Through the Autumn Air

by Kelly Irvin

  “How are those grandkids?”

  “Brian and Kayla are great. Michelle just got braces and hates them. Josh grew a foot this summer. Brooklyn and Olivia are going to a Mother’s Day Out program.”

  She rambled on and Mary Katherine let her. She knew how it felt to have grandchildren who filled up every corner of your heart. “You’d better visit your daughters at Thanksgiving and Chad at Christmas.”

  “That’s the plan. But right now my concern is getting this bookstore off the ground.”

  Mary Katherine leaned her elbows against the counter, rested her chin on her palms, and contemplated the ceiling fans. They made a slight thump-thump when the blades revolved, creating a lovely breeze that dispelled the stuffy air that had greeted them when they opened the door. Probably needed oiling or tightening. What did she know about these things? What would Freeman say? And Cyrus? And Thomas? Her oldest son had definite ideas about her retirement years, as he called them. “I don’t know if I can swing it.”

  “If anyone can, you can.” Dottie trotted across the room, then propped herself against the counter, mimicking Mary Katherine’s pose. “You can sell the idea to the others.”

  “I don’t know. A bookstore isn’t like Amish Treasures. It’s a bigger risk.” She chewed her lower lip. Thomas would go whichever way Freeman and Cyrus went. “People come here to buy Amish trinkets.”

  “They’ll buy Amish romances too. Count on it.” Dottie patted Mary Katherine’s shoulder. “Talk to your folks. If it’s about going into business with an Englisch woman, let me know. I’ll come talk to them some more.”

  “I don’t think that’s it.” They would think being a cook at the restaurant more suitable. Thomas would think staying home and embroidering tablecloths for the Combination Store and playing with the grandchildren more suitable. Everyone had an opinion on her future. “Let me see what I can do. Right now, I have to go. I’m taking Burke to the Purple Martin for supper. I want to see if Ezekiel will give him a job.”

  “You left the serial killer at your house?”

  “Not inside the house and he’s not a serial killer.”

  “What serial killer?” Walt tromped into the room, his cowboy boots clacking on the wood floor, Jim and Jerry right behind him. Walt had a cobweb on his cowboy hat, a gray Stetson this time. “You’re dating a serial killer and didn’t tell us, Mary Kay?”

  The other men guffawed. The idea of an old Amish lady dating a serial killer probably did sound preposterous. “He’s a homeless man who needs a job, that’s all. How does the wiring look?” After the fire that destroyed Amish Treasures and the antique store next door, Mary Katherine wasn’t taking any chances. “Would we need to do repairs or ask Bob to do them—or reduce his asking price?”

  “Wiring is good.” Jim had a gravelly smoker’s voice to match the stench of cigarettes that followed him around.

  “So’s the plumbing. Solid,” Jerry chimed in. He sounded almost sad. No work here for him. “You’re good to go.”

  No stumbling blocks there. Pleasure mingled with disappointment that no excuse presented itself in the building itself. “I still need to mull this over. We shouldn’t jump into something just because Bob is in a hurry to sell.”

  “Agreed.” Walt pursed his lips and crossed his arms over his rotund body. “That’s what I always say. Proceed with caution. Invest with care.”

  “That’s because you’re an old fuddy-duddy.” Dottie patted his arm. Her tinkly laughter softened the words. “Both of you are. I’ll talk to Bob. Ask him to hold off on selling to anyone else. We might be able to get an option on it.”

  “Don’t do anything that will cost you money if we decide not to go forward. Unless you can approach someone else to join you. Like Zoe. Zoe would be perfect.”

  Zoe was the volunteer who watched the library when Dottie had an appointment—like today.

  “Zoe is sweet, but she did her time as an ER nurse in the hospital in Chillicothe. Her husband wants her at home now. He barely lets her volunteer at the library. I need someone who can take the reins when Walt and I have our RV adventures.”

  “Sounds like Zoe listens to her husband a lot better than you do.” Walt’s grin said he wasn’t complaining.

  Dottie laughed with him and spun like a ballerina across the room with amazing agility for a woman of her age. Walt clapped. His buddies joined in. She bowed deeply. “We should have some background music. Jazz or classical.” She sounded breathless, but she was smiling. “Walt and I have got this covered. You just worry about getting rid of your serial killer.”

  “See you later.”

  If the serial killer didn’t get Mary Katherine first.

  SIX

  What on earth had she been thinking? Mary Katherine halted the buggy in front of the Purple Martin Café, with its lovely wooden sign featuring its namesake painted by Mahon Kurtz, local farmer and artist. Mary Katherine made no move to get down. What seemed to make perfect sense in the middle of the night appeared much more like the indigestion-induced musings of a sleep-deprived old woman in the early evening sunlight the following day. If this were a story, Dottie’s flight-of-fancy serial killer would be waiting around the corner ready to muffle the victim’s bloodcurdling scream. And Mary Katherine was the would-be victim. Burke McMillan sat unmoving next to her, as he had done throughout the thirty-minute ride into town.

  Her attempts at conversation with the man who’d broken into her house to make a ham sandwich had been met with brief but not unfriendly responses, which told her little about her new acquaintance. He hailed from a place he vaguely referred to as the East Coast. He sounded educated. He’d worked a variety of jobs. He had no family here. So why had he come to Jamesport? His response was a shrug and something to the effect that he decided he needed a change and found himself hitchhiking this direction. A lost man, a writer following bread crumbs.

  Hitchhiking. Who would pick up a man who looked like a scarecrow and smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in a month? She’d kept that thought to herself. No sense insulting a person when he was down.

  Why her house? Her ham and bread? Her mustard? She knew no more than she had the previous night.

  “Are we going in, or are we going to sit here and enjoy the last vestiges of light before the sun sets?” Burke raised his head to the sky and closed his eyes. “Not that it doesn’t feel good. A person has to enjoy it while he can.”

  Why did a man who looked and smelled like this one use such highfalutin vocabulary? Not that she didn’t like it. The writer in her couldn’t help it. He was a thinking person too. The puzzle pieces didn’t fit. He’d been ensconced in the hickory rocker on her front porch, the dirty duffel bag at his feet, when she returned early from Josephina’s frolic. He was so engrossed in reading a tattered paperback called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that he didn’t look up until she called his name. Then he simply removed skinny reading glasses, tucked the book in his bag, and came aboard without speaking. He was a much thinner man so she couldn’t offer him the one set of Moses’ clothes she’d saved as a memento of her husband. Surely Ezekiel would see past a little dirt to a man who needed a job and was willing to work.

  Where would he stay when winter came with its snow and cold? Not in her barn. They needed to get in there and get him a job. A job would give him the money to rent a motel room, at the least. “Did it occur to you that you might want to get cleaned up before asking a restaurant owner for a job?”

  “I thought about it.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head down. “But you didn’t offer to let me back in your house, so I figured I’d better let well enough alone.”

  Mary Katherine gave herself a mental slap on the head. Of course, he had no place to get cleaned up. Which begged the question, where had he spent the day? “I’m sorry. I should’ve—”

  “You’re not responsible for me being a ne’er-do-well.” He raised his head and stared at the restaurant. “It’ll be fine.”

  It would be wh
at it would be. “Let’s go, shall we?”

  Telling herself to ignore the large number of buggies interspersed with half a dozen cars parked in front of the long rectangular building with dark faux wood siding, she strode to the squeaky-clean glass double doors and tugged one open. The place would be busy on a Saturday night. No matter.

  Walking into the Purple Martin Café was like walking into her mother’s kitchen on a fall night. The flood of warmth, the mingled aromas of chicken frying, bread baking, and peach pies cooling on a table next to an open window, and the lively chatter of her sisters fixing food for people they loved. The Purple Martin smelled like love. It sounded like family. It felt like home. Ezekiel Miller had discovered the secret to a good restaurant wasn’t just the food. She paused, inhaled, and immediately felt lighter for a few seconds.

  All eight of the stools at the front counter were full. Almost all the picnic tables and the booths that ran along the wall to her left were occupied. They always were on Saturday night. Several people looked up when she stepped inside, Burke close behind. A person would think they had never seen a homeless man with a Plain woman. She and Burke made an odd couple. Not a couple. Her face heated at the thought. Don’t be ridiculous.

  She waded into the crowd, then stopped to greet her sister Willa, who sat in a red Naugahyde booth with her daughter, Amelia, and two grandsons who were using salt and pepper shakers as imaginary horses galloping across the gray Formica–topped table. Willa gave Burke the up-and-down once-over and went back to her pot roast. Having grown up with Mary Katherine, she could be counted on for a lack of surprise and for minding her own business. Amelia opened her mouth, but upon seeing the firm shake of her mother’s head, closed it.

  Thomas sat at a far corner table covered with a red-checked tablecloth. His wife and four youngest children sat with him.

  Fortunately for Mary Katherine, the wrestling-slash-basketball-slash-track team from Tri-County High School, along with their parents and the coaches, had commandeered four tables and shoved them together for a team dinner of some sort. When a high school had only seventy-some students, everyone went out for all the sports. Their presence made a perfect wedge between Mary Katherine and her son. And a perfect excuse for not squeezing through to say hello. The exuberant conversation of the athletes, filled with the requisite hoots, hollers, and fist bumps between intermittent selfies with phones and double thumb tapping on screens that could only mean the photos were winging their way to kids all over Jamesport, ensured that Thomas would never notice her.

  Coach Larry “The Claw” Wilson nodded as she passed. A former football player and wrestler, he coached all the sports and taught math at the high school. His wife, Phoebe, had frequented Amish Treasures and dragged him along occasionally. More often, their daughter, Nicole, who waitressed here at the Purple Martin, got roped into accompanying her mother. It seemed mean—or at the very least oblivious—to have an athletic dinner where their daughter worked and might have to serve her classmates.

  Phoebe grinned and waved with more enthusiasm. She would want to talk quilt patterns and when Mary Katherine would have her wares at the Combination Store. Mary Katherine waved but veered in the opposite direction. “Keep moving. Keep moving.”

  Burke edged closer and raised his voice to be heard over the rambunctious high school kids. He smelled of barn—manure and straw, both of which clung to his jeans and ragged tennis shoes. “Who are you avoiding?”

  “My son.”

  Thankful Thomas seemed engrossed in his food and conversation with Joanna, Mary Katherine headed toward the kitchen in the back. She hadn’t expected Thomas to be here. He was a frugal man who didn’t set much store by eating in restaurants. Joanna must’ve pleaded exhaustion after the cooking she’d done for the wedding. Thomas had a soft spot for his wife, even after seventeen years of marriage. He also had a soft spot for Ezekiel’s traditional meatloaf served with baked potato, buttery corn, and huge slabs of homemade sourdough bread.

  Ezekiel had a reputation for serving all his Plain dishes at reasonable—some might even say cheap—prices. He didn’t gouge the tourists, nor proclaim his menu as the be-all and end-all of Amish foods. Food was food. His menu varied depending on the season, with fall full of warm comfort foods that heralded the beginning of cooler weather in the Midwest. Pot roast with mushroom gravy, baked pork chops, fried chicken, chicken pot pie, chicken dumplings. Soups, like Mary Katherine’s favorite, with ham hock and navy beans, would come later when winter presented its snowy self.

  “I don’t want to cause you trouble.” Burke squeezed between a table full of Bylers and another that surely held tourists. They made it obvious with their loud exclamations over their server Anna’s dress and kapp and requests for “selfies” with her. “We can do this some other time.”

  “It’s okay. I just need to find Ezekiel.”

  “Mary Kay, over here, over here!”

  She turned toward the familiar high-pitched voice. Dottie and Walt sat at a table for four near the kitchen doors. Dottie half rose from her chair and waved. Mary Kay sighed and shook her head. Dottie couldn’t help herself. She had to see the serial killer. “Come on.”

  She threaded her way toward the table, then stopped to let Nicole pass with huge trays hoisted over her shoulders. The look on her face as she trudged toward the tables where her classmates waited confirmed Mary Katherine’s earlier thought. Bringing the kids here and then sitting in her area added insult to injury. She might be a cheerleader for the boys’ teams and member of both the girls’ basketball and softball teams, but tonight she was the server. “How are you doing, Nicole?”

  She shook her head. Her long ponytail of ebony hair shook with it. “No time to talk.” One tray, laden with heavy, steaming plates of chicken-fried steak, hamburgers, and fried chicken with all the trimmings, wavered. “Busy tonight.”

  The boy who bused the tables, Tony Perez, followed her with a foldout table to set the trays on. “Make way, Miz Ropp, make way,” he hollered. He seemed to labor under the illusion that all people over the age of forty were going deaf. As if she could miss the gangly six-footer whose weight couldn’t seem to catch up with his height. He was so lean a good northerly wind would blow him south to Texas. His jet-black hair, parted in the middle, was caught back in a ponytail almost as long as Nicole’s. “I don’t want Nicole to drop all that food.”

  “Come on, Mary Kay, we saved you and your guest a spot.” Dottie’s voice carried over the clatter of plates and spoons. “Don’t dawdle.”

  Feeling like the rope in a game of tug-of-war, Mary Katherine squeezed past Tony and made it to Dottie and Walt’s table. “I’ve never seen such a crowd off-season.”

  “It’s a testament to the fact that the locals like this place.” Walt patted his lips with his paper napkin. “You can’t beat Ezekiel’s chicken-fried steak or his pork chops.”

  “We moved from our usual spot because the coach’s kids were making so much racket over there.” Dottie sank into her chair with a tut-tut of disapproval. “Why didn’t they take them to a pizza place in Gallatin? They’re way too rowdy for this place, and you know The Claw is missing his beer. Phoebe probably has a flask of wine in her purse.”

  “Dottie! We don’t gossip.” Walt feigned disapproval as he dumped a packet of artificial sweetener in his iced tea. “Leastways not in public.”

  “It’s true. When they come to our card games, she can barely stagger to the car after.”

  “I’m surprised to see you here.” Mary Katherine tried to guide the conversation back to safe waters with quick introductions. “I thought you were dieting this week.”

  “We were. Dottie suddenly had a hankering for Ezekiel’s chicken-fried steak. Surprised me. She’s had me on this low-fat, low-taste diet for months. Doc says my blood pressure and my cholesterol are too high.” Walt shook Burke’s hand. “We saved you a seat. The fried chicken is so good it reminds me of my mother’s.”

  “Is there something wrong with my f
ried chicken?” Dottie’s lower lip protruded.

  “Only that you refuse to make it for me.”

  “That’s because I love you and I want you around forever.”

  Mary Katherine exchanged glances with Burke. Her friends’ obvious love affair after forty years was a thing of beauty. It could also make a person a little sad and a little jealous if a person were small. Mary Katherine tried hard not to be small. “Actually, we want to talk to Ezekiel before we eat.”

  “I’d like to clean up a little first.” Burke smiled at Dottie. “But it was nice to meet you.”

  Mary Katherine pointed out the back hallway that led to the restrooms beside another door marked EmployEEs only that led to Ezekiel’s office. She sank into the chair closest to Dottie. “What are you doing here? Checking up on me?”

  “He looks like Kevin Costner.” Dottie threw her hand against her forehead and pretended to swoon. “The older Kevin, not the young one. He definitely doesn’t look like a serial killer.”

  “Who’s Kevin Costner?” And what did a serial killer look like?

  Walt voiced that question aloud and then added, “You know, Field of Dreams, For Love of the Game, Bull Durham—the baseball trilogy. I like his older movies better than his new ones.”

  Mary Katherine didn’t know about the movies, but she nodded. “An actor.”

  “Not just any actor.” Dottie waved her fork. Drops of gravy splattered on the tablecloth. “Sexy. Cute. Sweet. Funny. He’s the kind of guy who makes you drool in your popcorn and Milk Duds. He’s aged really well, if you ask me.”

  “Nobody asked you.” Walt scraped the last of the gravy off his plate. “I think I’ve aged pretty well too.”

  “You have, sweetie, you have.” Dottie blew him a kiss. He grinned and dug into the few kernels that remained of his creamed corn. “Thomas is here.”

  “I know.” Mary Katherine nodded.

  “You should talk to him about the building.”

  One thing at a time. “I will, but not tonight.”