A Common Life (10 page)

He would choose each word as carefully as his mother had chosen peaches off Lot Stringman’s truck. “Let me pick them out for you, Miz Kavanagh.” “No, thank you, Mr. Stringman,” she would say, “I like the doing of it myself.”

Finally despairing that writing a poem was beyond his endowment, he had decided to be content with writing a letter.

Peach by perfect peach, that is how he would choose his words....

He sat as if drained; there was nothing left of him, nothing at all, he was parchment through which light might be seen.

“Barnabas,” he murmured.

His good dog stirred at his feet.

“I have a mission for you, old friend.” He folded the letter, regretting that he’d written it on paper from a mere notepad. Ah, well, what was done was done. He placed the letter in an envelope and thought carefully how he might address it.

In a letter hidden inside an envelope, one might say whatever one wished, but the outside of the envelope was quite another thing, being completely exposed, as it were, to . . . to what? The hedge? The sky?

My love, my blessing, my neighbor,
he scrawled with some abandon.

He licked the flap and pressed it down and sat for a moment with it under his hand, then took it to the kitchen and found a length of twine, which he looped around the neck of his patient dog. Lacking a hole punch, he stuck the tip of a steak knife through the corner of the envelope and ran the twine through the hole and tied it in a knot.

“There!” he said aloud.

He walked with Barnabas down the back steps and across the yard to the hedge. “OK, boy, take it to Cynthia!”

Barnabas lifted his leg against a rhododendron.

“Take it to Cynthia!” he said, wagging his finger in the direction of the little yellow house. “Over there! Go see Cynthia!”

Barnabas turned and looked at him with grave indifference.

“Cat!”
he hissed.
“Cynthia’s house! Cat, cat, cat!”
That ought to do it.

Barnabas sniffed a few twigs that lay in the grass, then sat down and scratched vigorously.

Rats, what a dumb idea. In the old days, a fellow would have sent his valet or his coachman or some such, and here he was trying to send a dog—he deserved what he was getting.

“Go, dadgummit! Go to Cynthia’s back door, that’s where you love to go when you’re not supposed to!”

Barnabas gazed at him for a moment, then turned and bounded through the hedge and across her yard and up the steps to her stoop, where he sat and pressed his nose against the screen door, peering in.

He suddenly felt ten years old. Why couldn’t he think straight for five minutes in a row? His dog might sit at that door ’til kingdom come, with Cynthia having no clue Barnabas was out there. Should he run to the door and knock to alert her, then run away again?

This was suddenly the most ridiculous mess he’d gotten himself into in . . . ever. His face flamed.

“Timothy?” It was Cynthia, calling to him through her studio window. He’d utterly forgotten about her studio window.

“Umm, yes?”

“Why are you hiding behind the hedge?”

He was mortified.
I have no idea,
he wanted to say. “There’s a
delivery”
—he fairly thundered the word—“at your back door.”

“Oh,” she said.

He waited, covering his face with his hands.

“My goodness!” he heard her exclaim as she opened the screen door. “A letter on a string!”

Surely he would regret this.

“‘My love, my blessing, my neighbor’!” she crowed.

Did she have to inform the whole neighborhood?

“Go tell your master that I’ve received his most welcome missive . . . which I can barely get off the string. Ugh! . . . Oh, rats, wait ’til I get the scissors.”

His dog waited.

“And further,” she said, coming back and snipping the letter off, “do tell him I shall endeavor to respond promptly. However, my dear Barnabas, do not harbor, even for a moment, the
exceedingly
foolish hope that it will be delivered by Violet.”

The screen door slapped behind her.

The deed done, his dog arose, shook himself, and came regally down the steps, across the yard, and through the hedge, where, wearing the remains of the twine around his neck, he sat and gazed at his master with a decided air of disdain, if not utter disgust.

S
he pressed the letter to her heart, wishing the power of its message to enter her very soul and cause her to believe with the writer what an extraordinary benediction had come to them.

Yes, she loved him; in truth, more than life itself. And yet, the fear was beginning to creep in, the fear she had at last grown wise enough to recognize—that she could not please him and give him the joy that he above all others, deserved; the fear that Timothy, like Elliott, would not find her valuable enough for any true purpose; the fear that her priest, her neighbor, and now her betrothed, might discover in her some “terrible lack,” as Elliott had called her inability to bear children.

Only weeks earlier, she had wept in despair that Timothy Kavanagh would ever be able to abandon his own raw fear and surrender his heart.

Now she bowed her head and wept because, at last, he had.

She stood at the kitchen sink, spooning an odorous lump of congealed cat food into Violet’s dish.

Drawing her breath sharply, she stared at the cat bowl that she had just filled without knowing it.

She felt stricken. What had she done when she accepted his proposal with such unbearable eagerness and joy? Had she rashly agreed to something in which she might prove a bitter disappointment to both Timothy and herself?

And another thing—could she, who had often felt thrown away, be a friend and guide to a thrown-away boy? She thought she could, she knew she wanted to—for Dooley’s sake and her own.

She put the bowl on the floor and walked down the hall to her studio and stood at the window, gazing across the hedge to the rectory. There was his stone chimney, his slate roof, his bedroom window beneath the gable....

How often she had found solace in merely looking upon his house, the place where he would be working in his study, snoring by his fire, brushing his dog, commandeering his wayward boy, living his life.

She’d begun by having the most terrific crush on him, like a pathetic schoolgirl; it had been the sort of thing that made her blush at the sight of him, and caused her skin to tingle when she heard his voice. Worse, there had been long lapses in concentration that afflicted her for months on end.

She had plotted ways to meet him on the street, and once thumped onto the bench in front of the Main Street Grill, affecting a turned ankle that delayed her jaunt to The Local. He had, indeed, come by, just as she’d hoped, and sat with her and smiled at her in a way that made her nearly speechless until, finally, she fled the bench, forgetting to limp, and avoided him altogether for several weeks.

She remembered, too, the day she had prayed and marched boldly to his back door. Her heart thundered under her jumper as she asked to borrow a cup of sugar to make a cake. Having no intention of making a cake, she worried whether, in some priestly way, he might see through such guile and find her out. But he had invited her in and fed her from the remains of his own supper and she had seen something in his eyes, some kindness that had nearly broken her heart with its plainness and simplicity. And then his dog, attached to the handle of the silver drawer by a leash, had yanked the drawer out, sending forks, knives, and spoons clattering about the kitchen and skidding into the hallway. They had dropped to their knees as one, hooting with laughter as they collected the errant flatware. Even then, she knew that something had been sealed between them, and that it was laughter that had sealed it

It had been years since Elliott walked out—the divorce papers arrived by certified mail the following day—and in those years, not one soul had made her mouth go dry as cotton and her knees turn to water. Oh, how she had despised the torment of loving like a girl instead of like . . . like a sophisticated woman, whatever that might be.

That early, awkward time had also been irresistibly sweet. But now this—confusion and distress and alarm, and yes, the oddly scary thoughts of the women of Lord’s Chapel who for years had stood around him like a hedge of thorns, protecting him as their very own; keeping him, they liked to believe, from foolish stumbles; feeding him meringues and layer cake at every turn; mothering and sistering him as if this were their life’s calling. She saw, now, something she’d only glimpsed before, and that was the way an unmarried priest is thought to belong to the matrons of the church, lock, stock, and barrel.

More than once she’d waited at his side, feeling gauche and adolescent, as they clucked over him—inquiring after his blood sugar, flicking an imaginary hair from his lapel, ordering him to take a week off, and coyly insisting he never stray beyond the town limits. They were perfectly harmless, every one, and she despised herself for such cheap and petty thoughts, but they were real thoughts, and now that the word was out, she felt his flock sizing her up in a fresh, even severe way.

Yet, for all their maternal indulgence of their priest, she knew they underestimated him most awfully. She had heard a member of the Altar Guild wondering how anyone “so youthful and sure of herself” could be attracted to their “dear old priest who is going bald as a hen egg and diabetic to boot.”

Indeed, he wasn’t merely the mild and agreeable man they perceived him to be; he was instead a man of the richest reserves of strength and poise, of the deepest tenderness and most enormous wit and gallantry.

From the beginning, she found him to possess an ardor for his calling that spoke to her heart and mind and soul in such a deep and familiar way, she felt as if he were long-lost kin, returned at last from a distant shore. He had felt this, too, this connection of some vital force in himself with her own vitality, and he had been knocked back, literally, as if by the thunder-striking power of a summer storm.