by Jan Karon
• • •
THEY HAD PUT AWAY four bags of provender, made a hasty lunch, and checked on Barnabas, then lay on the study sofa—his head to the south, hers to the north.
They woke at three, disbelieving.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘jet lag doesn’t disappear overnight.’
‘Let’s call Irene,’ she said.
Irene Schmirene, who, he’d bet anything, had come home from her own shopping expedition and was putting away her own provender, or possibly waking up from a nap . . .
No answer at the McGraws’.
‘What does her phone message say?’ he asked.
‘The usual. You’ve reached the McGraw residence, no one can come to the phone right now, please leave a message.’
‘Did you leave a message?’
‘I hung up.’
‘You could have left a message and when she comes in, she would call back.’ His wife didn’t know everything, not by a long shot. ‘Call her again at five o’clock.’
She sat up, took Violet in her arms, and wandered to the window, staring out. When his wife stared out windows, wheels were turning—walls may get glazed, chandeliers removed and replaced by lamps, draperies changed to a more seasonal color, and now what? Irene McGraw’s door was driving her crazy.
For years he had mildly resented her ardent labors at the drawing table, which for months on end took her out of his life into another. He must have developed a kind of mental callus, for now he wished her there at the table in her small studio—the familiar sight of her bowed head as he walked down the hall, the crick in her neck that he would willingly rub out, her struggle to produce a higher work than she had produced before—even the rice bubbling and then burning on the stove would be a consolation compared to this meddling business.
He never thought he’d hear himself say it. ‘Go work on your book, Kav’na.’
‘Okay,’ she said, obliging, and turned and disappeared down the hall with her cat.
He couldn’t believe she was actually doing something that wasn’t her idea. This woman could take charge of his life like a house afire, but she had the poignant and childlike side, too, that moved his heart every time.
• • •
IT WAS QUIET next door.
After he and Cynthia remodeled the yellow house a few years ago and moved through the hedge from the rectory he’d purchased from the diocese, he had rented the place to Hélène Pringle. Hélène was a French-born piano teacher and, to his everlasting surprise, a half-sister of the deceased Sadie Baxter—a circumstance which turned out to be more rose than thorn, thanks be to God.
Subleasing the basement apartment from Hélène was Harley Welch, a sixtysomething reformed moonshine runner and gem of a mountain fellow, who once acted as self-appointed guardian to Lace Turner before her adoption by Hoppy and Olivia Harper—all that being an opera of considerable magnitude with many arias yet to be sung. Indeed, the basement had become home, also, to Dooley’s two younger brothers, Sammy, seventeen, and the nineteen-year-old Kenny, recently returned from the four winds to which they’d been flung as children.
Suffice it to say, the trio made the occasional racket. In addition to the keyboard melodies pouring from Miss Pringle’s studio windows, ten until four, there was the racing of the engine of a derelict pickup on which the tenants labored into the night. No less clamorous was the hammering at the back stair treads which were slowly but surely being replaced. Through it all ran the threnody of country music from a boom box, turned full blast while reclaiming a rectory toolshed formerly lost to briars.
It was the stuff of life over there, though something of a blow to the neighborhood.
How the seemingly prim Hélène Pringle could bear all this, he didn’t know. She said a few weeks ago, when he found her weeding along her side of the hedge, that ‘they’ kept things ‘cheerful, more like a home.’
‘Pardon moi, Father, but before they congregated down there, I found the old place a bit . . .’ She looked up at him, apologetic. ‘. . . morose,’ she said in the French way.
Now you could hear a pin drop. Before they arrived home from Ireland, Harley had taken the boys to visit a branch of the Kentucky Welches, and Hélène had flown to Boston to settle her mother’s estate.
He found himself pacing the floor, as if waiting for something unknown.
• • •
HE PORED OVER HIS CALENDAR and a stash of notes scribbled to himself.
A Rotary meeting. A Kiwanis Club dinner. Cleanup day on the lawns at Children’s Hospital.
Return the call from the mayor—he was pretty sure Andrew Gregory wanted him to run for town council, an idea he’d dodged for years.
A request to speak to a clergy group in Holding.
The cure in Hendersonville looking to fill their pulpit for a month.
And there, of course, was the unopened letter from the new bishop. The new bishop. He had liked the old bishop.
He wasn’t busy enough, pure and simple. And yet such a list didn’t engage him at all. Dashing uphill and down, his tongue hung forth like a terrier’s, had lost its luster.
In the years he was heaped with responsibility and a flock that buzzed about him like bees, he’d been fine—except, of course, for the two diabetic comas. He had never lacked for something to do, some problem to solve, someone to try and make happy. Then came the course in clergy counseling, and the contemporary notion that he couldn’t possibly make someone else happy, such business was entirely up to the other person.
He wished, albeit briefly, that Emma Newland was still his erstwhile secretary. She would call around and cancel or decline as he directed, and leave most of them afraid to try again.
In sum, he wanted more out of life than meetings and dinners and confabulations of every sort and kind. He had thought Holly Springs and Ireland might give him some answers, but both seemed only to emphasize the questions, What now? What next?
He supposed he would do as he had always done—he would perform whatever duty his calendar dictated, and he would try to like it.
• • •
SHE MADE YET ANOTHER CALL AT SIX-THIRTY.
‘Still no answer,’ she said. ‘I left a message.’
‘The towel was damp when we were there this morning around nine,’ he said, musing.
‘So let’s say she left soon after. It’s six-thirty now; that would be—at least nine hours. Would you leave our front door open for nine hours?’
‘Only if I forgot it was open when I went out through the kitchen to the garage and drove somewhere.’
‘Maybe she drove to the airport and is gone for two weeks to . . .’ She threw up her hands, unable to think of a destination.
‘Ibiza,’ he said.
‘Do you think we should call the police?’
‘I do not. You know Rodney Underwood. He would rope off the house with yellow tape, and such a crowd of squad cars and theatrics you’d never see again. The poor woman couldn’t get in her own driveway when she comes home.’
‘It’s a good thing there’s a glass storm door, at least the bugs and squirrels can’t get in.’
He opened the Muse to finish what he had started hours ago.
‘But since it will be dark soon,’ she said, ‘don’t you think we should go up and close her door? Wouldn’t that be the neighborly thing to do?’
Here was his all-time favorite Muse column, Mayhew’s Mitford. Worth the cost of the paper right there, as Hessie Mayhew knew everybody’s business and wasn’t afraid to tell it.
‘Timothy?’
He glanced up.
‘This is Mitford, after all. Remember what we say about ourselves.’
‘“Mitford takes care of its own!”’ He quoted their longtime, albeit former, mayor’s classic slogan.
She made a beeline for the key rack. ‘I’
m going up there.’
‘I’ll just get my shoes on,’ he said.
• • •
THEY HAD HOPED for the welcome surprise of seeing Irene’s car garaged next to Chester’s, but it wasn’t there. They pulled into the driveway. In the approaching dusk, a nearly full moon had risen; the house had a vaguely lost look.
‘We should have called the post office and asked if she put a stop on her mail.’
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘about the message light that was blinking. Maybe there’s a phone message that would give us a clue.’
‘We could try it. Should we?’
‘Maybe,’ he said, getting out of the car.
They stood on the front stoop, indecisive. There was a definite drop in temperature, as often happened when the sun dipped behind the mountains.
They stepped into the dark entrance hall. He wasn’t feeling so good; something in the pit of his stomach. What was it about an empty house, any empty house where the human or even canine spirit was absent? He looked up to the stair landing, nearly vanished in the shadows.
‘I just remembered,’ he said. ‘We don’t have a password to pick up her messages. Besides, I don’t really want to go up those stairs.’ They were not his stairs to go up.
‘How about her windows being open? What if it rains? Did you hear a weather forecast? It’s hurricane season.’
‘They were up maybe two inches, for Pete’s sake.’ He was curt without meaning to be.
She looked at him, wounded. ‘Sometimes rain blows sideways.’
She appeared twelve years old in the diminished light. Though she’d recently had her sixty-fourth birthday, she was occasionally mistaken for his daughter.
‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘This is it for me.’ He took her arm, felt her stiffen.
‘Did you see that?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Something moved out there.’
‘Like what?’
‘A person, maybe. To the right, in the driveway.’
They were fresh from a burglary in Ireland, and a lawless freak jumping from the armoire in their room . . .
He saw movement, too, then; a blur through the glass door. The sudden impulse to run with his wife out the back door came forth as paralysis. He couldn’t move.
‘Deer,’ he whispered, hoarse.
‘Yes?’
‘As in doe and buck. They’re after what’s left of the hosta.’ They came in families most nights to the Kavanagh hosta, but only after they finished off the azaleas.
She was trembling, an ash leaf; his heart hammered. Dear God, for the comfort of home, the innocence of his dog’s snore . . .
Maybe She Who Always Had an Idea would come up with something; he didn’t know what to do.
‘We can’t stand here all night,’ he said. It was fish or cut bait. ‘Stay there, don’t move, it’ll be fine, I’m going out.’ But only if he could walk with knees turned to water.
The movement of the door latch was nearly inaudible.
His wife’s shriek; an inferno of white light emptied into his face.
‘Put your hands where I can see ’em.’
He said something unintelligible, his vital forces blinked off.
‘Father Tim?’
Another blaze of light, a young face, a gun.
‘Joe Joe?’ he said, aghast.
Joe Joe grabbed him as he fell and stood him against the doorjamb like a cooked noodle.
‘I can explain everything,’ he said. But why bother? Let his wife do the talking.
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?’