April 18
Ron’s June 18
Kim didn’t recognize the woman who strode in just after she unlocked the door for business.
The customer browsed the fiction wall without picking up a single book. That was the tell. People who wanted books picked up books. People who wanted something else browsed.
So Kim let her.
“You’re Kim Garbe?” the woman finally said.
“I am.”
“My sister-in-law is on Carol McDonald’s staff at Meadow View. She told me what you’re doing for the veteran.”
This was the part Kim hadn’t prepared for. Not the logistics, not the calendars and newspapers and rehearsed deflections, but the strangers. The people outside the planning meetings who’d heard about it the way people in small towns heard about everything. Through sisters-in-law. Church parking lots. Food Lion checkout lines that started with “Did you hear?” and ended with an opinion.
“It’s a community effort,” Kim said. The response was becoming a reflex.
“I think it’s beautiful,” the woman said. “My father was in Vietnam. If someone had done something like this for him—” She stopped. Composed herself. “Can I help? I don’t know what you need, but I can bake. I can sew. I can show up. Just tell me where.”
Kim thanked her and took her name and number on a Post-it. When she left, she added it to the wall where a handful of others were already stuck. Most were people she’d never met who had walked into Good Yarn and offered to help a man they’d never met either.
Not all of them had been like that.
Pastor Josh had called on Tuesday. Not to object, exactly. To ask questions. Careful ones. Questions a pastor asks when he’s working out whether something is ministry or manipulation.
“Is this man aware?” he’d asked.
“No.”
“And the family?”
“His family is gone. Annie is the closest thing he has. And Carol.”
A long pause. “You know I’m not comfortable with deception, Kim.”
“Neither am I.”
“But you’re doing it anyway.”
“We’re doing it anyway.”
Another pause, longer than the first. “I’d like to open the church parking lot for staging. And I’d like to offer a prayer at the ceremony, if there’s a place for it.”
“There’s a place for it,” Kim said.
That was the easy one. The hard one had been Catherine Hayes, Bill’s wife, who had come into the shop on Wednesday afternoon with a casserole and a look on her face that said she’d been arguing with herself all day.
“I told Bill this was wrong,” Catherine said. She set the casserole on the counter. Green bean. “I told him you don’t lie to a dying man, no matter how good it feels. I told him it’s patronizing. That if Ron knew, he’d be furious.”
Kim waited.
“Bill told me to bring the casserole anyway.” Catherine looked at the dish. “He said Charlie Drummond saved a man’s life in Korea, and the least we could do was give his brother a parade.” She pushed the casserole forward an inch. “I still think it’s wrong. But I made the casserole. So.”
Kim had taken it and thanked Catherine. She hadn’t argued, because Catherine was right. It might be wrong. It might be patronizing. Ron might be furious. All of those things could be true at the same time as the other thing. That a town was choosing to try, and the trying was worth it even if the method was flawed.
That was the part Kim couldn’t explain to anyone, because she couldn’t fully explain it to herself.
Now it was Friday. The Post-its were multiplying. The casseroles were stacking up in the back room. Frank had called this morning to say two more volunteers had shown up at the Patriot office asking about the parade route, and Mrs. Durfee had added three kids to the marching band after their parents called the school.
Kim surveyed the shop. It was busier this week than it had been in months, though she couldn’t quite explain why. A few of the strangers had actually bought things. A candle. Yarn. A paperback picked up while waiting to talk. She wasn’t sure if word of the parade was drawing them in, or just drawing them out of their houses, and Good Yarn happened to be there? Either way, she thought about what it meant that a town could hold two things at once.The belief that something was beautiful and the suspicion that it was wrong, and still show up with a casserole and an offer to help.
The bell chimed. Another stranger. A man this time, older, wearing a ball cap with a faded military insignia she couldn’t read from across the room.
“I heard about the veteran,” he said.
Kim reached for a Post-it.
“What do you need?” he asked.
Seventeen days.
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