Free A Stranger's Wish by Gayle Roper

years?”
    “Yeah.” He shrugged. “We all survived. I didn’t want to finish my high school career in Brazil, so I stayed here with Uncle Bud and Aunt Betty Lou. Nobody forced me or anything. My choice.”
    “Funny. I was just reading about choices this morning.”
    “It was one of the best choices I ever made, at least spiritually. Since Mom and Dad sort of ignore God, the years here grounded me in Him.”
    I thought about my parents, who were committed to God almost as much as they were committed to the law. What would it be like to grow up in an unbelieving home and never go to Sunday school and church?
    “I also attended regularly when I went to Lancaster Bible College,” he continued. “I worked with the youth pastor here for a couple of years before I took my own pastoring job in Michigan.”
    “Well, no wonder everyone knows you. Where’s your real home—where your family’s from, I mean?”
    “San Francisco—at least for most of my growing up. That’s why Mom and Dad always sent me to Lancaster County for the summer. Country air and all that.”
    “I left my heart,” I sang, before I realized what I was doing.
    Jon Clarke looked at me and laughed.
    I flushed and realized Todd was right. It was a stupid habit.
    We stopped beside Jon Clarke’s car.
    “What about my car?” I asked. “Shall I follow you wherever we’re going?”
    “Let’s just leave it,” he said. “We can come back and get it later.”
    I looked at my car, and he turned to look too.
    “Does it really look like a taxicab?” I asked.
    “Only if you’re very conventional and yellow means cabs, not sunshine, bananas, and buttercups.”
    I smiled happily. What an insightful man.
    Because many of the finest restaurants in the Lancaster area are owned by Mennonites, they’re closed on Sundays. We decided to try Cracker Barrel just east of town on Business 30. We had to wait a few minutes for a table, so we shopped in the general store, which was loaded with autumn and Halloween items.
    “Jon Clarke, look at this.” I pointed to a Halloween witch who cackled every time someone walked by her. “She’d get on your nerves very quickly.”
    He looked slightly pained but not at the witch. “Do me a favor? Call me Clarke. My mother’s a displaced Southerner, and she has the Southerner’s love for double names. I don’t.”
    “You don’t go by Jon?”
    “My father’s named Jon, and two Jons would be confusing, so I’ve always used Clarke. But Aunt Betty Lou calls me the whole thing, just like Mom. People around here followed her example.”
    “What’s your mother’s name?” I asked, curious.
    “Mary Rose.”
    “Nice.”
    “She’s lucky. I have an aunt named Charlotte Mabel, who’s called Lottie Mae, and another named Dolly Belle. Anyway, I sign my name J. Clarke Griffin.”
    Griffin, I thought as we followed the hostess to our table and placed our orders. “Reverend J. Clarke Griffin.”
    “Dr. J. Clarke Griffin.”
    “Right. Graduate school. I forgot. Well, it sounds fine. It also sounds familiar, though I can’t imagine why.”
    “It sounds strange to me. Too new. I imagine I’ll get used to it at the college, though.”
    “You’re teaching?”
    “Just like you.”
    “Hardly on the same level.”
    “Oh, I don’t know about that. I can’t imagine what I’d do with a roomful of little kids.”
    “And I with easily bored college students.”
    We took turns playing with the triangle peg game resting on our table. He kept ending with three pegs, and I managed to get two about half the time, three the rest. Neither of us managed one. Still, I beat him overall. Great strategy for impressing a first date. Well, not a date exactly. Maybe a first conversation? a first afternoon? a first meal?
    If he couldn’t take a woman besting him in peg jumping, he wasn’t the man I thought he was.
    The waitress arrived with our food, and Clarke pushed the peg triangle to the back of the table. “You’re good, but