“You have such a good heart,” Barbara told him, which felt good to hear, even though Sam had his doubts.

  17

  I saw our old pastor at the grocery store today,” Stacey Maxwell told her husband, Herb, at supper that evening.

  “Did he ask where we’d been?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell him?” Herb asked.

  “I told him we were attending a Quaker meeting and I told him why, that we didn’t like being harangued about money.”

  Herb chuckled. “What did he have to say about that?”

  “Personally, he seemed glad to be rid of us. I think he likes his followers to be more docile.”

  After dinner, Herb washed the dishes and picked up the living room while Stacey readied the twins for bed, then they collapsed on the couch.

  “So are we going to become Quakers or not?” Herb asked.

  “I don’t see anyone pressuring us to join. Let’s not jump into it like we did the last church.”

  “I agree,” Herb said. “I want to get to know them better before joining. For all we know, they could be snake-handlers.”

  Stacey had been on the Internet, reading about Quakers, and to her great relief hadn’t come across anything about snakes. That would have been a tough one to explain to her parents, raising their grandchildren in a church full of rattlesnakes.

  “So what did you do today?” Stacey asked.

  “Led a workshop on nutrition for the players. You wouldn’t believe what those guys eat in the off-season. I’m surprised they’re not all dead.”

  “No cheerleader physicals, eh?”

  “Nope, not today. How about you? What did you do?” Herb asked.

  “Changed diapers, kept the kids fed, went to the grocery store, and cleaned the house,” Stacey said.

  It wasn’t quite the life she had imagined while in law school. No better, no worse, just different. Just life.

  “You’re exhausted, honey. Why don’t you go to bed, and I’ll pick up the house and get the laundry going,” Herb said.

  It was his favorite part of the day, mindless activity at the end of the day, his wife and children asleep. Standing over the babies while they slept, watching their bodies rise and fall with each breath.

  He hadn’t counted on any of this—his family, his house, his job. His parents had divorced when he was young, he’d been raised by his mother, perpetually poor, but had landed a college scholarship, met and married Stacey, borrowed money for his medical school and her law school, graduated, the twins were born, and here they were, a family.

  His father had died ten years before; his mother had remarried and moved south. No aunts, no uncles, just his wife and the twins, and maybe a new church and the potential for friends. He hoped so anyway. He washed the dishes and put them in the drainer to dry, folded the first load of laundry, then went to bed, settling into the curve of his wife’s back, deeply happy.

  18

  Charles Gardner had spent the past three weeks studying the floors in their home, hoping if he contemplated them long enough, someone might come along and volunteer to sand them. Ideally, one of his sons, who seemed impervious to his hints.

  “They have their own lives, and they both work,” Gloria said. “You can’t expect them to give up vacation days to work on our house. You’re retired. You do it.”

  And he would have done it, except he feared if he were competent he would be expected to make more repairs. He was starting to wish they’d moved into a condo. What had he been thinking, moving into this old wreck of a house? Gloria had warned against it, but he hadn’t listened. Now it was too late.

  On top of that, he feared his wife might be losing her mind. Buying a bicycle? What had she been thinking? She was going to end up dead, smashed by a car, her head caved in, flatter than a fritter. She had told him not to worry. Easy enough for her to say. Who would cook for him with her gone? He’d raised the subject with Sam, who’d dismissed his concerns and then changed the subject altogether.

  “Say, Dad, you ought to get a heart scan. Dan Woodrum just had a heart cath and they found a blockage. You have the same symptoms he had. Your color isn’t good. You’re tired all the time.”

  “I’m tired all the time because no one will help me with this house. Maybe if I had help, I wouldn’t be so tired.”

  “Dad, you might have to hire someone to help you, like everyone else. I work full-time, and so does Roger.”

  “I tried telling him that,” Gloria Gardner said. “But he doesn’t listen to me.”

  Charles and Gloria began bickering, so Sam slipped out in mid-argument and headed toward home, stopping to see Dan Woodrum, who was recovering at home from his heart procedure. He was sitting in a recliner, watching the National Geographic channel. He waved Sam into the house.

  “Come in, come in. Thanks for coming to see me.”

  “How are you feeling, Dan?”

  “Great. Everything went well. Slid a balloon into my left anterior descending artery and opened it right up. I feel great.”

  “Ah, the ol’ left anterior descending artery,” Sam said. “They can sure be troublesome.”

  Sam stayed a half hour, marveling at medical science and Dan’s quick recovery, then walked home, feeling a twinge in his chest every now and then, fretting about his left anterior descending artery and how long he might have to live.

  19

  It had been a good many years since Hank Withers applied for a building permit of any sort, and he was amazed at how complicated the process had become. Meetings to attend, fees to pay, stacks of paperwork to fill out, signatures to gather, securing the approval of neighbors, sucking up to plan commissions and zoning boards; there was no end to it. A lady from the county environmental board showed up late one afternoon and spent three hours studying the earth to be moved, in search of rare flowers and insects, making sure they weren’t building on top of an Indian burial ground.

  “When I started in this business fifty years ago,” Hank told the lady, “you could pretty much build wherever you wanted, so long as it wasn’t in a flood plain.”

  “It’s certainly gotten more complicated,” the lady agreed.

  Hank regaled her with stories of the good old days before all the rules and regulations, which had caused nothing but trouble as far as he was concerned.

  “There hasn’t been an Indian on this land in two hundred years,” he complained.

  It was nearing dusk. She was studying a hickory tree, peering into the upper reaches with a pair of binoculars. “Did you realize there’s a nesting colony of Indiana bats in this tree?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, they get into the meetinghouse every now and then,” Hank said. “We have to swat them with a tennis racket.”

  “You kill them?”

  “It’s no big deal. There’s more where they came from,” Hank said.

  “I beg your pardon. It’s a very big deal. Indiana bats fall under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.”

  “We really don’t kill them,” Hank said, backpedaling. “We just open the windows and use the tennis racket to guide them outside. We wouldn’t think of hurting one.” Hank hated bats, and the previous summer had personally ushered a dozen or so of them to their eternal rest.

  “We can’t grant a building permit until this colony leaves the tree and enters hibernation,” the lady said. “Even then you won’t be able to cut down these trees. They’re a bat habitat.”

  “But that tree’s gotta go,” Hank argued. “It’s right where our new kitchen is going to be.”

  “I’m sorry, but the bats are a protected species.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They’re all over the place around here in the summer. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They boil out of these trees at night.”

  The lady seemed pleased by that news and phoned her boss to report that a thriving colony of Indiana bats had been discovered.

  The next day, early in the morning, a half-dozen officers from the Department of Natural Resources swarmed the meetinghouse grounds, climbed the trees, inspected the meetinghouse attic, collected bat poop in plastic bags, then presented Sam with an order demanding Hope Friends Meeting not only halt all efforts to build but also not enter the meetinghouse, which had a colony of Indiana bats in the attic, mating frantically, and were not to be disturbed under any circumstances.

  “I don’t want anyone near this meetinghouse,” the man in charge said, who had a hairy, scrunched face and looked something like a bat himself. “Bats stress very easily and it will ruin their reproductive cycle.”

  “We can’t go in our own meetinghouse?” Sam asked, incredulous. “Where will we meet?”

  “Not my problem,” said the bat man.

  “How long do we have to stay out?”

  “Three months, maybe four.”

  “Can I at least get my computer?” Sam asked.

  “Yes, but hurry.”

  Sam retrieved his computer, carried it across the parking lot to the parsonage, then phoned Ruby Hopper to report that bats had taken up residence in the meetinghouse attic, were engaged in loose and reckless sex, and the state had sided with the bats.

  “Well,” Ruby said, “we’re always talking about caring for the environment. I suppose we can give up our meetinghouse for three months if it means helping God’s creation.”

  “That’s not all,” Sam added. “We can’t build until the bats migrate for hibernation, and even then we can’t cut down trees to build onto our meetinghouse.”

  Sam was warming to the idea of closing the meetinghouse, thinking he might parlay it into a three-month paid vacation, which would allow him and Barbara to drive west to the redwoods, or maybe head east to Bradford, Pennsylvania, and tour the Case pocketknife factory and museum. Maybe even work in a visit to Georgia, where their son Addison was stationed. He was beginning to feel kindly toward the bats.

  “I guess I better start calling folks to let them know meeting for worship is canceled for the next three months,” he said.

  “Let’s hold off on that,” Ruby suggested. “I see no reason to cancel meeting for worship. We can certainly find somewhere else to meet. Let’s not tell the rest of the meeting until we have a plan of action.”

  And just that quickly, Sam’s dream of a summer off faded and was gone.

  At the precise moment Sam was watching his summer vacation vanish into thin air, his mother crossed an intersection on her bicycle and was clobbered by a car driven by a teenage girl who was texting and blew through a stop sign, crashing into the rear tire of Gloria’s bicycle, causing her to sail through the air and land on the opposite sidewalk in a battered heap. She had always dreaded the thought of languishing in a nursing home, so wasn’t altogether displeased at the prospect of dying quickly in an accident. She lay quietly on the sidewalk, gathering her thoughts, taking a mental inventory of any possible broken bones, moving her limbs one at a time. In the distance, she heard a siren and a young girl screaming, and the siren and screams became one, and then she heard nothing.

  20

  A memory. Sam was in eighth grade, acutely aware of girls, most of whom seemed acutely unaware of him. So when Uly Grant, his best friend, told him Kathy Thompson hoped Sam would invite her to the eighth-grade dance, he didn’t believe him. The next week, Kathy, in clear violation of the accepted protocol, asked him to the dance, and Sam was so shocked he said yes, before it occurred to him he had never danced, except when he was home and pretended he was on American Bandstand and Dick Clark himself had singled him out as a fine example of rhythm.

  Rhythm had never been Sam’s strong suit, and he had thought of calling Kathy the morning of the dance and telling her he was deathly ill with the bubonic plague, but his mother wouldn’t let him. Instead, she put on their Andy Williams albums and spent the afternoon teaching him how to dance. After three hours of practice, he still wasn’t very good, but was good enough for an eighth-grade dance. Good enough not to embarrass himself.

  The evening had gone about like he’d thought it would. Kathy spent most of the night in the girls’ restroom with her friends. Sam and Uly had stood by the punch bowl, eating cookies baked by Mrs. Selser’s home-ec class. Sam and Kathy had danced twice, both fast dances. The last dance was a slow dance, when they were supposed to dance while holding one another, but by then Sam was sick from the punch and cookies and had excused himself to go outside and barf. Uly had taken Kathy home, and they fell in love and dated the entire summer before high school, which had upset Sam at first until he realized that love and romance had made Uly miserable, then he was grateful Uly had spared him that particular misery.

  The week of the dance, Sam’s mother had driven him to Crowley’s Menswear in Cartersburg and bought him a new suit with money she’d saved for a new Easter outfit for herself, which he didn’t realize at the time, and found out only when he overheard his father criticize her for wasting their money on a suit that would be worn only once before Sam grew out of it.

  “It’s my money. I earned it, and if I want to spend it on Sam, I will,” she’d told him.

  It was late at night. His parents were sitting in the kitchen next to the cold air return, so Sam heard every word through the heating duct in his bedroom. He’d been listening to their private conversations for years, something he usually enjoyed, though he felt odd hearing this one.

  His dad had been tight with money. His mom made her money working for Johnny Mackey, cleaning the funeral home. Two dollars an hour. His new suit had cost eighty dollars. Forty hours of emptying ashtrays, vacuuming carpets, cleaning toilets, and digging out snotty Kleenexes from the sofa cushions. He’d vowed then and there to make it up to her. Maybe buy her a new refrigerator or stove when he got his first job. Then he got his first job and bought himself a car instead. Then the kids came, and there was never extra money after that.

  He’d brought it up in conversation once, when his kids were little. They were talking about the things parents did for their children, and Sam said he’d heard about this mother who’d worked forty hours to buy her son a suit for his eighth-grade dance, and she’d gotten embarrassed and told him to pipe down.

  He’d never gotten around to getting her a new refrigerator. Now she was pushing eighty and probably on her last refrigerator. Maybe he could get her a stove instead. Or a water softener. Or maybe a vacuum cleaner he’d seen advertised on TV that had enough suction to pick up a bowling ball, though not many people had bowling balls lying around on their floors. But something like that, something that said he cared.

  21

  The EMTs found Gloria Gardner on the sidewalk, dazed, babbling incoherently, clammy and shocky, unable to pronounce her name. They searched her pockets and found Barbara Gardner’s name and cell phone number on a scrap of paper with a note to phone her about the new meetinghouse kitchen and whether it should have two sinks or three. They phoned Barbara to tell her an elderly woman, with Barbara’s name in her pocket, had been struck by a car while riding a bicycle and was on her way to the hospital.

  A bicycle? Who did she know who was elderly and rode a bicycle? Then Barbara remembered Charles Gardner grumbling something about Gloria riding a bicycle. She phoned Sam, but he was talking to Wilson Roberts to tell him they’d been evicted from their meetinghouse by fornicating bats, so she called her father-in-law, Charles Gardner, who wasn’t wearing his hearing aids and thought she was a telemarketer so hung up the phone.

  Barbara found Sam at home, still gabbing away, pried the phone from his hand, loaded him in the car, and headed toward the hospital.

  “Is she dead?” Sam asked. “Tell me what they told you.”

  “Just that she’s been in an accident. We don’t know if she’s alive or dead. They didn’t tell me. They just told us to get to the hospital.”

  “I better call Roger and Dad. And Levi and Addison, too.”

  “Not yet. Let’s wait until we know something. No sense in worrying everyone.”

  Gloria Gardner was sitting up in bed, in the emergency room, by the time Sam and Barbara tracked her down. A nurse was bandaging her knees, which were scraped raw, while Gloria was ranting about young people and the dangers of texting.

  “She didn’t even slow down for the stop sign. Just plowed right into me. I’m lucky I’m not dead.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t land on your head and bash your brains out,” Sam said, finding his voice after his initial shock had worn off. “I thought I told you to wear a helmet.”

  The doctor strolled into the room, carrying X-rays, which he clipped on the view box.

  “No fractures,” he said, studying the screen. “You were incredibly lucky, Mrs. Gardner. But if I were you, I’d give up bicycling.”

  “Absolutely not, it’s the one thing I enjoy.”

  “Then please wear a helmet and be more careful,” the doctor said. “Watch out for cars. You’re going to lose every time you go up against one.”

  “She’s the one who ran the stop sign,” Gloria snapped. “Not me.”

  “If you’re dead, it doesn’t really matter whose fault it was, now does it,” the doctor pointed out. “If you’re going to ride, ride defensively. Assume cars don’t see you, and for God’s sake, get a helmet.”

  “How long do I have to stay here?”

  “You’re free to leave. You’re going to be really sore, so I’m giving you a prescription for pain medicine. Go easy on it, though, it’s powerful stuff. Get back here immediately if you notice blood in your stool.”

  The doctor studied her pupils once more, asked a few questions, then departed.

  Sam, Barbara, and Gloria waited in the room.

  “I didn’t care for his attitude,” Gloria said.

 

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