Free Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts

alerting the Treasury Department to a forgery. Then, with the expertise of a secret agent, he held the bill to the light, popped it to test its strength, and nodded shrewdly before he crammed it deep in his pocket.
    About the same time, he started asking Novalee odd questions about food—what she thought of veal, if she could eat curry, whether she liked orange food better than red. When he asked her if she liked the smell of tarragon, she said she didn’t like fish at all, a comment Forney found so delightful his eyes teared.
    What she had wanted to tell him was that she was sick of beef jerky, tuna packed in spring water, and Vienna sausages—that she would never eat deviled ham or Treet again—that Stokely’s peas and carrots tasted like the cans they came in—and that after living on Wal-Mart food for nearly two months, a home-cooked meal of veal, curry and even tarragon, orange or red, would suit her just fine.
    Thinking of food made her stomach rumble. She checked her watch and though she was still a few minutes early, she stood up and brushed the wrinkles from her dress. The street lights had just come on, casting shadows stretching from the heavy evergreens at the edge of the sidewalk to the letters chiseled into stone pillars at the front of the library.
    Forney was watching her from the window just behind the reference section. He had been watching her since she first sat down on the bench.
    When she was halfway up the sidewalk, he stepped away from the window and started for the entry hall. He tried to slow his steps, to match her pace, but he had the door opened before she had even reached the top of the stairs.
    He knew she had pulled her hair back and fastened it with a silver comb and he knew she was wearing a dress just a shade darker than wisteria, but he didn’t know until he opened the door that her hair would smell like honeysuckle or that the deepening light would make the green flecks in her eyes look the color of willows in early spring.
    “Good evening,” he said in the voice he had practiced.
    Novalee could hardly believe the man standing before her was Forney Hull. He was not wearing his stocking cap, the first time she had seen him without it. His hair, so brown it was almost black, fell loosely across his forehead. He had shaved, exposing skin that looked too smooth, too tender to belong to this giant of a man.
    He was wearing a strange suit with a long coat and velvet collar.
    Novalee had seen such suits in movies and old photographs, suits worn by rich men who wore shiny top hats and drank tea from china cups.
    “Hi, Forney. You sure do look nice.”
    “Oh. I . . . uh . . . well.” This was a line he hadn’t rehearsed.
    “You want me to come in?”
    “Please, come in,” he said, a bit louder than he had intended.
    “Are you catching a cold?”
    Forney shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
    “You sound stopped up.”
    He closed the door behind her. “So do you,” he said.
    “I sound stopped up?”
    “No! I mean, look nice. So do you . . . look nice . . . too.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Well,” Forney said, trying to get back on track. “Well.” Suddenly, with both arms, he made a grand, sweeping gesture toward the reading room, a gesture he had refined in front of his mirror. “This way, please.”
    He walked a bit behind her as she moved down the hall, sure now that the whole thing had been a mistake, certain she would think he was crazy, afraid she would laugh when she saw it.
    But when she stepped through the reading room door, when she saw what Forney had done, she sucked in her breath and clapped her hands together, struck by the wonder of it.
    The entire room glittered in candlelight. Golden, shimmering light flickered in every corner, on every surface. Candles burned on tables, shelves, cabinets and carts. And wherever there were candles, there were roses, dainty tea roses in soft pinks and pale yellows—rosebuds, full blooms, bouquets of roses in vases and