To Be Where You Are (A Mitford Novel, Band 14) - Hardcover

Karon, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399183736 ISBN 13: 9780399183737

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

#1 New York Times-bestselling author Jan Karon returns with the fourteenth novel in the beloved Mitford series, featuring three generations of Kavanaghs.

Wounds heal, bonds grow stronger, and celebrations continue...Welcome back to beloved Mitford. 

After twelve years of wrestling with the conflicts of retirement, Father Tim Kavanagh realizes he doesn't need a steady job to prove himself. Then he's given one. As for what it proves, heaven only knows.

Millions of Karon fans will be thrilled that it's life as usual in the wildly popular Mitford series: A beloved town character lands a front-page obituary, but who was it, exactly, who died? And what about the former mayor, born the year Lindbergh landed in Paris, who's still running for office? All this, of course, is but a feather on the wind compared to Muse editor J.C. Hogan's desperate attempts to find a cure for his marital woes. Will it be high-def TV or his pork-chop marinade? In fiction, as in real life, there are no guarantees. 

Twenty minutes from Mitford at Meadowgate Farm, newlyweds Dooley and Lace Kavanagh face a crisis that devastates their bank account and impacts their family vet practice. But there is still a lot to celebrate, as their adopted son, Jack, looks forward to the most important day of his life--with great cooking, country music, and lots of people who love him. Happily, it will also be a day when the terrible wound in Dooley's biological family begins to heal because of a game--let's just call it a miracle--that breaks all the rules.

In To Be Where You Are, Jan Karon weaves together the richly comic and compelling lives of two Kavanagh families, and a cast of characters that readers around the world now love like kin.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Karon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels in the Mitford series, featuring Episcopal priest Father Tim Kavanagh. She has authored twelve other books, including Jan Karon's Mitford Cookbook and Kitchen Reader, and several titles for children. Jan lives in Virginia near the World Heritage site of Jefferson's Monticello.

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1

Mitford

Thursday, October 1

 

It was the first day of October, and all things considered, Mitford was pretty quiet.

Around the tenth of the month is when it would hit the fan. The chlorophylls of summer foliage would have degraded into non­fluorescent chlorophyll catabolites, and hidden pigments would explode in a pyrotechnic extravagance of scarlet, gold, vermilion, and out-loud ­yellow.

While the display would be rampant throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mitford was proud to offer its very own autumn expo:

A brace of mature Acer rubrum, which paraded from Town Hall to First Baptist. Such annual spectacle would not be missed by tourists in the hundreds, steaming up the mountain with the ubiquitous cell phone and occasional Nikon.

There was, however, a caveat. There were now two gaps in the parade of maples. One where lightning had struck in 2005 and the other where trunk rot had finally dealt its fatal blow.

The Council had ordered the stump ground and the vacant sites disguised with mulch. Mitford had not enjoyed a furor in quite a while and somehow, collectively, had decided the time had come.

A party of locals demanded that the maples be replaced, full-size, which would cost the town a bundle. Others campaigned to replant with beds of pansies, historically known as the town flower. A group calling themselves the Vocal Locals objected to pine bark mulch as too acidic for the soil and pressed for cocoa bean hulls, which others rejected outright as ‘too foreign.’

Esther Cunningham’s copy of the weekly Muse hit the porch at seven-thirty sharp; she read the feature on the trees while cranked back in her recliner.

She hadn’t served as Mitford’s mayor, albeit former, for nothing. She knew about such things. People were right about th’ pine bark—get it offa there and go with th’ pansies. How often did they get a blank spot to drop in a couple flats of pansies? As for replacement, no. Nobody in their right mind would go for the cost of spading in mature trees, and young stock would look ridiculous among their elders.

After sixteen nose-to-the-grindstone years, she’d been retired for how long? Too long! She had sworn never to run for office again, but didn’t people change their minds all the time and so what if she was gaining on ninety?

Take th’ woman in England who was a hundred and still tend-­ in’ bar—pullin’ pints, she called it, three days a week. And that ­hundred-year-old gal writin’ for a newspaper, askin’ people, Got any news?

And how about th’ mayor who was still mayorin’ at a hundred an’ two, bless ’er heart? Just lately, she dropped dead comin’ out of a council meeting, which was no surprise. How many of those monkey shows had she, Esther Cunningham, barely escaped with her life?

She located the remote in the pocket of the recliner, cranked upright, and reached for her iPad.

Havin’ an iPad had opened a whole new world. Her daughters could no longer accuse her of bein’ Stone Age; she knew what was goin’ on out there with people livin’ longer.

 

At seven thirty-five, Father Tim Kavanagh dropped a frozen banana, half a package of frozen acai berries, and a handful of frozen mangoes and peaches into a blender. The mélange was followed by a container of Greek yogurt, a spoonful of tahini, and a long pour of almond milk.

He hit the Blend button while firmly holding down the lid. Completely new to the smoothie regimen, he was alarmed by the possibility of the lid flying off and splattering stuff all over the kitchen. But the blender wouldn’t blend. It sounded like an eighteen-wheeler spinning tires on a sheet of ice.

He hit Off and reviewed the options.

Puree, Whip, Mix, Stir, Grind, Frappé.

Grind did not work. Same with the other options.

Okay, so some of the contents were frozen like a rock; maybe they had to partially thaw. When the nurse gave him the recipe after his physical, she didn’t say the ingredients had to be thawed. He did not have time to wait for something to thaw. He hit Blend again. A sound like tires screaming on a NASCAR track.

This would be his first morning without caffeine. Whether he could live up to the caffeine-free regimen recommended by Dr. Wilson, he couldn’t say. He was totally hooked on coffee and had been for decades. Cut him some slack, for Pete’s sake. Let him cling to this harmless vice.

He removed the lid and looked in. Maybe if he stuck a knife down in there and broke up the frozen chunks . . .

So, okay, you cannot put in big chunks, they have to be broken up first, because that worked pretty well and now the blender was sort of blending. This smoothie business was no walk in the park. He’d had trouble opening the package of frozen acai berries and resorted to sawing through the wrapper with a bread knife. Acai berries, whey, tahini—­such exotic items were not available at the Local; he’d been forced to drive to the neighboring Wesley, a college town in which such products thrived.

He emptied the contents of the blender into a large glass for himself and one for Cynthia, who would be coming downstairs any minute, and since Puny was taking a few weeks off, he was careful to do a cleanup.

He carried the glasses to the study, glancing beyond what they called their ‘picture window’ to a view of their own Acer rubrum. The crimson was as yet a mere blush, and there were the blue mountains beyond, illumined by the blast of pure, clean light that happens when the earth does its autumnal tilt.

He put the glasses on the table, sat on the sofa. To be honest, he wasn’t completely excited about today’s agenda.

They would be lugging the contents of Cynthia’s workroom up the hall to the dining room, now vacant of the pool table, which had recently moved to Meadowgate Farm, hallelujah.

He visualized the countless tubes of paint and brushes, boxes of colored pencils and pens, and the tons of finished art that had happily leaned against a wall for a decade or two, plus the contents of a massive wooden file cabinet wherein resided the complete history of her life as a writer/illustrator of children’s books. Then there was all the stuff pushpinned to the wall that had served as images of encouragement: faded prints of Matisse paintings, her grandfather on a pony at the age of nine, newspaper and trade journal accounts of her many awards and recognitions, innumerable photos of white cats in various poses . . .

Lug, haul, schlep, tote—that was the way of marriage. As a bachelor, he had never moved anything. Every item in the rectory had been deeply, and for his money happily, rooted in place.

He checked his watch.

They would have to be dressed and out of here at twelve-fifteen for Esther Cunningham’s birthday luncheon at the club, and after the big bash, come home and have at it again. But he wouldn’t grumble. The new workspace would be reviving for his wife, who had for years hunkered down in quarters the size of a shoebox.

He looked across the room where Truman slept in a wingback chair, undisturbed by dreams of preying hawks or the one-upmanship of barn cats. A cat as white as chalk, except for a black ear, was a red flag to rural predators, including fox and bear. Clearly Truman had considered the odds and made a decision to leave Meadowgate Farm. He was discovered yesterday on the backseat of Cynthia’s new Mini Cooper Roadster. When she arrived home and opened the car door to take out a sack of squash from the farm...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0399183736
• ISBN 13: 9780399183737
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar