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Jack handed me one of the cups, and a spoon. “This is jack’s wax.”

“Your what?”

“No, jack as in lumberjack. Hot maple syrup over snow, the perfect dessert for poor loggers deep in the mountains. Let it cool for a minute.”

I took a bite of the now-chewy syrup, mouth puckering at the sweetness. “It needs a shot of something stronger.”

“I’m sure it’s been done,” Jack said. “Are you cold?”

“Very.”

“Let’s go in.”

The warm Grange air promptly thawed my nose, and it started dripping, tickling my upper lip. I sniffled.

“There you are,” Maggie said, rushing over to us. When Jack turned to speak with her, I wiped my nose with my glove and stuck it in my pocket. I’d wash it later.

“Iris Finn is going crazy. You haven’t returned your votes for the bake-off.” She paused. “Where have you been all night?”

There was something in her voice—the question chafed with motherly vigilance. Jack seemed to notice, too. He removed a handful of paper strips from his pocket. “I was mingling,” he said, his tone deliberate, his eyes steady on his mother. “Then I showed Sarah around the place and introduced her to jack’s wax. Here. Would you make sure Iris gets them?”

Maggie took the ballots. “I’ll find her now.” She started to walk away, but stopped, turned back. “And don’t worry about the kitchen. Us ladies will take care of it.”

The crowd had dwindled. A few dozen people bopped around the speakers or milled near the food. “I can see if there’s any coffee left,” Jack offered.

I dropped my coat on an empty chair.

“Dance with me,” I said. “Or aren’t you allowed?”

Jack wavered, eyes sweeping the room, and then said, “Sure, why not?”

“How progressive. Do you let your pregnant women wear shoes, too?”

“Funny,” he said, piling his coat on mine. “Actually, our denomination permits shoes. And dancing, even by pastors.”

“You don’t kiss snakes and roll around on the floor, do you?”

“No, that’s not us. Most would say we’re somewhere between a bit conservative and downright boring.”

We moved into the group of couples. Jack’s hand gently, chastely, settled on my waist, just above my hip. I tightened my stomach. His other hand was warm in mine.

I noticed a woman glowering at us, arms akimbo, hair so black it shimmered blue, like raven feathers. But before I could question Jack about her, he asked, “I have to know, how long have you been playing the violin?”

“Since I was six. I was at a rummage sale, and wanted to buy something with my own money. I had a nickel, and the only thing I could afford was an old Jascha Heifetz record. After that, I begged my grandmother for lessons. She made me earn them by polishing her silverware, scrubbing the floors. Dusting. Whatever.” I shrugged. “I really don’t play anymore.”

“But you love it.”

Instead of answering, I slid my hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck, closing the space between us. Jack tensed as I leaned into him and tucked my head under his chin. Each time he swallowed, I felt his throat bob against my brow bone, his stubble coarse on my skin.

As soon as the music stopped, he took two large steps away from me and nodded toward the kitchen. “I should go help the ladies clean up back there.”

“Sure, yeah,” I said.

He paused. “Now that you know how to get here, maybe I’ll see you Sunday?”

“Not a chance.”

“Well, I have to try. It’s that pesky pastor in me,” he said with that uneven, chapped-lip grin I was beginning to find infectious. “Have a good night, then.”

I stood there, in the center of the floor, watching Jack leave. The fluttery, warm feeling I had while my cheek was pressed against his chest—the stuff first dates are made of—withered away, replaced by a roomful of intrusive, skittering eyes. I yanked on my coat and drove back to the cabin.

I was alone. Again. But this time, for some reason, it stung.

chapter THIRTEEN

Jack wedged a rumpled paperback under one table leg, a folded washcloth under another. “How’s that?” he asked, on his knees beneath the tablecloth.

“Much better,” Ephraim Joseph said.

After brushing off his pants, Jack sat across from the retired minister, who proceeded to fold his hands and pray over their lunch. Then Ephraim passed a tray of deviled eggs. Jack spooned four onto his plate and ate them quickly, gulping iced tea after each bite. Still, the gritty yolks coated his tongue.

“Tell Clara thank you for these, but she really doesn’t need to go through all the trouble,” he said.

“It’s no trouble at all,” Ephraim said. “Quite the contrary, she tells me she enjoys making them for you. She knows you love them.”

Jack hated deviled eggs.

Not long after he returned from seminary, the Josephs had invited him to dinner. Clara made the bluish-white blobs, amply garnished with paprika and snipped parsley. Jack managed to swallow a couple without retching, and told her they were delicious. Since then, the thoughtful woman unfailingly sent several dozen with her husband each time he and Jack met for lunch, every other week.

Oh, the folly of lying, even with the best intentions. His stomach would gripe all evening.

“And how are things with Sarah Graham?” Ephraim asked. “She appears to be quite fond of you.”

“We just danced.”

“Yes, I have heard several detailed reports.”

“No doubt,” Jack said. “Maybe Sunday’s sermon should be on gossip.”

Ephraim’s mouth lifted slightly at the corners. “I know your eyes are heavenward, Jack. I’ve never doubted that, not for a moment, not even when you were a child. But that girl’s eyes are elsewhere.”

Jack sighed. He pressed his two middle fingers on the bridge of his nose, where it met the forehead. “No, you’re right. You’re right.”

Sarah was looking for something, and it certainly wasn’t Jesus. He had seen her flaunt herself consciously, unconsciously—one too many open buttons on her blouse, a loitering glance, a smile—using her body as a sword, to draw first blood. As Kevlar, to protect that soft underbelly, for fear that someone should reach through and find himself too close to her heart.

Jack walked a tenuous line, struggling with how to best reach out to her, wanting to be accessible but not overly involved. But if he waited until she asked for help, it wouldn’t be until she needed some strong arms to pack her truck in May.

Her music stayed with him, coursing through him as he stared at the black ceiling during the night, sleep buzzing in his ear like a hungry mosquito that wouldn’t be caught. Something resonated in each of Sarah’s notes, each pass of the bow on those steel strings, something so close to hope, and it hid under the tattered memory of a little girl with a five-cent record album.

Could someone connect with her through those notes? Brenda Hardy played the fiddle, but it was bluegrass twang, pig Latin to Sarah’s poetry. Jack knew of only one other person in Jonah who had any sort of classical music knowledge—Patty Saltzman. She and Sarah in the same room was a bad idea, like a fox in a hen house.

Who would be the fox and who the hen, it was difficult to say.

“I’m open to suggestions,” he told Ephraim.

The elderly man considered this for a moment, brow deeply creased. “I think your sister would be good for her.”

“She’d eat Beth alive.”

“No.” Ephraim shook his head. “Beth isn’t a child anymore, as much as you like to pretend otherwise. I think she would be very good for Sarah.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Good. Is that all?”

Jack pushed back his plate. “The Christmas pageant. I want to have it again this year.”

“I agree it’s time.”

“Will anyone else?”

“Perhaps not. But it is your decision.”

“I’ll make the announcement tomorrow after the service.”

After Ephraim left, Jack tugged on his boots and wrapped the leftovers in aluminum foil. He’d bring them to the Baldwins—one mother, two jobs, five small children and no ends met; they loved deviled eggs.

chapter FOURTEEN

I’d forgotten to buy an ice scraper.

A thin frozen crust encased the truck, caused by an unseasonable afternoon drizzle and plunging overnight temperatures. I used a steak knife to chip the ice from around the driver’s door, and found only a snowbrush in the cab. I would have simply started the truck and cranked up the heat until the ice melted, but I was worried the gas would run out in the process—the fuel gauge hovered at E.

Inside my gloves, my fingers prickled from the cold as I scraped the windshield with a plastic spatula. The handle snapped and I tossed the pieces into the snow. A metal tablespoon worked better, though it took twenty minutes to clean all the windows.

After all this trouble, I’d better be able to find a job.

With my eyeballs rotting in my head from too much television, and my paunch undeterred by a three-day lettuce diet, I knew that only some type of daily, scheduled activity would keep me out of a straitjacket. Self-motivated, I was not. I doubted, however, there was a hiring frenzy in town.

I didn’t mind working. I’d put in my share of menial labor, the kind usually reserved for high school graduates and single mothers. I even busked in college. Many of the Juilliard music majors did, including the trust-fund bunch—something about suffering for one’s art. Basically, it was an easy way to earn a few dollars for beer while putting in the practice hours. I clearly wouldn’t be standing on any street corners here. Anyway, I doubted a single person in Jonah could tell the difference between a Dvor
ák symphony and the dueling
Deliverance
banjos.

Well, maybe Jack could.

Jack.
I thought that he might come by Sunday morning, attempting to goad me into a pew. He didn’t, and that was the problem with nice guys—they actually did what people asked. I would have much preferred his showing up on my porch, and my dismissing him with a “Didn’t you listen to a word I said? I don’t want to be bothered.” At least then I would know he was thinking of me.

Like I was thinking of him.

Since the dance, Jack had impinged on my thoughts, mostly blurred recollections I swiftly quashed. Occasionally, though, my mind wandered down unhealthy paths that included two cats, joint checking accounts, and a picket fence.

“Enough, enough, enough,” I growled, stabbing the key into the truck ignition and twisting.

The engine sputtered, gasped, and then turned over. Gas first.

The station was a few miles south of the inn and offered a full-service pump. It cost nineteen cents more per gallon, but who cared? My father was paying the tab.

A stocky young man with piceous eyes plodded to the truck. He reminded me of a garden slug, thick and slow. I rolled down my window and handed him the credit card. “Fill it up.”

He did. The name patch on his jacket read
Dominic.

Now, where was I going to find a job?

Sunlight flared through the windshield, blinding me. I flipped down the visor and a small white card fluttered to my lap. I turned it over. Doc’s card. Well, it was as good a place to start as any.

I found the office on Main Street. A receptionist—the tart, midnight-haired woman from the dance—paged through a celebrity news magazine at the front desk.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Is Doc White in?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. Maybe a few years older than me, her lips gleamed with deep claret lipstick. “You don’t have an appointment.”

“No, but could you please tell him I’m here?”

“You can wait. He’s busy now,” she said, turning back to her reading.

I sat, shuffling through the dated magazines and tabloids, finding one with headlines announcing proof positive aliens had landed on earth. Probably here. That would explain things.

Doc came out of a back room. “Patty, I thought I heard—Oh, why didn’t you tell me Sarah was here?”

“She doesn’t have an appointment,” the receptionist said.

“Sarah, come on back,” Doc said, handing Patty some envelopes. “Please go mail these.”

“Okay, I will.”

“Now.”

Patty pulled on a yellow parka and trudged out the door.

“Loud,” I said.

“You’re telling me.” Doc led me into an examination room.

“I meant her coat.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “That girl has the biggest mouth in town, and the biggest ears. Worse than her mother, and that’s difficult to believe, if you know Ima-Louise Saltzman.”

“I had the pleasure of meeting her last week, at the diner,”

I said. “I don’t think she liked me.”

“You were sitting with Jack Watson. That would do it. Can’t help but overhear; my ears are big, too. They already have Patty’s wedding dress picked out, you know. She’s been trying to get her Jezebel red fingernails into the reverend for years.”

I laughed. “That’s not very nice.”

“I’m not very nice. Anyway, I’m not making it up. Her nail polish is called Jezebel Red. I watch her touch up several times a day.” He cleared his throat, a gloppy, guttural haw. “I thought you were leaving.”

“Change of plans,” I said, wringing my fingers in my lap.

I looked around the room. Cheap paneling, shabby brown carpet, and none of the generic pastel landscapes expected in doctors’ offices. The exam table was brown, too, and the synthetic cover had cracked and been taped several times.