by Jan Karon
“Well ain’t good enough,” she said flatly. “You need to do this for Cynthia. An’ for Sissy an’ Sassy!”
“OK,” he said. “I’ll go.”
“You could pick up th’ phone and make an appointment this minute.”
Emma Newland made over, except with freckles. “As a matter of fact, I have an appointment coming up in…let’s see, three days! How’s that?”
She looked at him intently, red-eyed. “Father…”
“Yes?”
“I think th’ Lord wants you to do this.”
“Well, then, that settles it,” he said earnestly.
“Dearest, you need a haircut.”
Get a haircut. See a doctor. Was there no end to it? “It can wait awhile.”
“You look like a Los Angeles film director.”
“What do you know about Los Angeles film directors?”
“Television, darling. Remember television? Film directors appear on things like Oscar night, which you and I recently watched for a full nine minutes before we fell asleep with our clothes on.”
“Ah.”
“So when can you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, but you know the alternative. If you don’t get it done professionally, that means I must do it, or Dooley.” His wife raised one eyebrow and grinned.
The very thought made him weak in the knees. Both had positively butchered him once or twice before, and Puny wouldn’t touch his hair with a ten-foot pole. But the last thing he wanted was to get caught in the fray between Joe Ivey and Fancy Skinner. No way would he slink in the back door of the Sweet Stuff Bakery and risk a run-in with Fancy Skinner; Fancy would curl his hair right then and there. In truth, rumor had it that she often looked down from her upstairs aerie to see who came and went to Joe Ivey, and was taking names. Emma said Fancy had seen Marcie Guthrie, to name only one, go turncoat. For a measly two bucks less, Marcie had popped in to Joe and was said to have exited the place looking like J. C. Hogan. “Let ’em go downstairs!” Fancy snapped, nearly burning Emma’s ear off with the curling iron. “Anybody can save two dollars and spend two months wishin’ they hadn’t!”
“I’ll run over to Wesley one of these days,” he said, trying to mean it.
He was sitting on the sofa in the study when he heard Puny and his wife discussing their neighbor.
“I don’t think she’s the marrying kind,” said Cynthia, rinsing mixed greens for a salad.
“Yes, but she’s a nice-lookin’ woman, seems it’d be good for her to have a husband.”
“Maybe. But who on earth would it be? I mean, this is Mitford!”
“Watch it!” he called into the kitchen. “Mitford, after all, is where you found yours truly.”
Puny giggled. “I think she’s kind of soft on th’ father.”
“Yes, well,” said his wife, “she can get over it!”
There! He was thrilled to hear this. Feeling expansive, he kicked off his loafers.
“What about the Collar Button man?” asked Puny, setting dinner plates on the island.
“I don’t think he’s the marrying kind.”
“Mr. Omer,” said Puny. “He has a nice, big smile.”
“Omer Cunningham is a teddy bear, but not her sort. Darling, who are the bachelors in Mitford?”
“Ummm. Let’s see. Avis Packard!”
“Too strange!” said his wife, rolling her eyes.
“Scott Murphy!” he called from the study.
“Timothy! Scott and Miss Pringle wouldn’t be suited in the least. What are you thinking?”
“I’m not trying to make matches here, you asked me who the bachelors are. I’d like to see Scott find someone, though, if you have any ideas on the distaff side.”
“Then, of course,” said Cynthia, dismissing his agenda for Scott Murphy, “there’s Andrew Gregory’s brother-in-law, Tony, a handsome fellow, and Catholic like Miss Pringle, but quite clearly—”
“Too young!” declared Puny.
“This is hard.” He scratched his head. “Old Man Mueller?”
“Timothy, for heaven’s sake!”
“Remember, I’m not proposing anything, I’m only naming bachelors, as I was asked to do. Lew Boyd!” Lew had been a widower for a number of years.
His wife didn’t acknowledge this contribution.
He threw up his hands, naming the only other bachelor he could possibly think of. “Coot Hendrick!”
“You see?” Cynthia said to Puny. “There’s absolutely nobody in Mitford for a nice French lady who teaches piano.”
He and Cynthia were hammering down on the front and side yards of the yellow house. Mayor Gregory had poured on the coal for their annual Rose Day, advertising the event in newspapers as far away as Charlotte, Asheville, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh. Now everybody was breaking their necks to get cleaned up for the tourists just days hence. While former Mayor Esther Cunningham had despised the very word tourist, Andrew Gregory thought otherwise, arguing that controlled tourism was an economy that produced no factory emissions or water pollution. The merchants, while fond enough of the Cunningham reign, clearly favored the Gregory renaissance.
Though five projects had been marked off Father Tim’s list, the following remained:
Add lkspr to front bds, cut wisteria off garage, grub honeyskle/ivy at steps, cultivate/mulch/spray roses, whlbarrow from H. Pringle, new hose/ nzzl.
Could he finish in time? Had his list been too ambitious? And then there was Cynthia’s list, which was considerably longer than the one in his shirt pocket. He leaned on the garden spade and wiped his perspiring forehead with a worn handkerchief. “No rest for the wicked,” he said.
“And th’ righteous don’t need none!” crowed his wife, completing a proverb favored by Uncle Billy Watson. She was squatting with a weeder, going full throttle at an infestation of wire grass in the perennial bed facing Wisteria Lane.
He heard a car brake suddenly in the street, squawking to the curb. “There she is!” a voice called.
He looked up as the driver and passenger leaped from a Buick, the motor still running, and dashed across the sidewalk to the perennial bed. Both callers wore muumuus, though of different colors, and both appeared flushed and overwrought.
“You’re Cynthia Coppersmith!” exclaimed the one with a camera strapped around her neck.
“The nice man at the drugstore told us where you live,” said the other, “but don’t tell him we told you he told us!”
“We’re your biggest fans in the whole world, we drove all the way from Albany, Georgia, just to see where you do your little cat books!”
“We hoped we’d run into you, but we never dreamed we’d find you out in your yard!”
“Oh, gosh, I’m often in my yard,” said Cynthia.
“Get over there behind her, Sue Lynn, and let me take a picture!”
He noted that Sue Lynn jumped behind his wife with astonishing agility.
Click. “Sue Lynn, honey, you blinked, let me take it again.” Click. “Oh, umm, could you move out of the picture, your arm was in that one.” He moved out of the picture. Click.
“Now, would you take a picture of Sue Lynn and me behind Cynthia?” A camera was thrust into his hands.
“Sue Lynn, honey, take your sunglasses off, we can’t see your face!”
“Oh, mercy,” said his wife, clearly distressed. “I’m filthy, we really shouldn’t be doing this.”
He was struck by her look of dumbfounded desperation. “Ladies!” he proclaimed in his pulpit voice, “perhaps we could—”
“Just look through that little place in the middle and push down the button on the right,” said the camera owner. She hunkered over Cynthia, who appeared frozen in a squat position. “We just love your little books better than anything, this is so exciting I can hardly stand it, we’ll send you a copy of the pictures, we always order four-by-six glossy. Sue Lynn, honey, move over ! It’s that little button on the right! On th’ right! There you go!�
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He noted that Dooley was forking down his lasagna, itching to pick up Tommy and haul him to Wesley for a movie. The plan to eat at least one meal a day together wasn’t easy to stick to, especially with a teenager, but they were all hanging in there until Dooley’s move to his mother’s house tomorrow night. After that, he’d be out to Meadowgate for the summer, helping Hal Owen with his veterinary practice, and they’d be heading for Tennessee.
“‘Fame…,’” he muttered, dribbling olive oil on a slice of bread.
“What about it?” Cynthia inquired.
“‘…can never be a bedfellow to tranquillity,’” he said, loosely quoting Montaigne.
“And all because of little books about a cat. Who knew?” His wife looked oddly pleased.
The award business in New York and the invitation to travel around the country had been one thing, but today had been another. He’d felt strangely unnerved by the women in muumuus.
“So who’s going to the movie with you?” he asked Dooley. He thought the boy looked unusually handsome; his bones were fitting together nicely these days.
“Tommy.”
“I know about Tommy. Anybody else?”
“Jenny. And Tommy’s date.”
“Aha.”
“Jenny,” murmured his wife, arching an eyebrow. Their young neighbor in the house with the red roof had moved in and out of Dooley’s life with some frequency over the years.
“Isn’t Lace home yet?” asked Father Tim. He’d heard Lace was visiting a roommate on her way from school to Mitford.
Dooley shrugged.
“We’ll just ring up to the Harpers and see,” said Cynthia, bolting from the table. “Excuse me!”
“Wait!” said Dooley, looking alarmed. “Don’t call. I don’t want to know if she’s home.”
“You don’t want to know?” asked Cynthia, clearly not concerned about being obvious. “What could it hurt to know ?”
With some haste, the boy folded his napkin, a civility drilled into him at school, and stood. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome,” said Father Tim, feeling the tension in the air.
“Lunch tomorrow, right?”
Dooley left the kitchen without looking back. “Be there or be square!” he called over his shoulder, and was gone down the hall.
Father Tim peered at Cynthia, who had a positively wicked gleam in her eye. “You see?” she said.
“See what?”
“He’s dying to know if Lace is at home!”
He sighed without meaning to. “He could have asked around town if he wanted to find out. Maybe he really doesn’t want to know if she’s home.”
“It’s not that we’re trying to force him into anything,” said his wife.
“Of course not,” he said. “Certainly not!”
He wasn’t taking Dooley to the Grill, no way. J.C. and Mule and Percy would want to know everything about school, girls, cars, grades, it was too much. Besides, Dooley did not hold the Grill in high estimation, as the menu still offered livermush and fries that were decidedly on the limp side.
He’d read somewhere that a place in Wesley was now selling wraps. He didn’t know exactly what a wrap was, but it sounded modern and upbeat. He got the new number from information, called to find out the address, and Dooley hied them there in the Mustang with the top down.
“So what do you think?” he asked as they looked around the wrap place. There was a considerable crowd of young people with nose rings and tattoos, there was music that sounded like…he couldn’t be certain what it sounded like, maybe like someone breathing heavily into an empty coconut shell.
“Cool,” said Dooley.
“And how was the movie?” he asked as they unwrapped their wraps.
“Neat.”
What had happened to the boy’s vocabulary? At the stunning cost of twenty-two thousand a year, it had been reduced to that of a mynah bird. Of course, he and Cynthia had found Dooley’s grades to be first-rate, so there was no complaint in that department.
“How’s Jenny?”
Dooley took a huge bite. Father Tim took a huge bite; stuff from the other end of the wrap thudded into his lap.
“Great,” said Dooley.
At the age of eleven, and with hardly any schooling, Dooley Barlowe had been able to speak in complete sentences. Father Tim couldn’t understand this drastic decline—he couldn’t blame it on one lone year at the University of Georgia; it must have taken root at that fancy school in Virginia.
“Wouldn’t you, ah, like to at least say hello to Lace before you go out to Meadowgate?”
“Say hello? She doesn’t want to say hello to me. The last time I called her from school, she was too busy to say hello, she never even called me back, I wish you’d quit bringing up her name all the time, Lace, Lace, Lace, I could care less.” The boy’s face flamed.
“Sorry,” said Father Tim, meaning it.
“You just dropped lettuce in your lap,” said Dooley.
“This is the coolest car in the whole town,” Dooley told him on the way home. “Mitford doesn’t have any really cool cars.”
“Come on! There’s Miss Sadie’s 1958 Plymouth still sitting in the Fernbank garage. Some people would give their eyeteeth to get their hands on a car like that.”
As Dooley wheeled right around the monument, Father Tim threw up his hand to Bill Sprouse, out for a walk with his dog, Sparky. Father Tim thought Sparky looked precisely like the head of a kitchen mop pulled along by a leash.
“There aren’t any neat girls in Mitford, either.”
According to Cynthia and Puny, there were no men; according to Dooley, there were no girls.
Father Tim felt suddenly inspired. “Let’s don’t go home! Let’s drive to Farmer.” The road to Farmer was the road Dooley had practiced driving on, the road Dooley had crashed Harley’s old truck on…it was a road of memories, it was a day that felt like summer; he wanted to savor every minute with the boy who was growing up so fast, too fast.
Dooley looked at his passenger and grinned. “Cool,” he said.
They had stopped at a country store and taken their cold drinks out to a table and wooden benches under a maple tree. Father Tim relished its mentholated shade. There was even a small breeze blowing.
“I’ve been wanting to talk with you about something,” he told Dooley. He paused a moment and lifted a silent prayer. “It’s about Sammy and Kenny.”
“I don’t want to talk about them anymore.”
“But we’ve got to do it once and for all, we’ve got to find your brothers. It’s been on my mind a lot, and finally I have a good idea.”
“It won’t work. There’s no use lookin’ for ’em, we’ll never find ’em, it’s been too long. Buck looked, you looked, and…”
“And what?”
“And you prayed.”
“Always.”
“Plus Cynthia prayed, Mama prayed, and I prayed. Even Jessie and Poo. It didn’t work.”
“Right. Not yet.”
Dooley looked at his drink bottle. “What kind of idea?”
“If we’re going to find your brothers, especially Sammy, I think we’ve got to find somebody else first.”
“Who?”
This was the part he dreaded. “Your father.”
“No,” said Dooley, getting up from the bench. “No.” All color drained from his face; he took several steps backward.
“He’s the one who can give us leads. Sammy was with him when he was last seen. It’s a chance we’ve got to take, son.”
“I thought you wanted to be my father.” Dooley had backed to the maple and stood there, defiant.
“I want to give you everything a father can give, but I can’t give you any clues about Sammy like I believe your birth father can. Help me in this, Dooley.”
“I hate his guts!” shouted Dooley. Tears escaped onto his freckled face. “I don’t want to see him, I don’t want him hanging around, bein’ drunk and knocki
n’ everybody in th’ head and callin’ me names.”
“Yes, but—”
“He might find Mama and hurt ’er, or try to take Jessie and Poo.”
“I’ll be in Tennessee, but I’ll manage to go to wherever he is. Or Buck—Buck will go. But you’ve got to help us figure out where he might be, what some of his habits were.”
Dooley had less than two days left with them, and now this hard thing in the midst of the only private time they’d had together….
But one couldn’t wait forever to tackle hard things.
Dooley wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Besides, maybe he’s dead. I hope he’s dead.”
“Come on. Sit down. Try to remember. Kenny is seventeen now, Sammy is fifteen, only four years older than you were when I saw you the first time.” As clearly as if it had happened yesterday, Father Tim recalled the image of an eleven-year-old Dooley Barlowe, barefoot and in filthy overalls, peering in his office door. You got anyplace I can take a dump?
“Let’s do our best, let’s give it another shot,” he said. “After all, life is short.”
He had a terrible lump in his throat—for Sammy and Kenny, for Dooley, for the hard things of life in general.
Was he jealous of his wife’s fame? He wrenched a dandelion from the damp earth and tossed it on the pile. On the other hand, could two women in muumuus be called a bona fide indication of fame? His face burned as he thought of being spoken to as if he were the yard man.
He made it a point to pray—asking for humility, for help in swallowing down his pride. At least it appeared on the surface to be pride. Was there a deeper issue? Surely he couldn’t be jealous of any honor accruing to his wife’s long years of hard work and dedication.
Whatever it was existed at a level deeper than jealousy. He thumped into the grass near the fence, took off his work gloves, and leaned against the pine tree. So what was really making his gut wrench?
Fear.
It was that simple.
He was afraid she’d somehow be taken from him, swept away on a tide they couldn’t anticipate or control.
“How’s the new book coming?” he asked as they lay in bed. He was rubbing her neck, as he often did when she was slaving over a drawing board. He’d long ago given up hope that she wouldn’t do this to herself anymore; no, she loved it too much. Just as preaching had been what he did, writing and illustrating books was what she did, it was how she processed her life.