She pulled out into early afternoon traffic. ‘You want to eat it now, in the car?’

‘I do,’ he said.

‘And let the rest melt?’

‘No, I want to eat half in the car and go home and put the rest in the freezer, and call and see if Irene answers, and if she doesn’t, I’ll ride up with you.’

‘That’s very sweet,’ she said. ‘Really it is.’

The cruise along Main Street was the best thing since his first milkshake in the backseat of his Grandpa Yancey’s touring car in Holly Springs. He thought he hadn’t recently been happier—and then he thought again of his doctor.

Hoppy Harper was heading for South Sudan to do good in this broken world, and here he was with nothing better on his agenda than going after a block of Cherry Garcia with a plastic spoon. He realized he’d been greatly pestered by the idea of Hoppy’s bold future, for it made him despair of his own. He had a future, God willing, but bold?

He wished Irene McGraw would get herself home ASAP and shut her blasted dadgum door.

•   •   •

HOPE WINCHESTER MURPHY stood at the window of Happy Endings Bookstore and watched the Mazda go by with Father Tim in the passenger seat. He was eating something, maybe with a spoon, and looked happy.

She had walked past Lord’s Chapel the other day on her way home and for the first time in ages, popped into the rose garden.

She wouldn’t say a word to Father Tim, for it would disappoint him to know that the rose garden he’d planted behind Lord’s Chapel had gone to ruin. Aphids, Japanese beetles, you name it, they had all enjoyed communion and left the leaves in shreds.

The Malmaisons, the thorny Gertrude Jekylls, the Pink Dawn that had shot so joyously up the side of the old Sunday school building—maybe they would make it, and maybe not. She had looked around for a hose and found one buried in weeds and attached it to the spigot and watered the beds, which made her feel somehow victorious over death and destruction.

Soon after his Ireland trip, Father Tim had dropped in to shop her annual S for September Sale, which gave fifteen percent off all titles beginning with S.

She had looked up from Pat Conroy’s memoir of his reading life, and there he was, smiling in that boyish way that had caused her to have such a crush on him before she met Scott Murphy and went head over heels for the first time in her life.

‘No fair buying by author name, as I recall.’

‘No, Father, sorry. Just titles.’ She knew he knew that, and was only teasing. ‘What author?’

‘Strindberg.’

‘Strindberg! I can’t imagine you reading Strindberg.’

He laughed. ‘Just thought I’d see if you were paying attention. I believe it was Strindberg who wrote, “No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car.” Not bad, you must admit.’

‘And there’s what he said,’ she countered, ‘about people who keep dogs. He called them cowards who don’t have the guts to bite people themselves.’

How good it was to laugh with him. He was the only customer she knew who could quote Strindberg, who had read Steinbeck’s complete works, and was an expert on Wordsworth, Cowper, and even the poor deranged plowboy poet, John Clare.

With all his fondness for the old and familiar, he was also willing to take a chance on authors he’d never read—not often willing, of course, but she had introduced him to Gabriel García Márquez and he had thanked her, and gone on to Jorge Luis Borges. She remembered him standing by the shelf with the Borges volumes and copying something in a little notebook he carried. He had shown it to her when he checked out.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. JL Borges

‘Biblical,’ he had said, smiling.

She couldn’t imagine that he’d known misfortune or embarrassment or humiliation, but her notion of clerics was at that time unrealistic at best. She was blinded by the pomp of the office, and could scarcely comprehend the humanity of those ordained to it until she came to know Father Tim. It had been oddly inconvenient to see, if only so far as literary tastes allow, into the day-to-day life of a religious—more inconvenient than she had then cared to undertake, for as Mr. Emerson had pointed out, changing one’s mind was nothing if not vexing. Though she was once content to view the cleric as a blurred figure in the background of a photo, knowing Father Tim had brought such imagery into sharp and agreeable focus.

It was he who had hired Scott as chaplain of Hope House, and he who had performed their wedding ceremony at a lovely old mountain church with the smell of beeswax and apples, and a view to Tennessee. He had even baked a ham for their reception.

Above all, he and Cynthia had been two of her biggest supporters when, scared out of her wits and not knowing how she could possibly make it, she bought the bookstore and moved upstairs and hung curtains at the windows and came to believe in God.

Margaret Ann leaped onto the bench at the window and settled into a patch of sunlight.

She reached to stroke her yellow cat, and there it was—the warmth of her blood trickling down as if from a tap. It had been like this for days. She had missed two appointments with Dr. Wilson because a fill-in for the store was hard to find and the money for a fill-in harder still. For some reason she couldn’t comprehend, she had declined to talk about the baby with anyone except Scott and Louise and Dr. Wilson—it seemed natural to keep such news private and close until it was made obvious. Hoping to please, Scott had agreed. If her sister still lived in Mitford, she would tell her about the bleeding, but Louise was in Charleston, in a stressful job, and she wouldn’t wish to alarm her.

And why hadn’t she told Scott about the bleeding, or called the doctor’s office to make an appointment? She was nearly four months, and surely this was not the time for secrets. What was she waiting for?

She pressed her forehead against the cool pane of the window. She was waiting to grow out of the terrible fear of too much happiness, or too much sorrow.

•   •   •

THEY HAD PUT AWAY four bags of provender, made a hasty lunch, and checked on Barnabas, then lay on the study sofa—his head to the south, hers to the north.

They woke at three, disbelieving.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘jet lag doesn’t disappear overnight.’

‘Let’s call Irene,’ she said.

Irene Schmirene, who, he’d bet anything, had come home from her own shopping expedition and was putting away her own provender, or possibly waking up from a nap . . .

No answer at the McGraws’.

‘What does her phone message say?’ he asked.

‘The usual. You’ve reached the McGraw residence, no one can come to the phone right now, please leave a message.’

‘Did you leave a message?’

‘I hung up.’

‘You could have left a message and when she comes in, she would call back.’ His wife didn’t know everything, not by a long shot. ‘Call her again at five o’clock.’

She sat up, took Violet in her arms, and wandered to the window, staring out. When his wife stared out windows, wheels were turning—walls may get glazed, chandeliers removed and replaced by lamps, draperies changed to a more seasonal color, and now what? Irene McGraw’s door was driving her crazy.

For years he had mildly resented her ardent labors at the drawing table, which for months on end took her out of his life into another. He must have developed a kind of mental callus, for now he wished her there at the table in her small studio—the familiar sight of her bowed head as he walked down the hall, the crick in her neck that he would willingly rub out, her struggle to produce a higher work than she had produced before—even the rice bubbling and then burning on the stove would be a consolation compared to this meddling business.