Free On Shifting Sand by Allison Pittman

especially these days, when my skin refuses to be anything but dry.
    I want him to stay and I want him to read. I want us to have a reason for interacting—a shared reaction, perhaps, to a common story. Better yet, for him to read something I haven’t, so he can introduce me to something new. Nothing in Featherling is ever new. Not the people, not the thoughts, not even the books in our pittance of a library. They’re all donated, culled from estate sales, or rescued and catalogued from abandoned attics.
    Which makes me think.
    “There’s a family,” I say, even as the idea is forming. “The Campbells that just left. Packed up and gone. They’re from Chicago—well, she was. Their house is empty, and I know she was a reader, so they might have left—”
    “What are you suggestin’, Mrs. Merrill?”
    I blush, because there is more to that question than I care to admit to myself. “It’s an understanding we have here. What’s left behind is—”
    “Fair game?”
    Now he is outright flirting, and I flush clear down my neck. I can only plow through my thoughts, speaking too fast and too loud for him to wedge himself between my words.
    “I thought you might go out to their place. We could take you—Russ could take you, if he wanted, or I’d write you the directions, though it might be better if you went with someone from town, in case anybody asked questions. Mrs. Brown, even, might escort you. She usually heads up these things. . . .” My mind wanders briefly to the image of the minuscule Merrilou Brown and Jim, picking their way through abandoned Campbell finery, and I immediately change tack. “The point is, you can go and look and see what they have before Mrs. Berry, our librarian, takes them all. Or before the bank comes for the auction. I myself might be heading out there to take a peek. For the kitchen . . .”
    I haven’t run out of things to say, but his growing amusement at my speech stifles me.
    “So, you’re sayin’ I’ve stumbled into a town of sanctioned squatters and thieves?”
    I don’t laugh, really, not wanting to indulge his judgment. “Is that what it sounds like?”
    “No,” he says, his voice gentle now, and low. “Sounds like you’re just people, hit hard and hurtin’, like everybody is. Takin’ care of each other best you can. Times like these, seems best to throw right and wrong out the window. This whole part of the country’s livin’ in a cloud.”
    “It seems that way.” Which makes me wonder why he would choose to show up in a place where the rest of us longed for escape? So I ask him, but before he can answer, the bell above the shop door rings, and Russ walks in. In that moment I have my answer. Jim Brace has blown in to test me, and my feet are too shaky to stand.

  CHAPTER 6   
    W E SPEND NEARLY EVERY AFTERNOON of the next nine days together. I’ve managed to pilfer a copy of Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned from Mrs. Campbell’s nightstand, along with a lovely cut-glass candy dish, should we ever again feel safe to have a dish of candy exposed to the open air. Every day, when Russ leaves to tend to his pastoral visits and Ariel waits for the minute hand to fall to the six (sometimes taking longer than thirty minutes, due to my surreptitious setting of the clock), I venture down to the shop with a tray of lunch for Jim, stationed behind the counter should a customer wander in. Few ever do, and those in need of a saw blade or a bag of nails find me busy feigning inventory while Jim, engaging in enough charming banter to encourage a return visit, completes the transaction with a notation in our book of pending payment. Then, alone again, the novel emerges, and we read.
    I take my turn first, reading while he eats, a tacit acknowledgment of how difficult it might be to accomplish both tasks at once. Then, when he finishes, he asks politely if I’d like to take a break.
    That first day, I am thankful for the refuge of text—something to keep me