Free Come Rain or Come Shine by Jan Karon

what’s going on with Harley and the Toyota?’ he asked Lace.
    â€˜He’s not talking.’
    â€˜Has he asked you about Las Vegas?’
    â€˜He said they’d talked about it, but she decided she couldn’t leave her cats.’
    â€˜Is his money in a shoe box or in the bank?’ He was a meddlesome son of a gun, a prime requirement for clergy.
    â€˜In the bank, in a CD, with something in savings.’
    â€˜What’s this about her being a hoofer?’
    Lace laughed. ‘I meant to tell you. He said she danced in a show on Broadway years ago.’
    Broadway
? If that didn’t take the cake . . .

    The burial of the bottle had roused a good bit of merriment in what had been a hectic day. He and Cynthia were in bed by eight. Indeed, the entire ménage was quiet, though he heard the house phone ring a few minutes ago.
    Graduation tomorrow. He would make breakfast and they’d head out with Lace around noon. Yesterday Lily had lined up the men, including Hal and Blake, and given them all a haircut on the porch. Though he felt positively skinned, he was ready to see Dr. Kavanagh
walk
.
    They turned out the lights, silent for a time.
    â€˜Are you dead yet?’ asked his wife.
    â€˜Not yet,’ he said.

    She placed the phone on the charger. Her whole body was thrumming with a kind of low-grade tremor.
    She had just sold five paintings to a three-time Academy Award nominee on the other side of the continent.

S he would miss her lookout tower.
    And sometimes she missed the children she had worked with at the nonprofit. She looked around the attic studio, at the walls hung with more of their art than her own. Luke’s wild, painted horses. Emmy’s huge raccoon faces. Eugene’s skyscrapers and whirling Van Gogh planets. Latisha’s row of strangely beautiful dolls . . .
    When she and Dooley moved into the second-floor bedroom after the wedding, the view would be lovely but different. From this big attic window, she could look into the front yard and over to the clinic, and there was the green post in its bed of zinnias, waiting for the sign to be hung.
    She went quickly to the other window, which was open to the breeze. The trailer was backing up to the cattle gate right now.
    There was Jake from their hole-in-the-wall diner in Farmer. And their postmistress, Judy, who had been kind tothem over their years of visiting Meadowgate. And there was Willie and Harley and Hal and Blake and Father Tim and Cynthia and all the farm dogs and a squad of neighbors lined up along the fence. How amazing! Their new bull was a complete celebrity.
    She’d been working on Dooley’s wedding present and forgotten the time, and if she didn’t hurry, she would miss the whole show.
    She tossed her hair into a ponytail and opened her jewelry box and took out the strand of turquoise beads. She loved these beads. He had given them to her when they finally knew the friendship ring was an engagement ring. She wore them only on special occasions, the most recent being his graduation yesterday.
    And there was her cell phone ringing. That would be Dooley saying
Where are you?
    She slipped the strand of beads around her neck, fastened the clasp, and raced downstairs.
    Yes!

    She heard hooves thundering against the metal of the trailer bed, then clattering down the ramp.
    Surely he would bolt into the pasture from the restraint of the trailer, but he stopped just beyond the ramp, silent as stone, looking ahead.
    She drew in her breath, astonished by the authority of his massive shoulders and his immense poise.
    He flicked an ear.
    â€˜Holy cow,’ whispered Honey Hershell. ‘That’s some big guy you got there.’
    Standing with his rump to the crowd in what Dooley called the ‘chill pen,’ Choo-Choo turned his head and gazed to the right, then turned his head and gazed to the left.
    â€˜Go, Choo-Choo!’ yelled eleven-year-old Danny Hershell.