A Common Life

Table of Contents

 

 

Jan Karon says she writes “to give readers an extended family, and to applaud the extraordinary beauty of ordinary lives.” Other bestselling novels in the Mitford Years series are
At Home in Mitford
;
A Light in the Window
;
These High, Green Hills
;
Out to Canaan
; and
A New Song
. Coming in 2002 is her seventh novel in the series,
In This Mountain
. Her children’s books include
Miss Fannie’s Hat
and
Jeremy: The Tale of an Honest Bunny
.

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,

Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,

Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads,

Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001

Published in Penguin Books 2002

 

Copyright © Jan Karon, 2001

Illustrations copyright © Penguin Putnam Inc., 2001

All rights reserved

 

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED

Karon, Jan, date.

A common life : the wedding story / Jan Karon.

p. cm.—(The Mitford years)

ISBN : 978-1-101-54848-6

1. Weddings—Fiction 2. Mitford (N.C. : Imaginary place)—Fiction.

3. North Carolina—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Fiction I. Title.

PS3561.A678 C6 2001

813’.54—dc21 00-031984

 

 

For my much-appreciated
nieces and nephews,
with love

 

Warm thanks to Viking Penguin Chairman Susan Petersen Kennedy; my agent, Liz Darhansoff; my editor, Carolyn Carlson; Paul Halley; Ruth Bush; Kay Auten; Betty Cox; Bishop Keith Ackerman; Father Charles L. Holt; Father Terry Sweeney; Harvey Karon; Martha J. Marcus; Gail Mayes; James Harris Podgers; Betty Pitts, and the late Hayden Pitts.

Special thanks to Father James Harris, a faithful friend to Mitford; to
Victoria
magazine for excerpts from Mitford fiction that appeared in its pages; and to the lovely Carolyn Clement, our own Hessie Mayhew, who gathered and arranged the wedding flowers which are captured in pastels by Donna Kae Nelson for the jacket of this book.

F
ather Timothy Kavanagh stood at the stone wall on the ridge above Mitford, watching the deepening blush of a late June sunset.

He conceded that it wasn’t the worst way to celebrate a birthday, though he’d secretly hoped to celebrate it with Cynthia. For years, he’d tried to fool himself that his birthday meant very little or nothing, and so, if no cards appeared, or cake or presents, that would be fine.

Indeed, there had been no card from Cynthia, though he’d received a stack from his parishioners, and certainly she’d given no promise of cake or candles that definitively pronounced,
This is it, Timothy, the day you appeared on earth, and though I know you don’t really care about such things, we’re going to celebrate, anyway, because you’re important to me.
He was deeply ashamed to admit that he’d waited for this from her; in truth, had expected it, hoped for it.

He’d known suffering in his thirty-eight years in the priesthood, though nearly always because of someone else’s grief or affliction. Now he suffered for himself, for his maddening inability to let his walls down with her, to cast off his armor and simply and utterly love her. He had pled with God to consume his longing and his love, to cast it out as ashes and let nothing interfere with the fulfillment of the vows he’d made years ago as an ordinand. Why should such a flame as this beat up in him now? He was sixty-two years old, he was beyond loving in the flesh! And yet, as desperately as he’d prayed for his longing to be removed, he craved for it to be satisfied.

He remembered the times she had shut herself away from him, guarding her heart. The loss of her ravishing openness had left him cold as a stone, as if a great cloud had gone over the sun.

What if she were to shut herself away from him once and for all? He paced beside the low stone wall, forgetting the sunset over the valley.

He’d never understood much about his feelings toward Cynthia, but he knew and understood this: He didn’t want to keep teetering on the edge, afraid to step forward, terrified to turn back.

The weight on his chest was palpable; he’d felt it often since she moved next door and into his life. Yet it wasn’t there because he loved her, it was there because he was afraid to love her completely.

Perhaps he would always have such a weight; perhaps there was no true liberation in love. And certainly he could not ask her to accept him as he was—flawed and frightened, not knowing.

He sank to his knees by the stone wall, and looked up and opened his mouth to speak, but instead caught his breath sharply.

A great flow of crimson and gold was spilling across the sky like lava, running molten from west to east. He watched, awestruck, as the pyre consumed the blue haze of the firmament and bathed the heavens with a glory that shook and moved him to his very depths.

“Please!” he whispered.

It was then that he felt a sensation of warmth welling in him, a kind of liquid infilling he’d never experienced before. Something in his soul lifted up, as startling as a covey of quail breaking from the underbrush, and his heart acknowledged, suddenly and finally, that his love for her could not, would not be extinguished. He knew at last that no amount of effort, no amount of pleading with God would enable him to sustain any longer the desperate, wounding battle he had launched against loving her.

In a way he couldn’t explain, and in the space of the merest instant, he knew he’d come fully awake for the first time in his life.

He also knew that he wanted nothing more than to be with her, at her side, and that after all the wasted months, he couldn’t afford to waste another moment. But what if he’d waited too long, come to his senses too late?

He sprang to his feet, as relieved as if he’d shaken off an approaching illness; then, animated by a power not his own, he found himself running.

“There comes a time,” his cousin Walter had said, “when there’s no turning back.”

He felt the motion of his legs and the breeze on his skin and the hammering in his temples, as if he might somehow implode, all of it combusting into a sharp inner flame, a durable fire, a thousand hosannas.

Streaming with sweat, he raced down Old Church Lane and into the cool green enclosure of Baxter Park, his body as weightless as a glider borne on wings of ether, though his heart was heavy with dread. She could have gone away as she’d done before . . . and this time, she might never come back.

The dark silhouette of the hedge separating the park from Cynthia’s house and the rectory appeared far away, another country, a landmark he might never reach.

As he drew closer, he saw that her house was dark, but his own was aglow with light in every window, as if some wonderful thing might be happening.

He bounded through the hedge; she was standing on his stoop. She held the door open, and the light from the kitchen gleamed behind her.

She stood there as if she’d known the very moment he turned into the park and, sensing the urgency of his heart, felt her own compelled to greet it.

He ran up the steps, his chest heaving, as she stepped back and smiled at him. “Happy birthday!” she said.

“I love you, Cynthia!”
His lungs seemed to force the declaration onto the night air as if by their own will. He stood with his mouth open, marveling, while she raised her hand to her cheek in a way that made her appear dubious, somehow, or amused.

Did she think him mad? He felt mad, riotous, he wanted to climb on the roof, baying and whooping—a sixtysomething bachelor priest, mad with love for his next-door neighbor.

He didn’t consider the consequences of this wild skidding out of control; it was now or never.

As she backed into the kitchen, he followed. He saw the cake on the breakfast table and the card propped against a vase of flowers, and he fell to one knee beside the table and gathered her hands in his.

“Will you?” he croaked, looking up at her.

“Will I
what,
dearest?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

He knew that she knew; why wouldn’t she help him with this thing? He was perfectly willing to bring the other knee down if only she would help him.

And why was he crouching here on the linoleum, sweating like a prizefighter, when he might have been dressed in his best suit and doing this in the study, or in the Lord’s Chapel garden by the French roses?