Текст книги "Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good"

Автор книги: Jan Karon

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter Three

I’m off,’ she said, giving him a kiss on the cheek.

‘To?’

‘Concrete World, for a birdbath and two frogs under an umbrella.’

‘Don’t do the frogs,’ he said. ‘Go and be as the butterfly.’

Out she went to the garage, in breezed Puny from the stoop.

‘It’s your short day,’ he said. ‘You don’t have time to torment me.’

‘I’ve always got time for that, Father.’

She was mischief itself, he could see it coming.

She removed her sweater, rolled it into a ball, stuffed it in her bag, put the whole business under the counter, and stood up, grinning.

‘Joe Joe says you fell out when he shined that light on you.’

‘And shoved a Glock .45 in my face. Wouldn’t you fall out?’

‘I’d drop dead on th’ spot.’

‘The truth is, I did not fall out, as you say; my knees went weak, that’s all. I trust he won’t be spreading such foolish news around town.’

She took the cushion off a kitchen stool, pummeled it. ‘He would never say a word, but I don’t know about Officer Greene, th’ ol’ so-an’-so. He might tell Ruby, an’ then, you know, party time.’

‘Party time?’

‘Everybody will know you fainted. But that’s okay, men faint a lot, it’s not just women that faint. A woman tells her husband she’s havin’ twins, an’ what does he do? He falls out. A man goes to th’ doctor an’ when he hears th’ bad news, he pitches headfirst off th’ table.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I have a friend who’s a nurse in Wesley. She says men fall out all th’ time.’ She gave what-for to another stool cushion.

‘Did Joe Joe do that when you announced you were having the girls?’

‘He actually did, I forgot about that. Hit his head on the bedstead.’ She was having a pretty good laugh about it. ‘It didn’t hurt him none, though.’

‘What about the second time around?’

‘Cool as a cucumber. Lord knows, twins don’t run in that family, they gallop. It’s nothin’ that ever come out of my family, I can tell you that.’

‘So tell Joe Joe I’ll keep quiet if he’ll keep quiet.’

‘More coffee?’

‘Half,’ he said, holding forth the mug.

‘All that uproar over nothin’,’ she said. ‘Who wouldn’t git in their car an’ shoot down to Georgia with their door wide open? Especially if her daughter was havin’ a baby a whole month early an’ lost th’ last one. If one of my girls was in that fix, I’d be leavin’ my door blared open, too.’ She rattled a handful of flatware out of the dishwasher and into a drawer. ‘It’s a good thing her neighbor spotted your car over there and called th’ police. It’s nice to know people still keep an eye out for each other.’

‘All’s well that ends well.’ He snipped the coupon from the Muse.

‘Seven pounds four ounces and a great pair of lungs, she said when Joe Joe an’ her neighbor called down to Georgia. An’ think about it—if you and Miss Cynthy hadn’t gone over to check, who knows what criminal element might’ve backed a truck in there an’ emptied th’ place?’

She lifted the lid on the Dutch oven, peered in. ‘Are you movin’ Barnabas down today?’

His heart sank.

‘I’ll help you. It’s got to git done.’

‘No, no. I mean yes. Monday. I think Monday. He likes it up there, you know. That’s home.’

‘But he’ll like it down here, too, once he gits used to it. Y’all are down here so much, it’ll be company for ’im. Where’s Miss Cynthy at?’

‘Buying a birdbath and two frogs under an umbrella.’ Actually, that was his wife’s code for buying art materials in Wesley.

‘She don’t need to buy those frogs, ever’body has frogs under a umbrella. You could not give me frogs under a umbrella. Does she want these beans cooked?’

‘She does.’

‘Did she soak ’em overnight?’

‘She did.’

‘Did she add ginger?’

‘I believe so.’

‘What are you doin’ today?’

‘Lunch with J.C. and Mule.’

‘Fancy Skinner’s sister is movin’ here from Tennessee, she’ll have ’er own chair at A Cut Above.’

‘So I hear.’

‘You need a trim really bad.’

Here it comes, he thought. For a full decade, Puny Guthrie had monitored his barbering regimen—in truth, had a particular zeal for it.

‘I had a trim a couple of weeks ago.’

‘That was in Ireland,’ she said.

‘How much could it grow in two weeks?’

‘I been wantin’ to say it, but I hated to—they left it too long. It’s throwin’ money down th’ drain when they leave it too long, I can tell you that.’ Out with the mop bucket.

‘Miserere nobis.’

‘What’d you say?’

‘Talking to myself.’

How many times had he wanted to tell her to back off, he had a wife to mind his business? But he couldn’t say that to this spunky mountain girl whom he loved like a daughter. Puny had ministered to him as tenderly as any angel before Cynthia came on the scene—trouble was, she never stopped doing it, and he didn’t have the heart to rebuke her.

‘You said you’d never go back to Fancy again in this life, an’ Lord knows, I don’t blame you, but maybe her sister would work out. It’d save you th’ trip to Wesley. You know th’ price of gas these days an’ Joe Joe says it’s not goin’ down anytime soon.’

Talk about meddling; he was a novice.

She ran hot water in the mop bucket and turned, green eyes wide, to pin him to the wall of the study.

‘So?’ she said.

‘So, what?’

‘You know. What I brought you.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, stiff as a board. ‘A very helpful household hint.’ End of discussion.

‘It sure made you nicer this mornin’.’

He fled upstairs to don his running gear.

•   •   •

‘I’M HAVIN’ TWO CHILDREN’S PLATES,’ said Mule, looking pleased with himself.

‘Why a children’s plate?’ said J.C.

‘I want to see if it’s any good; it’s their new promo.’

‘And why two, for God’s sake?’

He didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation, but he’d give it a go. ‘He likes children,’ he told J.C.

‘So order one children’s plate,’ said J.C., ‘and if you don’t like it, you won’t be stuck with two.’

‘But I really like macaroni and cheese,’ said Mule.

‘Which comes with a grilled cheese sandwich, for crap’s sake. You want to detonate your arteries?’

‘You only get half a grilled cheese with it.’

‘But if you get two plates, one each with half a grilled cheese, that’s a whole grilled cheese plus a double macaroni and cheese. Why not just order a grilled cheese and a side of macaroni and save a buck fifty? I thought you liked to pinch a penny.’

‘I want two children’s plates, one at a time.’

‘If you ain’t th’ cuckoo clock,’ said J.C.

‘Leave him alone,’ he said. ‘Let the man order what he wants.’

‘But he’s not goin’ to like havin’ two children’s plates. You don’t even get a pickle with that deal.’

‘Children don’t generally enjoy pickles,’ he said, conciliatory.

‘And look around. Do you see any children in here? I don’t see any children in here, which tells you where this promo is headed.’

He examined the menu card.

‘I guess you read about Fancy’s sister coming in?’ asked Mule.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘Clipped the coupon this morning.’

‘She’s single.’

‘Aha.’

‘I heard she’s movin’ here to look for a husband.’

‘She might want to rethink that,’ he said.

Lunch and dinner only

No breakfast served, you are on your own

Soup of the day: Cream of chicken

Pie of the day: Cherry

Special salad of the day with our homemade poppyseed dressing

Try our house specialty: Banana pudding—sorry about leaving out the bananas last week

For restroom key, ask Mindy

‘I think I’ll have the special salad,’ he said.

‘Maybe I’ll have that, too.’ Mule looked hopeful.

J.C. did an eye roll. ‘Every wife’s dream—for hubby to have a salad.’

‘What’s in the special salad?’ asked Mule.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It just says special salad.’

‘You’d order a salad and not know what’s in it?’

‘Why not? Whatever it is, you get fiber.’

‘You order salad just for fiber?’

Why did he continue to have lunch with these clowns? Had he been a bona fide psychiatric case all these years and people were too kind to confront him with the truth? Lunch at home, that was the ticket. Or better still, in Wesley once a week, to get out of the house. Mule was too cheap to drive to Wesley for lunch, and J.C. went to Wesley only on Thursdays, so if he avoided going to Wesley on Thursday, he would have complete freedom the other four days to do what he wanted, and with no dithering conversation thrown in. It came to him that under such circumstances, he’d be at liberty to eat a whole pepperoni pizza with nobody the wiser. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before.

He rechecked the menu. ‘Or maybe I’ll have the vegetable plate.’

‘What are th’ choices?’

‘Green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, cooked apples . . .’

‘I don’t like green beans.’

‘. . . black-eyed peas, coleslaw, glazed carrots . . .’

‘Nothin’ glazed for me,’ said Mule.

‘. . . sweet potatoes, or cabbage. Choose three.’

‘How would mashed potatoes and gravy go with cooked apples?’ Mule eyed J.C., who refused to comment. ‘But maybe not, maybe th’ gravy would run into th’ apples.’

Pizza, his wife would say to the coroner.

How do you know that, ma’am?

I smelled pepperoni. He could never fool me.

Their favorite server, a young mountain girl with consummate charm, was nowhere to be seen. Someone tall, big-boned, and tricked out in an apron and cowboy boots was taking orders.

‘That’s th’ new owner,’ said Mule. ‘She sold her other place down th’ mountain. Cracker Barrel came in and she went out. Heard this place was up for sale an’ jumped on it.’

‘News you can use,’ said J.C.

‘We pumped regular together at Lew’s this morning.’

‘Hello, boys.’

A hand shot his way. He stood and shook it.

‘Father Kavanagh?’ she said. ‘Wanda Basinger.’

‘Ms. Basinger, this is J. C. Hogan, editor of the Mitford Muse, and I believe you’ve met Mule Skinner, our erstwhile realtor, at the gas pump. Welcome to Mitford.’

‘So this is th’ Turkey Club I’ve heard so much about.’

‘Where’s that young woman used to wait tables here?’ asked Mule.

‘I had to let ’er go.’

‘Let her go? What for?’

Wanda Basinger raised an eyebrow. ‘She was nice to th’ customers.’

Mule adjusted the knot in his tie, stricken. J.C. mopped his forehead with his napkin. As for himself, he sat down.

‘We’ll start with you, Mr. Skinner, what are you havin’? I can recommend the special salad with Gruyère, sliced figs, and onion.’

‘Sliced figs,’ said Mule, dazed. ‘Onion. No, thanks.’

‘The cows’ll come home before you get an order out of him,’ said J.C. ‘I’ll have th’ chopped barbecue plate, double hot sauce, double fries, double pickles, and a large root beer.’

‘A man who knows what he wants. Father?’

‘The vegetable plate. Coleslaw, black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes, hold the corn muffin.’

They all looked at Mule; J.C. drummed the table with his fingers. ‘Sink or swim, buddyroe.’

Mule faced the wall, avoiding eye contact with Wanda Basinger. ‘I don’t know,’ he snapped. ‘Ask th’ father.’

‘Bring him two children’s plates,’ he said. ‘One at a time.’

•   •   •

‘I’M NEVER COMIN’ BACK HERE.’ Mule stared at children’s plate number two, disconsolate. ‘Who would fire a girl like that? She was th’ best thing they had goin’. She always gave me an extra roll and butter, and extra whipped cream on th’ chocolate pie. Since when is it a crime to be nice to customers? Right there is what’s wrong with th’ world today.’

‘How was the barbecue?’ he asked J.C.

‘Good. Real good. Amazing barbecue.’

Wanda was patrolling the room with a water pitcher. ‘Everything all right over here?’

Mule shoved his untouched second order to the side.

‘Would you like this in a take-out, Mr. Skinner?’

‘For my dog.’

‘Whose barbecue was that?’ asked J.C.

‘It was yours, honey, you’re payin’ for it.’

‘What I mean is, who made it?’

‘Somebody in east Tennessee.’

‘The menu says it’s North Carolina barbecue.’

‘You do not have to live in North Carolina to make North Carolina barbecue. Just open th’ vinegar bottle and pour it in there, you can do that in Tennessee, Mississippi, or Detroit, Michigan.’

‘May be a little misleading,’ said J.C.

‘North Carolina is a style of barbecue,’ said Wanda, ‘just like Memphis is a style of barbecue. My husband makes Texas barbecue without steppin’ foot out of our backyard on Little Mitford Creek.’

She filled their water glasses.

‘If you know what you’re doin’—an’ my husband, Lloyd, knows what he’s doin’—it tastes like the real thing, you can’t tell it from th’ real thing. You take Kansas City barbecue, they make it over in Alabama and Arkansas and all around down there . . .

‘. . . which,’ she said, taking her leave, ‘would make that a style of Kansas City barbecue.’

‘Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide in this town,’ said J.C., slapping a couple of quarters on the table.

•   •   •

THEY STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK and watched Mule head out with his Styrofoam box.

‘I didn’t know Mule had a dog.’

‘He hasn’t had a dog since fifth grade,’ said J.C. ‘He’ll eat the second go-round when his stomach settles down. That woman needs to be rustlin’ cattle, not hustlin’ food.’

‘She does make Velma look cordial.’ J.C. had engaged in a verbal brawl with Velma Mosely, co-owner of the old Main Street Grill, thereafter taking his lunch trade to the tea shop.

They stared at a black limo moving north on Main, the driver in uniform.

J.C. gawked. ‘Who do you think that is?’

‘A tourist with money to burn,’ he said, walking.

‘Didn’t look like Ed Coffey at th’ wheel.’

Ed Coffey, liveried to the max, had driven Edith Mallory for years in a black Lincoln town car with tinted windows. ‘Ed Coffey’s in Florida with Edith,’ he said. ‘I hear she’s having a tough recovery.’

He remembered the inferno boiling into the night sky, and the looping shriek of fire engines. He’d run out to the street and looked at the ridge above Fernbank where Edith Mallory’s Clear Day was ablaze. By the time their local engine and a backup from Wesley hacked through the overhanging rhododendron, the house was destroyed and Edith had suffered a severe head injury.

‘Is she talking yet?’ asked J.C.

‘We had a card from her when we got home. Said she’s doing better.’ Doing better, she had written, pray for me.

‘I guess you heard what’s going on at Lord’s Chapel?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Actually, nobody really knows, but rumors are flyin’. The story I get is—’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he said. ‘I keep my nose out of parish rumors.’ Not only was that expected of the former priest, but he really didn’t want to hear it. It would do him no good to know whatever it was nobody really knew.

J.C. wiped his face with his lunch napkin. ‘You’d never make it in my business.’

‘True.’

‘That was some good barbecue, you should try it. But the fries came with aioli.’

‘So?’

‘I thought they weren’t servin’ anything people can’t pronounce.’

‘You just pronounced it. Maybe you and Mule can overlook the owner’s personality and we can settle in and be regulars.’

‘Or maybe we’ll go back to Lew Boyd’s an’ eat bad sandwiches . . .’

‘Your sandwiches were bad, not mine.’

‘. . . an’ sit on those dinette chairs by th’ vending machine, suckin’ up exhaust fumes from th’ garage . . .’

‘Snow blowing in . . .’

‘Freezin’ our ass to th’ chair,’ said J.C.

‘Those were the good old days.’

‘It was just a few months ago.’

‘Tempus fugit.’ He was going to coax his Latin back if it killed him.

‘Find a hole and fill it, that’s my motto. If I was a rich man, I’d put a real restaurant in this town.’

They were legging it up Main Street—a grand, soft day, as the Irish would say. He was glad he’d run this morning, if only a couple of miles; he’d get back to a regimen, he would straighten up and fly right.

‘We have a real restaurant,’ he said. ‘Lucera. Miss Sadie’s old place. Great food. Terrific atmosphere. Romantic.’

‘That’s the problem—you pay for romantic. I don’t need romantic.’

‘Adele might enjoy romantic, ever thought of that?’

‘Oh, boy, Dr. Phil comes to Mitford.’

‘Remember who helped you land Adele.’

‘Right. Mitford’s leading citizen.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Wait’ll you see next week’s Muse. I paid big money for this piece.’

‘What piece?’

‘Wait an’ see. Inspired by the McGraw incident. You’ll like it.’

‘Come on. What are you talking about?’

‘Number one, we’re posing an important philosophical question to this community. Number two, a couple of people called you Mitford’s leading citizen and we’re taking a survey—you could end up th’ winner.’

‘Wait a minute. I am not a leading citizen. No, no, that’s embarrassing. Are you serious?’

They stopped outside the men’s store.

‘For one thing, I don’t lead anybody.’

‘You led a hundred and twenty people, give or take, for sixteen years.’

‘That’s a completely different matter, and that was five years ago, it’s history.’ He didn’t like the feel of this. ‘You need to cancel that story,’ he said. The McGraw incident?

‘Freedom of the press, buddyroe.’ J.C. opened the door to the Collar Button, the bell jingled. ‘I’m droppin’ in here to pick up a half-page ad, looks like th’ local economy’s on the upswing.’

•   •   •

HE GUNNED HIS VINTAGE RAGTOP up the hill to Hope House, dismissing J.C.’s blather. He would give J.C. a call tomorrow, nip this thing in the bud—he didn’t like what he was feeling.

There. The kick in the engine, like a tic, then the feel of something disconnecting and firing again.

For a year or more, they had thrashed through whether to sell his Mustang, trade it, put it on blocks in the backyard (‘Too rural,’ said his wife), save it for Dooley, or auction it off at the fiftieth anniversary benefit for Children’s Hospital. Cynthia was keen on the benefit, Dooley didn’t appear to want it, and storing it on blocks, anywhere, seemed uselessly sentimental.

If he knew the ropes of Internet commerce, he would put it on eBay or one of those lists he’d heard about. Or maybe park it at Lew’s with a sign on the windshield.

The benefit was probably the answer. A completely trouble-free way to let it go and get a deduction into the bargain. But he’d miss it, of course. Cynthia had given it to him a few years ago as a birthday present; it had marked a memorable chapter of his life.

He pulled into the parking lot at Hope House, liking the ease of the steering, the worn leather seat—an old shoe on wheels. He got out and locked it, then stood back and looked at what the boys in Holly Springs had called ‘a sharp little ride.’ A collar in a red Mustang convertible had raised a few eyebrows along the way, which, if nothing else, had been fun.

He heard the familiar buzz just beyond the treetops to the north, and looked up and, yes, oh, boy, there it was—Omer Cunningham’s yellow ragwing, making a pass over Hope House.

He threw up his arm and waved to beat the band. Omer dipped a wing and roared south.

Omer’s personalized wing dip was a tribute cherished by more than a few. Uncle Billy, a recipient of one of these dips, had marked the occasion by saying, ‘That’d bring tears to a glass eye.’

It gave him a thrill to see Omer gunning around in his slapdash contraption. Not that he, Timothy, had been the perfect passenger the time or two that Omer had taken him up. He remembered trying to hold on to his minimal breakfast; remembered looking down at the floorboard, where a ruined bath mat failed to cover a gaping hole—a hole through which he gained an uneasy view of treetops and power lines.

Where Omer got the wherewithal for such entertainment, he had no idea. ‘He’s a decorated ’Nam vet,’ J.C. said. ‘Let ’im do what he dern well pleases.’

The door to Room Number One was open, as he usually found it, and the real Number One was sleeping in her blue recliner.

The chair faced out to the nurses’ station where the action was, and had been called the best seat in the house or the worst, depending. All the world was right there, just through the door, still living and using a walker, still dying and being rolled to the elevator on a gurney, still uttering the occasional epithet, still bringing flowers and removing the perished ones, still bearing trays of food, some you could eat and some you couldn’t, and once in a blue moon there came the brightness of children passing, going in to their great-grandma—or great-grandpa, though there were currently only three of these good souls, one still with an eye for the nurses.

The children were especially worth waiting for, hoping for, they seemed to come most often around Easter, bringing baskets, conducting something into the world of the hallway that reminded Louella of her own youth, those long days ago when she was raised by Miss Sadie, seven years her elder, and pulled around town in a red wagon like a sack of seed corn.

For Miss Sadie to raise a little dark girl as her own and to give her the family name if she wanted it, and then to take her in again years later, when her beautiful husband had died and her step-grandson was transferred to Los Angeles—to do all that and then put in her will that Louella Baxter Marshall was to have the many satisfactions of Room Number One until the day, according to the handwritten will, that ‘Louella, my sister in the Lord and dearest friend,’ was herself rolled to the elevator on a gurney.

‘Miss Louella, you see too much goin’ on,’ a nurse once said. ‘It’s too stimulatin’. You need rest.’

‘I’ll rest in th’ grave,’ was the reply.

Louella had asked him which cost the least, a casket funeral or cremation. Cremation, he said. She didn’t want the price of a fancy casket to bear on the funds Miss Sadie had set aside to take care of Louella Baxter Marshall’s needs. She wanted to choose cremation, then, as Miss Sadie had done. She had never heard of a Baptist being cremated, though Episcopalians did it all the time.

‘I was ’piscopal all my young days,’ she once told him. ‘Then Baptist with my husband all my middle days, then ’piscopal all my old days. I guess I’ll go out th’ way I came in.’

‘Cynthia and I will keep your urn,’ he said, ‘or we can sprinkle your ashes.’

‘I’d hate bein’ closed up in that little thingamajig. Where would you sprinkle me?’

‘How about into the valley where the train runs every day blowing its horn, and the river turns its face to the sun and catches the reflection of clouds passing over?’

‘That sound good,’ she said, thoughtful. ‘I’m not afraid to go. You might get Dooley to sing.’

‘He’d be honored.’

‘No organ back of ’im, just ’is voice. An’ you could put a little pinch or two on that place where you buried Miss Sadie’s urn in th’ churchyard.’

Beloved. He had written the word on a slip of paper and, unable to speak, handed it to the fellow who would engrave Sadie Baxter’s small headstone.

‘An’ a little pinch in th’ ol’ part of th’ buryin’ ground where some of my people are at.’

He took her hand and held it.

‘An’ you might maybe put a teaspoonful in th’ bushes up at Fernbank.’

He laughed. ‘I’ll be burning some fat on this run.’

‘In th’ lilacs. Th’ ones on th’ south side by th’ porch steps. Miss Sadie an’ me used to drag a little bench out there an’ peel apples in th’ sunshine.’

‘Consider it done,’ he had said. ‘But I believe we’ve got a while yet.’

He slipped into the room and sat by her chair on the low stool he always occupied during these visits. On the stool, he was twelve years old. Indeed, he felt some primordial consolation when he was with Louella, something that reached back beyond his earthly beginning. Perhaps because it was Peggy’s dark-skinned arms in which he slept as an infant as his mother and father drove the Buick from Grandpa and Nanny Howard’s town house out to a new life in the Mississippi countryside. It had been Peggy he ran to when his heart was broken or his knee gashed when he fell on a rusty plowshare. It had been Peggy he always ran to, except when he turned ten, and suddenly there was no Peggy to run to.

He had a moment of yearning for those days. The ‘old fled days,’ the Irish called their years of tribulation. In tribulation, there had been a certain sweetness, too, as marrow in a remorseless bone.

Louella opened one eye, then the other. ‘I see you,’ she said, chuckling a little. ‘I see you on yo’ stool. Where you been so long?’ She pressed the remote on the chair arm and raised the recliner to an upright position.

He stood and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Been to Ireland,’ he said, happy.

Louella reached for her dentures on the TV table, installed them. ‘Where th’ fairies are!’

‘That’s it. Where have you been?’ He sat again on the stool.

‘Dreamin’ I was in that little wagon, bumpin’ all over town. I dream a lot ’bout that wagon, ’bout Miss Sadie pullin’ me around, darin’ somebody to call me that bad word we don’ use no more.’

I have a brother, he wanted to say, but couldn’t.

Then again, maybe he could. Maybe he should. As a kid, a dime had burned a hole in his pocket before he learned the secret promises of saving. This far greater secret, kept from all but Cynthia and Dooley and Lace, had burned a hole somewhere in him, and it was still smoking.

‘Can I tell you something . . . that no one else needs to know just now?’

‘’Tween us an’ th’ Lord.’

Louella would be ninety years old any day. What if she forgot her declaration and told a nurse, or . . . He felt the shame of his selfishly endless noodling.

‘I have a brother.’ There it went, like a string winding off a ball.

‘I declare.’

‘My father,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘With the woman who helped raise me.’

‘Black like me,’ said Louella.

‘Yes.’

‘Happen all th’ time. When you find out?’

‘July, when I went down to Mississippi.’

‘They some bad jokes ’bout Miss’ippi.’

‘Don’t I know it.’

She looked at him with the inexplicable fondness that came from that other dimension.

‘I met him,’ he said.

‘He’s a good man?’

‘A very good man. Tall, handsome—like my father.’

‘He dark?’

‘Not very, but yes. He writes poetry.’

She nodded, affirming this in some way.

‘His mama livin’?’

‘She’s about your age. I saw her for the first time since I was a boy. Peggy is her name—she left when I was ten, it was a hard thing. No one knew why she left, though she thinks my mother knew.’

‘How old a man?’

‘Sixty. Retired from the railroad. He was a porter, and later a conductor on a train that ran from New Orleans to Chicago. The City of New Orleans, it’s called. He once got a hundred-dollar tip from Elvis Presley.’ He was oddly pleased with the Elvis scrap of Henry’s history.

‘A porter was a fine thing to be back then. A society of gentlemen, is what my gran’ma said.’

‘He didn’t have enough red blood cells, he would have died without a transfusion of cells, so I gave him some of mine.’ Tears sprang to his eyes; Holly Springs and all that came with it had been a time of tearing apart and putting back together, and then Ireland with its own riving and mending, and now home to try and find his center again.

‘He gon’ make it?’

‘We believe so, we pray so.’

She patted the arm of the recliner. ‘This th’ prayer chair, you know.’

‘His name’s Henry. Henry Winchester.’

‘A fine name,’ she said. ‘I’ll pray for Henry an’ Peggy and you th’ same. I’m glad you got a brother, honey, real glad.’

‘Thank you.’ He had hung on to Miss Sadie; he was hanging on to Louella. All that they were he would never have again. He remembered what Peggy told him her mother had said after the cruel loss of her young son. All us got is us.

‘This is the prayer stool,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘We need to talk about you now.’

•   •   •

HE MADE A RIGHT off the elevator, hoping to connect with Dooley’s mother, Pauline. She was dining room coordinator at Hope House, and a darned good one.

Pauline’s years of alcohol addiction had been damaging in the extreme. Sammy was probably six or seven when she deserted four of her five children, taking only her son Pooh with her. Her husband, Clyde, in many ways more dysfunctional than Pauline, had taken Sammy. Kenny had been traded by his mother to a complete stranger for a gallon of whisky, a move which, in the end, was a very good thing. Jessie, the youngest, had been abducted by a psycho cousin of Pauline’s, and Dooley ended up on the rectory doorstep at age eleven. He had driven to Lakeland with Cynthia and Pauline a few years back to recover Jessie, and thus most of the worst scenarios, he hoped, had played out for the Barlowes. And thank God, there had been healing in Pauline’s new life as a believer—she had married Buck Leeper, also a recovering alcoholic, and they seemed to be coming along better than expected, with Jessie and Pooh doing well in Mitford School. Dooley would see his mother on occasion, but was reserved; Kenny and Sammy refused to see her at all.

‘Father!’ she said, standing from her desk in the small office. The tears began. There were nearly always tears when they met. He gave her a hug and handed over his handkerchief.

‘How are you?’ he said.

She smiled a little, nodded. ‘God is good.’

‘I’ve noticed that myself. And Buck?’

‘The best. He’s doing well.’

‘Any work?’

‘Comes and goes.’

‘Feast or famine,’ he said of the construction business in general.

‘How is Sammy?’

‘Hurting.’ He never veiled the truth with her if he could help it.

She nodded, wiped her eyes with the handkerchief.

‘And Kenny is a wonderful young man. The couple he ended up with—it was a blessing, as you know.’

‘So thankful.’

‘Dooley will be home toward the end of October, I’m hoping we can arrange something, break bread together.’

‘Thank you, Father.’

‘And Sammy—back to Sammy. When it comes to shooting pool, he’s a genius. All we have to do is figure out how to channel genius.’

She looked away from him. ‘One day . . .’

‘Yes, oh, yes, definitely. One day.’ One day there would be an end to the hurting. There had to be an end to it.

•   •   •

THEY WALKED OUT with Barnabas to the flower borders, carrying mugs of Earl Grey.

His wife looked west over the trees; a breeze stirred her hair, the sleeves of her blouse. ‘’T will be a lovely sunset,’ she said.

Hydrangeas blooming, digitalis thriving, black mulch from the pile where the garage once stood. Harley had done a fine job of keeping things in order.

‘I told Louella about Henry.’

‘Wonderful.’

He cleared his throat and made the announcement in what she called his Old Testament voice. ‘I’m wearing a suit tomorrow night.’

She laughed, put her arm around him. If he never wore a tux again, it would be too soon.

‘Forgive me for pushing you to the brink?’ she said.

‘Always.’

‘Bookends?’

‘Always.’

‘Puny left you a wonderful salmon and pasta dish, but I’m hungry for liver and onions tonight, will you have some? It might be fun just to try it, darling.’