35

Barbara felt better the next morning. A little headachy, but not quite as disgusted with herself. She hadn’t wanted to be rude, so had finished the bottle of wine with Bruno before excusing herself and walking home. No reason to feel guilty. He was old enough to be her father, after all. Over in Italy, fifteen-year-old boys were customarily married with two or three children. Weren’t they? She thought so. She told Sam about Bruno to satisfy her conscience.

“I met the nicest man yesterday on my walk. A lot older than us. Probably around a hundred or so. He owns the restaurant next to the hardware store.”

“There’s a hardware store in the neighborhood?” Sam asked, then began to talk about nuts and bolts and all manner of fastening devices, promptly forgetting all about the man who had made a pass at his wife and tried to get her pickled.

“I’ll have to go see that hardware store,” he said. “But first I must organize my new office.”

His old office at Harmony Friends Meeting had once been a boiler room and was musty and dark. But when Hank Withers had designed the Hope meetinghouse, he had outdone himself at the office. Two walls were mostly windows, looking out into the beech trees. The other two walls were bookshelves made of cherry and walnut. The desk was built-in, nestled in the corner where the windows met, looking outside. The windows were tinted. He could look out, but people couldn’t look in, which gave him time to hide if someone he didn’t want to talk with approached the meetinghouse. He whispered a prayer of thanksgiving for Hank Withers.

Sam unpacked his boxes of old sermons and arranged them on the bookshelves. He organized them by years in loose-leaf binders on the off chance he became famous and his alma mater wanted his sermons after he died. Nearly fifteen hundred sermons, only a few of which he remembered, none of which he wished to preach again. He changed his mind too often to give the same sermon twice. He knew ministers who’d written three years of sermons and kept repeating them. They were the same ministers who bought joke books and looked up sappy stories on the Internet to include in their sermons, and made it seem as if the events had happened to them. Usually a story about a kid with leprosy.

He stacked his funeral eulogies next to his sermons. From time to time, when he was depressed, he would reread certain of them and be cheered up. It was comforting to remember some people were dead and no longer annoying anyone. In some instances, Sam believed death was God’s way of evening the score. Some people are the source of great suffering and finally God knocks them off in a spectacular fashion and everyone has to act sad, but after the funeral they go home and say to their spouse, “He sure had that coming.” When Bob Miles Sr. had finally died after a long, hateful life, Sam’s father had said, at the funeral within earshot of half a dozen people, “It’s about time he bit the dust. Meanest man I ever knew.” Sam read Bob Sr.’s eulogy once or twice a month, always with great pleasure.

After arranging his papers, he sharpened a dozen pencils and placed them in the tray drawer of his desk, opened a box of stationery, and placed it within reach of his chair. So far, the only furniture in the office was the desk and chair, but the meeting had told him to go buy a new couch and two chairs. At Harmony, his office had been filled with castoffs people had dragged in from their homes. Chairs with three legs, a recliner with worn-through fabric, a coffee table with water stains, moth-eaten rugs, and old lamps with frayed cords that threw off sparks, causing Sam to leap out of his three-legged chair and stomp out small fires. The recliner had belonged to Bob Miles Sr. It had been donated by Bob Jr. and smelled like a dead geezer, like someone who had died on a Friday and not been found until the next Monday, which had in fact been the case. Sam had a theory that Bob Sr.’s spirit had stayed behind and settled in the recliner. Nothing else could explain the stink.

A new couch and two chairs! He didn’t have to run his choices past a committee or seek anyone’s approval. No one had to okay his fabric selection or ask if it was on sale. He didn’t have to listen to anyone talk about how this was no time to be buying furniture what with children starving in Africa.

“It’s your office,” Hank Withers had told him. “You pick out the furniture. What do we care what it looks like? You’ll be the one staring at it all day.”

Sam was starting to think he could listen to a lot of lectures on plumbing fixtures for this kind of freedom.

After organizing his office, he drove to the furniture store Hank Withers had recommended, selected a couch, two matching easy chairs, and a coffee table, then arranged for delivery.

He ate a late lunch with Barbara. Tuna salad sandwiches. She’d spent the morning working on the house, arranging the kitchen and hanging up their clothing.

“Well, what do you think so far?” Sam asked.

“I can’t believe this house. It’s so pretty. Everything is so tasteful. I can see why Wanda Fink wants to keep it nice.”

“Yeah, well, I still think she’s a little kooky,” Sam said.

“I’m almost embarrassed to put our furniture in here,” Barbara said. “It smells like dirty socks.”

“You can come over to my office and smell my furniture anytime you want,” Sam offered. “Brand-new. Just picked it out.”

Sam looked around the kitchen and into the living room. Their furniture did look a bit shabby.

“When we get a little money ahead, we can buy some new furniture,” he promised.

It had taken him almost thirty years to get their furniture broken in and comfortable, but he was fairly certain they’d never get a little money ahead so went ahead and promised Barbara. The furniture had belonged to his grandmother. She had won it, an entire living room suite, on the Gil Gillock Garden Hour, after correctly spelling the word chrysanthemum. The prize didn’t include delivery, so Ellis Hodge had driven her in his stock truck to Cartersburg, where she had visited Richard “Mother, Put the Coffee Pot On!” Bennett’s Furniture Store, and selected a couch, two chairs, a coffee table, three lamps, two end tables, and a rubber plant. She was dead two weeks later, causing many people to wonder why God had let her win all that furniture only to knock her off before she’d even removed the plastic covers.

Sam and Barbara had lived on other people’s furniture their entire married lives, except for their bed. Harvey and Eunice Muldock had offered them their old mattress and box spring when they’d moved to Harmony, but Barbara had refused to accept it.

“I am not going to sleep on the same mattress that Harvey Muldock’s bare, bony butt has lain on the last twenty years. We’ll buy a new mattress.”

They had bought it on time, thirty dollars a month for thirty months. Nine hundred dollars for a mattress that formed a trough in the middle after six months. They woke up each morning, their backs throbbing, their necks stiff, their vertebrae locked in place. Sam calculated their mattress had shaved ten years off their lives.

“Maybe instead of getting a new couch, we can buy a new mattress when we get some money ahead,” Barbara said that night, lying in the trough next to Sam.

“Maybe the meeting will grow so big, I’ll get a raise and we can buy a new couch and a new mattress,” Sam said, ever the dreamer.

“I need a new mattress, too,” Levi called out from the next room. “This one smells like pee.”

“When is he going back to Purdue?” Barbara whispered to Sam.

“I heard that,” Levi said. “This Thursday.”

“We love you, Son,” Sam said. “Good night.”

“Good night, Dad. Night, Mom.”

Sam lay awake, cuddling next to his wife and feeling amorous, so he thought of Wanda Fink to tamp those feelings down. Thursday couldn’t come soon enough.