weekend,” she says. “Besides, I’ll be late getting home tonight.”

“Why?” I ask, as if I hadn’t seen her and Bobby Harmon talking every time I walk into Bi-Lo. Like I hadn’t seen them drive off together at lunchtime.

“I already told you,” she says. “Bobby’s making us work overtime. It’s only an hour or two.”

I try not to think what can happen in an hour or two, or all the overtime she’s worked, how those hours never show up on her paycheck. I try not to think of the perfume she sprays on her neck when she leaves in the morning, as if to cover up some plainness with our lives she ain’t satisfied with.

Before she heads out the door I look to make sure she’s still wearing her ring. She’s never took it off that I know of, but I keep looking. It’s like a man glancing out his window every five minutes, waiting for the first storm of winter to set in. Only it’s not winter yet, because the first reds and yellows on the maple trees on top of Laurel Mountain have only flared out some. The autumn woods have yet to light up like something on fire.

After Joan leaves I scout through the newspaper, but my mind creeps back to Bobby, that pretty wife of his and their big house out on Laurel Point, the subdivision carved into the side of the mountain like a picture painted on a postcard—and none of it’s good enough for him. I wonder if that pretty wife of his feels the way I do as she watches Bobby leave for work. If she looks for that glitter of gold on his ring finger. I wonder if she smells the cologne sprayed on his neck, if the scent reminds her of the smell of change.

The morning cold stiffens my knee bad, and I bend down to rub it though it don’t do no good. Eight years laying asphalt on a road crew wore that knee down to bone, and the surgery I had on it two months ago didn’t help none. I think about what the doctor told me after he took a glance inside my knee. You’ll never feel like a young man again, Joey. I thought surgery was supposed to heal people, so I didn’t know what he meant, not until last month when the weather turned cold and stiffened the joint good. Not until I tried going back to work a couple days ago and lasted all of one hour, the foreman telling me to go home until my knee was all healed, not knowing that a thing like this never really heals. I think about Bobby, how I see him running along Cove Creek Road near every morning, and Bobby already forty years old, ten years my senior. That wife of his sometimes follows behind him like an afterthought, her shadow a darkness he can’t shake.

It’s near ten o’clock when I hear Joan’s car pull into the driveway. I think how there used to be a sweetness to that sound, like where a river enters...