“Do they do that with everybody who was ever the Christ child in the nativity play?”

  “Only the ones who started a war of icy civility,” said Eggie.

  Bubby McCoogle wasn’t alert at all. A middle-aged woman, nicely dressed, sat nearby on the porch of the old folks home, reading something on her Kindle. So Amazon’s reach extended even to Good Shepherd, though Spunky imagined the local UPS drivers making deliveries on buckboards. Eggie asked the woman how Bubby was doing today. She just shook her head and went back to her Kindle.

  Spunky sat beside him and tried to explain about the cheek swab she needed, but Bubby showed no sign of consciousness except that his eyes were open. Unfocused, but open.

  “I don’t hear him arguing against taking a cheek swab,” said Eggie softly.

  “I can’t force somebody to . . .”

  “This isn’t a criminal case you’re building. It’s just easier to get DNA from a cheek swab than from a beer glass.”

  “The glass clearly contained tomato juice,” said Spunky.

  “Maybe he was drinking blood.” Then Eggie reached over and pulled Bubby’s mouth open, holding the cheek wide.

  Bubby gave no reaction and made no movement to shy away or bat Eggie’s fingers from his mouth.

  “That looks like consent to me,” said Eggie.

  It’s not as if this would invalidate his DNA, thought Spunky. She darted a swab into his mouth, then sank it into the solution and sealed it. She labeled it with Bubby’s subject number and that was that. If the middle-aged Kindle-reader noticed what they did, she wasn’t objecting.

  “I feel like a burglar,” said Spunky as she and Eggie walked out of the grounds of the old folks home.

  “He doesn’t want his saliva back,” said Eggie. “Or his cheek cells.”

  “It’s not as if we left a hole in his face,” said Spunky.

  “We both rationalize our ethical violations so well,” said Eggie, “that we really need to go into business together. As the pettiest criminals in history.”

  “The Tissue Thieves,” Spunky suggested.

  “They’ll think the movie is about stealing Kleenex,” said Eggie.

  “Which gives away the whole plot. You’re right.”

  Parting with Eggie at the clinic, where Elyon was taking samples, Spunky felt a stab of regret. What if this was the only really good guy she’d ever meet? She might never meet a man who would be such a good father to their kids—though how she knew that kindness, hard work, and selfless service would be good attributes for a father or husband to have, Spunky couldn’t have said. She just knew that she might always regret her decision to ignore the sparks between them.

  But she couldn’t talk to Elyon about it. In fact, she didn’t know anybody to talk about such things with. They’d think she was crazy, which would damage her reputation, or they’d blame her father’s neglectful childrearing for her madness. Falling in love with a bald alderman in a country hamlet. Here, take a long pull on our Sanity Juice—you’re decephalizing too rapidly in the hot sun.

  What Elyon actually did was simple. He cleaned up in his office and then his eye was drawn to the new phial of cheek scrapings Spunky plunked down on the desk beside his computer mouse.

  “Are you asking me to put a rush on this?” Elyon inquired.

  “No, forty-five seconds will do,” said Spunky.

  Elyon sighed elaborately as he began the process of reading Bubby’s DNA. “Oh, by the way, Thanksgiving is tomorrow,” he said.

  “So I’ve heard,” said Spunky.

  “I’m inviting you to have Thanksgiving dinner with Jozette and me,” said Elyon.

  “Three’s a crowd,” said Spunky, “but thanks.”

  “At her mother’s house,” said Elyon. “Cooked by her mother.”

  “You can’t invite me to somebody else’s Thanksgiving dinner,” said Spunky.

  “Miz Eliza did the inviting,” said Elyon. “She’s assuming that if you ask around, you’ll accept. She has kind of a big dinner. A bunch of people have Thanksgiving at her house. Jozette tells me that if you’re invited once, the invitation stands for as long as you want to come. I spent a couple of hours last night after dinner helping Jozette set up tables all over the house. It’s like thirty people.”

  ‘Like’ thirty people? Was Elyon beginning to talk like Jozette? Or had he always said things like that, only Spunky wasn’t actually listening?

  “What time?” asked Spunky.

  “I thought so,” said Elyon. “I’m going over at noon, because Jozette and I are doing tablecloths and silverware. Miz Eliza doesn’t trust us with the plates.”

  “Perhaps she knows Eliza well.”

  “I think she just doesn’t know me well enough,” said Elyon. He laughed, but he also looked a little embarrassed.

  “What, you broke something at her house?” asked Spunky.

  Elyon looked away from her, as if embarrassed. “She, um, she says that I can’t be trusted with plates till Jozette remembers to wear . . . a . . . you know . . . supportive underwear.”

  “Jozette’s own mother said that?”

  “And Jozette said, ‘Buy me one that fits,’ and Miz Eliza said, ‘Stay the same size for a month and I will.’”

  This was the way Jozette and her mother talked in front of Elyon? If Jozette’s father was in the picture, he was probably loading the shotgun already.

  “What time should people who aren’t interested in looking down Jozette’s blouse arrive?”

  “Something about the turkey coming out of the oven about two. Does that sound right?”

  “I’ll come earlier. Bring something?”

  “As Miz Eliza always says, all you need to bring is your best appetite and pants you can let out.”

  Compared to this aloof scientist, Spunky realized, Eggie was downright sophisticated. He must have picked up his city manners in New York, while he was making his killing. Whereas Elyon had no manners at all, except bad ones, so now he was cloning a set of manners from a family that didn’t even meet local standards.

  Well, her job wasn’t to supervise Elyon’s education. If he got out of town unmarried, he’d probably recover soon enough and be back to his regular unspeakable rudeness.

  The next morning, Jozette came by quite early and took Elyon away. As a result, Spunky got caught up in her genealogical charts, referring back and forth to photocopied town records, and lost track of time. The knock on her apartment door alerted her to the fact that it was two-fifteen.

  It wasn’t Elyon, though. It was Eggie.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said to him. “I’m already late for Thanksgiving dinner at Miz—”

  “Miz Eliza’s,” said Eggie. “I know, because she sent me over to get you. Though you’re not actually late. Turkey came out five minutes ago and she sent me to fetch you, because Elyon was vague about whether you really planned to come.”

  “I’ve never tasted Miz Eliza’s cooking, but I have witnessed Elyon’s dinner conversation, so I was kind of torn.”

  “He’ll be at the kids’ table,” said Eggie.

  “He’s a post-doc,” said Spunky.

  “The kids’ table is a huge honker of a banquet table where Miz Eliza’s children all sit, along with whoever they dragged along. Jozette’s the youngest, so I expect that her brothers will make Elyon’s meal a living hell.”

  “Or he’ll get talking about helicase and hydrogen bonds and leading strands and lagging strands and they’ll die.”

  “All Miz Eliza’s sons went to college,” said Eggie.

  Spunky couldn’t hide her surprise.

  “Jozette isn’t stupid, Dr. Spunk,” said Eggie. “Nobody in that family is.”

  Spunky grinned. “Well, you’ve got a point. Book-larnin’ ain’t everything, is it.”

  “I figure somebody who gets whatever she sets out to get, and then holds onto it, is as smart as she needs to be,” said Eggie.

  “The hard part is figuring out what you want,” said Spunky.

  “Well, get crackin’ on that, lassie,” said Eggie. “Time’s a wastin’.”

  “Oh, there’s a deadline?”

  “Santa Claus comes to the Christmas parade on the Saturday after Thanksgiving and if you don’t know what you want, he shines you on.”

  “Who plays Santa?” asked Spunky.

  Eggie raised his eyebrows. “‘Plays’ Santa?”

  Spunky gave him the chuckle he was asking for, and then said, “You called me ‘lassie.’”

  “Because you’ve called me ‘laddie’ a couple of times so I thought we were pretending to be Scottish.”

  “No, no,” said Spunky, laughing in embarrassment. “Just something in my family.”

  During this conversation, Eggie had been deftly closing up Spunky’s pens and now he was holding out her coat to shrug into. Then he opened her apartment door and closed it behind them.

  “Did you lock it?” asked Spunky.

  “I’m sorry, didn’t you know you were in Good Shepherd, North Carolina?” he said.

  “I can’t just leave it unlocked—”

  “All the expensive equipment is downstairs in Elyon’s rooms, but nobody wants to steal your stuff anyway. Where would they sell it?”

  Spunky held tightly to his offered arm once they got outside, because last night’s snow was of a loose, wet, and slippery variety.

  “So you don’t want to fall,” said Eggie.

  “That’s my plan.”

  “And you’re clinging to my arm because you are determined to fulfil your plan,” said Eggie.

  “I am,” said Spunky. “And I’m not letting go no matter how much you goad me.”

  “As long as I get my arm back when it’s time to eat, because I’m clumsy with a spoon in my left hand.”

  “I’ll change sides if you want,” said Spunky, “but I’m left-handed, and I’m not sure if I can rely on the combined strength of our non-dominant arms.”

  “What if I just promise that if you fall, I’ll fall down too.”

  “It’s not as humiliating if you do it on purpose.”

  “It’s not humiliating at all if I do it to impress a girl.”

  “Or to mock one by imitating her,” said Spunky.

  “No, that would shame me. So hold on tight, lassie, and tell me about this ‘family thing’ about pretending to be Scottish.”

  “My mother always wanted to travel the world,” said Spunky. “But there was never any money or any time, for that matter, so she read about other cultures. She had a brief Scottish phase, where she greeted us every morning and after school in a thick brogue that sounded perfectly authentic to me at the time. And when Dad finally got her to stop, my brothers and I had already picked up ‘laddie’ and ‘lassie,’ and we could all recite ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, O what a panic’s in thy breastie!’”

  “That’s a pretty good brogue. A little thick, but Bobby Burns pours it on himself.”

  “My brothers only recited it to have an excuse to say ‘breastie,’ which they did not pronounce in the Middle English way, ‘bray-stee.’”

  “So your mother’s wanderlust only took her to Imaginary Glasgow?”

  “Oh, no. She collected sayings from other cultures. There was one from East Africa that became a catch phrase in the family. ‘The day a monkey.’ One of us would say it and everybody else would break up laughing.”

  “‘The day a monkey’ what?” asked Eggie.

  “Oh, it’s—well, when something’s going to happen, no matter what you do to prevent it, then in Swahili you’d say, ‘The day a monkey is fated to die, all trees are slippery.’”

  Eggie laughed. “Yeah, that’s good, that’s a good one. Has your mother got any others?”

  “She had hundreds, but we didn’t adopt them all as family sigils. Oh, here’s one. I say this one, too, when I’m not paying attention to the fact that it isn’t a saying in English. If somebody’s a complete screw-up—not clumsy, but grimly determined to do everything the wrong way so failure is guaranteed—then Mom would say, ‘Headin’ to the sea.’”

  “Help me make sense of that.”

  “We always shortened her sayings. The whole thing is, ‘He goes into the sea to get dry,’” or something like that. Farsi, I think, or maybe Turkish. She went through those at kind of the same time, which makes no sense except that they have Islam in common.”

  “And coasts on two different seas.”

  Spunky nodded and smiled. “I never thought of that as something Iran and Turkey have in common, but yes, though technically we could say that Turkey borders on three seas.”

  “Black Sea, Mediterranean . . .”

  “Aegean,” said Spunky.

  “Show-off. Blathering post-doc. The Aegean is part of the Mediterranean, but the Black Sea isn’t.”

  “Iran coasts on the Caspian Sea but the Indian Ocean.”

  “The Persian Gulf,” said Eggie.

  “A gulf not a sea,” said Spunky in mock triumph. “And also a part of the Indian Ocean. Don’t ever call me wrong, laddie, because I will rub your nose in it forever.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” said Eggie. “I have no such fragile ego needs. I’m perfectly content to know that you’re wrong, yet never mention it again.”

  Spunky laughed.

  They walked in silence for a while, because the route Eggie was choosing involved snow on top of a muddy, rooty path for a while, with low branches that dumped snow down Spunky’s neck when she bumped into them.

  “Couldn’t help but see several charts laid out on your table,” Eggie said.

  “Are you serious that you don’t know what they are?”

  “I knew all the names instantly, so of course I knew. You’re charting all of our inbreeding.”

  “I am not,” said Spunky. “People always think that but come on. Demographically speaking, the entire world is inbred. Most people can’t go back six generations without having the same person pop up in two different places on their pedigree. Everybody on Earth is related to everybody else, and not all that distantly.”

  “I guess there’s nobody for us to mate with but other humans,” said Eggie.

  “Well, our first ancestors weren’t all that fussy. Everybody of European and Asian and Amerindian descent has a decent amount of Neanderthal DNA. It doesn’t help us or hurt us, so it’s just along for the ride. Then the East Asians and Amerindians also have Denisovan DNA, so—two different groups of humans interbred with us.”

  “Still humans.”

  “A source of much argument,” said Spunky.

  “Among bigots who can’t stand to think we aren’t a different species from ‘cave men.’”

  “Nobody says ‘cave men’ anymore,” said Spunky.

  “Well, not after that Geico ad,” said Eggie. “But they still think it. I’ve heard of Neanderthals but they didn’t teach me about that other group back in school.”

  “Denisovan. From the name of the cave where their DNA was found. In the bones of a child.”

  “Not just eastern Neanderthals?”

  “We’ve sequenced enough different Neanderthals that we can say with some certainty that the Denisovans were their own branch-off from the parent stock that left Africa.”

  “I feel pretty ignorant, here,” said Eggie.

  “Was I supposed to make you feel smart?” asked Spunky, with chip-on-her-shoulder insouciance.

  “Hickety-heck no,” said Eggie. “It’s like with dinosaurs and planets and the names of countries. They keep changing them and I can’t keep up.”

  “I have a degree in economics but I have only the vaguest idea of what you did to make your killing on Wall Street.”

  “Oh, right. That’s complicated. Like a lot of people who make their killing on Wall Street, I made friends with an older guy with a lot of influence. He let me in on a couple of deals so that starting with no capital except a pittance of savings, I found myself as principal stockholder of a couple of firms. And because I knew how to convert those companies into moneymakers, I made that stock rise in value and then sold at a reasonable time and left.”

  “Your benefactor—was he miffed that you didn’t keep going?”

  “I went and saw him on my way out of town to take care of Dad,” said Eggie. “He said, Good for you, Bert—they called me Bert there—and he said, Wish I’d had the spunk to do the same. Enough is enough, but most people think ‘enough’ means whatever scraps you leave for the other guy.”

  “Come on,” said Spunky.

  “Come on what?” asked Eggie.

  “He didn’t say ‘Wish I’d had the spunk to do the same.’”

  “Oh. I think he did, but I don’t have an eidetic memory, and maybe having this beautiful brilliant slippery spinstery post-doc clinging to my arm made me replace ‘guts’ or ‘balls’ with ‘spunk.’ Cliffs of fall.”

  Spunky stopped abruptly, which almost made them fall. It took a moment to recover balance. “What?” asked Eggie.

  “Did you really say ‘Cliffs of fall’?”

  Eggie laughed. “Oh, yeah. Your family has its things, and so does mine. My father thought Gerard Manley Hopkins was the greatest poet who ever lived. ‘Oh the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall—”

  Spunky finished the couplet. “Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap . . .”

  And Eggie joined her: “Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.”

  “That’s as far as I can go from memory,” said Spunky. “Don’t know why that stuck in my mind, but I could never memorize an entire Hopkins poem except ‘Margaret, are you grieving . . .”

  And again he joined in as they recited together, “. . . over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves like the things of man, you with your fresh thoughts care for, can you?”

  And suddenly Spunky couldn’t go on because she was weeping. Not little tear-in-the-eye stuff like at a sad or happy movie, but full on weeping, sobbing into his sleeve as she turned her face into his shoulder.

  “Wow,” Eggie whispered. “Poetry really gets to you.”

  “It’s about dying,” said Spunky, “written by a poet who absolutely believed in resurrection.”

  “‘It is the blight man was born for,” said Eggie. “It is Margaret you mourn for.”