Summer of Joy (2 page)

David wanted the ring he bought now to mean something, but the clerk in the Grundy jewelry store had sized him up on sight. A middle-aged man without much money in his pockets. “We have payment plans,” the clerk had suggested when David asked him the price of one of the rings. “You’d have to be approved for credit, of course.”

“I didn’t ask about a credit application. I asked how much this ring cost.” David had stared straight at the man until he had to uncurl his upper lip and give David some prices. All of them completely out of David’s range.

“And is this ring for your own fiancée?” the clerk asked as if he was having a hard time believing any woman would be interested in marrying David.

“A man usually buys an engagement ring for his own fiancée,” David answered.

“That is the customary practice.” The man slid his glass case shut, locked it, and dropped the key in his pocket almost as if daring David to ask for another price. “Perhaps I could make a suggestion. Many of our older couples come in together to allow the lady to choose her own ring.” The corners of the man’s mouth curled up in another fake smile as he looked at David and went on. “After all, we’re not exactly teenagers, are we? We don’t have to get carried away by the moment.”

David stared down at the rings in the case a moment longer before saying, “You could be right.” He didn’t get the man’s name. He didn’t want the man’s name. As he’d driven back to Hollyhill, he wondered if he could call Rollin Caruthers and arrange for him to show him some rings in the back room where nobody could see David ring shopping.

But that wouldn’t solve the not-enough-money part of the problem. He could wait, try to save up some money before Valentine’s Day or whenever, but he didn’t want to wait. His mother would be glad he took her ring out of the envelope and put it to use. She’d have liked Leigh. The diamond wasn’t big, but it was a diamond. And it had symbolized a good marriage for his mother and father. He could get it reset. Not in that store in Grundy. That snooty clerk would probably whip out a magnifying glass to see if he could locate the diamond. No, he’d just have to swear Rollin to secrecy.

Jocie knocked on his door and called, “Hey, Dad. You got that editorial ready?”

David jumped as if he’d been caught napping. He tried to drop the ring down into his shirt pocket, but missed. The ring hit the floor and bounced. He dove under his desk after it as Jocie pushed open the door. His chair crashed into the wall and his shoulder banged against the side of the desk. A fat file of newspaper clippings slid off onto the floor, scattering papers everywhere. Then somehow his foot got tangled up in the telephone cord, and the telephone knocked his coffee cup over on its way off the desk. Coffee started dripping down onto his legs. At least it wasn’t too hot.

“Oh my gosh!” Jocie said. “Are we having an earthquake?”

2

J
ocie had never been in an earthquake. She’d lived through a tornado going over her head and had been right in the middle of a house burning down, but she didn’t have any experience with an earthquake. At least not yet. The way her year was going, anything was possible.

She touched the doorframe. The building didn’t seem to be shaking. But why else would her father be diving under his desk while everything on top of it was falling off on the floor?

“Don’t be silly.” Her father’s voice coming from under the desk sounded cross. He backed out of the kneehole of the desk to peer over it at her. His hair was mussed and his cheeks were red. He grabbed his coffee cup to set it up, but the coffee was already spilt and streaming across his desk toward some letters. “We’re not having an earthquake. I just dropped something.”

Zella came up behind Jocie. “That has to be the understatement of the year. What in the world, David?”

“I just knocked off a couple of things. No need to get in a panic.” Still on his knees behind the desk, Jocie’s father tried to corral the coffee with his hand. “It might help if one of you would go get some paper towels.”

Jocie put her hand over her mouth to keep from giggling. Her father looked so funny trying to hold back the coffee with his hand, but he wasn’t smiling. Not even close. Jocie decided to run for the towels and let Zella ask what was going on.

Her father must not have been in a question-answering mood. When Jocie got back with the towels, he was chasing Zella out of his office before she could pick up even one of the papers scattered all over the floor. “I made the mess. I’ll clean it up.” He grabbed the paper towels out of Jocie’s hand.

“Well, fine and dandy. I’ve got more than enough to do without picking up after you anyway.” Zella straightened her dark-rimmed glasses and stomped back to her desk.

“You okay, Dad?” Jocie asked as she watched him mop up the coffee. While Jocie and Wes sometimes made a game of getting Zella steamed up, her father never did. He said he owed her too much for helping keep the paper out of the red when he first took over as editor of the
Hollyhill
Banner
.

“I’m fine. Clumsy, but fine.” He looked up at Jocie. “Now get out of here and let me get this mess cleaned up.”

“You don’t want any help?”

“No.”

“What about the editorial?”

“I’ll bring it back when I get it finished.”

“Sure, Dad. Whatever you say.” Jocie backed toward the door.

“And watch where you step.”

“Yes sir.” Jocie carefully stepped between the papers on the floor.

“And shut the door when you go out.”

When Jocie pulled the door shut behind her, Zella looked up from her typewriter to say, “He’s certainly in a mood.” She sniffed and jerked a pink tissue out of the box on the corner of her desk to blot against her nose. Then she patted the black sausage curls on her head to be sure they were all in perfect order as usual.

“Yeah. You think him and Leigh had a fight or something?”

“No, Leigh would have told me,” Zella said, but she looked worried. She took almost total credit for finally getting Jocie’s father to notice Leigh Jacobson. In return, she expected Leigh to keep her up-to-date on whatever was happening between them. Zella still hadn’t gotten over finding out that Wes had caught the couple kissing before she knew the romance had progressed that far. The first real tiff was something she definitely should know about. She reached for her phone.

Poor Leigh. If there had been a fight, Zella would badger her for every detail. Jocie started to run out the door and down the street to the courthouse to warn Leigh, but Zella would already have Leigh cornered on the telephone by the time Jocie got there.

Besides, even though Leigh was definitely a softie, she had a way of handling nosy people. She’d had plenty of practice out at Mt. Pleasant. Church people thought whatever their preacher or his family did was their business and they didn’t mind grilling his new girlfriend about anything and everything. Leigh spent the better part of some Sundays blushing, but Jocie had noticed Leigh didn’t answer any questions she didn’t want to answer. So maybe she could handle Zella’s third degree. Jocie went on through the door back into the pressroom.

Wes looked up from moving some papers off the press. His white hair was sticking up in all directions as usual and he had an ink smudge on the side of his nose. Every time Jocie saw him in the pressroom, a thankful prayer took wing in her heart. For weeks after he’d used his body to shield her in the middle of that tornado last summer and ended up with a tree crushing his leg, she hadn’t been sure he’d ever be back to his old self, helping with the paper, riding his motorcycle, telling zany Jupiter stories. But he’d finally gotten the last cast off his leg the week before. He was still limping. But he could walk. He could climb on his motorcycle. He could ride. He could keep the press running and Jocie laughing.

“What’s going on up there?” Wes asked. “The Martians invading?”

“Martians? Where did you come up with that? It was your Jupiterians come after you, but we refused to let them have you.”

“They wouldn’t have took me now anyhow,” Wes said with a sad shake of his head. “They’d have took one look at me and seen I’ve done been earthed.”

“Earthed?”

“That’s right. It’s the number one most dangerous threat to space travelers, especially us guys from Jupiter. Old Mr. Jupiter, he wants to find out all about earth and what makes the gravity so strong down here that folks stick to the ground so good. So he lets some of us come on down here to try to figure things out and send back reports, and by jumping juppie, that gravity sometimes reaches right out and grabs us too. Then we’re earthed. Stuck tight to the ground. Mr. Jupiter can’t transport us up no more.”

“Good,” Jocie said. “I don’t want you transporting up anywhere.”

“You don’t have to worry.” Wes leaned over and tapped on the shin of his leg. “This here rod in my leg would set off all the transporting alarms. Earth metals mess up the Jupiter magnets that hold the ship together. Why, once when this guy tried to carry home an Earth penny as a souvenir for his kids, you know, we pretty near fell out of the sky before he owned up to it and threw that penny out a window. Now it could be they’ve come up with better magnets since I fell out of the spaceship all them years ago, so they might be able to transport me up—leg and all. That is, if I hadn’t been earthed.”

“Do earth people ever get jupitered?” Jocie asked.

“Sure,” Wes said. “That’s what’s happened to those people down at your space center. The ones trying to figure out how to go to the moon and all. Course they’ve got a long way to go before they get things figured out, so I don’t think Mr. Jupiter has anything to worry about for a while. Or the man in the moon.”

Wes had been telling Jocie Jupiter stories ever since he’d landed in Hollyhill when she was three. She used to believe them. Now she just loved to hear him tell them. Someday she planned to write them down in one of her notebooks.

“But where’s your daddy’s editorial?” Wes asked. “Did the Jupiterians steal it for their earth news column or something?”

“I don’t think he’s written it yet. He’s acting really strange.” Jocie glanced over her shoulder toward the front office and then looked back at Wes. “I knocked on his door and he nearly turned his desk upside down diving under it. Said he’d dropped something.”

“He has been a mite jumpy lately,” Wes agreed. “Oh, the things love will do to a man.”

“Do you think he’s really in love with Leigh? I mean
really
in love.”

“Could be. But maybe that’s a question you should ask him and not me.” Wes sat down, put his foot up on a box, and peered over at Jocie. “Would it bother you if he was?”

“I don’t think so.” Jocie frowned a little as she gave his question some thought. “Tabitha says Dad’s not really all that old even if he is a grandfather now. She thinks he should get married again. She said she thinks she should get married too, but that she doesn’t figure there’s much chance of that happening as long as she’s in Hollyhill. What with having Stephen Lee and all.”

“She thinking about leaving?” Wes asked.

“Gosh, I hope not. It would kill Aunt Love if she took Stephen Lee off somewhere. You’ve seen how Aunt Love is with him. She sings verses out of Psalms to him when she rocks him to sleep. I don’t think she ever loved me like that.”

“Well, you weren’t quite so loveable as baby Stephen Lee when she came on the scene. You were already what? Maybe eight. A lot of difference between anitsy sweet baby and a smart-mouthed eight-year-old. And a lot has happened since then.”

“You can say that again.”

“And a lot has happened since then.” Wes smiled at her.

“Is that why you’re earthed now? All that’s happened lately?” Now it was Jocie’s turn to peer over at Wes and wait for his answer.

“I’ve been giving that very thing a lot of thought ever since the doctors took the last plaster anchor off my foot.” Wes stared down at his foot and worked it back and forth. “A man don’t realize how nice a shoe looks on his foot until he hasn’t worn one for a good long spell.”

Jocie sat down on the stool in front of the composing table. They had more pages to run, but there was no hurry. The paper didn’t go out until Wednesday and this was only Monday. She’d raced through all her homework earlier in study hall, so she didn’t have to worry about that. Maybe she’d even have time to work on a new idea for the Christmas program at church. They’d probably done the nativity scene bit every year since Mt. Pleasant had been established back in eighteen whatever. That was a lot of shepherds in bathrobes and angels in sheets and garland halos.

It would have to be something simple. Their first practice was Sunday afternoon. Miss Sally normally had the play organized and well on the way by this time of the year, but this had been a hard year for her what with her house burning down and Mr. Harvey having a heart attack. Miss Sally had tried to get someone else to take over planning the Christmas program, but everybody insisted she had to do it the same as always. Jocie’s dad said Miss Sally needed to keep working with the kids at church so that she’d have a reason to keep smiling because Mt. Pleasant needed Miss Sally to keep smiling.

Jocie looked over at Wes and asked, “You want to be in the Christmas program at church?”

“And what would I be?”

“I don’t know. How about one of the wise men? It might be neat if the adults did the manger scene this year instead of us kids.”

Wes frowned a little. “I think you’d better find a wiser man than me for that job. I haven’t even gotten officially dunked yet.” Wes had joined the church back in September, but they’d put off his baptismal service until he got his cast off.

“The wise men came seeking knowledge. That sounds like you. You’re always reading to find out something new. And you look like somebody who might ride a camel across the desert.” Jocie leaned forward and studied Wes as if measuring him for a wise man costume.

“I don’t know, Jo,” he said with a half shake of his head. “I think I’ll stick to motorcycles. Besides, I’m doubting the folks out at the church would take to a Jupiterian wise man. From what I’ve seen, most church folks don’t like anybody messing with their traditions at Christmastime.”