a. . . a strange sort of jubilation coming, a wonderful discovery,
revelations. . .”
The bespectacled clerk had stepped away from the cash register to show
them the total on the tape. Grinning, he said, “Newlyweds?”
At the convenience store next door, they bought ice for the chest, then
orange juice, diet soda, bread, mustard, bologna-olive loaf, and
pre-packaged cheese slices.
“Olive loaf,” Holly said wonderingly. “I haven’t eaten this stuff since
I was maybe fourteen and I learned I had arteries.”
“And how about these,” he said, snatching a box of chocolate-covered
doughnuts off a shelf, adding it to the market basket that he was
carrying.
“Bologna sandwiches, chocolate doughnuts. . . and potato chips, of
course. Wouldn’t be a picnic without chips. The crinkled kind, okay?
Some cheese twists, too. Chips and cheese twists, they go together.” ù
Holly had never seen him like this: almost boyish, with no apparent
weight on his shoulders. He might have been setting out on a camping
trip with friends, a little adventure.
She wondered if her own apprehension was justified. Jim was, after all,
the one whose presentiments had proven to be accurate. Maybe they were
going to discover something wonderful at the mill, unravel the mystery
behind the last-minute rescues he had performed, maybe even encounter
this higher power to which he referred. Perhaps The Enemy, in spite of
its ability to reach out of a dream into the real world, was not as
formidable as it seemed.
At the cash register, after the clerk finished bagging their purchases
and was making change, Jim said, “Wait a minute, one more thing,” and
hurried to the rear of the store. When he returned, he was carrying two
lined yellow tablets and one black, fine-point felt-tip pen. To Holly,
he said, “We’ll be needing these tonight.”
When they had loaded the car and pulled out of the parking lot at The
Central, heading for the Ironheart farm, Holly indicated the pen and
tablets, which she was holding in a separate bag. “What’ll we be
needing these for?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. I just suddenly knew we have to have
them.”
“That’s just like God,” she said, “always being mysterious and obscure
.”
After a silence, he said, “I’m not so sure any more that it’s God
talking to me.”
“Oh? What changed your mind?”
“Well, the issues you raised last evening, for one thing. If God didn’t
want little Nick O’Conner to die up there in Boston, why didn’t He just
stop that vault from exploding? Why chase me clear across the country
and throw me at the boy, as you put it? And why would He up and change
His mind about the people on the airliner, let more of them live, just
because I decided they should? They were all questions I’d asked
myself, but you weren’t willing to settle for the easy answers that
satisfied me.” He looked away from the street for a moment as they
reached the edge of town, smiled at her, and repeated one of the
questions she had asked him yesterday when she had been needling him:
“Is God a waffler”
“I would’ve expected. . .”
“What?”
“Well, you were so sure you could see a divine hand in this, it must be
a bit of a letdown to consider less exalted possibilities. I’d expect
you to be a little bummed out.”
He shook his head. “I’m not. You know, I always had trouble accepting
that it was God working through me, it seemed like such a crazy idea,
but I lived with it just because there wasn’t any better explanation.
There still isn ‘t a better explanation, I guess, but another
possibility has occurred to me, and it’s something so strange and
wonderful in its way that I don’t mind losing God from the team.”
“What other possibility?”
“I don’t want to talk about it just yet,” he said as sunlight and tree
shadows dappled the dusty windshield and played across his face.
“I want to think it through, be sure it makes sense, before I lay it out
for you, ’cause I know now you’re a hard judge to convince.”
He seemed happy. Really happy. Holly had liked him pretty much since