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in that cellar. “I love you,” he said. And despite everything, he meant it.

Chapter Twelve

    “Jimmy?” Dee Dee called.
    Schoen disentangled himself from the covers. “Jimmy, honey? What is it?”
    He sat on the side of the bed, the carpet tickling his toes.
    In the cobalt rectangle of the window he could see, framed between the trees, a swatch of starry sky.
    “Honey. Don’t let the Torku worry you like that. Them coming up at altar call. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
    But nothing was meaningless in God’s world. Not a sparrow falls . . . Everything was ordered, everything preordained. The hairs on his head were as numbered as his days.
    “Tonight in church you weren’t looking at me. You’re supposed to look at me during the sermon. Did you hear a word I said?”
    “Well, honey, of course I did. I always listen, you know that. I was thinking, that’s all.”
    “Don’t think! The congregation sees you looking around like you’re wondering what to make for dinner. God has called you as my helpmate. We’re married for a reason. I can’t save the town by myself.”
    A creak of bedsprings as she sat up. “Oh now, Jimmy. I help. Don’t I help? I run the cake sales. I organize the visiting. I—”
    “And what in God’s name have you done with your hair?”
    Dee Dee was a black, silent form next to him. He couldn’t tell whether she was shocked wordless or simply confused.
    “Oh, this?” she asked from the dark. “The frosting? Mary Dixon did it for me. She colors her hair, and she always looks so good. She said it makes me look sophisticated. Isn’t that just the nicest thing you’ve ever heard? When I looked in the mirror, I thought I looked really sophisticated too, like I was from New York or something.”
    “Vanity is woman’s trap. Rinse it out tomorrow. Do whatever you have to do to look like yourself again.”
    “Oh honey, don’t you get tired of the same things over and over again? Always Grape-Nuts and dry toast for breakfast. Roast every Sunday. Steak every Saturday night. And you never want to try a new salad dressing. French. Every supper, we have to have French. I could buy creamy garlic or ranch. Wouldn’t creamy garlic be fun? And I’d like to change the curtains. Get some pretty throw pillows. It’d be nice to have some bright colors–“
    “Be thankful for what you have. God puts a roof over your head. Food on the table.”
    “Well, I get food from the store really, and of course it does come from the Torku, even though I figure, well, God would have to have a hand in it somehow, wouldn’t He? I could make curtains. Terra cotta and turquoise, don’t you think? I think turquoise and terra cotta are just the most sophisticated colors. Mary Dixon says if we don’t change, we get old too quick. And it seems to me she’s right. Why, all the old people I know–“
    “Don’t raise your voice with me.” He got to his feet.
    “Jimmy?”
    “Be quiet. You’ll wake the children.”
    He strode to the living room and opened the front door, for the night air to clear his mind. For the wind to tell him why, after fifteen years of marriage, his wife wouldn’t obey him anymore.
    Shivering, he walked across the porch to his telescope and peered through the eyepiece. Hubert Foster’s bedroom window came into sharp focus. The room was dark.
    Schoen straightened and sighed. Pulling a lawn chair up to the telescope, he sat down, his vigilant eyes scanning the neighborhood at the bottom of the hill.
    Granger was in his workshop. Doc was drinking again in his study. The Albertsons were sitting down to a late-night snack of chocolate cake.
    The night was still and hushed, most sin abed. Distance was containable. It was a soothing perspective–seeing things at arm’s length, the way God sees. He felt as though the figures in the telescope lay cupped in his sheltering hand.

Chapter Thirteen

    Rain was coming down in a mist. Outside Bo’s cedar-shadowed cottage the garden had been