“Mr. Personality,” Blair dryly commented. “Well, I guess I have work to do.” He rapped the counter. “Harry, if you need it, you can use my adjoining pasture, the cemetery pasture. There’s plenty of water in that pasture, too, and the fencing is good. Oh—I’d keep my eye out for terrorists crawling through the animal door if I were you.”
“Right.” Harry half-smiled, for she was doubly unhappy. She was upset about Jerome and just miserable over Sugar.
“Bye, ladies.”
As Blair walked outside into the sunshine, Harry gritted her teeth. “I will kill Jerome Stoltfus, that idiot!”
“A little man with a little power is much worse than a big man with big power,” Miranda sagely noted.
“Oh, Miranda.” Harry threw up her hands, then sat down at the small table covered in a checkered tablecloth. Tears filled her eyes.
“Honey, what’s the matter?” Miranda, motherly and kind, put her arm around Harry’s shoulders.
Mrs. Murphy and Tucker hurried over to comfort Harry. Pewter walked over, but slowly. It wouldn’t do to be too obvious in her devotion.
“I don’t know.” Harry reached for a napkin to dab her eyes.
“Sugar is with the Lord. ‘Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.’ Sugar is forgiven and in a better place.” She had quoted Psalm 51, First Verse. “And as for Jerome, well, he will make trouble, so the way to head him off is to draw up a petition. Ned Tucker can do that for us and have every single postal patron sign it.”
“What?”
“A petition that declares Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker are valuable members of our community and the post office can’t function without them.” Miranda smiled down at the three faces looking up at her. It was uncanny, but sometimes Miranda thought they understood.
“She’s come a long way. Remember when she didn’t like cats and dogs?” Tucker recalled.
“A lot of people are like that until they get to know us.” Mrs. Murphy rubbed against Miranda’s leg.
“Miranda, that’s a wonderful idea.” Harry cried a little harder.
“Now, you don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it.” Miranda patted her on the back.
“I feel like I’m slipping.” Harry wiped her eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’m stalled out and I don’t know where I’m going. I feel terrible about Sugar and Barry, too. And I’m sitting in the post office getting cussed out by Jerome Stoltfus, whose IQ hovers at his body temperature. You know?” Her voice lifted up, lilting. “And Pug Harper is going to come on down here and be nice, but it won’t be nice for us.” She reached down to stroke Tucker’s glossy head.
“That’s why this petition is going on Pug’s desk.”
Harry, more composed, leaned back in the chair. “Miranda, I don’t say but so much, but I know how things work. Pug will acquiesce to the petition and be all smiles. Jerome will slow down once this rabies scare is over, plus he will irritate so many people in the pursuit of his duties that Jim Sanburne will haul him on the carpet. What will happen to me is when the new post office is built, that’s when the boom will be lowered. No cats and dogs.”
Miranda sat opposite Harry. “We can hope that won’t happen, but I think you’re right. It seems nothing is particular anymore.” She used the Virginia word for individual, special, distinctive. “New buildings mean new rules, and those rules don’t take into account people’s feelings, traditions, or ways. Americans confuse things with progress. Progress is really of the spirit. Material progress is secondary.”
Harry lifted Mrs. Murphy onto her lap, so Pewter, not to be outdone, jumped up. “What can we do?”
“Keep the old ways.”
“But some of the old ways meant racial oppression, women treated as second-class citizens . . . you know.”
Miranda nodded that, indeed, she did know. “Harry, you’re much younger than I am and you lost your parents in your early twenties, too young for that. Maybe you’ve missed out on their perspective. Perhaps I can supply a little of it. Honey, all your life things will change. You have to decide what is important to you and stick to that. I decided a long time ago, before you were born, that what was important to me was love: love of God, love of friends and family, and, of course, the love of a good man. George was a good man. Now, to someone walking down the street I probably seem like I have a little life, but it’s a full life. I don’t need all that stuff that’s advertised in magazines and on television. I still drive my Falcon and it gets me where I want to go. I have a rich, rich life. You have to decide what is important to you.”
Harry realized she’d held her breath when Miranda was speaking. She exhaled, then inhaled. “My babies!” She meant her cats and dog. “My farm. The whole swing and sway of country life and country values. My horses. The sunrise shining on the mountains and the sunset glowing behind them. My friends. St. Luke’s. Miranda, I’m babbling.”
“But you know what’s important.”
“Our way of life. I guess it does come down to love. I don’t know that I’m as faithful as you are, Miranda. I have so many questions that the church doesn’t answer.”
“Church doctrine is one thing.” Miranda belonged to the Church of the Holy Light, whereas Harry was high church, meaning she followed a liturgy, a catechism, a strict protocol. Miranda, on the other hand, didn’t have much truck with doctrine, for her spiritual experience was emotional, not intellectual. “Follow your heart.”
“The funny thing is, I know that.”
“We all do. We just need to be reminded.”
“Miranda, when the new post office gets built and if Pug jams a bunch of new rules and new people down our throats, what are you going to do?”
“Wish them all well and dig in my garden.” Miranda stood up because Carmen Gamble walked into the post office, and she looked peaked.
“Hello, Carmen.”
“Poor Sugar. I feel awful for him. He was such a nice guy. I’m just shook up. I mean, I guess, well,” she stammered, “we dated a little. Nothing major. I guess I lost interest because he was too nice a guy.” Her lower lip trembled.
Miranda flipped up the counter divider, walked over to Carmen, and put her arms around her. “I’m sorry, honey. Put your faith in the Lord.”
Tears cascaded over Carmen’s cheeks. “I do put my faith in the Lord. I just don’t have any faith in Rick Shaw or Cynthia Cooper.”
Harry quietly said, “Carmen, they’ll figure this out. They will.”
Carmen sobbed as Miranda hugged her. “And I keep thinking I kissed both Barry and Sugar. I know my tests came back okay, but what if the lab made a mistake?”
Harry, who had grilled Fair over rabies, reassured her. “You can only get rabies if the saliva enters your body from a bite, gets into the muscle tissue, and travels up your nerve highway. It takes one to three months. So the virus won’t be in the infected person’s saliva until they show the symptoms, until the virus has reached their brain. You’re fine.”
This calmed Carmen a lot. She hugged Miranda, then walked to the counter divider. “Dr. Langston did tell me that rabies in humans is extremely rare.” She wiped her eyes. “But I wonder—I mean, I wonder about Barry most of all. He had a kind of sly streak. I used to get on him about some of his horse sales, you know? He’d say he was an entrepreneur. I said I saw it differently.”
“How?” Harry asked, as three pairs of animal eyes focused on Carmen.
“Whenever money passes hands, it sticks to someone’s fingers. He was doing pretty good for a guy starting his own business, and you know what else?” She paused as Harry and Miranda leaned toward her. “There was a lot he didn’t tell Sugar. He’d tell me. Bragging.”