Free Leota's Garden by Francine Rivers

cane. Any kind she wanted. One with a dragon head! However, the lure of acing Professor Webster’s class gripped him, nailing his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He had to keep on track. He breathed in slowly and managed a stiff “My pleasure, ma’am.”
    “Oh, drivel,” he thought he heard her say.
    Neither spoke another word for five blocks, and when they got to the store, Leota Reinhardt did all the talking.

    “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life!” Corban heaved his sports coat into a chair. “I wanted to buy duct tape and use it on that old hag by the time we were halfway through the grocery store!”
    “You’re in a fine state.” Ruth laughed. “What happened?”
    “What didn’t happen! First off, she made me wash her front window. You should have seen this dump, Ruth. Then she insisted on walking five blocks down to the market. When we got there, she took an hour poking through the vegetables and fruit, complaining to the produce manager how nothing tastes real anymore. ‘You might as well eat plastic!’ she said, and you should’ve seen the guy’s face. And then she pushes the cart over to the meat section and points out how everything is packaged for families. ‘You have to buy ten pork chops to get a decent price. Do you know how long it would take me to eat ten pork chops?’ she says. And all that was nothing compared to what she had to say to the poor checker. That old woman was telling the girl how she used to buy pork chops for five cents apiece and the price of a single tomato is worse than highway robbery.”
    “Calm down, Cory. It couldn’t have been that bad.”
    “Three bags of groceries, Ruth. Heaping bags! I had to carry two of them five blocks uphill . She stopped a couple of times, but just when I thought I’d have the chance to put them down and rest a minute, she’d start off again. She put her bag on the porch rail and dug around in her purse for five minutes trying to find her key. My arms were aching. I was just about ready to dump her stuff and go when she opens the door and tells me to take the sacks into her kitchen. I came back and carried in the other one, too, because I knew if I didn’t, I’d have to wait another half an hour for her to walk from the front door to the kitchen with it. I offered to put her things away, and she said she could do it herself. And then, to top it all off, she hands me a quarter!”
    Ruth laughed. “Well, I suppose in her day, that would be considered a good tip.”
    Corban knew better. “She did it to be nasty.”
    “Oh, come on! Why would she do that?”
    “You’d have to meet her to understand.” He yanked open the refrigerator and looked around. With a mumbled curse, he pulled out a bottle of red wine. Setting it on the counter, he opened the cabinet, looking for a clean glass. Finding none, he glanced at the sink. “Did you have friends over or what?”
    “The women’s advocacy meeting was here this afternoon,” she said, distracted by her studies. “Sorry. I haven’t gotten around to doing the dishes.”
    Stifling his irritation, he slammed the cabinet and opened another. He took out a mug. “This isn’t going to be as easy and quick as I thought.”
    “What?”
    “The old woman.”
    “Well, did she answer any of your questions? Were you about to get any information?”
    “Are you kidding? I didn’t get the chance to ask her a single question. I wasn’t there ten minutes before I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get anything useful out of her until I’ve established some kind of rapport with her. And God knows how long that will take.” He downed half the mug of wine. His head was pounding. Nothing like a tension headache to make one want to drink. After a few hours with Leota Reinhardt, he felt like taking the bottle by the neck and draining it.
    Ruth wrote something in her notebook and glanced at him briefly before returning her attention to the text propped against two stacked books. “So why