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leave the room, and yet she was afraid to leave. He might be disappointed, or the note might really be from Jack, but upsetting somehow, written from a ward for the chronically vexatious, the terminally remiss. From jail, for heaven’s sake. He had better have a good reason for rousing these overwhelming emotions in his father. He had better have a good excuse for exposing the old man to the possibility of inexpressible disappointment. Even if he was dead.
    “Glory, I think you will have to help me. I was waiting till I got a little steadier, but I guess that’s not going to happen. You’ll want to use a penknife. We don’t want to damage that return address.”
    She found a paring knife and sliced the envelope, removed a folded slip of paper, and handed it to him. He cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. He found the handkerchief in his lap and set it on the table. “Let’s just see what he has to say.” And he opened the note and read it. “Well. He says he’s coming home. He says here, ‘Dear Father, I will be coming to Gilead in a week or two. I will stay for a while if that is not inconvenient. Respectfully, Jack.’ Inconvenient! What an idea! We’ll have to write to him. I’ll do it myself, but I have to rest a little first. I don’t think I could hold a pen right now.” He laughed. “This is quite a day!” he said. “I wasn’t always sure I’d live to see a day like this.” She helped him into his chair in the bedroom, slipped off his shoes, and covered him with a quilt. She kissed his forehead. He kept the letter in his hand. He said, “Ames will want to know.”
    So while he napped, prayed, composed himself, set aside grievances and doubts, suffered the pangs of anticipation, sought footing in the general blessedness of his life for a posture of heroic and fatherly grace, and perhaps skirted dangerously near ruptureof some part of the sensorium given over to grand emotion—her father’s silences were never merely silences—she walked over to Ames’s house.
    The place looked exactly as it always had, but swept, polished. It was built in the style of any modest farmhouse in that region, with nothing in the way of ornament about it except the spindle shape of the porch pillars and bannisters. For all the years of her childhood old Ames had seemed to live in his study on the second floor. At night she always saw light in that window, and in the daytime when she was sent with a note or a book for him she stood in the kitchen and waited until he heard her voice, finished a paragraph he was writing or reading and came down the stairs. The kitchen had smelled of cleanliness, never of use, as though an essence emerged from the linoleum to fill a vacuum left by the idle stove and the empty pantry.
    Now there were geraniums in the kitchen window and there was something like glee in the whiteness and crispness of the kitchen curtains. New gardens had been planted along the walk. The Boughtons had all come home for Ames’s wedding, except for Jack, of course. It was the last wedding at which her father would ever officiate, he said, and the most joyful of them all. He relented a few times, married six or seven other couples he felt a special affection for. He had expected to marry Glory, but she had sent a letter explaining that, on impulse, just to get things settled, they had gone to a justice of the peace. Her father performed a few more baptisms besides those of his own grandchildren. Still, he called the Ameses’ marriage the culmination of his pastorate. Lila, the improbable bride, in her yellow satin suit and pillbox hat, had stood smiling with gentle embarrassment, tolerating their photographs, humoring them. Her arms were full of roses she had grown and gathered herself. Her roses were her particular pride. They still teased her because she had refused to toss her bouquet. Like his parsonage, old Ames seemed to have been transformed without being changed. Now he was not only fatherlybut a