A Case for Forgiveness. Carol Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ can—I’d never played bingo in my entire life until a few months ago. Can you imagine that? I’ve been missing out and besides, did you not hear that the blue-diamond pot tonight is one-hundred and twelve dollars?”

      “Why is everything blue?” Jonah asked waving one hand across the tablescape and holding up his cup of blue raspberry punch with the other. The plastic table cloths were blue, the centerpieces on the table held little vases of blue carnations and baby’s breath, and strings of blue lights were twinkling here and there around the room. Even the ink was blue.

      Hannah looked puzzled. “I have absolutely no idea. Maybe it’s Mrs. Wizencroft’s favorite color. She can be a real dragon lady, runs the Seniors’ Circle like it’s the Marine Corps.”

      Jonah laughed. “It’s great to see you, Hannah. Gramps told me you were back home. How are you holding up, not being able to ski?”

      Hannah reacted with a look like he’d poked her in the ribs with a stick.

      “I’m sorry—was that not okay to ask?” Stamp, stamp.

      She grinned. “No, actually, it is. It’s just that no one ever asks me that—except Shay. They ask me how I’m doing or how I am, but no one ever asks me about skiing. I think people are afraid that I’m going to break down and start bawling all over them or something.” She tipped her head, looking thoughtful for a second. Then she added, “Which I might. And it feels...how much time have you got?”

      Jonah pulled his brows up and made a tsk-ing sound. “No time, actually, I’m super...” He stamped Bernice’s card. “Duper.” He reached over to stamp Doc’s card, who had apparently exhausted the subject of gout, but was now whispering loudly in Erma’s ear about lupus. “Busy,” he added as he then reached over and stamped her card.

      Hannah made a big show of protesting. “Well, skipping over the accident and the ensuing realization that my career—my life—was over?” She nodded as if giving herself permission to continue. “Okay, so, skipping over all that and in addition to trying to forgive the drunk driver who almost killed me, I’m learning to enjoy life in a different, more content-based way—as my expensive sports psychologist terms it. Not that I wouldn’t ski competitively again if I could—without risking messing up my body forever, because I would. But the cool thing is that I’m learning and trying to accept, that skiing doesn’t define me as a person.”

      “That’s...awesome, Hannah.” And it was. Jonah could only imagine what that kind of recovery entailed. Hannah had been skiing since she was four years old. Even Jonah had to admit that when he thought of Hannah—he couldn’t picture much else but her on a pair of skis.

      “Yep, it is.”

      “How are you doing that?”

      She belted out a laugh before commenting, “Slowly, painfully, and with extreme difficulty. Kind of a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ kind of thing. Shay has been amazing, of course, giving me a job and a place to live and tons of unconditional sister support.”

      Her tone was light, but Jonah could hear the pain still lurking in her voice. He wasn’t sure what to say. He stamped his card, and his adopted cards, and struggled to come up with something profound.

      Hannah was smiling at him, warmly. “Shay’s right about you, isn’t she?”

      He let out a chuckle. “Probably, but in what way are we referring to specifically?”

      “About your lawyering, specifically—how important it is to you. You can’t even begin to consider what your life would be like if you couldn’t be an attorney, can you?”

      This was true, he thought, and Shay had certainly accused him of putting too much importance on it in the past. But the part he’d never understood was how his focus on his career was so different than how Shay felt about the inn. He’d asked her about it when they’d had that fight a couple years back, but she’d only looked at him like he was the biggest fool on the planet.

      He looked up at Shay now. She was such a force in this town. If it was possible to personify a place, Shay did so with the Faraway Inn. She was the Faraway Inn, and how ironic he thought, that the word also described the nature of their relationship; Jonah and Shay—so far away—too far away from each other in every sense that really mattered.

      “I’m sure your sister couldn’t imagine her life without the Faraway Inn either.” Jonah could hear the defensive tinge in his tone.

      Hannah’s chuckle had him thinking that she could hear it, too. “That’s where you two have some common ground then, isn’t that right, counselor?”

      “Common ground?”

      “Shay thinks she wouldn’t be who she is without the inn and you probably think you’d just shrivel and die without the ‘attorney at law’ tacked on to the end of your name. Common ground.”

      Shay was staring at him again. He met her eyes and felt a shot of awareness course through him because she was smiling at him—that dazzling dimpled smile that used to leave him dumbstruck. He smiled in return, and had to correct his previous thought, because they weren’t so far away in all the ways that mattered—just the ones that would allow them to ever be together again.

      Hannah had started talking once more. “...but if there’s one thing I have learned from my experience it’s that true happiness is not about what you do for a living, there’s a lot else besides work, right? That’s what Dr. Vossel keeps telling me anyway. And I’m trying my hardest to believe it.”

      Jonah stared blankly at Hannah, taken aback by her statement, not sure if he agreed, but certainly not wanting to disagree in light of everything she’d been through.

      Jonah looked around in bafflement as some in the crowd began making a “quack, quack” noise. Then Shay called out something that sounded like “clickety-click.”

      Hannah grinned, then reached over and stamped the O-66 space on his card.

      “O-66,” she explained and then yelled, “Bingo!”

      * * *

      SHAY ANNOUNCED A short break and then dabbed the sweat from her brow with a tissue.

      Janie handed her a glass of cold punch. “Looks like Caleb and Mary Beth are getting pretty cozy.”

      “I noticed that. It’s sweet, huh? They’ve been spending quite a bit of time together lately.”

      “Bernice is gunning hard for Doc.”

      “I could hear that, too—all the way up here.”

      They shared a chuckle.

      “Jonah only takes his eyes off of you long enough to stamp an entire table’s worth of bingo cards, which surprisingly doesn’t take him long at all. It’s like he’s a veteran.”

      Shay grinned. “You can’t tell but his eyes are pleading with me to come and save him.”

      “Save him?”

      “Yeah, I kind of, um, encouraged him to come tonight.”

      “Ah,” Janie said with a quick grin. “I see. Well, he should СКАЧАТЬ