Jan Karon - In the Company of Others

He knew the feeling.

‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘A perfectly good question,’ he said.

‘As for the jolly plan for us to travel together in the same vehicle when my ankle is knit-never. You should have seen the face of the shop owner when she opened the door and Stirling pulled the car practically up to the washbasin.’

What could he say?

At six-thirty, Katherine appeared at their door in her bathrobe, pleading sudden and utter exhaustion, and reporting Walter still incoherent. They wouldn’t be down for dinner, they were having it in their room, please forgive-but they’d be up at the crack, ready for a lovely long chat at breakfast before heading over to the ruin of the family castle and off to the cemetery for a gravestone rubbing and then down to Connemara, though heaven knows they’d love to stay and help the Garda solve the mystery of the missing painting, and what a scramble their long-awaited trip to Ireland had turned out to be for all concerned, proving once again that truth is immensely stranger than fiction.

On Katherine’s heels had come Corrigan, nosing out the name of the inn at Strandhill, and then Feeney, on his way home from the free clinic he’d pulled together two years ago.

Feeney showered praise on the patient who had obviously resisted every temptation to rile the ankle by witless conduct.

Following dinner, they declined the trifle or chocolate torte and opted for coffee at their table.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said.

‘Can’t do what?’

‘I can’t leave.’

‘Can’t leave?’

‘Because these people mean something to me. They need us.’

‘But we can’t be providence for other people, Kav’na. Oswald Chambers says that’s one of our hardest lessons-learning that we mustn’t interfere in other people’s lives.’ There wouldn’t, after all, be a checkers game with William…

‘I’m not trying to be their providence, I’m their friend. Bella needs someone, Timothy-someone who isn’t her overworked mother or Maureen. It’s not that I’m in any way better than these two good women, not at all, it’s that I was once as frightened and frozen as she is.’

‘But this is a vacation,’ he said in something akin to his pulpit voice. He’d never see the Mass rock or finish Fintan O’Donnell’s journal or row her to the forested island in the middle of the lough, but so be it.

‘What is a vacation, anyway? Two or three weeks of sucking up every good thing for yourself? And even with all that’s happened, I love it here. It feels in a way like home, like family. You know I never really had a family. Just my parents and myself in this sealed envelope, each of us desperate to break the seal. I don’t feel our stay is over yet, something isn’t right about leaving.’

‘But what can you do if we stay?’

‘About what?’

‘About anything.’

‘I don’t think I’m needed to do anything except be here.’

He said to her what Anna had said to him. ‘You’re very unusual, Kavanagh.’

She shrugged, laughed a little. ‘I remember sitting on the big stone in the schoolyard with my teacher one day, it was fifth grade. Everyone had gone and we were waiting yet again for Mother to come for me. Miss Collins asked if it made me sad for my mother to forget me. I said it made me sad that Mother herself felt forgotten.

‘She looked at me and touched my hair and said, Cynthia, you are most unusual. I was afraid that being unusual wasn’t good, then she said, And that’s a good thing. Sometimes I think Miss Collins might have been my first taste of God.’

She sipped her coffee. ‘Besides, I’m not interfering any more than you interfered by hearing Anna’s testimony.’

‘She asked me to hear it.’

‘And in a way, they’ve asked me to be here, to stand with them… though of course they haven’t said that in so many words.’

His wife had a mind unlike any he’d ever encountered, a fact he blamed, if any blaming were to be done, on the nature of artists in general. Her instincts often raced ahead of his own to the quick of things.

‘My work is going so well now-the best in years. I’d like to tough it out, Timothy-live it out, pray it out, paint it out.’

‘This trip is your birthday gift, not mine. All I want is to do what’s best for you.’

‘But what’s best for me right now is what’s best for them, I think. Don’t you see?’

He did see. But it angered him.

In the library, which he was coming to account as the central nerve center of the universe, Seamus and William were at the checkerboard, the Labs by their feet; a couple of club members sat at a game table, having coffee with Tom and Hugh.

‘Hey, y’all!’ Tammy threw up a hand, jangling the redoubtable bracelets.

‘Pull up a chair,’ said Debbie, ‘we’re just shootin’ th’ bull.’

‘Thanks. Maybe later.’ He couldn’t shoot the bull right now if someone gave him cash money. ‘Come,’ he said, offering his arm to his wife. ‘I’m taking you out.’

She eyed him, solemn, then laughed. He saw the forgiveness in her, and laughed back. Caving to the siren call of dispute was the last thing they needed.

‘Look,’ she whispered, as they stepped out to the garden.

In the last of the light, the silhouette of two people who had been quicker on the draw.

‘Busy bench,’ he said.

‘Shall we go in and start a jigsaw?’

It was definite, then, engraved in stone-they would not be leaving. One didn’t start a jigsaw without hope of seeing it through.

‘I have a call to make.’ He expected to pay for the room in Strandhill, an expense accountable to a birthday made happier. But there would be no accounting of such expense. A couple from Kerry had called, said the inn-keeper, and would be thrilled to get the room- been to your Philadelphia, saw the bell, deposit refunded, and thanks very much.

He scrawled a note for Liam and Anna-Would like to stay as earlier planned, hope our room remains available, Tim-and left it on the enormous slab of limestone that served as the kitchen prep station.

On the way to the library, he suddenly remembered seeing Bella on a bicycle the morning after their arrival. He hadn’t meant to lie to Corrigan-until now, he’d forgotten that brief glimpse entirely. Besides, that was days ago, so how could it have anything to do with last night?

At the puzzle table, four pieces out of five hundred already fitted together to form the hindquarters of a ram lying among a flock downhill from a thatched cottage. He studied the image on the box lid: In the foreground, a young man and woman on bicycles, pedaling home from the turf field with side baskets loaded. The woman wore a bandanna over her hair; the man, a beat-up hat slanted at a rakish angle.

He sat with her and looked for border pieces; he liked to start with the borders. She Who Would Start Anywhere the Notion Struck busied herself with turning pieces face-up.

‘For a moment,’ she said, ‘I thought it was Anna and Liam on the bench, but of course Anna isn’t here tonight.’

‘Not to mention that they never sit down.’

She slid another piece onto the ram.

‘I hate it when you do that,’ he said.

‘I wonder who it was.’

‘It was Pete and Moira.’

‘Surely not.’

‘Trust me.’

They were picking up steam with a portion of thatched roof when Pete and Moira breezed in and stationed themselves by the hearth.

‘Ta-da-a-a!’ Moira alerted the assembly at the top of her voice.

Pud woke up and looked about.

‘We have great news, everybody!’

He noticed the high color of Moira’s face, the necktie with the fishing-lures pattern sticking out of Pete’s jacket pocket.