A Common Life by Jan Karon Read Free Book Online

his collar suddenly tighten.
    “And so,” Cynthia told Stuart, “when we drive on the Parkway or visit our bishop, we take my car.”
    “How do you feel about that?”
    She wrinkled her nose. She stared briefly at the ceiling. She smiled. “I can live with it.”
    Stuart chuckled. He had his own opinion of his priest’s car, but far be it from him to comment. “It’s terrific that you’re willing to name the conflict, my dear. This equips us to attack the problem instead of attacking the other person.”
    Stuart sat back in his chair. “So, Timothy, how do you feel about driving her car instead of yours?”
    “Good!” he said, meaning it. “I can live with it.” He pressed Cynthia’s hand and turned to look at her. She appeared to sparkle in some lovely way he’d never seen before. After his brief moment of righteous indignation, he was custard again.

    On the way home in her Mazda, he noticed that she looked at him fondly more than once.
    “Sweetie pie,” she murmured, patting his knee.
    Sweetie pie! As a kid, he was called Slick; Katherine called him Teds; one and all called him Father. He liked this new appellation best of all. Maybe one day— maybe —he’d look into trading his Buick for a new model. But certainly nothing brand -new, no; no, indeed.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Joke

    H e drove to the Wesley mall and looked in the jewelry store display cases.
    His heart sank like a stone. There was absolutely nothing that measured up to the fire and sparkle, the snap and dazzle of his neighbor.
    He would have a ring made, then, fashioned exclusively for Cynthia Coppersmith Kavanagh. He saw their initials somehow entwined inside the band— ccktak . But of course he had no earthly idea who to call or where to turn. When someone left a Ross-Simon catalog on the table at the post office, he snatched it up and carried it outside to his car, where he pored over the thing until consciousness returned and he realized he’d sat there with the motor running for a full half hour, steaming in his raincoat like a clam in its shell.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at her bare ring finger. “If I’d done things right, I would have given you a ring when I proposed.”
    “I don’t really want an engagement ring, dearest. Just a simple gold band would be perfect.”
    “You’re certain?”
    “Yes!” she said. “I love simple gold bands.”
    The image of his mother’s wedding band came instantly to mind. It was in his closet, in a box on the shelf, tied by a slender ribbon. He would take it to the store and have it cleaned and engraved and present it at the altar with unspeakable joy and thanksgiving.
    He felt he was at last beginning to get things right.

    Uncle Billy Watson brushed the leaves and twigs from last night’s storm off the seat of a rusting dinette chair and sat down in the backyard of the Porter house, a.k.a. Mitford’s town museum.
    He gazed dolefully into the sea of towering grass that extended to the rear of the house and then beyond his view. The town crew was supposed to mow the grass once every twelve days; by his count, it was fourteen going on fifteen, and a man could get lost out here and not be heard from again; it was a disgrace the way the town put every kind of diddledaddle ahead of mowing something as proud and fine as their own museum. If he could do it himself, he would, but his arthritis hardly allowed him to get up and down the steps, much less scour a full acre and a quarter with a rusted push mower. He hoped that when he got to Heaven, the Lord would outfit him with a new body and give him a job that required something of a man.
    But he hadn’t come out here to get his dander up. He’d come out to noodle his noggin about a joke to tell at the preacher’s wedding, back in that room where they’d all eat cake and ham after the ceremony. Though nobody had said a word about it, the old man knew the preacher would be expecting a joke, he’d be counting on it, and it was his