In This Mountain (39 page)

“You doin’ all right?”

“I am!”

“Well, you come up and see us anytime. Esther’s bakin’ apple pies today, she said tell you she’ll leave th’ sugar out of one if you’ll come up an’ get it.”

“That,” he said, “is the best offer I’ve had all day.”

Eager to give another tutorial, Emma stopped by on her way to The Local, showed him again how to retrieve his e-mail, and delivered one of her own.

“Who do you think should go?” he asked Emma.

“Why, th’ mayor, of course, that’s th’ sort of thing mayors
do.
”

“If he can’t go, who do you think? Hessie Mayhew?”

“Hessie Mayhew?”

Emma’s indignation nearly blew him against the wall. “Why not?”

“
Why not?
She’s Presbyterian, that’s why not.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’ve been workin’ with th’ Anglicans over there, th’ whole thing’s bein’ done thro’ th’
Anglicans
!”

“I see. But don’t you think the delegate should be somebody who simply represents the spirit—the heart, if you will—of our Mitford, regardless of denomination?”

“What I really think is, you should be th’ one goin’.”

“How quickly you forget. I’m not flying across that pond or any other.”

“You bought a computer,” she reminded him.

“Give you an inch, you want a mile.”

“Maybe Esther Cunningham. She was mayor for how many years, eighteen?”

“Esther won’t do it, she’d rather be traveling with Ray in the RV. I’d talk to Andrew if I were you, get his thoughts.”

“Right,” she said.

“You know who I’d send?”

“Who?”

“You,” he said.

“Me?”

“It was your idea. It’s your hard work that got us to this point. I think you should do it. In fact, I’ll mention it to the mayor.”

“Fly all that way over
water
?”

“Don’t look down,” he said. “Get a seat on the aisle.”

She frowned. “I’m too fat to go to England. Plus I don’t have anything to wear.
Nothin’.
And even though I used to be Episcopalian, now I’m a Baptist.”

“Umm,” he said.

“An’ Snickers…I’ve never left Snickers. I don’t know if he could live without me.”

“Scared of flying, too fat, nothing to wear, dog will keel over, and a Baptist! You’ve convinced me. If I were you, I wouldn’t go, either.”

She peered at him over her half-glasses. He knew that look. She was waiting to be begged, cajoled, wheedled, and coaxed. But no way. Let that job fall to somebody else.

She picked up the e-mail and studied it. “What in th’ dickens does this mean…‘washed into the neighbor’s ha-ha’?”

“A ha-ha is a ditch, a sort of ravine that cows won’t cross. Saves on fencing.”

“The way they say things over there, you’d think they live in a foreign country.”

“They do live in a foreign country.”

He went back to paging through the essays she had typed and printed out before the era of his own p.c.

“OK,” she said.

“OK what?”

“If th’ mayor asks me, I’ll go. I’ll give up potatoes, gravy, bread, an’ ice cream startin’ in January. That way, I’ll lose ten pounds by May, which means I can get in that blue suit you’ve seen me wear, th’ one with th’ gold buttons, and that orange knit dress with a jacket. You remember that orange knit dress with a jacket.”

“Can’t say that I do.”

She took a deep breath. “I should probably give up bacon while I’m at it, an’ I’ll get a pill from Hoppy, to knock me out over th’ Atlantic.”

“There you go,” he said. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

“But I’m not gettin’ my hopes up,” she said. “Andrew will probably go, or he’s already got somebody in mind.”

“Could be.”

“And lookit, they’re sendin’ a couple. I wonder if that means we should send a couple, to keep things even. I can’t imagine who it would be, can you? Not th’ Bolicks, he has that tumor. Not th’ Harpers, they’ve just been on vacation….”

He studied the top of the computer screen, pondering the mysteries to be unlocked within File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Tools…

“Besides, who would fix Harold’s breakfast?”

“Percy Mosely?” he asked, hoping to be helpful.

“Late February is what th’ doctor said. But I hope it’s March! If it can wait ’til March th’ third, it’ll be born on my mama’s birthday.”

He sat at the kitchen table, counting his pocket change. “Do you know whether it’s a boy or a girl?” A dollar forty, a dollar fifty…

“No, sir, I don’t know an’ don’t want t’ know. What did people do before you could look in somebody’s stomach with a camera? They waited ’til it was born, that’s what!”

“Will you, ah, be bringing the baby to work?”

“I’m sure not goin’ to farm it out! Besides, how do you think it would get to know its granpaw if I didn’t bring it to work?”

He thought Puny looked positively radiant.

“A dollar seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven. You’ve got a point there,” he said.

Emma Newland’s possible mission to England, and his new grandchild on the way….

Just let somebody try to tell him that miracles didn’t happen every day.

“It’s me…Betty.”

“Betty!”

“I’ll do it.”

“Great! Wonderful!”

“But no cleaning.” He heard the tremor in her voice. It wasn’t easy for Betty Craig to lay down the law.

“Absolutely none!”

“And just two meals a day.”

“Not a scrap more,” he said.

“When do I start?”

“He’ll be home tomorrow. Your timing is perfect.”

“So I start tomorrow evenin’?”

“Yes, ma’am. Around four-thirty, if you could.”

“Will you be there to get me started?”

“I will.”

“And Father?”

“Yes?”

“Every time Miss Rose is mean to me, I’m goin’ to put a dime in a little bank I made from a Sprite can.”

He laughed. “You could quickly become a very rich woman.”

“Yes, sir, an’ when this job is over, I’ll use th’ money for a vacation—’cause I’ll sure be needin’ one.”

Father Talbot rang up in the evening. Would the Kavanaghs come to a spur-of-the-moment community-wide covered dish supper on Friday? Bill Sprouse would be there, and Millie Tipton; there would be special music, and they’d do a bit of ecumenical praying-for-rain into the bargain.

Cynthia was up for it.

“Ray Cunningham’s cole slaw, Margaret Larkin’s fried chicken, and Hessie Mayhew’s yeast rolls. Fabulous!” said his wife.

“How do you know they’ll even be there?”

“It’s worth the gamble,” she said. He thought Cynthia Kavanagh had come home as starved as a barn cat.

Father Tim called George and Harley to see if they could reschedule the barbecue for the Saturday before George was to leave. Not a problem. George said he would pass on going to Lord’s Chapel, however, and get together with Scott Murphy.

Harley was keen for the church supper.

“What sort of getup?” asked Harley.

“Khakis, I’d say, and a sport shirt.”

“You reckon I ought t’ bring a pan of brownies?”

“Definitely!”

“Nuts or plain?”

“Nuts,” said Father Tim. “And when you take the Saran Wrap off, stand back.”

Harley cackled. One of his proudest moments had been when two church ladies begged for his recipe. He’d written it down on the back of a pew bulletin, and now, every time they came by the station, they talked about the brownies that were making them famous all the way to Minnesota, or was it Montana?

Didn’t he have to earn his wings sooner or later?

Well, then, why not sooner?

He’d take five minutes while Cynthia dressed for the church supper, and carry forth the dictum laid down by Nike.

Thumping into his desk chair, he opened the laptop and accessed his e-mail. Nothing new. He was pierced by an odd disappointment.

Now. He knew how to retrieve his e-mail, but could he
send
one without Emma standing over him? All he had to do was follow the handwritten directions she’d scrawled on a yellow pad. What could happen, after all, if he did it unsupervised? Could he somehow break the thing that had cost an arm and a leg and thrust him into the twenty-first century?

If so, so be it….

He hit send, holding his breath.

Out of here.

Emma Newland would count this her greatest triumph. To tell the truth, he felt pretty good about it himself.

At six-thirty, Hope Winchester filled her teakettle with bottled water and placed it on the gas burner. She was wondering whether she’d ever known anyone other than George who was willing to make personal sacrifices for God.

She thought of her mother, who had made desperate sacrifices for her two daughters, but not for God. Her mother didn’t appear to believe in God, though Hope remembered the time when her sister, Louise, was running a perilous fever, and her mother had sat at the foot of the bed and wept and rocked herself. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh,

God,” she had whispered over and over. It had frozen Hope’s heart to witness her grief. When she was older, Hope remembered wondering if it had been God who made Louise well.

It was mystifying to her that George would choose to go back to prison, back into despair and hopelessness and even possible danger, when he could have chosen an easy life in Mitford. And yet, she sensed it wasn’t in him to choose an easy life.

She walked to the front window of her two rooms above the Chelsea Tea Shop, and looked out to Main Street. The days had grown shorter; already the street lamps were shining against the gathering dusk. Three people passed on the street below, two of them carrying something covered by a tea towel.

A choir member had invited her to the Lord’s Chapel supper, and she’d wrestled all day with the invitation. Never in her life had she cooked or baked anything for a covered-dish supper, and the thought of doing it and failing was humiliating.

Worse still, what if she took something and no one ate any of it and she had to carry the dish away, untouched, while everyone else went home with empty platters?

It occurred to her in the afternoon that she might buy a dozen corn muffins before the tea shop closed, and in this notion found a moment of glad reprieve. Bought muffins, however, might be a mark against her in some way she could only sense and not fully understand.

She wished fervently that she’d never been asked, and found that she was wringing her hands again. The bright spirit she’d recently felt had vanished, and she was her old self, the worried, fretful self she’d been before the fall.

She went to her boiling teakettle and looked at the clock on the stove. Six forty-five. As the supper was at seven o’clock, it was too late to worry about it anymore. The whole affair could at last be forgotten.

She instantly felt both an enormous relief and an unexplainable sadness, something like the feeling she had when she realized she wasn’t in love with George Gaynor, after all, but counted him a friend.

“And in this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of choice pieces, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow….”