cheerfully cleaning the last of the fried rice out from between her toes.
I fortified myself with a Tootsie Roll from Bernice’s cache in the canister marked Tea, pretended I was a FEMA worker and bravely entered the bathroom. With my eyes closed. I turned toward the spot where my bathtub had been that morning. When I opened them, there was a faucet.
“Snap, I have a faucet. A real, live, normal-looking faucet!”
And a date for Friday night, an irritating little voice reminded me.
It’s not a date. It’s two people who are new in town getting together to see the sites. All two or three of them.
I decided to celebrate—the faucet, of course—with a long soak in the bathtub.
When my phone rang a little after ten, I hoped it was Bree. She’d warned me she’d be putting in long hours helping her dad with the farm and there’d be times she wouldn’t be able to talk to me until after dark. Which was fine with me because I did some of my best talking late at night.
“Does it work?”
“Dex?”
Silence. I took that as a yes. His question had been so uncertain I wondered what exactly had taken place while I was gone during the day.
“Yes, it works.”
“I was late for another job.”
“There aren’t that many places to work around here,” I said, daring to tease him. “Did Sally give you a job as a waitress?”
“No.”
Obviously teasing Dex was like playing tennis when no one was on the other side of the net. Still, he’d made that “shaken not stirred” comment, so maybe there was a sense of humor buried in there somewhere. If someone had the patience to look for it.
“I’m not coming over tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be back on Monday to start in the kitchen. Did you want me to replace the cupboards or paint them?”
The image of a crowbar and splintered wood sprang into my head. “Paint them. Definitely. And thanks for the Chinese—”
He’d hung up on me again.
“Food.”
In the name of dessert, I grabbed another handful of Tootsie Rolls, tucked my Bible under my arm and curled up in the chair by the window to talk to God.
Psalms was always a good place to hear His voice. Even though David was a guy, he tried to live honestly before God. There were times he praised Him, times he questioned Him and times he asked Him for things. And times he asked God—in no uncertain terms—to squash his enemies. Which, truthfully, made me a little squeamish. But after having met Mrs. Kirkwood, I was a little more understanding. David also asked God to direct his steps, something I was doing on a daily (hourly?) basis. We had a lot in common.
My Bible fell open to Haggai again. Not because a divine hand stretched out and turned to it but because there was a folded-up piece of paper there. A receipt for sweet and sour chicken from the grocery store. Scrawled on the back of it was a question.
What does it mean that the people earned wages and put them in a purse with holes in it?
Dex had hijacked my devotional time!
Panicked, I thumbed through my Bible, looking for the extremely personal poetry, musings and notes to God that I sometimes wrote on the back of church bulletins and making sure The List, safely hidden in the Song of Songs, hadn’t been tampered with.
I breathed a sigh of relief when everything seemed to be in its rightful place. Not that Dex had been rifling through my Bible, but still…how had he known I was accidentally reading Haggai?
I skimmed through the verses and found the one he’d questioned. Why did he think I knew what the purses with holes passage meant? I wasn’t exactly a Bible scholar.
I did, however, know purses. They were kind of my specialty. And I was pretty good at finding shoes that matched, too. Encouraging him might not be a good idea, but I couldn’t resist. I grabbed a pen, took out a fresh sticky note and wrote the first thing I thought of when I imagined a rip in my Juicy bag.
You might lose something important.
I put it back in Haggai, chapter one. A booby trap to see if I’d catch a snoopy handyman.
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