Free Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good by Jan Karon Page A

just thinking about it.
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    Dear Henry . . .
    The morning was close, humid; he was sweating as he hooked a right toward Farmer. Any advantage of the running he’d done in the past was long used up; he was strung tight as a mountain banjo.
    Out of the Irish skillet and into the fire, it appears that C and I cannot avoid all manner of boondoggleries.
    But no, he wouldn’t go into the McGraw affair, too much work composing all that drivel, and to what end?
    We’re plenty glad to be back at 107 Wisteria
.
As I said when we talked, we arrived home in the middle of the night, Dooley and Lace driving us up the mountain. What I forgot to say is that I wish you could have seen our little town sleeping at two in the morning—I was especially moved by the sight of the streetlamps glimmering as if under the spell of sober thought, and the silent mountains beyond. It is cause to believe that one day, all will be well with the world.
    He would like to say,
You must come and have a look for yourself.
    But he couldn’t say it; it would commit him to something he couldn’t fully undertake.
    Thank God for your steady improvement. This six- to twelve-month stretch of your immunodeficiency is a tough pull—but I should think everything depends on it. On the upside, your hundred days of staying out of the fray will soon be over—maybe a matinee (usually only a few people in the theater) and a box of popcorn?—I’ll Google your low-bacteria diet to see what is approved. No Milk Duds would be my guess.
    Thanks for your letter received on the seventh. We still have tomatoes in plenty, and will indeed save our seeds for your patch. You are a better man than I if you get anything useful from them.
    If Henry should ever come to Mitford, he wondered whether he could introduce him as his brother. The thought had presented itself in Ireland, but hadn’t concerned him. Now he was home, and the anxiety had come back. It wouldn’t be so easy with others as it had been with Louella.
    He had stopped to adjust the bandanna around his head when he looked up and saw the limo headed north toward Farmer.
    Identifying the plate was a lost cause; the car was in the opposite lane and moving fast. He didn’t care for tinted windows, though they had their virtues; he wasn’t even the man for sunglasses. He regretted that he’d gaped like a moron.
    The point was, Henry’s bloodline made itself clear even to the casual observer. What would his former parish have to say? And why in God’s name would it matter what was said?
    It mattered because the fact of Henry’s existence revealed their father’s duplicity, which was a slap in the face of his mother. Or worse, in his view, was that some may think his mother had been the one for duplicity. Either way, his mother’s memory would bear the brunt, and the fault would rest on his shoulders. He had not let sleeping dogs lie, he had roused them up and they had gone baying.
    The Methodist chapel was coming up on his left—he imagined himself resting on the bench in the memorial garden, shaded by a hedge of privet; he saw himself making excuses to Wilson, but no, he couldn’t worm out of this, not with Wilson doing twenty to his three.
    The vastly more important thing was that his half-brother now freighted a population of Tim Kavanagh’s stem cells. That his cells would have been a match for Henry’s was given less than a five percent chance, but they matched—an indisputable miracle, according to members of the Memphis medical team. The miracle had kindly extended itself to a successful transfer of his cell soup, which vanquished—for how long, no one knew—the acute myelogenous leukemia.
    Clearly, God had given him this particular brother, and his cowardice to fully accept that was shaming.
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    E STHER C UNNINGHAM was driving home from the Local with a sack of fingerling potatoes when she saw Father Tim running east on Lilac Road. Now, there was a sight for