Abby stumbled out of the bathroom at 6:43 the next morning on her way back to bed for another sweet hour of oblivion before it was time to get up. Merri stopped her just outside the door. Abby yawned and rubbed her eyes, hoping she was only dreaming. She blinked, but Merri was still there—annoyingly wide awake and fully dressed for church.
“How do I look?” Merri said.
“Awesome, kiddo,” she said, stifling another yawn. “I love that look you’re going for.”
“Thanks. Would you do my hair in a French braid again? We’d better hurry. I don’t want to be late.”
She smiled sleepily at Merri. Abby knew that Merri wasn’t thinking about church so much as she was about her lunch date with her dad afterwards, but still it was good to see her so eager. “I think we’re okay for time,” she said drily. “Wait here. I’m going to make coffee and try to jolt myself out of this walking coma I’m in.”
When Abby had offered to take Merri to the restaurant to meet her dad, Pat had been grateful, saying she didn’t have the stomach to sit through a meal with her ex-husband Brad after all the trouble he had caused. She had grudgingly admitted he did love Merrideth—in his own selfish way—and that she couldn’t keep them separated from each other forever—no matter how much she wanted to.
Abby just hoped Merri would be able to sit through church without exploding with excitement.
Abby was a little late getting to the young adult Sunday school class, so she had to sit in the last available seat— in the front row. John, near the back with a group of guys, smiled at her when she passed him and she felt relieved. Maybe he didn’t think she was crazy after all. Or then again, maybe he was just smiling at her because he was trying to be nice to a crazy person. It was a good thing there were no open seats next to him, because it would have looked like she was chasing him, which she definitely wasn’t. He obviously wanted to keep it a casual friendship. And that’s what she wanted too. Really.
Mr. Luckert led the class in a good discussion on Abraham’s faith. John made several comments that showed he had studied the Scripture passage. Abby was impressed. Maybe she could casually stop him after class and they could discuss it further. But after class, Mr. Luckert stopped her to ask how she was getting along and if she were making any friends. He meant well, but she might have had a better chance of doing so if he hadn’t delayed her.
Then, when she got to the sanctuary, even if she had wanted to sit next to John, which she didn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to because he was in the back, managing the audio and recording systems. He didn’t look up when she entered the room, so she and Merri sat next to the friendly couple she had met before. Her last thought before turning her concentration to the service was that there would be plenty of guys, with imaginary charts and stars of their own, when she got back to Ambassador College in the fall.
Abby smiled as Merri nearly skipped up the sidewalk to the front door of the Brown Cow. Its rustic decor was totally different from Genevieve’s, but it was every bit as crowded with its own variety of enthusiasts. Abby checked in with the hostess, who told her there would be at least a fifteen-minute wait.
Merri stood on her toes to look over the people waiting in front of them. “I don’t see him.”
“Well, we’re a little early.”
This time, there was no girly gift shop to kill time in, so Abby took a menu from the wooden rack on the wall to read while they waited. It was certainly geared toward carnivores. Raspberries weren’t mentioned anywhere on the menu.
The hostess called the party of twelve in front of them and she and Merri had a clearer view of the dining room.
“What time is it?” Merri asked, studying the crowded room.
Over the buzz of conversation and clink of cutlery Abby heard a faint warbling. “Hey, isn’t that your phone?”
Merri pulled her phone out and opened it. “I’m getting a text.” The smile drained from her face. Snapping her phone closed, she turned toward the door without a word and elbowed her way through the people waiting in line.
“Wait, Merri! What is it?” Abby followed her out onto the sidewalk, mumbling apologies to the people Merri had trampled, all the while knowing the answer to her own question.
“I know it’s hard.” Abby sat down on the front porch step next to Merri. She looked up at the sky, hazy with humidity and heat, and thought about what to say. “The Bible says we have to forgive.”
“But he was so mean to me.”
“I’m not saying you don’t have a right to be angry. What your dad did was wrong.”
“He’s done it to me over and over again. I can’t keep forgiving him.”
“One guy thought he was being generous to forgive seven times. But Jesus told him to keep on forgiving, even seventy times seven.”
“Well, I’m on about 489 and a half by now.”
“Let’s go in where it’s cooler.”
“Look,” Merri said pointing to the road. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and grinned. “Your new boyfriend’s coming to see you.”
John’s blue Mustang, closely followed by a battered and rusty panel van, turned off Miles Station Road onto their so-called street and stopped.
“What do you know,” Abby said softly, “He came back.” She resisted the impulse to do a happy dance and run down to the car to meet him.
John gracefully unfolded his tall frame from the Mustang and waited for the guy in the van to wrestle his dented door open. After a struggle, he got out of the van, tugging a backpack with him, and followed John up the sidewalk.
“Hi.” Abby stood and brushed dust off the seat of her shorts. John smiled and as usual, her stomach did weird things.
“Hi. Abby, Merri. This is my friend Tim Skyzyptek. He’s a computer wizard.” He looked the part, with his horn-rimmed glasses and dinosaur-green T-shirt that read: Pterodactyls are Pterrific.
“He might be able to fix your computer.”
“Hi, Tim Sk…something…tech,” Abby said. “Thanks for coming.”
Tim grinned. “No sweat. And just call me Tim.”
“Hey, squirt, how did your lunch—?”
Abby elbowed John in his side and smiled brightly at Tim. “Come on in out of the heat.” She opened the front door and they went in, John frowning at her in puzzlement. Tim pushed his glasses back into place on his nose and looked around the room with interest.
“When he gets your computer fixed, you can show me your weird program.” John said it with a faintly patronizing smile, but that was all right. She’d enjoy the look on his face when he finally went time-surfing with them.
“So, does this mean you believe me now?”
“I didn’t say that. But if we don’t save the program, I’ll never know, will I?”
“It’s upstairs,” Merri said. “Follow me.”
Abby started up the stairs after her, but when she heard the guys’ clomping along behind her she stopped. John bumped into her.
“Sorry,” he said.
Tim grinned. “Maybe you should watch your feet instead of—”.
“Shut up, Tim.” John’s face was as pink as the hydrangeas at Genevieve’s.
Abby felt her own cheeks heat. Well, she thought happily, Pat was wrong about his sexual orientation. “We’ll have to be quiet. Merri’s mom is napping.”
“Oh, sure,” Tim whispered back.
“What’s with Merri?” John said quietly. “She looks like she’s been crying.”
“Her dad didn’t show at the Brown Cow. At the last second he texted her to say something had come up. Didn’t even have the guts to call. Says he’ll come next weekend for sure.”
“Sounds like a swell guy.”
“You have no idea how swell. If you guys can get the program going again that would really cheer her up.”
Merri stood at the door to the computer room. “There it is.”
Setting his backpack on the floor beside the chair, Tim sat down and began to check out the computer. Merri sat in the straight-back chair beside him and Abby and John stood behind them looking over their shoulders.
“You’ve got 1.5 terabytes,” Tim said. “Definitely a flaming sweet beast.”
“It is?” Merri said.
“What Timmy Tech means is it’s a top-of-the line computer with lots of memory,” John said.
“So did your proggie barf on you or did you get the screen of death?” Tim said.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Abby said.
“You know, the blue bomb.”
“Tim, you’re such a Dilbert,” John said.
“Why thanks, Johnny Boy. You’re no larva yourself. Sorry, Abby, for brain dumping on you. I mean did your program send error codes, or did everything crash to a blue screen?”
“Here, let me show you,” Merri said. She took the mouse and clicked on the Beautiful Houses program icon. After the welcome screen came on, this time featuring Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Chicago home, a slide show of houses began to scroll across the screen as usual.
“We thought it was pretty cool to be able to take virtual tours of some really neat houses all over the world,” Abby said. “But then one day, bam! There was this old house looking just like the drawing in the history book we saw, surrounded by shops, a train depot, Colonel Miles’ steam mill—the whole village of Miles Station just like it was over a hundred and sixty years ago.”
“Man, that sounds off the hook!” Tim said.
“Yeah, it was awesome.” Abby pointed at the house that had just come up onscreen. “See. That one.”
“That’s cool. It looks like this house—only new,” John said. “How did they—?”
“That is this house,” Merri insisted. “Only when the power came back on after the storm last week it was all messed up. Watch what happens when I click on it.”
The screen image rolled dizzily and then settled into a long error message.
“Might as well be Greek,” Abby said.
“Did you call customer support?” Tim said.
“Of course, but the technicians kept passing us on to other technicians, and nobody was able to fix the problem.”
“You probably had a power surge during the storm and it corrupted some of the program files,” Tim said. “Did you try reinstalling?”
Abby shook her head. “No software disks. Since it’s still under warranty, I’ve been thinking about just sending it all back to the company and letting them take care of it.”
“There’s only one problem with that.”
“What?”
“They’ll format the hard drive and everything will be gone,” Tim said. “I wouldn’t bet on getting the program back the way it was. But don’t worry. I think I can phrack in through the backdoor and clean up the files for you. That is, assuming they’re not totally nuked. Then I have a little app I wrote that will make your proggie pretty much bulletproof.”
“Okay. Thanks. I think.” Abby looked up for John’s reaction.
“Yeah, thanks, Tim.”
They watched as Tim’s hands flew over the keyboard and he happily chattered away in geek speak, which they mostly ignored. After about thirty minutes he said, “There. Good as new. No more nasty frags floating around. You’re all set to go.”
“This is going to be so cool,” Merri said. “Wait until you see it, John.”
“I’m watching.”
“And you won’t think I’m mental now.” Abby clicked on the house, and this time no error message popped up—but then neither did the enhanced program features. “They’re gone,” Abby said. “The control buttons are all gone.”
“What did you do to the program?” Merri glared at Tim.
“Sorry, ladies,” Tim said. “That’s the best I can do.”
“That’s it?” Merri said. “No more Charlotte? How will we know what happened to her?”
Merri bolted from the room, and then down the hall her door shut—almost loud enough to be categorized a slam.
“Sorry about that. She’s had a really bad day. Thanks for trying, guys,” Abby said. It was difficult to be polite when she was fighting the ridiculous urge to cry.
John touched her hand and when she looked up at him, he seemed sincerely distressed. “I’m sorry it didn’t work, Abby.”
“At least the error messages are gone.”
Tim pulled a cable from his backpack and used it to connect Merri’s computer to John’s laptop. “I’m going to beam the program over to Johnny Boy’s laptop so you all can go native,” he said, seeming totally clueless about the emotional vibes in the room.
“That’s good,” Abby lied, because of course it was pointless now that they wouldn’t be able to time-surf any more.
“There. That should do it. I’ve got to take off now,” Tim said. “I promised my grandma I’d stop by. Sounds like she’s cooked her email program again.” He chuckled. “The four gazillion emails she forwards on a daily basis might have something to do with it.”
Abby and John followed Tim downstairs. Waving as he drove off, they sat down on the front porch steps.
“If only you could have seen how Miles Station looked back in the day,” she said, gesturing toward the west where now only cornfields grew. “I could show you pictures—the history books at the library have a lot of stuff—but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself.”
Picking up the laptop beside him on the step, John stood. “I’ve got to go now, but why don’t we go to the library and you can show me? Maybe tomorrow.”
It was sweet of him to try to fix the computer. And the suggestion about going to the library obviously meant he still wanted some kind of relationship. But what kind of relationship could she ever hope for if he didn’t believe her? Which called into question his status as possible marriage material, no matter how many stars on his chart. Which probably meant she should stop thinking about kissing him.
She sighed and said, “I’ll walk you to your car.”
When she rose from her seat on the porch step, she saw Merri’s raggedy five-year-old neighbor, shuffling down the dusty road toward them, carefully carrying something covered in aluminum foil. “Wait, John. You can’t leave yet. Looks like Michael’s bringing us something.”
Abby had felt a sense of protectiveness from the first moment she saw the little boy playing on the train tracks in front of their house. Because his mother was deaf, Michael had not been exposed to clear speech and so he had several odd speech problems. Abby and Merri had been unable to understand him at first. Some of the neighborhood kids teased and bullied him. At least they had before John set the little thugs straight. His rescue had, unbeknownst to him, earned him a star for heroism.
Michael’s sweet smile was bigger than ever. “Mrs. Arnold made you cookies.” He handed the plate to John. What he had actually said was more like, “Mi-uh Ahnow may oo coo-ees,” but they were used to his speech patterns and understood perfectly well what he was saying. He pulled back the foil to reveal a pink glass plate of sugar cookies shaped like flags and iced in red, white, and blue.
“Thanks, buddy,” John said, juggling the plate and his laptop. “That reminds me, Abby. I talked with my cousin Lucy about Michael. She’s a speech therapist. Works out of her house in Alton, one of those old Victorians near where we were yesterday. Anyway, I called her last night. She’s willing to work with him if it’s all right with his parents.”
“That would be wonderful!” Abby moved closer to John and lowered her voice. “But I don’t think Michael’s mom can afford to pay a speech therapist.”
“Not a problem,” he mumbled around the cookie he had stuffed in his mouth. “She’ll take the case pro bono. She wants to see him Tuesday morning.”
After John and Michael left, Abby sat there wondering how she could cheer Merri up. Her first thought was to take her the plate of cookies, but she knew Merri was really trying not to eat junk food. Besides, using food as a reward was a really bad idea. If Pat hadn’t been doing it Merri’s whole life, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten so heavy. The kindest thing she could do was to remove the temptation, and so she ate two of the cookies while she tried to think of something to do with Merri. After her third cookie, she gave up and called Kate.
“He came back. I thought he was giving me the brush off at church this morning, but, apparently not.”
“Really? Did he take you some place romantic again?”
“No, better. He brought his friend Tim and they tried to fix the computer. It didn’t work, but still.”
“Definitely not romantic.”
“Yes, but sweet—in a guy sort of way. Blast it! Now I have to give him another star, which is pointless because he’s not really marriage material.”
“Why not? He sounds nice.”
“Yeah, well, what about trust?”
“Trust? What are you talking about?” Kate said.
There was no way around it. John either thought a) she was crazy, b) she was a liar, c) she’s was so stupid she didn’t understand what she had seen on the computer, or d) she was joking past all point of being funny, which, of course, was just another way of saying she was stupid. She would have to take him out of the marriage possibility category and put him in the friend category. But what kind of friend was he if he didn’t trust her? Then it occurred to her that what was true for John was also true for Kate.
“Abby, are you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” She sighed. “But I’ve got to go think of some way to cheer up Merri.” And herself. “I’ll call you later.”
“Okay. Have fun.”
When Abby picked up the pink plate to take it to the kitchen, she discovered it was empty. Wow, she thought, stress eating was really a bad idea too.