Spunky was relieved that he pronounced “Appalachian” correctly: ap-a-LATCH-un, not the northern affectation ap-a-LAY-chun.

  “Please note the pronunciation,” said The Professor.

  “Pronunciation of what?” asked Elyon.

  The Professor looked at Spunky, and she gave him the eyeroll he was clearly expecting.

  “I’ve noticed that people tend to like and trust Dr. Spunk pretty near immediately,” said The Professor.

  “People like me fine,” said Elyon.

  “I’m so happy that you’ve found such people,” said The Professor. “But I believe them to be rare as hen’s teeth.”

  “How many weeks will I have to be there?” asked Elyon.

  “That depends on how quickly Dr. Spunk establishes rapport with the community. Because our goal is to get every genome into the database.”

  “Ten thousand people?” said Elyon, incredulous. “Where’s our support staff?”

  “You are each other’s support staff,” said The Professor.

  “What’s our real cutoff?” asked Elyon. “What’s the number where you say ‘Good enough’?”

  “One hundred percent,” said The Professor.

  Elyon was doing all the objecting, but Spunky was just as skeptical.

  “Don’t underestimate Dr. Spunk’s ability to establish good relationships with strangers,” said The Professor. “All I ask of you, Dr. Dewey, is that you not muck it up.”

  Elyon was outraged, of course. But Spunky wasn’t inclined to intervene, because she had exactly the same low expectations for Elyon as The Professor. To her knowledge, Elyon had established something between a feud and a cold war between himself and half the grad students in every field in biology, not to mention the umbrage and hostility he routinely created in a shadow of loathing around himself.

  Yet this was the longest that Spunky had ever been in the same room with him, and she was beginning to see that while he was insufferably arrogant about his own abilities, he was easily hurt. He didn’t know, apparently, that The Professor routinely goaded everybody, in the firm belief—often stated—that people don’t do their best work without serious quantities of competitiveness and adrenaline, which were most cheaply produced by anger, resentment, and fear.

  “You don’t have to do this, of course, either of you,” said The Professor, which was his way of making sure they understood that they did have to do it. “And from what I’ve heard about Good Shepherd it will help you both greatly if you arrive there with a lot of Christmas spirit.”

  Elyon looked at him as if he were insane. “I’m a Jew,” said Elyon. “I don’t even have Chanukah spirit.”

  “Then stay out of Spunky’s way, because she even decorates her car for Christmas.”

  That was the end of the meeting, which The Professor signaled by starting to type something into his computer while refusing to answer or even acknowledge any of their questions or, in Elyon’s case, objections.

  Spunky convened a second, smaller meeting in the corridor, about twenty paces from The Professor’s door.

  “Let me make sure I understand the division of labor here,” said Spunky.

  “I do all the science and you do all the selling,” said Elyon.

  “It’s my job to persuade people not only to let us take swabs and spit, but also to fill out long and detailed questionnaires on medical matters, which will be easy enough, and also on personal matters, like why they moved out and back in, or why they think so many grownup children stay in Good Shepherd to raise their own families.”

  “If that’s multiple choice, will ‘they’re all lackwits’ be one of the options?” asked Elyon.

  “Yes,” said Spunky. “But that one will be hidden away in their average high school grade point average.”

  “They’ll lie,” said Elyon.

  “No, Elyon. You would lie because you pride yourself on the near perfection of your grades since kindergarten. But because most actual humans don’t care, my guess is that almost none of them will actually remember, which is why I’ll ask them for permission to access their school records.”

  “This is a Russian doll of endlessly nesting research into the lives of people who were chosen for their lack of ambition and achievement.”

  “That positive attitude of yours is going to carry us right through this,” said Spunky.

  “Well, you write your questionnaires and I’ll find out what equipment I can bring with me to analyze the samples once you get them.”

  “I will indeed write the questionnaires, which you will read carefully to make sure they’re clear and apt for our purpose. And you will physically take all the easy samples—the people who don’t need persuasion to be part of the study.”

  “The scutwork, you mean,” said Elyon.

  “Yes,” said Spunky. “Because this is not one of those high school team projects where one person does all the work but everybody takes the credit.”

  “I know,” said Elyon. “I’ll be doing all the science, while you’ll be going out and making friends like a supercharged elf.”

  “You do understand the concept of irony, don’t you, Elyon? You do know that The Professor was teasing me exactly the way he was teasing you.”

  “He wasn’t teasing me,” said Elyon, “he was torturing me. And how exactly did you decorate your car for Christmas?”

  “Last year I lent my car to Rajam while hers was in the shop, and she let her boyfriend drive it when they were out on a date. He was drunker than they knew, and drove them through the Christmas decorations on the lawn of the house next door to The Professor’s. My car ended up festooned with a combination of Santa, Wise Men, Rudolph, and the Baby Jesus, along with strings and balls of little twinkly lights which had their own batteries, so my car looked quite festive when it was towed to the garage. Dozens of people, including The Professor, texted me pictures of the car and then posted those and other pictures on Facebook.”

  Elyon looked at her with a blank expression, saying nothing for several seconds. Then he said, “Was Rajam all right?”

  “She and her boyfriend walked away without injury. Apparently a lawn ornament of the baby Jesus is a very forgiving thing to crash into.”

  Elyon nodded. “When we move to Good Shepherd, a town that lives like a stinking blister on the ass of North Carolina, we are not sharing either an apartment or a car.”

  “True,” said Spunky. “You will have an apartment large enough to hold all your equipment and computers, while I rent a cubbyhole somewhere. And I will have a car so I can range all over the town, while you will be close enough to everything you need to do that you can walk.”

  “If you get a car, then I—”

  “You get whatever the budget will justify. If you don’t like my decisions, by all means get me kicked off this project from hell.”

  “If I tried that he wouldn’t fire you, he’d fire me.”

  “Elyon,” said Spunky, “twice in this conversation have you given me grounds for hope.”

  “It was unintentional,” said Elyon.

  “First, when I told you about how Rajam’s boyfriend trashed my car, you actually asked me if Rajam was hurt or not.”

  Elyon looked at her blankly.

  “And the other grounds for hope is this: You recognized that if you tried to get me fired, you’d be the one they’d drop. Both of these show that you have some measure of understanding of the behavior of other human beings.”

  Elyon nodded slowly. “I see. You think those are both good things.”

  “I think they suggest that you have some amount of empathy.”

  “I have all the normal feelings,” said Elyon.

  “You just don’t show them,” said Spunky.

  “Let me ask you something,” said Elyon. “Why does everyone call you Spunky?”

  “The Professor calls me Dr. Spunk,” said Spunky.

  “The question stands,” said Elyon.

  “My last name is Spunk. It’s a natural nickname,” said Spunky.

  “It’s not natural to have it completely replace your first name. What is your first name? Is it so awful that you hide it from everyone?”

  “Yes,” said Spunky. “And that question, however rudely it was phrased, shows that you’re capable of speculating about other people’s motives. These are all very good signs.”

  “Name?” asked Elyon.

  “If I have your solemn oath that you will never divulge it to anyone in Good Shepherd, North Carolina.”

  “I so swear,” said Elyon.

  “Or on the internet or any social media, or by text or telephone.”

  “You seem to think I have some sort of presence on social media, and that I have someone in my life that I could tell your terrible secret to.”

  “My name is Delilah Spunk,” said Spunky.

  A couple of beats while Elyon thought this through. “A Bible name,” he said.

  Spunky nodded.

  “The woman who seduced Samson and then betrayed him to her real lover, who was apparently a barber.”

  Spunky nodded again.

  “Nobody names their daughter Delilah. Who looks at a baby and thinks, ‘This little girl is going to grow up to seduce men and betray them’?”

  “My mother and father were just getting religion when I was born. Mother wanted me to have a Bible name, so she picked Delilah out of a list of ‘Women of the Bible.’ It wasn’t till she was deeply involved in a Southern Baptist church that somebody who had actually read the Bible told her the Samson story and asked her why she thought Delilah would be an appropriate figure for her daughter to emulate.”

  “Thus confirming my belief that all religious people are loons. Including my own very Orthodox family, by the way,” said Elyon.

  “My mother isn’t a loon, she was simply naive.”

  “No, Dr. Spunk, knowing who Delilah was is what marks you as naive.”

  “You knew,” said Spunky.

  Elyon simply regarded her without answering.

  “Was there irony somewhere in your comment?” asked Spunky.

  “An explanation of irony is even more pathetic than explaining a joke,” said Elyon.

  “Are you somewhere on the autism spectrum?” asked Spunky. “Flat affect, off the charts smartiness, but no practical awareness at all of other people’s feelings and responses to your words and actions?

  “I have often wished I had savant capabilities, but lacking them, I’ve trained my mind into a fine-tuned engine of discovery and memory,” said Elyon. “And I’m always aware of other people’s feelings and responses to my words and actions. I just don’t care.”

  “Until we’re ready to take up residence in Good Shepherd, let’s meet every week at this time, since obviously both of us are free.”

  “And these meetings will be instead of something convenient, like sending emails to each other?”

  “I don’t believe you will ever read an email from me, let alone reply,” said Spunky.

  “Who did you hear that from?” asked Elyon. “An old girlfriend?”

  “You’ve had a girlfriend?” asked Spunky.

  “That’s the kind of irony that I employ in order to entertain myself,” said Elyon. Then he walked away.

  Spunky’s first thought was that maybe if she just did nothing, the whole project would go away. The Professor would find some other team for this grant, and Spunky could move back home to Tempe and sun herself on her parents’ front gravel while she thought of something she could do with her ambiguous doctorate that would allow her to support herself someday.

  But Spunky immediately realized that she could never do that. She would dig in, write the questionnaires, gather the material they’d need, supervise Elyon’s equipment acquisitions, and handle the logistics of getting them both moved in to appropriate apartments in Good Shepherd.

  With any luck, this could all be done before the first of October, so that the actual data acquisition could be sorted before Christmas.

  If everybody was cooperative, it might even be finished before Christmas.

  Then she remembered her father’s first law of adulthood:

  Everything takes longer.

  2

  Good Shepherd was not what Spunky expected, but when she tried to think of what she had expected, she couldn’t figure it out. Had she expected Disney World’s Main Street? Or a depressed downtown of pawnshops, nail salons, thrift stores, and homeless shelters where department stores used to be?

  Since there was no WalMart anywhere near Good Shepherd, the downtown was still alive, with two grocery stores and a couple of one-off department stores. A florist, a book shop, several salons and boutiques, a hobby store, and a discount store in a building that still bore the name of J.J. Newberry, a now-defunct five-and-dime, in faded signs painted on brick walls.

  It was a downtown where people of every income level could come and shop, with not a recognizable mall-store anywhere. Even the eating establishments were local—a couple of diners, a soup-and-salad lunchery, and one sit-down restaurant with a clear intent to seem classy. No arches, crowns, or saucy red-headed girls.

  Every store seemed to have apartments above it. People lived downtown.

  “So we’re not doing genetics here,” said Elyon. “We’re doing paleontology.”

  For once Spunky agreed with him. “The town that zoning laws forgot,” she said.

  “It’s like the churches are the tent pegs keeping the whole town from blowing away,” said Elyon.

  Only then did Spunky notice the churches. She realized that to Elyon, it was bound to look like a large number, but Spunky grew up in a church-going town and so the churches were, to her, like lawns—you only noticed them if they weren’t well tended.

  There were the normal denominations for a southern town, and none of them looked particularly large. The only church buildings with any attempt to look imposing faced each other across the small town square, and neither one managed to look like anything special compared to the two banks, the courthouse, and the city hall.

  But the churches still won out because they both had steeples, one with a big clock and the other with a big bell.

  “I wonder if the bellringer sets his watch by the other church’s clock, or if the clockwinder set the clock by the bellringer’s idea of noon.”

  “They just look at their cellphones,” said Elyon.

  “I’m afraid our mobiles have been bricked in this place.”

  Elyon pulled out his iPhone and swore. “No bars at all.”

  “The bars are at the far ends of Main Street,” said Spunky.

  “You know what I meant,” said Elyon. “No reception.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see whether we can get any kind of high-speed internet,” said Spunky.

  “It’ll be even more interesting if we can discover that none of these people have human genes so we can get back to civilization.”

  “This is civilization,” said Spunky. “Look at the sidewalks at four on an autumn afternoon.”

  “Wow. Real pedestrians.”

  “Exactly,” said Spunky. “These people have actual working feet. They aren’t just squishy driver worms inside cars.”

  By now Elyon had located the address of their rental agent, half a block off of Main Street. And it only took a moment for the agent to point out the building where both of their apartments—and their office—were located. Directly across the same side street.

  “How convenient,” said Spunky.

  “Because we’ll be dropping in on our rental agent every morning to tell her how we’re doing,” said Elyon.

  “Because we’re half a block from Main Street. And a diner that serves breakfast.”

  “Aren’t you the cheerful one, Pollyanna,” said Elyon.

  Spunky really couldn’t let that one pass. “Have you ever actually read Pollyanna?”

  Elyon looked at her blankly. “There’s a book?”

  “What, you only saw the Hayley Mills movie?” asked Spunky.

  “Movie? It’s just—a word my parents used for anybody who was insanely cheerful no matter what happened.”

  “That’s a fair definition,” said Spunky. “Don’t ever see the movie.”

  “It’s that awful?”

  “No, but it makes people with human hearts cry, and that might cause other people to realize you don’t have one.”

  “I cry at sappy movies,” said Elyon. “That’s why I don’t go to them.”

  It took them forty minutes to unload the van that would be their only source of transportation for the duration of the study. Elyon got the big apartment so he could sleep in the smaller bedroom, run all his analytics out of the big bedroom, and use the furnished living room as a reception area for people coming in to fill out their questionnaires and have their samples taken.

  Spunky got a tiny studio apartment on the top floor, which was, fortunately, only two flights up from the street. It gave her a lovely view of the top floors and roofs of nearby buildings.

  Elyon was working on connecting all the electronics that were supposed to be connected when Spunky announced she was going out for a walk.

  “Why?” asked Elyon.

  “To see the town.”

  “We saw the whole thing driving in.”

  “We’re going to live here for a few months, why not get to know the place?”

  “And what will you do the second day?”

  She ignored him then, and walked to the central square. There was a bandstand there, and a set of weathered bleachers. Apparently this was where public events and ceremonies took place. The bandstand made her think of middle school, trying to get tuneful sounds out of her flute until she liberated herself by not registering for the orchestra or band when she entered high school.

  Did Mom and Dad still have that flute? It’s not as if Spunky ever looked for it when she went home.

  The two big churches that faced each other across the square were both Episcopalian, which in the small-town South meant they were the churches that the well-off people attended. But why two?