I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(77)

It was when we were coming out of the Canterbury Diner, having sat at the lunch counter and devoured two pizza-slice-sized wedges of sour cherry pie, that Dev said, “Too bad there’s not one of those public parks like in the movies where all the old-timers hang out and play checkers and reminisce so that we could go ask them if they’d ever heard of a safe house for battered women or the story of a mystery man who came to town empty-handed and left carrying a baby.”

I stopped short on the sidewalk in front of the diner, whacked Dev on the shoulder, and said, “Bingo!”

“Okay! Jeez. Or bingo,” said Dev, frowning at me and rubbing his shoulder. “Although people usually play bingo in fire halls or church basements or whatever. Checkers is more of a park thing.”

“No, I mean ‘bingo’ as in ‘you’re right!’”

“You don’t hit people who are right. You high-five them or shake their hand or hug them. You don’t hit. But hell, yeah, I’m right. What else would I be?”

“You have no idea what you’re right about, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Old people,” I said. “We need them, a bunch of them, preferably. A critical mass.”

“A critical mass is the minimum amount of fissile material you need to start a nuclear reaction,” said Dev.

“The fact that you just said that out loud tells me, once again, that you did not get beaten up nearly enough in middle school.”

I seized him by the elbow and U-turned him back into the diner. Our tiny, adorable server, Audra, who had flirted shamelessly with Dev back when we were customers although she could not have been older than sixteen, and who had the phrase “a murmuration of starlings” tattooed on the inside of her right wrist, stood behind the counter reading a hardback biography of Harry S. Truman so thick that I wondered how her scrawny little, bird-boned, bird-loving wrist could hold it.

“Excuse me,” I said.

Without even glancing up, Audra said, “It didn’t stand for anything.”

“What didn’t?” asked Dev.

“The S. That’s why there’s sometimes no period after it,” said Audra.

“His middle name was just the letter S?” said Dev.

She lifted her big, green, kohl-rimmed eyes from the book, aimed them at Dev, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Indeed.” Then she smiled and batted—actually batted—her sooty lashes and said, “Are you back for more—pie?”

Dev laughed.

“No,” I said, giving him a stern look. “We were actually wondering if there’s a retirement community or maybe a nursing home around here.”

“Well, she’s a fun date,” said Audra to Dev.

Dev laughed again, and I elbowed him in the ribs.

Audra sighed and swiveled just her eyes in my direction. “Yes. Greenbriar Community. My grandma lives there.”

She gave us the address, and I typed it into my phone.

“Thanks,” said Dev, and he shot her a grin that almost sliced his face in half.

“Anytime.” Audra leaned a few inches closer to him. “At all.”

As we walked out of the shop, I growled, “Stop grinning like that. You look like a shark. And anyway, she can’t see you anymore.”

“But you can.” Dev’s grin got wider and sharkier. “Maybe we should stop by on our way out of town. Get a piece of pie for the road.”



We found our critical mass of old people sitting out on the sunlit patio in front of the retirement community. Four of them sat in rocking chairs; one woman was on her knees planting pansies in a flower bed; and two of the men were actually playing checkers, which caused Dev to do a (thankfully) abbreviated victory dance, which I ignored. When the rocking-chair people saw us, one of the women—she wore jeans and an Obama hope T-shirt—stood up and said, “Come over here where we can see you.”

Dev and I obeyed. The woman assessed us, head cocked, hands on hips, then turned to her friends and said, “Do these belong to any of you?”

The flower-bed woman squinted up at us. “Not me. They’re cute, though.”

“I’m Dev and this is Clare, and we’re actually not from around here,” said Dev.

“Well, of course, you’re not,” said one of the checkers players, irritably. “We’d know you if you were.”

The Obama woman gestured to a couple of empty chairs. “Pull up a chair and stay awhile.”

We did. The gardening woman tugged off her gloves, slapped the soil from her knees, and pulled up a chair, too.

“I’m Tess,” said the Obama woman. “These people are Mattie, Cleve, Paul, and Kate. The ones who can’t be bothered to get up from their game are Jack and Pete. They’re chronically grumpy.”

“True fact,” said Jack, without turning around.

“So what’s your story?” said Kate, the gardener.

Even though I’d given my spiel three times, at the hospital and both churches, here, with all those avid eyes on me, I was suddenly nervous. I cleared my throat.

“Um. So. I recently found out that my father, who died when I was eleven and who I didn’t really know that well, was adopted. He grew up in New York, but he was adopted here.”

“When was this?” asked Tess.