A Light in the Window (57 page)

If this was what marriage was like, he thought, he was getting a good dose. Cynthia Coppersmith was lapping up his doting attention like cream, without so much as bothering to take the curlers out of her hair.

“That woman left!” Dooley yelled from his bedroom.

He walked to the boy’s doorway and looked in. “Left? When?”

“After you went to your office. I seen ’er creepin’ down th’ stairs.”

He went to the guest room door and tried the knob. Locked.

“She’ll be back,” he told Dooley.

“Poop.”

“Tomorrow night is when we’ll talk. You’ll be well enough and in the nick of time, too. You start back to school on Monday.”

Dooley pulled the covers over his head.

“Well! I see you went out. That’s good news.”

“I went out for personal items,” she said, ducking through the kitchen in her trench coat.

“I love you,” he would say, meaning it.

“That’s the first thing I want you to know.”

Then, he would talk about school laws and how they’re designed for the common good, not to mention individual good, which, in this case, had everything to do with health.

Then, he would deal with the issue of wrong friends and once again go over the ramifications of stealing as it affected personal character and spiritual freedom.

He would close with the warning Buck Leeper had commanded him to pass along. Here was yet another infraction of rules, another instance of disregard for set boundaries. He would not allow this sort of behavior to become a pattern, and neither did he want to make any threats he couldn’t keep.

He pondered what Dooley liked best:

Playing with Tommy, singing in the chorus, listening to his jam box, eating hamburgers.

To underscore the ten-day suspension, he could remove everything but the chorus—but should he remove them all at once or in descending order? And for how long? He would call Marge Owen, who had raised two and was sufficiently skilled to be doing it all over again.

This was treacherous ground, and for Dooley’s sake, he didn’t want to step in a hole.

To accommodate two working mothers, the ECW changed their morning meeting to an evening meeting but failed to tell him. As he was the speaker, along with Mayor Cunningham and a Wesley town official, he had to change his own plans and be there.

“We’ll talk when I come home,” he told Dooley, who was well enough to watch TV.

But when he came home, the boy was in bed, snoring, his red hair lying wetly on his forehead.

He looked down at his freckled face and the arm thrown over the covers, grateful for all he had brought into the silent rectory, including the worry and aggravation.

Barnabas, who was sleeping at the foot of Dooley’s bed, didn’t raise his head but opened one eye.

Right there was some of the best medicine Dooley Barlowe had ever had. His dog could positively cure what ailed you—not to mention the fact that he was an upstanding churchgoer into the bargain.

He looked out his alcove window before getting undressed and gave his neighbor a quick call.

“Hey,” he said when she answered the phone.

“Hey, yourself.”

“What’s going on next door? Do I see your Christmas lights burning?”

“I’m celebrating.”

“Alone?”

“I wouldn’t be, if you’d come over.”

“Well ... ,” he said, uncertain.

“No strings attached.”

That was fair enough. He went over.

She invited him to sit on the love seat in her workroom.

“What are you celebrating?” It must be fairly momentous, as she had taken the curlers out of her hair and looked terrific.

“Being alive.”

“You were that sick?”

“It has nothing to do with being sick. We breathe, we run around in our underwear, we go to the store, we dig up the tulip bulbs or plan to, we make soup and pay the electric bill, and we never stop to think—we’re alive! This is a gift!

“I wasn’t even pondering this. I wasn’t being poetic or introspective. It’s just that I glanced at the floor—right there—this afternoon and saw how the light came through the window and fell on the wood.

“It bowled me over. It took my breath away. I could hardly bear it.”

He was silent, looking at her.

“There was so much life in the light on the wood, the way it folded itself gently into the grain. That little spot on the floor radiated with tenderness. And then it was gone.”

He couldn’t stop looking at her and didn’t try.

“Do you know?” she asked softly.

“I know,” he said.

“Not everyone knows,” she said.

“Yes.”

They heard the ticking of her clock in the hallway outside her workroom.

She was perched on the stool at her drawing board. “Why don’t you come and sit here?” he said.

She slid off the stool and came to him and sat down, and he took her hand. They were quiet for a time, in a soft pool of light from the lamp.

It occurred to him that he wanted to kiss her, to hold her close, but he didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve even to be sitting here, a man who couldn’t make up his mind from one hour to the next.

She leaned her head to one side, in that way of hers. “What are you thinking?”

“That I want to kiss you,” he said. “More than anything.”

She smiled. “No strings attached?”

“Yes,” he said. “No strings attached.”

He couldn’t help it that Dooley had a mild relapse on Saturday night and that he didn’t feel so good himself. Nor did he intend to fall asleep on Sunday after church and nap until the afternoon, which is when Dooley fell asleep and was out like a light until dinnertime. He meant to discuss the whole thing with him that night, before the boy went back to school the following morning, but when he sat on the side of Dooley’s bed, it was all he could do to say, “Listen, this can’t happen again. Do you hear me?”

Dooley had seemed to hear him, but he couldn’t quite forgive himself that he hadn’t handled it right. No, he hadn’t handled it right at all.

The lilacs bloomed so furiously that not a few of the villagers turned out to view the bushes.

“You’ve got to walk down behind Lord’s Chapel,” Hessie Mayhew told Winnie Ivey. “There’s a white bush you won’t believe! Take a camera!”

“Come and look!” Cynthia called through the hedge one morning. Barnabas nearly pulled him down racing to her yard where an ancient purple bush, half-hidden by the garage, was massed with fragrant blooms.

Andrew Gregory invited two friends from Baltimore to “come for the lilacs” and took them up and down Main Street to meet everybody from the postmaster to Dora Pugh, whose window display at the hardware store had changed to seed packets, bonemeal, garden spades, and wooden trellises.

On Sunday, the rector felt a lightness of spirit like he’d seldom known.

He walked toward home, as if on air, until he saw Percy and Velma driving down Main Street after the Presbyterians let out.