by Jan Karon
He would finally be able to do everything that needed doin’: Vacuum the store, wash the front windows, haul off the recycling, dust the books, an’ whatever else Miz Murphy and Sister Louise wanted him to do, or even Grace, who sometimes asked him to catch her a frog or a housefly or a turtle so she could draw it.
Get stamps, he needed to get stamps for their mail-order business. An’ put his bedclothes in th’ washer in the basement. It would be nice to have clean bedclothes to look forward to when he finished his book tonight, and Lord knows, he hated to finish it. He’d got so used to that book, it was like he was livin’ in a whole other place.
He remembered there was a piece of Miz Bolick’s Orange Marmalade Cake still in the freezer. He would set that out to thaw and eat it tonight after he finished his book. He got a shiver of joy rememberin’ how that cake looked settin’ on his little table and how it was just for him, to help him get well. Miz Bolick had brought it up to the store and said to Miz Murphy, ‘This is for Coot, who is one of Mitford’s town fixtures.’ It was a solemn honor to be called a town fixture.
He was turning away from the window when he saw the patrol car run the red light. He wondered if police had some kind of special permission to run a red light if nobody was comin’ from a side street, which nobody was.
• • •
Grace Murphy was writing a book.
It was a teachers’ workday at Mitford School, and she had come really early to Happy Endings with her mom, who was unpacking a huge box with Aunt Louise and getting ready for the O for October sale. Usually she helped her mom, but her mom had said go write your book and we will call you if we need you. So she was lying on the new rug in the poetry section with her book bag and her notebook and pencils and writing at the top of page 4.
The news today is not good said Samantha. Yesterday the news was good but today it is not very good.
Is it sad news said Mrs. Ogleby?
Not exactly said Samantha.
Her bifocals slipped down her nose; she pushed them back.
Because I will go inside and close the shudders if it is sad said Mrs. Ogleby.
She wasn’t using lined paper because that was for really young children, and she was six, almost seven.
Being six was neat. When you are five, you go to kindergarten and help the teacher with the children. But when you are six, you get to start first grade and dress yourself every morning and meet your friends at the corner and walk to school together.
Six was different from five in a lots of ways. When you are five, you like bugs, but when you are six, you do not like bugs because of the things they can do, like get in your hair and sometimes up your nose.
When you are five, you ride a bike with sixteen-inch wheels, but when you are six you get twenty-inch wheels because she was tall like her dad. She had wanted an even bigger bike, but the man said it was dangerous to have a bike too big for the kid and it was not safe to buy a bike for a kid to grow into. So that is why she had twenty-inch wheels, which were just right for now. Plus at five she had played with dolls, and now at six almost seven, she wanted to write books like in her mother’s bookstore.
A million books were in their store and she had read a lots of them, at least fifty or two hundred, including Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Garden, and The Boxcar Children. Her new teacher said Grace you’re reading ahead of yourself! But she didn’t know how anybody could read ahead of themselves or behind of themselves. She had just finished reading Louisa: The Life of Louisa May Alcott, and that is why she was writing a book of her own. Not on her iPad like at school, but with a pencil like Louisa. She was up to four pages in cursive, which her mother had taught her how to do when she was five.
Her book was about a girl who lived in a tiny town where only her family had TV and so she learned the news from her TV and went around in the town and told the news to people. She went out in rain and even snow and her puppy Morris went with her. As the writer of the book, she was mostly doing what her mom said to do, which is write about what you know, which was living in a tiny town even though other people had TV in Mitford.
She did not have a plan for how the book would end. She only knew it would not be sad and nothing bad would happen to the puppy. Her dad, who was chaplain at Hope House, said she could have a puppy soon. Luke and Lizzie were his Jack Russell therapy dogs and they were getting old, they had gray muzzles. They worked with him at Hope House and let the old people pet them, which made the old people truly happy. When she got her puppy, she would take it up to Hope House and everybody could pet it all they wanted to.
She would really like to have a brother and two sisters. Or she would take a sister and two brothers, either way, but her mother could not have a baby anymore and so a puppy would have to do. She was glad she had been born before the time her mother could not have a baby anymore.
• • •
Though the Local didn’t open until eight, Avis Packard answered the store phone at seven-thirty and took an order for two roasters, a pound of thick-cut bacon, a dozen free-range eggs, two pounds of red potatoes, and two bottles of Prosecco, to be picked up at eleven o’clock.
Any business that rolled in before eight, he considered gravy. He wondered who was coming to see Miz McGraw, as she could not possibly eat two roasting hens by herself, much less a pound of bacon, and for sure, the Prosecco was a tip-off. This was an order that had ‘company’ written all over it. He liked knowing what his customers were up to, but would certainly not ask for details, no way, he didn’t meddle in other people’s business—what they shopped for usually told him all he needed to know.
So maybe it was Miz McGraw’s twin sister, a Hollywood actress whose name he could not remember because he preferred old Westerns.
Pondering how he would answer the phone today, he stepped out to the sidewalk, lit an unfiltered Camel, and enjoyed a lengthy spasm of the familiar hacking cough.
At six-thirty this morning, he had taken delivery of fourteen pounds of livermush and twice as much sausage from his supplier in the Valley. Sausage was a sure seller. So in today’s phone-answering blurb, he would promote livermush instead of hypin’ the sausage, which would fly out anyway.
He inhaled deeply. Coughed. Recited aloud.
‘Fall into the Local and get your first taste of Valley-made livermush.’
No. He needed to emphasize the first word, which was seasonal, and go more upbeat and cheerful on the word livermush. People who moved to Mitford from away, especially Yankees, didn’t have a clue about livermush. Liver and mush were two words that scared people to death if they weren’t from these parts.
He took another drag off the Camel and blew a smoke ring and recited today’s phone greeting once more.
‘Fall into the Local and get your first taste of Valley-made livermush!’
Right on.
‘Slice it thin an’ fry it crispy! Avis Packard here, how can I help you?’
It was a mouthful, but with the cost of newspaper advertising, a man had to do what he had to do.
As for knowing what he’d say to the big convention of the Hometown Grocers Association in November, he’d be et for a tater. They had called an’ invited him to make a twenty-minute speech, and the very notion rattled him so bad he said yes without thinkin’. He knew exactly what they wanted to hear—it was how the little guy could make a decent livin’ in a world of Harris Teeters, Food Lions, and Piggly Wigglys. In twenty minutes! As if he knew!
He regretted that he was not prone to pray.
• • •
Across the street at Sweet Stuff Bakery, Winnie Ivey Kendall propped open the front door with a brick from the long-ago Sunday school construction at Lord’s Chapel. As the sun shone in, the aromas rolled out. Cinnamon. Oatmeal. Chocolate chip. Yeast rolls. Fig bars, still sleepy in their sugar-dusted wraps.
She shivered a little in the cool mountain air and drew i
n a lungful with something like joy. Summer had given them a black bottom line, followed by a sigh of relief when the tourists went home, and any day now, there’d be the big wave of leaf peepers to tide business over till the Thanksgiving surge.
Some would come up ahead of the color—she liked the first little ripple—and spread out around town like kids in a wonderland. They would want everything in the Sweet Stuff case; she could see their faces now. It was the same faces every year, though most of the time totally different people—she guessed it was the light in their eyes that was the same as they looked at the donuts or the cream horns, or the big slices of Orange Marmalade Cake, which this year would go for two-seventy-five a slice. The price was up twenty-five cents from last year, a huge hike that she and Thomas had talked about and also prayed about, and agreed it was the only possible way to make a profit on the OMC, which was complicated, time-consuming, and about as fun to bake as havin’ a root canal.
She could not cut corners on the OMC or ‘go commercial’ in any way, as she had a typewritten agreement with Esther Bolick, who created the famous confection. She had promised to stay true to the original recipe and methods of preparation, and give Esther ten percent of all profits, and that had been faithfully done.
Over the years, Esther had eyed Sweet Stuff like a hawk, looking for the slightest variation or discrepancy, but not once had Esther enjoyed any real reason to complain of compromise. Though the agreement was not strictly legal, she, Winnie Ivey Kendall, would stick to it no matter what.
• • •
On the west side of the town monument, Lew Boyd pumped twenty bucks’ worth of regular into a 1982 Ford F-150 half totaled by rust. This piece of junk would not live to burn a half tank. Three gallons. Four. Five. He yawned; his mind went into dream mode. It was time for him and Earlene to go ahead and retire. Buy a camper. Head out west like Esther and Ray Cunningham used to do. Pull off the road by a little stream, haul in a trout, cook it over an open fire. Yessir. That was th’ ticket.
Fall was here, he could see it in the way the light glimmered and changed in the beat of a mortal breath. He shut off the hose. He’d spent forty years pumping gas for people going somewhere. It was his turn.
He went inside, whistling as he ran the credit card.
See the USA in your Chevrolet . . .
• • •
Esther Bolick hung her dress on the hook behind the closet door—it was polyester that looked for the world like silk crepe—and selected her shoes.
Red. She hoped red shoes were not too loud for a lunch at the country club with Esther Cunningham, who was turning eighty-nine today. How Esther Cunningham had made it to eighty-nine was a miracle. Stents. Strokes. Arthritis. Bladder infections. Biopsies. Boils. Osteo. Ingrown toenails. She was a regular Job whose medical quandaries had half killed her husband and all of her daughters, but nothing slowed Esther down. Oh, no, Esther Cunningham had a whole tribe of people to lean on, boss around, and generally wear to a total nub.
She would never tell her age, but she, Esther Bolick, had been spared to live to eighty-seven last March. And what was she spared for? That was the question. Sometimes she even asked out loud, ‘Lord, why did you put me here, anyway?’ Would the Lord put somebody on earth just to bake cakes?
How many OMCs she had baked in this lifetime she did not know. Maybe six hundred, maybe two thousand, or maybe as many as the stars in the Milky Way, which Gene said were three hundred billion.
She tried hard to get her breath. It seemed stuck somewhere in her chest.
She would keep going till the cows came home, but right now she was just bushed, hung out to dry. She sat on the side of the bed and looked at her ankles, which were as big as lampposts. Swollen ankles, Dr. Wilson said, came from too much sitting. Swollen ankles, somebody said at the Woolen Shop, came from too much walking. She couldn’t recall if she had been walking or sitting. What had she been doing, anyway? Her mind was a furball.
She couldn’t just step into those pumps, she would have to lean down and stuff her feet in with a shoehorn. She hated leaning down—it cut off her breath and made her head swim. Maybe she should wear the little black low-heels she could slip into while holding on to the doorknob of the closet. But no. Anybody could wear low-heeled black shoes, which, if the eye trailed down that far, disappointed the onlooker. Red shoes gave people a lift. Maybe that’s why she was spared—to give people a lift once in a while.
If it wasn’t Esther Cunningham, she wouldn’t go. She didn’t know who else was coming, but for sure it would be the Roman legions. The Cunningham daughters, who rigged this celebration, were known to invite half the county to everything from baby showers to Tupperware parties, but right there was a reason to stay home, as in a huge crowd she would not get her proper recognition. No, she would be introduced to out-of-town cousins as ‘th’ lady who used to bake the famous OMC.’ Used to bake? Hadn’t she baked an OMC just a week or two ago and trundled it up to Coot Hendrick, who was livin’ in the bookstore attic? Because he was sick as a cat and had a fever and in his delirium, according to Hope Murphy, had cried out for an OMC? Cried out!
Used to bake? She could hardly bear to live another minute on a planet full of people who gloried in willful ignorance.
So yes, she would definitely wear the red pumps. They picked up the red in the dress she bought two years after Gene passed. If he could see her in that dress—she could just hear him—‘You look eighteen years old, dollface. I’m comin’ over there an’ give you some sugar.’
Who was pickin’ her up, anyway? Was it Dora? Dora had borrowed her good fall hat, which she just remembered she wanted to wear. She did not like to borrow or be borrowed from. Or maybe she, Esther, was doin’ the drivin’ today. Seems like she had given up drivin’ a while back.
She leaned down . . .
• • •
Déjà vu all over again,’ he said, recalling the armoire they once lugged to their bedroom.
The Yogi Berra line usually got a laugh, but his wife was in no laughing mood. For a woman who loved surprises and welcomed change, she was morose as all get-out in abandoning her work habits of seventeen years, give or take.
Since somewhere around nine o’clock, he’d endured the nagging headache of caffeine deprivation. A curse, and for what? As for the workroom transfer, he’d rather unplug a drain or give a talk to the Rotary.
They had ‘done’ her enormous file cabinet—emptied all drawers, moved the cabinet, sat on the floor and exclaimed over forgotten contents of the files, put the stuff back in the drawers—and were currently wrangling her worktable before going upstairs to dress for the birthday bash.
The worktable was an artist’s contraption with a sloped drawing board. It had looked to him oddly lightweight all those years, tucked into the little room where she had illustrated and written so many books for delighted children. Now it weighed like raw ore.
Midway to the dining room, the thing threw a leg that crashed to the hall floor. Truman bolted for cover.
‘Rats!’ she said. ‘I forgot to tell you about that leg.’
Married all these years and he’d never known about the bad leg on his wife’s worktable? He could have propped it up with a matchbook, taken a screwdriver to the nut, something.
‘We can’t just stand here, Kav’na. Keep moving.’ His headache was in the process of rolling over to pounding.
‘There goes the phone,’ she said. Her husband enjoyed answering the phone. It could be a former parishioner in trouble, someone passing through town and needing a handout, or maybe a birth or a bride-to-be—the possibilities for a priest, albeit retired, were virtually endless.
He set down his end of the table and made a dash for the kitchen phone. Though working long hours as a new vet at Meadowgate, his son, Dooley, was trying to help him buy a vehicle; he had been vehicle-less since Lace and Dooley’s wedding in June. ‘It could be Dooley!’ he c
ried, which caused a blinding sear of pain over his right eye.
‘Or Jack Tyler!’ she said, brightening.
It was Dora Pugh.
‘I’m glad you’re home, Father, I ran by Esther’s a little early to take back th’ hat I borrowed in case she wanted to wear it for th’ party today, you know th’ one . . . ’
‘Ahhh,’ he said. Dora Pugh sounded mildly hysterical, quite unlike herself. ‘Is this Dora?’
‘Of course it’s me, who d’you think it is? I couldn’t get her to th’ door, so I ran in and looked around an’ hollered an’ there she was. In her bedroom!’
‘Aha.’ Explosives gouged a crevasse in his brain.
‘Dead, Father! As a doornail! Esther.’
Good Lord! His thoughts went instantly to Ray Cunningham, who had aged considerably in taking care of Esther in her manifold ailments. He was a prince of a guy, he would be desolate . . .
‘Is Ray there?’
‘Ray who?’
‘Ray! Her husband!’
‘Oh, good grief, you think I mean Esther Cunnin’ham? Law, no, she was up to see Doc Wilson th’ other day, he said she’d live to be a hundred! No, bless ’er heart, it’s Esther Bolick. I don’t know why people in th’ same town have to have th’ same name, have you ever wondered about that? It’s confusin’ . . . ’
‘Slow down, Dora. Where are you?’
‘In her livin’ room. I’m not afraid to be in th’ house with dead people.’
He could hear Dora’s teeth chattering.
‘Hold on!’ he said. ‘I’ll be right there.’
‘She’s on th’ floor, half dressed, I covered her up with a blanket out of respect. I called th’ funeral home, they’re on their way, an’ I thought I should let you know ’cause she always said she wanted you to conduct her funeral.’
That wouldn’t do. Father Brad was her priest, but . . . he had to get over there . . . the prayer of commendation . . .