by Jan Karon
‘Plumbing problems. We start tearing the place up on Monday.’
Pooh thought his big brother suddenly looked pretty serious. He guessed that whatever it was would cost money, but Dooley had money. Dooley had everything. He was rich from what Miz Baxter left him.
Ever since he was a kid, he thought his big brother could do anything, he was perfect. Dooley had been his hero when they were little, and he was still his hero. But there had been that flash of something in his expression just now and he thought that maybe, down deep, Dooley was like everybody else, even like Pooh Barlowe—Dooley had feelings, things didn’t always go right, he wasn’t perfect.
• • •
He sat in the glider, looking up from the spreadsheet on his laptop. Pooh and Jack and Charley were fooling around in the yard.
‘You’re some little guy with that football,’ said Pooh. ‘How about a ride on my back before I bust out of here?’
‘I’m not little!’
‘Yeah, but we need somebody in th’ family to be little, just for a while, okay? You’ll be big way sooner than you think. Besides, big guys can’t climb on my back and ride around, but little guys can.’
Pooh squatted; Jack climbed.
‘Go fast!’
And off they galloped to look for Choo-Choo and the heifers.
• • •
Unbelievable.
She had forgotten about Kim and Irene coming tomorrow afternoon to see the farm.
She literally ran to the freezer in the storage room.
Apple pie, blackberry pie, the inevitable banana bread, the hoarded piece of their wedding cake . . .
She grabbed the blackberry pie. She and Dooley and Jack had picked the berries in August. They had given a free ride to a bunch of chiggers just like when they were kids, and they all had berries with cream and sugar for supper. Jack had gotten wired from the sugar, they all did, and they danced on the porch to Dave Rawlings and wound up itching like crazy.
She would heat the pie and serve it with ice cream if they had any. They couldn’t keep ice cream in the house, it was Dooley’s favorite thing, but here was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s vanilla behind a pork roast. Vanilla was Dooley’s sworn favorite in the ice cream universe; he had inherited his vanilla addiction from Father Tim.
As for the house being ready for company. Dismal! The worst was the living room, which nobody ever lived in. The upholstered stuff needed slipcovers; it looked like a yard sale.
A dust rag, a carpet sweeper, and a handful of zinnias from the garden—she caught her breath. It was the best she could do for someone who had a fabulous house in Malibu and was nominated three times for an Academy Award.
• • •
She figured this wasn’t the best time to talk about the phone call. Dooley had just built a fire and was sitting in Doc Owen’s old chair in the kitchen with a vet magazine in his lap, probably hoping for rain. That would be another thing on his mind right now.
She used to just blurt stuff out any time, anywhere, which was not a good idea. Their counselor had taught them to pray before big talks, to be sensitive to timing.
She didn’t want him to say yes just to please her. This had to please everybody. Beth was a hit with Jack; during the rehearsal and the wedding, she’d been a safe place for him to run during a strange, even scary time. And Harley and Willie were keen on Beth—among other things, she was lots of fun.
She was as collected as she was going to be, so she told him.
He was getting this wrinkle between his eyebrows. She didn’t remember noticing it before.
‘There’s a lot going on,’ he said.
‘I know. But she’ll be lots of help, and I think we can help her. It’s just temporary.’
He really didn’t want to share his wife right now. He was beat, she was stretched. Yes, they had a wonderful life; things could have been worse, a lot worse. How could he possibly complain? He couldn’t. So he didn’t.
He would lose a part of her, just as he had lost a part of her with Jack, but what he got back from that more than compensated, more than repaid. Her best friend was another thing. They would talk, they would laugh, he would be . . .
He stared into the fire.
She didn’t ask for much. He didn’t want to mess this up. He hated feeling jealous, didn’t even like the word. Or maybe it was fear.
‘She’ll be useful to everyone,’ said Lace. ‘I promise.’ She had told him about the rent money, but didn’t want to mention it again. Money shouldn’t be a deciding factor.
‘Where would she bunk?’ he said.
‘I don’t know yet. We could clean out the junk room upstairs.’
All his stuff from eight years of college. Data! Artifacts! Stuff he needed to go through. At a time when he really needed to let go, he was holding on. To Lace. To his stuff. Let go, let God. Come on, man.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sure, that would be great.’
She didn’t hide her excitement. ‘Is Tommy in town?’
‘I think the band is on the road. But I don’t know. Why?’
‘I’d like to tell him Beth’s coming.’
Her best friend, Beth, who sang with Tommy at the dance after the wedding . . . and Dooley’s best friend, Tommy, who had driven Beth and her mother to the airport the next morning . . .
She moved to the chair and leaned down and put her arms around his neck. ‘You know what?’
‘What?’
‘I’m goin’ to hug you and kiss you till you holler for help.’
He cackled his Dooley laugh and pulled her into his lap. She was crazy about her husband.
• • •
She and Beth were laughing like they laughed in school. Over everything and nothing. The whole idea of what they decided to call their ‘merger’ was so out of the blue. It was like the planet was spinning on a completely other axis.
‘I meant to tell you before,’ said Beth. ‘Mom is on a rafting trip with Father Brad. With his two daughters and their families.’
‘How amazing. And wonderful!’
‘I loved my dad,’ said Beth.
‘I know. But it’s been a long time for Father Brad and for your mom, too. Everything will be okay, I promise. Bring warm clothes. Lots of people say it will be a hard winter.’
‘I’m totally prepared for winter. I grew up in Boston and I’ve lived in Manhattan since college. Winter can’t scare me!’
• • •
They were making soup tonight from the last of the garden.
Dooley was reading, Jack was zooming around on the kitchen floor with his cars and dump trucks.
‘We can’t put Beth in our junk room,’ she said. ‘It’s piled with tons of old clothes and things from your apartments at school and my stuff from all over. And we can’t give her my studio because I work in there.’
‘Right . . .’ He was focused on a Beef Cattle Science book. He kept a stack of magazines and textbooks close by at all times, and was a total student of surgery procedures on YouTube. He had just watched an agonizing procedure called enucleation, where the vet had to remove a dog’s eyeball. Lace could help him at the clinic in a lot of ways, but never that way.
‘Are you listening?’ she said. ‘I wish she could have Harley’s room. With that great bathroom and big closet, it would be perfect. He’s over at Willie’s a lot and I don’t think Willie would mind if . . . ’
‘I know what I want for the day I get official!’ Jack sat up amid the fleet of vehicles. ‘A really big dump truck.’ He used his loud voice, spread his arms wide. ‘This big!’
‘Make a list, buddy,’ said his dad.
‘I mean, they enjoy each other’s company,’ she said, ‘they’re like brothers. And Harley hates Rebecca Jane’s old canopy bed. It embarrasses him, even though nobody sees it.’ She stirred the soup. ‘I guess we could as
k?’
Dooley glanced up. ‘Don’t look at me. You ask.’
‘Why do I have to ask?’
‘I can do a lot of things, but I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘Willie has lived in that house for thirty-five years. It’s his territory. And Harley is settled in downstairs. I can’t do it.’
She saw that Dooley’s leg was jiggling.
‘Or it could be a yellow backpack like Granpa Tim’s. Or a pony!’ Jack zoomed a truck under the table. ‘But mostly a bike with sixteen-inch wheels if it would be red. Or it could be blue.’
She walked over and took Dooley’s hand. ‘Come out to the porch with me.’
There was a great cooking smell wafting around that wasn’t their own.
‘Cornbread!’ he said. Willie’s house with the green shutters and screen porch—it was coming from there. ‘And collard greens. Pretty nice setup.’
Now and again, Harley joined them for dinner at the farmhouse, but typically he and Willie cooked supper together across the yard. Willie’s longtime specialty was cornbread—thin and crispy. Harley’s skill set was more extensive and somewhat mixed: brownies, lasagna, various greens with ham hock, and more recently, banana pudding. Harley had seen a TV chef make banana pudding and had since turned out two or three, including one for Miss Pringle.
‘Willie has that whole other bedroom,’ she said. ‘It’s neat as a pin, like it’s just waiting for someone to move in.’
He gave her a grin. It was the first she had seen in what seemed ages. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It could work.’
‘Or even a tractor,’ said Jack, standing with Charley on the other side of the screen door. ‘But one my size that me an’ Charley could ride around on, or even a new jigsaw puzzle with a lots of pieces like forty.’
‘Just tell them it’s only temporary,’ said Dooley. ‘I’ll give you cash money to ask.’
‘How much?’
He dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill.
‘No way,’ she said.
He dug into his other pocket and examined the contents. He folded two one-dollar bills with the five. ‘Seven bucks,’ he said, grinning. ‘And not a dime more.’
She put her hands behind her back. ‘Done! But please give it to me in change.’
• • •
As for the roomful of junk, how did two so-called young people start out with so much baggage?
Hadn’t she always heard stories about starting with nothing, like her dad when he was in medical school and married to Carol? They had lived on the third floor in one room with ‘a hot plate, two chairs, and a Beach Boys poster,’ as he loved to say.
Cleaning out the junk room for guests would be a pain. And what would they do with it all, anyway?
She paused on the stairs. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? And at the same time, they could park the Beemer by the road with a FOR SALE sign. Awesome!
Jack was asleep, Dooley was finishing his deep-dish pizza for tomorrow, and she needed to put the leftover soup in the freezer.
Yes! she thought as she ran down the stairs. Piggy banks, rental income, eggs, Beemer sale, yard sale! Rebecca Jane Owen could help; there would be plenty of hands to make it happen.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
Everything was going to be all right.
• • •
He carried over two buckets of water, did last rounds, visited the patients.
A text from Joanna.
Planning what to sell and what to leave behind. Have dental equipment, IV pump, oximeter, etc, a few things u may be able to use, some free. Call Monday if interested.
It would be cool to jump in a truck with all you need already stowed and drive around these beautiful back roads. If he bought her practice, he could do it Monday through Wednesday, while Hal and Blake tended the clinic here, then do the Thursday/Friday swing back here. But both practices would suffer. That was inevitable. And he would be on call 24/7, just like Hal and Herriot had warned against. No time for Lace and Jack, and worst of all, he would be in debt, big-time.
So why was he wasting energy even thinking about it?
He would pray for her dad. That was the best he could do with Joanna Rivers’s inconvenient news.
The grass was getting crispy in spots. Thank God for hay in the barn.
5
MITFORD
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3
He opened the side door and heard the wistful morning piano of Miss Pringle.
Once in a blue moon, they got an October morning like this. It was a day when he could almost smell the ocean, when a gull might wing overhead. He wasn’t the biggest fan of sand and sea, but occasionally some hungering gnawed at him for the visual feast of the Atlantic plain and the knowledge, more like a secret revealed only to Tim Kavanagh, that over there were Ireland and England and Scotland and Italy and . . .
The chiming of the church bells. Eight A.M.
His insulin shot was done and he was writing a sermon in his robe and pajamas.
Except for the headache, it felt good to be back to his old routine. The only thing missing was Barnabas, who always had an ear for the read-aloud excerpt or, now and then, the entire homily.
He left the door open and looked across to the sofa where Truman was sleeping off a night out. Clearly, Truman had been nostalgic for the wilds of Meadowgate Farm—the narrow misses by a renegade fox, the aggression of male barn cats twice his size—for he had shot through the cat door at six A.M. with a torn ear and a gimp leg.
Wearing oven mitts against the resistance of an insulted cat, he had vetted the torn ear and bandaged it. About the leg, he wasn’t so sure. He would call Dooley around nine and get a little free advice.
An email chimed into his desktop PC.
>Got to get out there and face the bloody music. Drop what you’re doing buddyroe and help me out here. High noon. Feel Good.
Their local desperado had returned from his hideout.
• • •
He slid into a chair at their usual table at Feel Good, where J.C. sat with his back to the door.
‘Tell me who’s comin’ in,’ said J.C. ‘I’ve got to work up to showin’ my face, I can’t do this all at once.’
‘Who is it you don’t want to see?’
‘Half th’ town. But especially th’ churchwomen who pitched in and took th’ back page.’
‘Which churchwomen? There are five churches in these immediate parts.’
‘That ECW crowd. They could wrangle elephants with Genghis Khan.’
They gave their order to a college student from Wesley who would rather be hiking with his beagle. He drank half a glass of tap water and waited for the confession.
‘Okay.’ J.C. wiped his perspiring face with a paper napkin. ‘By mistake I pulled Esther Cunningham’s photo out of the file. So sue me! Is it my fault those women have th’ same name? Come on, I was in a hurry, I had no help, I had to get th’ blasted thing to bed. Look on the positive side—how many people could turn around a special edition, full color, in under sixteen hours, ads and all?
‘I didn’t sleep, man, I was cockeyed, give me a break. And think about it—it was a very flattering shot of the old mayor. With th’ birthday front page comin’ next week, she gets her picture in the paper twice in a row! One with the lieutenant gov’nor! She loves that stuff.
‘As for Esther Bolick, I hate that it wasn’t her photo, she was a very nice woman. I’ll run a correction next Thursday, and a photo with th’ cake. But—and here’s a mega plus—the obit was a masterpiece. Vanita at th’ top of her game!’
J.C. maneuvered another napkin around the moonscape of his face. ‘So I made a mistake. One little bitty mistake in thirty-five years! And what happens? I’m a leper in this town . . .’
‘A group just walked in,’ he said. ‘One, two, three, four women.
Part of the ECW committee for the Bolick reception.’
‘Don’t make eye contact,’ said J.C., sliding down in his chair.
Wanda Basinger plowed through the lunch crowd in full cowgirl gear, her coffeepot a six-gun.
‘How about you, Father?’ She ignored the Muse editor.
‘Not for me. I’m off coffee.’
‘How long?’
‘Two and a half days and counting.’
‘You’re gettin’ more oxygen to your brain, your brain don’t know what to do with it.’
‘True. The headache from Gehenna.’
‘Did you go cold turkey?’
‘I did.’
‘That’s your problem. You don’t cold-turkey a caffeine habit.’
‘What do you do?’
‘You come off easy. Use a blend of decaf with your regular joe and keep taperin’ th’ regular. Do that for a month and bingo. You’re unhooked.’
There went the lightning flash over his left eye.
‘Too late,’ he said.
Wanda turned to J.C., gave him a look, eyed his coffee mug. ‘You?’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said the editor.
‘So, Wanda, who is the woman who came in with friends a couple minutes ago?’
‘Lilah somebody from up north. She’s on th’ committee to bury Miz Bolick an’ tryin’ to get a handle on th’ way we do things down here.’
‘That ought to keep her rollin’ in the aisle,’ said J.C.
Coffee poured, Wanda Basinger was on to greener pastures.
‘Did you see that? If looks could kill, I’d be pushin’ up daylilies . . . ’
‘Maybe you should think about doing what Ben Franklin said: Never ruin an apology with an excuse.’
‘. . . which is the thanks I get for bein’ a Feel Good regular.’
‘Just tell people you’re sorry. Be sincere. Keep it simple. It’ll blow over.’
‘Not to mention cuttin’ her a deal on an eighth page and recommending her fries in an editorial last year.’