A New Song by Jan Karon Read Free Book Online Page B

the grille of an eighteen-wheeler, not critically injured, but dead. He was too old to have a teenager, too old to figure this out the way other people, other parents, seemed to do.
    “Look,” he said, pacing alongside the stone wall, “we talked about this before, starting a few months ago. You were perfectly fine with no car this summer; we agreed on it. You even asked me to hunt down your bicycle pump so you could put air in the tires.”
    He knew exactly what had happened. It was that dadblamed Wrangler. “Is Tommy getting a car this summer?”
    “No. He’s working to raise money so he can have one next year. He’s only saved eight hundred dollars.”
    This was definitely an encouragement. “So, look here. Harley was going to mow our two yards once a week, but why don’t I give you the job? I’ll pay twenty bucks a shot for both houses.”
    “If Buster Austin did it, he’d charge fifteen apiece, that’s thirty. I’ll do both for twenty-five.”
    “Deal!”
    He looked at the boy he loved, the boy he’d do anything for.
    Almost.
     
    It rained throughout the night, a slow, pattering rain that spoke more eloquently of summer to him than any sunshine. He listened through the open bedroom window until well after midnight, sleepless but not discontented. They would make it through all this upheaval, all this tearing up and nailing down, and life would go on.
    He found his wife’s light, whiffling snore a kind of anchor in a sea of change.
     
    Bolting down Main Street the next morning at seven o’clock, he saw Evie Adams in her rain-soaked yard, dressed in a terry robe and armed with a salt shaker.
    “Forty two!” she shouted in greeting.
    He knew she meant snail casualties. Evie had been at war with snails ever since they gnawed her entire stand of blue hostas down to nubs. Some years had passed since this unusually aggressive assault, but Evie had not forgotten. He pumped his fist into the air in a salute of brotherhood.
    After all, he had hostas, too. . . .
     
    “If I have to say goodbye to you one more time, I’ll puke,” said Mule.
    Actually, Mule was moved nearly to bawling that his old buddy had come by the Grill at all. Father Tim could have been loading his car, or turning off the water at the street, or changing his address at the post office—whatever people did who were leaving for God knows how long.
    “Livermush straight up,” Father Tim told Percy as he slid into the booth. “And make it a double.”
    “Livermush? You ain’t ordered livermush in ten, maybe twelve years.”
    “Right. But that’s what I’m having.” He grinned at the dumfounded Percy. “And make it snappy.”
    It was reckless to eat livermush, especially a double order, but he was feeling reckless.
    Percy set his mouth in a fine line as he cut two slices from the loaf of livermush. He did not approve of long-term Grill customers moving elsewhere. Number one, the Father had been coming to the Grill for sixteen, seventeen years; he was established. To just up and run off, flinging his lunch and breakfast trade to total strangers, was . . . he couldn’t even find a word for what it was.
    Number two, why anybody would want to leave Mitford in the first place was beyond him. He had personally left it only twice—when Velma was pregnant and they went to see cousins in Avery County, and when he and Velma went on that bloomin’ cruise to Hawaii, which his children had sent them on whether he wanted to go or not.
    But worse than the Father leaving Mitford, he was leaving it for a location that had once broken off from the mainland , for Pete’s sake, and could not be trusted as ground you’d want under your feet. So here was somebody he’d thought to be sensible and wise, clearly proving himself to be otherwise.
    As he laid two thick slices on the sizzling grill, Percy shook his head. Every time he thought he’d gained a little understanding of human nature, something like this came up and he had to start over.
    J.