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The Collar Button man, whose name, for some inexplicable reason, he could never retain—Eddie? Freddie?—emerged from the men’s shop next door and lit his meerschaum pipe.

‘Glad to see you, Father. Going up for a haircut?’

‘Not if I can help it. Going up yourself?’ The subtle force of pipe smoke on the morning air . . . The Collar Button Man raised an eyebrow. ‘Wi-Fi? Barry White? Cheap wine? Not I.’

‘I’ve seen a black limo cruise through a couple of times,’ he said, ‘but didn’t see where it’s from.’

‘North Carolina. I’ve also heard California. Definitely a car service plate.’

‘Any idea what it’s all about?’

‘Winnie Kendall has had two sightings and is hoping for Elvis. Fancy Skinner has had one sighting and is rooting for George Clooney on a search for mountain real estate.’

The Collar Button man released a veritable plume of smoke.

He sprinted by the shoe store, formerly the Main Street Grill, where for four decades Percy Mosely had curmudgeoned his customers, local and otherwise; and where, for all Percy’s love of menu experiment, the Livers and Gizzards Special had been the great hosannah, the magnum opus of the Grill’s long history.

Before he retired from Lord’s Chapel, the rear booth had been generally known as ‘the Father’s pew.’ He always sat with his back to the front door, symbolic, perhaps, of shutting out the maelstrom for an hour.

He’d been fond of those days.

•   •   •

SITTING ON A BENCH beneath the awning of Happy Endings Bookstore, Coot Hendrick looked up to see Preacher Kavanagh balling the jack up Main Street. Out of respect, he stood and held out his hand, which the preacher stopped and shook.

‘Coot, how are you?’

‘I never growed up with people runnin’,’ said Coot. ‘Some of ’em, they run right out in traffic.’

‘How’s your mother?’

‘Mean as a rattlesnake.’ Coot grinned, baring a set of gums appointed with stubs for teeth. ‘I heered you fainted like a woman when th’ cops come on y’.’

‘Good to see you,’ the preacher said, and there he went like a shot, didn’t think that was funny a’tall.

•   •   •

THEY WOULD BE SLEEPING AGAIN tonight on the sofa—there was an odd comfort in seeing the blankets folded at one end, the pillows stacked at the other. She was squeezed in between the bedding gear, reading; he had commandeered the wing chair with Violet on his lap.

He looked at his wife over Thomas Traherne’s Poems of Felicity—her glasses had skied to the end of her nose. As always when reading, she had left these parts for an obscure outer planet.

He had a go at his own book, but his mind dipped and reeled like a swallow in summer air. He had no idea what he had just read, possibly because he had occupied himself with scratching a rash on his neck which appeared today for no good reason. Just there, under his left jaw, suddenly populating the privacy of his flesh.

‘A rash,’ he told his wife, jabbing a forefinger in its general direction.

She looked up, unmoved.

‘Can you see it?’

‘I can,’ she said. ‘These things happen.’

She was so cool, so distant from suffering, always a better man than himself. Why should he be pitiable and complaining, and she ever stalwart? He was the priest, she the mere deacon, appointed by himself without official credentials of any kind, yet ready, of course, in all situations to stand for what was right and good. Even with the ankle business throughout their Ireland trip, she was undaunted save for a single weeping spell which helped alleviate the tribulation of sitting for days with her foot elevated.

He hated this about himself, his whimpering. Churchill’s mandate to never explain and never complain was baloney. He had read the man’s letters to Clementine and was hardly surprised to learn that the old so-and-so had grumbled as bitterly as the rest of the common horde.

Here he was, seventysomething, and still whining, though God had woven like a gold thread through every chapter of every book of Holy Writ: Rejoice! Know that I am with you and for you and will never leave you; take courage that I will fight for you and be your shield and buckler and provide for you when you are old; I will supply your every need, I will give you victory over death, I have prepared a place for you in heaven . . .

Every imaginable love and consolation had been and was currently being delivered to him, and yet he had no wit or gumption to receive it. Abject, a worm, he lifted a silent petition for grace.

She turned a page.

‘Besides the rash . . .’ he said, eager to divulge the entire calamity, ‘my right eyeball is scratchy.’

The blank look.

‘Like sandpaper.’

‘What’s really the matter?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It isn’t the rash or the sandpaper. What’s really wrong?’

He opened his mouth to protest, but knew he couldn’t cover himself. What was really wrong was . . . He felt tears in there somewhere. ‘I’ve lost something,’ he said, swallowing down the knot.

‘Like?’

‘Like . . . passion.’ It was hard to use that word, which was so often overused, but there it was. ‘Like . . .’ He closed his eyes. ‘I feel useless,’ he said, humiliated to confess this, even to her.

‘Feeling useless is a good thing.’

He had no comment on such ridiculous thinking.

‘There have to be rest stops in music. There must be winter for the roots of a plant to dig down and grow strong for spring. There—’

‘Please,’ he said.

‘You do this at least once a year, ever since you retired. In fact, you just did it in Ireland! And I drag out all my homilies and metaphors and somehow we manage to push on.

‘Listen to me, sweetheart. What happened in Sligo? The woes of an entire household fell on you; souls were spared because of a meddling priest. You had just come from saving the life of a total stranger who happily turned out to be your brother. Before that, there was our year at Holy Trinity, where you restored a parish gone to ruin for forty years.’

‘You always say these things.’

‘Somebody has to say these things. You have an insatiable craving to always do more, nothing is ever enough. You want God’s job.’

‘Cynthia.’

‘It’s true. It was this very refusal to slow down and be useless once in a while that forced you to retire. You were killing yourself.’

He had no words; words were impotent, tiresome.

‘Remember the cave and how you’d been plagued with always wanting to get it right, whatever that means? Remember realizing that God and God alone is the only one who always gets it right?’

‘I know this,’ he said, angry. ‘I’m not a child.’

‘Think how you rounded up a scattered family, lost from each other for years—all Dooley’s siblings together now, and Dooley—you took a thrown-away boy into your heart and helped him become a young man of character—look at him and what he’s making of himself. Look carefully at him when you’re feeling useless, and remember Morris Love while you’re at it, and Buck Leeper and Dooley’s mother and legions of others too numerous to mention.’

It was that numbskull write-up in the Mitford Muse, it was Hoppy Harper going out there to make a difference, it was time racing by, it was his complaining in the face of God’s benevolence, it was his dog growing old, it was—it was jet lag, he didn’t care what anybody said.

He put his head in his hand. And as yet my love is weak, he prayed as did Thomas à Kempis, and my virtue imperfect and I have great need of your strength and comfort . . .

She stood and came to him and sat on the arm of the chair. ‘Honey . . .’ she said.

He liked it when she called him honey, which she almost never did. Yankees were accustomed to using the word exclusively for the produce of bees.