“But it isn’t,” said Spunky. “It’s my mother, making us memorize a poem every week. She got to choose the poet. My brothers all ignored her choices, though, so they recited perfectly awful stuff from Ginsburg. Or Herrick, ‘Whenas in silks my Julia goes.’”

  “I bet your mother just laughed,” said Eggie.

  “How did you guess that?”

  “Because come on, they found those poems on their own and then memorized them. What’s not to love?”

  “They found Dickey, too, because his name sounded schoolboy-dirty. ‘Warm in such braces, mentioning grasses, grinning disgraces.’ For a year after that, Mom called my brothers, individually and as a clump, ‘Grinning Disgraces.’ Spunky, would you call the Grinning Disgraces in for dinner?”

  “OK, that’s it. I loved my mother but can’t I at least pretend your mother was my favorite aunt?”

  “You may have her as your aunt because she had no nephews. Just sons.”

  “And now you’re through crying?” he asked.

  “So I’ll come in to Thanksgiving dinner with red eyes and wet cheeks and everyone will have to pretend they don’t notice—”

  “Have you forgotten where you are? They’ll accuse me of making you cry and call me Monster all day, and you’ll be something like Weepy or Boo-Hoo or Damsel.”

  “Now’s when all my sociological training comes into play,” said Spunky. “I’m going to own this and make it my own. Is that the house?” She pointed to a big ramshackle mountain of weathered wood just down a little more slope and past the end of the trees.

  “You guessed it,” said Eggie, “since after that house there’s a cliff and a rill and then it’s deer and bears and raccoons all the way to Tennessee.”

  “I also see that there’s a perfectly serviceable road that looks almost paved or at least macadamed, but you took me through the slippery woods instead.”

  “And you clung to my arm the whole time, keeping me warm. My folks didn’t have no stupid children, missy.”

  “Missy not lassie now,” said Spunky.

  “You go by Spunky. I can call you anything I want.”

  They were there, and Eggie just swung the door open, no knock or anything. Inside everybody was moving toward the tables, as if the sight of them through a window had been the signal for the feast to start.

  It was plain enough that the woman with a gravy-covered wooden spoon and a spattered apron and flour in her hair was Miz Eliza, and Spunky was not surprised at all that she greeted her—the first words the woman had ever addressed to Dr. Spunk—by saying, “What did our lazy alderman do to make you cry?”

  “Gave me an Indian burn on my arm,” said Spunky, filling her voice with outrage. “And a noogy right on the top of my head.”

  “So he thinks he’s your big brother,” said Miz Eliza. “Figures, with the dumb ones.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone cares to know what she did to me,” said Eggie.

  “Not a one of us,” said Miz Eliza. “And besides, you’re saying the prayer and we’re all hungry so do it. And remember that everybody in this room says their own prayers, complete with all kinds of thank-yous to the Lord of Hosts, so if your prayer could end while the turkey’s still warm we’d all be grateful.”

  “And if you’d stop raggin’ on me, thou importunate Vieille Dame, I could begin, which will certainly bring me closer to ending the prayer.” And right there in the doorway, which was still slightly ajar behind them, and with his arm still around Spunky’s shoulders, he launched into a prayer as sweet as any that Spunky had ever heard, ending with the words, ‘And let there be no more tears shed in this house today, except of joy in the fellowship of good souls and the memory of beloved ones who can’t be with us.”

  The room was filled with a strong “amen” from everybody—well, most people. Spunky couldn’t actually see Elyon, but it would be hard to imagine him saying amen to any kind of prayer, least of all a Christian one.

  Then again, he did know his scriptures, in Hebrew at least, so maybe he bowed to local custom when he was among believers in the Book.

  The food was everything Eggie had bragged on and Elyon had promised, and as Spunky watched Eggie during the meal she kept forgetting to eat, because he not only knew everybody seated anywhere nearby, but also liked them and cared about them and asked questions about their lives and their relatives and their pets and their projects and their jobs. And then he listened to what they had to say, and laughed at their jokes, and a couple of times became grave when they spoke of things they had suffered.

  He was deft at comforting people. Not the way most people did, by trying to cheer them up, which is usually offensive to somebody who’s really down, because “cheering up” is about making everybody else feel better so they can ignore you again.

  Instead, to the boy who was clearly sad about losing the girlfriend that Eggie asked about—“Oh, she’s off to college, sir, and I don’t figure she’ll come back much from Boone, if she didn’t come for Thanksgiving”—Eggie only gripped his arm a moment longer, saying, “We’ll all miss her, but you’ll miss her most of all, I think.” And then the boy fled to avoid shedding any tears in front of everybody, but as Spunky saw it, Eggie had just validated him, had just said, You’re right to love her, and we who love you recognize your suffering and respect it. He didn’t offer stupid encouragement and he didn’t tell him he’d get over it and there was nothing about how many fish are in the sea or how the wounds of the young heal fast or gibes about how a bit of time under the mistletoe would cure what ailed him.

  Eggie’s genius, come to think of it, was in all the stupid things he chose not to say.

  And then Spunky thought of their whole bantering, flirting conversation as they walked here, and her sudden rush of tears when they quoted a poem that brought back all her grief over her mother’s death, and how kindly and gently he helped her become ready to face a house full of people.

  People who were not, after all, strangers, though she hadn’t yet interviewed them all.

  Nobody here would consider me to be a genuine citizen of this town, she thought, but nor am I a stranger to them. And yes, I worked hard to reach this point, but I also had this amazing man smoothing the way for me. How did anyone ever say no to him when he asked them to help with some community project? How had he lasted this long without being married?

  Was it possible that he was right, that young women shunned him because he was balding? Bald shmald, the man at least had a fine set of teeth; surely that moved him to the front of the herd.

  Then a thought popped into her mind.

  He isn’t married because he was waiting for me.

  That was when she dove back down into her plate, blushing, and methodically tracked down and consumed every scrap of food remaining.

  7

  I’m not an anthropologist, Spunky reminded herself. I’m not here to study their culture, and I have no ethical rule of non-interference. If I fall in love with the town’s main public servant, and he by some chance also falls for me, it won’t change anybody’s DNA or behavior patterns or culture or anything.

  Except for that tiny lingering part of me that wants to avoid the emotional devastation of leaving here, knowing that I won’t come back and that he can’t follow me.

  I’m just not a one-Christmas-season kind of girl, Spunky realized.

  Having never been in love or anything close to it, she hadn’t known how it would hit her.

  Now she knew.

  It was all-consuming. Ever since that snowy flirty walk to Thanksgiving dinner, ever since she had cried into his shirt and felt his arm around her while he prayed for the whole gathering and watched him work magic in the lives of the people around him, all she could think about was him, except when she absolutely had to talk to somebody or do some job, and even then he would creep into her thoughts and distract her.

  “Leave me alone,” she said to him when she responded to a knock on her apartment door and there he was. “I have work to do.”

  His reply was to kiss her quite thoroughly and then step past her to stand over the table, looking at the charts. The one on top was the master chart, tracking the families that were most intertwined. She used yellow highlighter to draw the connections when somebody showed up in more than one place—as one family’s child, as another family’s son- or daughter-in-law.

  “Good thing I know you’re not tracking our inbreeding.”

  Still a little cloud-niney from the kiss, Spunky floated over to stand, not beside him—too dangerous to her ability to function mentally!—but across from him. “What I’m tracking,” she said, “is Episcopalians.”

  “The rich people,” he said. “Typical historical approach.”

  “The people divided by the nativity pageant in 1930,” she corrected him. “Look at all the intermarriage through the whole Episcopalian community before the church divided. And afterward, not one extra-congregational marriage.”

  “Lack of exogamy going to be a problem, do you think?”

  “Before the war in Bosnia, Serbs and Croats and Muslim Bosnians intermarried like crazy,” said Spunky. “Since the war, it took fifteen years before the first interfaith marriage, and it made international headlines.”

  “Um, nobody’s been massacred in a football stadium in Good Shepherd.”

  “Ignoring the fact that Good Shepherd has no football stadium, just two sets of bleachers at the high school, this is exactly what I’m fascinated by. Nobody’s been killed here. It isn’t a war. People don’t even hate each other, or at least everybody’s civil.”

  “As long as they all stay to their side of the street, so to speak,” said Eggie.

  “Atrocities, massacres in Bosnia, and fifteen years later, at least one marriage. Bad tempers and building a second church with a clock instead of a bell, plus two pageants at the same time for eighty-seven years, not a drop of blood shed, and no intermarriage.”

  “In a place this small and isolated,” said Eggie, “I guess grudges last longer.”

  “Eggie,” said Spunky. “There has to be more to this than arguments over who gets to play the Baby Jesus.”

  “We’ll never know,” said Eggie. “All the people who were making the decisions then are dead.”

  “That Christmas pageant divided this town. Probably for at least a century. What is it that nobody’s telling to the outsider who’s here to study the genes of Good Shepherd?”

  Eggie stood there in silence, looking down at the chart.

  Spunky knew him well enough to expect that he had already figured out how to change the subject completely, and was only hesitating because he knew she’d see through the attempt and be either angry or hurt.

  To her surprise, he didn’t change the subject at all. “Spunky, you’ve finally put into words something that I’ve wondered about my whole life. I mean, even as a kid, when my parents first tried to explain why there were two Episcopalian churches in town and two Nativity pageants, I said to them, ‘Well, that’s stupid. Why don’t they just act like grownups and get back together?’”

  “I am not surprised that you were a preternaturally wise child,” said Spunky.

  “I am surprised that you expect a Wall Street guy to know the word ‘preternaturally.’”

  “I knew that if you didn’t know the word, you would guess its meaning from context.”

  “I knew the word,” said Eggie. “I just never heard anybody say it out loud.”

  “So you agree with me that there has to be more to this,” said Spunky.

  “I think somebody on each team must know what the real grievance was,” said Eggie, “but I will never be in the chain of custody for that secret, and neither will you.”

  “And in the meanwhile, the dueling pageants are Good Shepherd’s only claim to fame,” said Spunky. “I’m surprised nobody’s got some Hong King company to make a bunch of two-pageant snow globes to sell to tourists.”

  Eggie shook his head. “I’ve let it be known over the years that if any merchant starts commercializing our town’s division, they will suddenly find themselves dealing with all kinds of inspections and infractions and fines and liens. Nobody’s going to have a vested interest in keeping it going.”

  “So you’re tougher than you look,” said Spunky.

  “I don’t look tough at all,” said Eggie. “You look tough.”

  “I think women aren’t ever called ‘tough.’ I think the term for us is feisty. Witchy.”

  “Spunky,” said Eggie, adding to the list.

  Spunky frowned. “That moves me from the realm of toughness to the playpen of cuteness.”

  “Cute as a bug,” said Eggie.

  “My rule is never to hit anybody,” said Spunky. “Please don’t goad me into changing that policy.”

  “Still figuring out what kind of bug you’re as cute as,” said Eggie. “A mantis? A hornet? A horned dung beetle?”

  That took her aback. “Not just a beetle, but a dung beetle? Not just a dung beetle, but a horned dung beetle?”

  “World’s strongest insect,” said Eggie. “It can lift the equivalent of me lifting six full double-decker buses. I’ll find you the reference online if you don’t believe me. I promise it wasn’t in a Buzzfeed slideshow.”

  “I can’t lift more than two buses at a time, empty,” said Spunky.

  Eggie ignored her. “Technically the bullet ant has a more painful sting than a hornet, but nobody knows what a bullet ant is, and we know hornets well enough that getting a bunch of people mad is ‘stirring up a hornet’s nest.’”

  “You are a font of information today,” said Spunky.

  Eggie looked rueful. “I’m trying to find at least one thing you didn’t already know every day, so that you’ll keep conversing with me.”

  “Well, so far you’re batting zero,” said Spunky, “because I knew every one of those facts.”

  “You didn’t know that as a child I didn’t believe that the town division was really about the babies.”

  “Eggie, what are we doing?”

  “Standing across a table from each other pretending that we haven’t fallen in love like a couple of moonstruck teenagers.”

  “I know that you’re not moving away from this town,” said Spunky.

  “Seems unlikely, in the foreseeable future,” said Eggie.

  “And after this grant, I don’t know what career path I could possibly follow that would ever bring me within a hundred miles of here.”

  “You could open a Taco Bell franchise,” said Eggie. “We don’t have a single Mexican food establishment here. When Taco Bell opened in Romania a few years ago, it became the most successful business in the whole country. I made a lot of money from that. Lines around the block. We’re like Romania here—starved for ground beef and hot sauce.”

  “I don’t love you enough to get into the food service business just to stay nearby,” said Spunky. “There isn’t enough love in the history of the world to get a woman as smart as me to do that.”

  “That’s why I only dated stupid women,” said Eggie. “Till now.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve never had a date,” said Spunky.

  “We’ve had dozens of dinners together, we’ve worked together on how many projects now? And don’t forget walking in the woods on a snowy afternoon.”

  “Not one of those was a date,” said Spunky. “Most of the time I had no idea you were coming.”

  “But I knew I was going to see you, and I spent the day counting the hours and minutes till then, so to me it was a date.”

  Spunky tried not to smile. “You were dating me, but I wasn’t dating you?”

  “There’s no point in looking for precision,” said Eggie. “This isn’t physics, it’s propagation of the species.”

  “We haven’t done any propagating,” said Spunky.

  “All the hormones pumping through us, telling us that we must find a way to live with each other forever, preferably in close physical contact, evolved in order to propagate the species. So even if we fail to propagate, our genes insist on making us try. Right, O Expert on the Human Genome?”

  “The more we know about genetics,” said Spunky, “the less we understand about love.”

  “That’s so disappointing,” said Eggie.

  “It’s like religion,” said Spunky. “Some things we have to learn on our own.”

  “On my own? Then what was Sunday school about for all those years?”

  “It wasn’t about love,” said Spunky.

  “If I climb over the table to kiss you,” said Eggie, “I’ll make a mess of all these charts you’ve been working so hard on.”

  “Then I suggest you stay on the floor and propel yourself around the table, using feet.”

  “Do you have any idea how long that will take?” asked Eggie.

  She walked around the table with all the dignity of a doctor about to give a favorable prognosis to a patient. Not hurrying, but unable to conceal her eagerness. “I can’t marry you,” said Spunky.

  “What language are you speaking now?” asked Eggie. “I don’t understand a word.”

  Then she reached him and words were pretty much impossible for a while.

  8

  Work went on. Interviews happened. More and more people found time during holiday preparations to come down and get swabbed. Elyon managed to look at the screen between meals and see what the computer was finding in its searches through the growing Good Shepherd database. The Professor seemed to be happy with the progress they were making.

  Everybody in town seemed to accept that Spunky and Eggie were a couple, and now that it was true, nobody teased them about it. Teasing an unmarried couple about being in love is how a community pushes them to marry. Spunky understood that in general, any culture that didn’t encourage procreation was going to be out-propagated by another culture that did. But in particular, between her and Eggie, there was still a lot of territory to cover.

  They put a rigid five-minute cap on any activity that Eggie’s mother would have called “necking,” because, as Eggie explained, “We’re marrying folk, in our family. No child should grow up doing the arithmetic on his birth date vis-a-vis his parents’ anniversary.”