Free A Light in the Window by Jan Karon

look up.
    “Don’t you want to know what it is?” asked J.C. wiping his face with the ever-present handkerchief.
    “Sure I do.”
    “They’re givin’ away a Cadillac,” said J.C.
    He was dumbfounded. “Doing what?”
    “Adios,hasta la vista, ” said J.C. creaking out of the vinyl seat with his bulging briefcase. “See you in the funny papers.”
    If there was anything J.C. loved, it was going around town telling half a story to make sure somebody bought his newspaper.
    “Don’t that beat all?” said Percy, who had heard J.C.’s announcement. “I never knew the Lord was in the car business.”

    He went at once to the library and gave an astonished Avette Harris two twenty-dollar bills.
    “My!” she said, looking at him with admiration.
    “This is to replace those Mouse in the Manger books,” he said.
    “I declare, we have tried and tried to clean those book covers. It’s something just like jam, but it won’t come off. We don’t know what it is. You should see the things that happen to children’s books, sometimes. We found a dead cricket the other day in Little Women, and it looked like lasagna in The Hungry Caterpillar.”
    He nodded.
    “Isn’t that Miss Coppersmith something? We’re so proud of her, we could just bust.”
    He smiled.
    “Of course, this is way too much money. Two little books don’t cost forty dollars! Not yet, anyway.”
    “If there’s anything left,” he said, “buy a box of candy and pass it around to the volunteers.”
    He was on the sidewalk, headed toward the post office, when Avette caught up with him.
    “Oh, Father, when someone gives a book, we like to put a little book plate in the front that says who it’s given by. What would you like yours to say?”
    He thought for a moment.
    “Just say, ‘Given by Miss Coppersmith’s neighbor.’ ”

    Peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches? That had been Tommy Noles’s favorite food. Tommy had subsisted on that very fare from fourth grade through high school, with an occasional side of grape jelly. Tommy liked his on white bread, with the bananas mashed flat into the peanut butter. He wondered how she liked hers.
    Barnabas stopped to sniff a rock.
    The rhumba! What an extraordinary thought. He would have thought the fox trot, if he had ever thought about it at all.
    He was struck by the endless number of things he hadn’t thought about concerning Cynthia. Why had he never been more curious about her life, about her work? Where had she gone to school, for heaven’s sake? And why hadn’t he found out why she nearly died in a hospital? He’d even lacked the courtesy to ask lately about her nephew, who was as cherished as a son. It seemed a small thing to wonder, but what was his last name? He didn’t even know what kind of work he did.
    She had asked him to pose for a wise man in The Mouse in the Manger, yet he’d never inquired about the finished book. Worse, he had never once read anything she had written.
    He had treated her, he realized, as if she didn’t really exist.
    That realization was overwhelming to him. He’d believed what his parishioners had told him, that he was caring and nurturing. Yet, it was a lie. He wasn’t really either of those things. The truth was, he was unutterably selfish and self-seeking, going his own way, doing his own pious thing. It was disgusting to him.
    How had he come this far without seeing himself for what he really was? How had God let him get away with this loathsome deception for so long?
    Barnabas lifted his leg against a tulip poplar.
    He believed he had never married because he was married to his calling. The truth was, he had a complete lack of the equipment demanded for truly loving.
    Perhaps he was like his father, after all, though he’d believed all these years that he had his mother’s disposition. He had believed the friends and relatives and old Bishop Slade who had said, “Kind like his mother! Patient like his mother! Easygoing like his mother!”
    Yet,