A Light in the Window (66 page)

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Authors: Jan Karon

BOOK: A Light in the Window
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The phone rang as he was walking across his bedroom to turn off the light.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Umm.”
“We were only playing when we talked about being a clergyman’s wife... right?”
“Oh, yes. Just... idle abstraction.”
“Well, then, I’ve something to add to it... since we’re just playing.”
“Do!”
“Yes, I have my own work and I love it and want to continue it, but if I were a clergyman’s wife and I truly loved the clergyman, I’d want to do something I failed to mention tonight. More important than teas and teaching, I’d want to take the tenderest care of the clergyman himself.”
She was silent for a moment. “That’s all,” she said softly. “That’s all I wanted to say. Good night, Timothy.”
After turning off the bedroom light, he went to the alcove window and looked down at the little yellow house with the glow of a lamp burning under the eaves.
“Good night,” he whispered, his breath making a vapor on the glass.
“Come home,” said Puny, breathless.
“What is it?”
“Come quick as you can,” she said.
He went.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hasta la Vista
Puny met him at the kitchen door.
“You won’t believe this,” she said.
“What? What is it?”
She marched down the hall to the stairs. “I’ve never seen anything to beat it.”
He raced behind her up the steps. “What happened?”
“The most disgustin’ thing in th’ world is what it is.”
“What’s going on?”
She stopped at the guest room. “I’ve lived on this earth thirty-four years, and I’ve never ... see this little rug? She must of thought she was puttin’ th’ key in her pocket, and it fell on th’ rug, where I found it.”
She turned the knob and threw open the door.
Puny was right. He couldn’t believe it.
From the unmade bed to the bags of garbage that littered the floor, the room was in complete chaos. Nothing had escaped the disorder-even the pictures hung wildly crooked on the walls.
“Smell that?” demanded his house help. “Nothin’ in here’s been washed or cleaned for two months. You could get arrested for livin’ like this.”
He walked slowly into the room.
He saw his books scattered about, many of them open and lying face down. Everywhere, garbage bags spilled forth their contents: KitKat wrappers, old newspapers, scribbled notes, soda bottles, crumpled dinner napkins, tin foil, drink cans.
Clothing lay in a soiled heap in the corner.
“A pigsty!” said Puny, clearly enraged. “And look at this bed.” Full of crumbs, he saw. The remains of a sandwich lay on the pillow, and an open bag of potato chips had been shoved under the blanket.
The typewriter sat in the only cleared space on the floor, a sheet of paper rolled into the carriage. What he presumed to be a manuscript lay in sections around the room, the bulk of it scattered across the foot of the bed.
He picked up a page and scanned it. His face burned.
“Good Lord!” This was definitely not about the Potato Famine.
“I read one of them pages, and it shamed me t’ death. Her writin’ must come straight off th’ walls of a public rest room. We ought t’ jis’ heave it into sacks and burn th’ lot of it.” Puny was trembling with anger. “And what do you think about that?”
She pointed to an empty milk carton on the dressing table.
No, she was pointing to what lay beside it:
The brooch.
“I found it on the landing,” said Meg Patrick, white with fury. “I was going to give it to you, but I forgot. It was right there on the dressing table, in your own house, in plain view—it wasn’t as if I’d stolen it, for heaven’s sake. And what were you doing in my room? I should think you would respect my privacy as I have unfailingly respected yours.”
She stood in the hallway outside the guest room, her hands shoved into the pockets of the belted trench coat, glaring at him.
“I considered asking that you merely clean your room, but I realize that isn’t what I want to say, after all.”
“What do you want to say, then?” He saw that her magnified pupils had dilated alarmingly.
“I want to say that I’ll drive you to the airport in Holding or the bus station in Wesley, whichever you prefer, and we’ll leave here this evening at eight o’clock sharp. I’ll thank you to pick up my books and stack them properly and take that manuscript out of here before I dispose of it personally.”
She didn’t slam the door until she had cursed his paternal line all the way back to his great-grandfather.
He lugged the suitcases down the stairs and loaded them in the trunk. His cousin had asked to be dropped at the bus station in Wesley.
“I don’t have any money,” she said, glowering. “I had thought the heart of a cousin would be generously disposed to a relative who has has traveled all the way from the home country.
“Further, I believed that my needs would be considered as graciously as yours were considered in Sligo, while you lapped up our hospitality like a stoat.”
He choked down a retaliation, which would have been futile, and peeled two bills off the money he’d got from the bank only this morning. He handed them to her without a word.
Dooley came along, so they could pay a surprise visit to Tommy.
His houseguest of two months rode to the station without speaking and disappeared into the terminal without a word of good-bye.
“Gross,” said Dooley.
His sentiments exactly.
Before Percy let the jukebox go to the Collar Button man, he discovered it was worth more than five hundred dollars—a lot more. Then, before he could run a classified ad in the Wesley paper, Esther Cunningham talked him out of it for the museum, along with a stack of early advertising signs for Camel cigarettes, Dr. Pepper, and Sun-beam bread.
“Just think of the tax deductions,” she said, peering at him over a sausage biscuit from Hardee’s. “And think of seein’ your name on a little sign on the wall next to that jukebox. How about ‘Early Wurlitzer, a gift of Percy and Velma Mosely, proprietors of the Main Street Grill, established World War II.’ How’s that?”
On Wednesday, the mayor called an informal meeting of intimates at her home, hastening to add that Ray would be cooking barbecue with all the trimmings.
The subject was a festival to celebrate the opening of the first room of the museum and the installation of the Willard Porter statue on the lawn.
“Mayor,” said the rector, who arrived early with a six-pack of Diet Sprite, “you are hopelessly prone to festivals.”
“There’s worse things mayors are prone to,” she said. The red splotches had appeared on her face and neck, indicating her special enthusiasm for this project.
She stationed him in the family room where he could watch Ray finish making coleslaw. “Take a load off your feet,” she said. “I’ve got to call the hospital an’ see if th’ new grandbaby is comin’ anytime soon.”
“Another grandbaby?” he said to Ray with astonishment.
“Number twenty-four!” Ray said, stirring the homemade dressing into the grated cabbage. “Esther likes to be there when it happens, but this one has been hemmin’ and hawin’ for better than a week.”
“Doesn’t want to come out here and face the music, I suppose. And no wonder.”
Ray shook his head over the vagaries of modern life.
“Can I give you a hand?”
“You can put th’ ice in th’ glasses. There’ll be six of us. Table’s set, chairs are pulled to th’ table, cornbread’s bakin’. We’re on go.”
“Oh, well,” said Esther, blowing into the room, “not a peep. I guess nobody told it that Cunninghams like to jump out and hop to it.”
After dinner, the mayor occupied a velveteen swivel rocker in her family room and opened the meeting for discussion.
“I think we ought to have a band for when we unveil the statue,” she said. “Do you think the Presbyterians who play the Advent Walk would do it for nothin’—or charge an arm and a leg?”

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