‘Is she talking yet?’ asked J.C.

‘We had a card from her when we got home. Said she’s doing better.’ Doing better, she had written, pray for me.

‘I guess you heard what’s going on at Lord’s Chapel?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Actually, nobody really knows, but rumors are flyin’. The story I get is—’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he said. ‘I keep my nose out of parish rumors.’ Not only was that expected of the former priest, but he really didn’t want to hear it. It would do him no good to know whatever it was nobody really knew.

J.C. wiped his face with his lunch napkin. ‘You’d never make it in my business.’

‘True.’

‘That was some good barbecue, you should try it. But the fries came with aioli.’

‘So?’

‘I thought they weren’t servin’ anything people can’t pronounce.’

‘You just pronounced it. Maybe you and Mule can overlook the owner’s personality and we can settle in and be regulars.’

‘Or maybe we’ll go back to Lew Boyd’s an’ eat bad sandwiches . . .’

‘Your sandwiches were bad, not mine.’

‘. . . an’ sit on those dinette chairs by th’ vending machine, suckin’ up exhaust fumes from th’ garage . . .’

‘Snow blowing in . . .’

‘Freezin’ our ass to th’ chair,’ said J.C.

‘Those were the good old days.’

‘It was just a few months ago.’

‘Tempus fugit.’ He was going to coax his Latin back if it killed him.

‘Find a hole and fill it, that’s my motto. If I was a rich man, I’d put a real restaurant in this town.’

They were legging it up Main Street—a grand, soft day, as the Irish would say. He was glad he’d run this morning, if only a couple of miles; he’d get back to a regimen, he would straighten up and fly right.

‘We have a real restaurant,’ he said. ‘Lucera. Miss Sadie’s old place. Great food. Terrific atmosphere. Romantic.’

‘That’s the problem—you pay for romantic. I don’t need romantic.’

‘Adele might enjoy romantic, ever thought of that?’

‘Oh, boy, Dr. Phil comes to Mitford.’

‘Remember who helped you land Adele.’

‘Right. Mitford’s leading citizen.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Wait’ll you see next week’s Muse. I paid big money for this piece.’

‘What piece?’

‘Wait an’ see. Inspired by the McGraw incident. You’ll like it.’

‘Come on. What are you talking about?’

‘Number one, we’re posing an important philosophical question to this community. Number two, a couple of people called you Mitford’s leading citizen and we’re taking a survey—you could end up th’ winner.’

‘Wait a minute. I am not a leading citizen. No, no, that’s embarrassing. Are you serious?’

They stopped outside the men’s store.

‘For one thing, I don’t lead anybody.’

‘You led a hundred and twenty people, give or take, for sixteen years.’

‘That’s a completely different matter, and that was five years ago, it’s history.’ He didn’t like the feel of this. ‘You need to cancel that story,’ he said. The McGraw incident?

‘Freedom of the press, buddyroe.’ J.C. opened the door to the Collar Button, the bell jingled. ‘I’m droppin’ in here to pick up a half-page ad, looks like th’ local economy’s on the upswing.’

•   •   •

HE GUNNED HIS VINTAGE RAGTOP up the hill to Hope House, dismissing J.C.’s blather. He would give J.C. a call tomorrow, nip this thing in the bud—he didn’t like what he was feeling.

There. The kick in the engine, like a tic, then the feel of something disconnecting and firing again.

For a year or more, they had thrashed through whether to sell his Mustang, trade it, put it on blocks in the backyard (‘Too rural,’ said his wife), save it for Dooley, or auction it off at the fiftieth anniversary benefit for Children’s Hospital. Cynthia was keen on the benefit, Dooley didn’t appear to want it, and storing it on blocks, anywhere, seemed uselessly sentimental.

If he knew the ropes of Internet commerce, he would put it on eBay or one of those lists he’d heard about. Or maybe park it at Lew’s with a sign on the windshield.

The benefit was probably the answer. A completely trouble-free way to let it go and get a deduction into the bargain. But he’d miss it, of course. Cynthia had given it to him a few years ago as a birthday present; it had marked a memorable chapter of his life.

He pulled into the parking lot at Hope House, liking the ease of the steering, the worn leather seat—an old shoe on wheels. He got out and locked it, then stood back and looked at what the boys in Holly Springs had called ‘a sharp little ride.’ A collar in a red Mustang convertible had raised a few eyebrows along the way, which, if nothing else, had been fun.

He heard the familiar buzz just beyond the treetops to the north, and looked up and, yes, oh, boy, there it was—Omer Cunningham’s yellow ragwing, making a pass over Hope House.

He threw up his arm and waved to beat the band. Omer dipped a wing and roared south.

Omer’s personalized wing dip was a tribute cherished by more than a few. Uncle Billy, a recipient of one of these dips, had marked the occasion by saying, ‘That’d bring tears to a glass eye.’

It gave him a thrill to see Omer gunning around in his slapdash contraption. Not that he, Timothy, had been the perfect passenger the time or two that Omer had taken him up. He remembered trying to hold on to his minimal breakfast; remembered looking down at the floorboard, where a ruined bath mat failed to cover a gaping hole—a hole through which he gained an uneasy view of treetops and power lines.

Where Omer got the wherewithal for such entertainment, he had no idea. ‘He’s a decorated ’Nam vet,’ J.C. said. ‘Let ’im do what he dern well pleases.’

The door to Room Number One was open, as he usually found it, and the real Number One was sleeping in her blue recliner.

The chair faced out to the nurses’ station where the action was, and had been called the best seat in the house or the worst, depending. All the world was right there, just through the door, still living and using a walker, still dying and being rolled to the elevator on a gurney, still uttering the occasional epithet, still bringing flowers and removing the perished ones, still bearing trays of food, some you could eat and some you couldn’t, and once in a blue moon there came the brightness of children passing, going in to their great-grandma—or great-grandpa, though there were currently only three of these good souls, one still with an eye for the nurses.

The children were especially worth waiting for, hoping for, they seemed to come most often around Easter, bringing baskets, conducting something into the world of the hallway that reminded Louella of her own youth, those long days ago when she was raised by Miss Sadie, seven years her elder, and pulled around town in a red wagon like a sack of seed corn.

For Miss Sadie to raise a little dark girl as her own and to give her the family name if she wanted it, and then to take her in again years later, when her beautiful husband had died and her step-grandson was transferred to Los Angeles—to do all that and then put in her will that Louella Baxter Marshall was to have the many satisfactions of Room Number One until the day, according to the handwritten will, that ‘Louella, my sister in the Lord and dearest friend,’ was herself rolled to the elevator on a gurney.

‘Miss Louella, you see too much goin’ on,’ a nurse once said. ‘It’s too stimulatin’. You need rest.’

‘I’ll rest in th’ grave,’ was the reply.

Louella had asked him which cost the least, a casket funeral or cremation. Cremation, he said. She didn’t want the price of a fancy casket to bear on the funds Miss Sadie had set aside to take care of Louella Baxter Marshall’s needs. She wanted to choose cremation, then, as Miss Sadie had done. She had never heard of a Baptist being cremated, though Episcopalians did it all the time.