“Repentance Baptist,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “What side are the Baptists on?”

  “Side?” he asked. Then he saw her looking at the two stages being built at exactly the same time, facing opposite directions. “Oh, this is an Episcopal thing. The rest of us just attend whichever pageant we feel like. A boy’s got his heart set on a pageant angel, he’s going to watch her show. Nobody keeps a tally. The Episcopalians don’t care what Baptists do, or Pentecostals. We might as well be Muslims for all they care.”

  “You ever lived somewhere else besides Good Shepherd?”

  He grinned at her. “If I wanted to be interviewed, I would have made an appointment. You must be getting desperate.”

  “I am, and you’re a nice guy, so why not just answer a simple forthright question?”

  “Because I spent my whole time in high school bragging like a fool on what I’ll do when I made the NFL, and then I didn’t get accepted at any college with a football program, so here I still am.”

  “There’s other ways out of town than an athletic scholarship,” said Spunky.

  “Well, I’m overdue for them to come along with a Genius Grant or Publishers Clearing House, but they keep not seeing my house number in the dark.”

  And Spunky had herself another interview, because once he started talking, there was no getting that Baptist boy to clam up again.

  5

  It’s not as if Eggie hadn’t heard the same rumors about the two of them. In fact, being a local boy that everybody loved, he was bound to get teased about it, and Spunky figured that he must be getting pretty tired of having her around.

  He made a joke about it, the day they took down the Welcome to Good Shepherd sign from the east end of town, so Mack Wine, who originally painted it, could fix up the picture of the Good Shepherd he had copied from a print by Del Parson that Miz Illa owned. He couldn’t go out and repaint it in place, because it was cold in early December and he was old and well along with dying of something that he wouldn’t talk about. So they had to bring the sign to him.

  As they were unscrewing the sign from the posts, Eggie said, “I’ve got to get to the big city pretty soon because if I don’t kneel down and offer you a big fat diamond ring on Christmas Eve, folks are going to be so mad at me they’ll write me in as mayor.”

  “So you think we’re in a Hallmark Christmas movie, too?” asked Spunky.

  “Well, you’re a smart solitary educated woman going about her business, partnered with a complete geek who doesn’t know she’s female, and I’m a lonely, good-looking, hairless-but-not-bald bachelor with all kinds of leisure and a mortgage-free house. And we’re thrown together constantly because you keep taking ‘yes, please’ for an answer whenever you volunteer to help on something. We know how such situations have to end up for the good order of the universe to be maintained.”

  “Isn’t it enough that we take care of moving this sign?” asked Spunky. “Do we have to take on the good order of the universe, too?”

  “Somebody’s got to,” said Eggie.

  “Not me,” said Spunky. “I’m not an alderman.”

  “But you’re falling in love with our crazy little town, aren’t you?” asked Eggie.

  “I am,” said Spunky. “If they’ll just offer me a job at the local university . . .” Which was the same as saying, No way will this ever be my home.

  Eggie sighed. “I guess I’ll never get a woman to make a baby for me,” he said.

  “Well, if you’d stop shaving your head and let the hair grow in, maybe you’d have a chance with one of these buxom nubile country girls.”

  “The way they see it, I’m halfway through my life already. Too old to scamper about with them, but too young for them to count on me dying and leaving them my fortune while they’re still young enough to remarry and have somebody else’s babies.”

  “Now that doesn’t sound like a Hallmark movie,” said Spunky.

  “Yeah,” said Eggie. “More like Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde.”

  “You did go to college,” said Spunky.

  “I did, but I read Austen from my mother’s bookshelves, and I saw Importance of Being Earnest at three different universities when I was growing up because it was worth a bus ride to her, since Mama didn’t calc’late to raise no idjits.”

  “Your mother did not talk like that.”

  “She did when she said she didn’t calc’late to raise no idjits.”

  “Save yourself a bus trip, my friend,” she said to Eggie. “You are not to propose to me in a public place because if anybody is so arrogant as to propose to me in public without knowing the answer in advance, the answer will be ‘no’ with a glass of whatever liquid is at hand thrown in his face.”

  “The glass itself, or just the liquid contents thereof?”

  “It depends on how sure he seems to be that I’ll say yes.”

  “So my native confidence will work against me.” He looked very crestfallen, and for a moment it occurred to Spunky that maybe he was only pretending to be joking, and in fact this conversation might have been designed to see if the idea of such a proposal might be at least a little intriguing to her.

  It wasn’t. And pitying somebody for their disappointment would be a truly terrible reason to throw over all her plans and dreams in order to live in a town so small it didn’t even have a mayor, just so she could bear a kind, hardworking, but unambitious husband a passel of young bumpkins.

  Then again, he had made a killing on Wall Street before he was twenty-six. Did you still need ambition after that?

  She wondered how many zeroes there were in a Wall Street killing.

  She thought about Elizabeth Bennett teasing her sister Jane by saying that she really fell in love with Darcy when she got her tour of Pemberley.

  It was about time she got a look inside Eggie’s paid-for house, wasn’t it?

  6

  But when Eggie took her by the elbow instead of letting her help with setting up the back wall of the Nativity Church stage, it was not to give her a tour of his fine domicile. Instead, he explained that it was about time she got her interview with each of the two big babies who had caused all the problems by being born within a few hours of each other on December seventh in 1930. “Eleven years before Pearl Harbor took that date away from them forever,” said Eggie.

  Old Dan, whose last name nobody used but it was Lacker, had never married and so had no relatives. He lived in a converted carriage house behind the big house he grew up in, which he now rented out to a young family who were related to him in some distant cousinly way.

  “I wondered when the hell you was going to come and stick my tonsils till I gag up some DNA,” Old Dan said, greeting them at the door.

  “I won’t come near your tonsils, sir,” said Spunky. “I have better aim than that, and besides I doubt you have tonsils because when you were young, they were taking out everybody’s tonsils.”

  “What, they’ve stopped?” asked Old Dan.

  “Well, the number of tonsillectomies has dropped from almost a million and a half per year back in the 1950s to a sixth of that number now.”

  “Now don’t tell me you know how many of every kind of operation gets performed every year,” said Old Dan.

  “I had strep throat and swollen tonsils just over a year ago, and those were the statistics the doctor recited to me as he explained that no, he had no intention of taking out my tonsils.”

  “Well, I want mine back, so I’m complete on Resurrection Morning.”

  “The exact number of tonsil transplants performed every year is zero, and that number has never changed,” said Spunky. “I studied statistics in college, so I know.”

  “Sending girls to college,” Old Dan muttered. “Where will it end.”

  It was Eggie who answered. “It better end pretty quick, because none of these college girls is dumb enough to marry an old bachelor like me.”

  “Me too, just the same,” said Old Dan. “It’s been a dang lonely life. But at least I’ve never had a serious income, so I always had do-gooders calling on me to bring me charitable suppers. That’s the best part about being one of the baby Jesuses—The Church Of can’t very well let me starve to death.”

  “So that was the pageant you were in?” asked Spunky.

  “So I’m told,” said Old Dan, but then he looked puzzled. “Except McCoogle and I looked so much alike they couldn’t even tell our baby pictures apart. For all I know, in the fracas we got switched back and forth so many times that not a soul knows which is which.”

  “How did you feel about growing up as a Baby Jesus?” asked Eggie.

  Spunky shot him a look and he shrugged. Apparently it was a joint interview.

  Old Dan didn’t care whose question he was answering. “At first I didn’t mind all the attention. But when I got to school, that’s when it got nasty. There were boys from Nativity Church that couldn’t rest till my clothes were covered with mud, and that took some doing on dry days, I’ll tell you.”

  “It turned violent?” asked Spunky.

  “Among the children,” said Old Dan. “All the grownups were good Christians and pretended to care equally for everybody—even as they tore the town apart with their feuding. That’s why I’m not sure whether it was really me in the pageant of The Church Of.”

  “The Church Of has the bell, right?” asked Spunky.

  “The Bell from Hell,” said Old Dan. “Rings so loud you can’t hear a word spoken inside either church, so I don’t know as it makes much of a difference which steeple has it. But I hope that’s not what you came to ask me about, because I’ve answered all the questions so many times I thought about writing up a pamphlet of my answers. Only printing up pamphlets takes money, and my handwriting is illegible so the printer can’t set the type.”

  It sounded like he meant that to be funny, and so Spunky laughed.

  He either misunderstood or pretended to. “‘Illegible’ means nobody can read it. Though I never met a soul as called it ‘lejjing,’ so why not just say ‘unreadable’?”

  “For an illiterate old coot,” said Eggie, “you sure spend a lot of time talking about words.”

  “They’re the only things I’ve got to entertain myself with. I talk to myself like a crazy person. I answer myself too. I’d think I was crazy if I hadn’t seen that alderman fellow doing the same thing.”

  “You have not,” said Eggie.

  “We call him Eggie because he shaves his head,” Old Dan confided to Spunky.

  “And because my name is Ecgberht,” said Eggie.

  “I’ve seen your name written down and it’s not a name,” said Old Dan, “it’s an explosion in the alphabet soup factory.”

  Old Dan was full of information about a lot of people who were dead and therefore couldn’t have their DNA sampled. But family history was part of this study, and in Good Shepherd there was a lot of knowledge about ancestors and ancient feuds and which family originally homesteaded this or that plot of ground. Information that could help them chart the passage of and prevalence of various genes.

  She had already got so much information that during her downtime, Spunky was charting the town’s genealogy. She could never aspire to the completeness of Iceland’s genealogical database, but she was working with less than a tenth of Iceland’s numbers, so she could at least try to approach completeness.

  “I’m doing that scientifically,” Elyon said, when he saw her charts.

  “You’re doing nothing of the kind,” said Spunky. “You’re doing statistics about long chemicals, and I’m dealing with the lore of the local culture. You: genes. Me: memes.”

  “Memes,” said Elyon, “are a fancy name for epigrams and cat pictures.”

  “You tell yourself that, Elyon,” said Spunky.

  “All that lore of the local culture is probably fiction, anyway. I mean, it’s already lore that you and that bald coot are a thing, and after we leave here I bet you become the legendary Indian princess who came to Good Shepherd and got old Ecgberht pregnant and then threw yourself down a well because he wouldn’t admit you were the mother.”

  That was the first time Spunky was actually sure that Elyon was trying to be funny, and since he actually succeeded at it, she laughed out loud. But then she thought of something. “How are you hearing the local gossip?”

  Elyon just shook his head. “I’m not without resources,” he said. “When the diners stopped serving me, I asked around and hired a girl who comes in and cooks for me. Cleans a little, too.”

  “Oh,” said Spunky. “And here I thought you were tidy.”

  “I am tidy,” said Elyon, “though not quite at OCD levels. I didn’t say she had to work hard. I didn’t say she cleaned a lot.”

  “So she feeds you and then goes home and fixes dinner for her seven children?”

  “Jozette doesn’t have any children,” said Elyon scornfully. “She stays and eats with me and that’s when I find out what people in town are talking about.”

  “So you interview her,” said Spunky.

  “I know so much more about her than I want to know that sometimes I feel like screaming.”

  “So you yell at her?”

  “Never,” said Elyon. “She’s a good cook, she’s always cheerful, she can read the recipes I got my mother to email to me, and I’d never do anything to hurt her feelings or I’d probably starve to death.”

  Spunky might have made some remark about Elyon entertaining a young woman in his bachelor apartment without a chaperone, but then Spunky remembered that this was Elyon, so Jozette was as safe as an escapee being tracked by a bloodhound with a cold.

  Spunky tried eating with Elyon and Jozette, a high school graduate with absolutely no understanding of any aspect of Elyon’s abilities or work. Her cooking was barely adequate—her idea of seasoning was either a little salt or a lot of salt—and Spunky got the distinct impression that the girl made it a point to bend over a lot facing Elyon, so he could see down her blouse clear to her belly button. There was never anything between blouse and skin to obstruct his view.

  Spunky knew for a fact that not one girl in Elyon’s entire educational experience had ever tried to provoke any interest from him, so the poor boy was completely unequipped to deal with all that aggressive cleavage.

  He’s going to be married or at least engaged before this project is over.

  Spunky emailed The Professor about this and received a terse reply: “Good for him. Mind your own beeswax.”

  The Professor was right. After all, the day a monkey . . .

  After that, Spunky started taking all her meals at one of the restaurants that had banned Elyon. She was glad if Elyon was discovering his desirability to poor ignorant mountain girls who hoped he would take her away from all this. But she didn’t have to sit through the first tedious bloom of love.

  Then Eggie started showing up at suppertime, and it took maybe ten minutes to get from “May I sit with you?” to him grabbing the check and paying for it.

  “It won’t save me money,” Spunky told him. “The grant pays for all my meals.”

  “How can I impress you?” asked Eggie.

  She laid a hand on his. “You know that you already have. But we don’t have a future.” She didn’t have to explain about their mutually exclusive goals.

  Eggie smiled at her ruefully. “Here’s the future I see for us. Dinner and conversation at short-order restaurants until your grant runs out.”

  “Or until Christmas Eve,” said Spunky.

  “You really did come here just to see our dueling nativities.”

  “I came here to collect stories.”

  “You’ve got mine by now,” said Eggie.

  “As you have mine,” said Spunky. “As far as either of us has been willing to share.”

  “This isn’t going to end like a Hallmark movie, is it,” said Eggie.

  Spunky shook her head. “It isn’t going to have an ending. One day the Professor tells me and Elyon that we’ve got enough data and we pile into the van and drive away.”

  “That is an ending.”

  “Not all ends are ‘endings.’ Ours will be more like petering out,” said Spunky. “But from now on, I’m going to be comparing every other guy who made a killing on Wall Street with you, and none of them will measure up.”

  “So you’ll remain a spinster until . . .”

  “Spinster! Not I, laddie, unless I feel like it. I’ll just settle for somebody who’s obscenely rich even if he isn’t the kind of guy who comes home to take care of his ailing father and then stays to keep his hometown livable. Because there’s only one of him.”

  Eggie got a thoughtful look as he gazed into her eyes, and she realized that instead of bantering, she had been completely candid, and her respect for him might lead him to a false conclusion.

  She needn’t have worried, because his response was banter. “I see through your whole act now, Dr. Spunk. You go to school for years and get a doctorate so that gathering data as a post-doc will provide you with an excuse to visit small towns, where you can break the hearts of local politicians.”

  He was bantering when he talked about a broken heart, wasn’t he? “Good Shepherd isn’t small. You’ve got ten thousand people.”

  “That isn’t even one Bruno Mars concert,” said Eggie.

  “Eat your food, Eggie,” said Spunky. “I’ve still got work to do tonight.”

  “All work and no play . . .”

  “Makes Delilah spunky?”

  “I just remembered,” said Eggie, “that the food here isn’t very good.”

  “It’s as good as whatever Elyon is having for dinner in his apartment, with less cleavage.”

  “Jozette’s mother, Miz Eliza, is a miraculous cook. Jozette just doesn’t pay attention.”

  “I want to meet the other nativity baby from 1930. If he’s still alive.”

  “I already told you that he is,” said Eggie.

  “That was yesterday. He’s eighty-seven. Things can change.”

  “If Bubby McCoogle is still alive at nine in the morning, we’ll visit him. He may not be as lucid as Old Dan, though. They still revere him at Nativity Church. Lucid or not, there’ll be somebody with him.”