Chapter Seven

"How did you end up having a Salvage Yard in your salvage yard?"

Hazel found herself back again at the Lunchbox in Upper Sharon, sitting across from Nicholas at a booth where this time she (and he) were first in and tucked into the wall, with the mostly younger students from Cyrus College and elsewhere filling in and hanging off the end.

They'd ended the service and piled into an assortment of cars, including her Prius, and driven back up the road to what was clearly this fellowship's home away from home. They'd come in together and immediately taken the last four booths and adjoining small tables, with the obvious assent of the hostess, who was the senior of the two waitresses moving back and forth from tables to the grill and back again, with loops past the coffeemaker.

Nicholas smiled and looked up somewhere over Hazel's head. "Yeah, that's a funny sort of thing. It's not what I had . . ." He looked directly at her. "You've heard, probably, that my wife died last year."

"Yes, I'd heard some sort of strange, horrible accident. I'm sorry to hear it, of course."

"Strange, horrible, all those adjectives. She was darting back into the house: we have these three girls (he pointed generally towards enough girls to add up to more than three, but she assumed they were somewhere among them), and they were always forgetting things, and Natasha went to get something, slipped and fell backwards, hit her head, and laughed, got up, came back to the van -- we took the girls to school, I dropped her off at work and told her to be careful, and two hours later the hospital calls to tell me she's gone."

"Oh." There was a great deal of shock, sympathy, and felt pain in Hazel's small exclamation."

"Exactly," Nicholas answered with gentle acceptance. "It took me days to just get past the unreality of it all. I'm still not sure I really understand that she's gone. But it had been just a few weeks before that she'd run into some of the folks (and he gestured towards the booths filled in behind them, the older half of the group from the Salvage Yard) from an AA group that used to meet at the Memorial Church."

"You mean the one next door to here?"

"That's the one," Nicholas said wryly. "There was some sort of problem, a clogged toilet or something of that type, and next thing they knew, they'd been asked to meet somewhere else."

"Oh, that's so unfortunate," Hazel said, thinking she'd seen the same sort of thinking in academia, but hoped that churches were a little less hidebound.

The wry smile grew wryer as he replied "Yes, especially since just a few years before that, your predecessor had kicked them off of the Cyrus College campus."

"Oh." It was an entirely different "oh," with a new set of meanings to the same monosyllable.

"Yes. So they weren't sure it was a good idea to go back across the creek and see if the new president was any more reasonable (could his smile get any broader, she wondered), and were simply ready to give up, when one of their number mentioned their dilemma to Natasha. And that night, she came home and told me we were having an AA meeting in the shop."

"The shop?"

"Sharon Architectural Salvage, to be precise. Or the shop, as I usually call it."

"Oh."

They reflected together for a moment on the many uses of that term, then Hazel went on, a tiny bit uncomfortably: "So this was an AA meeting? Should I have been there? Because I . . ."

"No, no -- the church came later. It began with the AA group, and they still meet there. Tuesdays. Then NA, Thursdays. And then Al-Anon on Mondays. Which somehow became a group that was made up of a number of Memorial Church castaways who asked if they could use the chairs and space and coffee machine on Sunday mornings, and we'd done that all of twice when Natasha . . . died."

"Has it helped, this group, or does it . . .?"

"It does help. It hurts, not infrequently, but it hurts sometimes in the morning to see the girls coming out to the van, but that doesn't change how much I love them. The Salvage Yard is something that Natasha didn't know she was leaving me, but it's become like my fourth child."

"And your children are adopted?"

"Yes, we had been foster parents, and then we became foster parents who just couldn't let go, and the Children's Services folk couldn't have been happier. They helped with everything, and the adoption was final almost two years ago. This adoption, the church . . . I don't know if it's really a church, but the group, the community, it . . . well, my family has been, really, I guess blessed by it. And we want to find ways to bless others, and that's what our reason for getting together is. That, and remembering that we should be thankful, and remembering who to be thankful to."

"God, you mean."

"That's the name. If you aren't a God person, we're okay with that, you can probably tell. But most of us think God's a pretty important part of how we understand ourselves."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean to imply; I mean, God is . . . this isn't something I guess I've given much thought to. I'm a scientist and an academic, and Sundays stopped being something I spent in a big room singing in the morning back when I was in high school. Other than the stray wedding, or funeral . . ."

A particular funeral, one Hazel had not seen but could readily imagine, hung in the air between them. As if they'd spoken out loud, Nicholas said "Yes, we did her funeral right there in the shop. It seemed right. The funeral home was very helpful, if quite confused when they first showed up. But once we got them used to the idea, they were fine. I hope it's a long, long time before we use what we learned that day again to hold one of those."