A Change of Heart Read Online Free

or Summer Fling. People leave them in stacks at the book door of the library, after hours, when no one is likely to discover their depravity.
    She’s also swamped with back issues of Reader’s Digest, Upper Room devotionals, and the Friendly Women’s Circle cookbook. Confident it would hit the best-seller list, the Friendly Women had 5,000 copies printed in 1983 and managed to sell 432 of them. The remainder are stored in the attics and basements of Friendly Women all over town. For years they’ve unloaded them on Miss Rudy. They are the zucchini of books—everyone has more than they could possibly use. Miss Rudy hauls them to the recycling center in Cartersburg.
    She stopped by Kivett’s Five and Dime to see if Ned had any books to donate. Ned was gone, but Nora Nagle was working the checkout counter. She’s been reading Emily Post’s book on wedding etiquette. She isn’t engaged, but wants to be prepared in case the right man happens along, though she is starting to think she might have to settle for the wrong man.
    Nora Nagle was the 1975 Indiana Sausage Queen. She moved to Hollywood, where she starred as a dancing grape in an underwear commercial, but doesn’t have a romantic prospect in the world. She is too beautiful; men are frightened of her. So they ask out less attractive women while Nora Nagle sits at home. She’s been thinking of marring her perfection so she won’t be so intimidating, maybe breaking her nose or letting her eyebrows grow together.
    She gave the wedding book to Miss Rudy for the sale, who made a mental note to set it aside for Deena Morrison. A goodly number of people have taken a deep interest in Deena’s wedding, which is drawing perilously close. Bob Miles has been running a countdown in the upper left corner of the front page of the Herald, next to the weather. Seasonal temperatures expected, though variations might occur. Thirty-nine days until the big day!
    Deena found the wedding dress she wanted in a magazine at the library. Miss Rudy relaxed her rule about not letting people check out current magazines so Deena could show it to Miriam Hodge, who is sewing her wedding dress.
    In the midst of all the wedding planning, Deena’s computer crashed. Self-proclaimed computer healers from around town laid hands on it, trying to resurrect it, but apparently lacked faith because it’s still broken. She’s been using the computer at the library, trolling the Internet with Miss Rudy for wedding ideas.
    Deena is having the kind of wedding Miss Rudy wishes she could have had, but never did. It isn’t just the wedding Miss Rudy wanted; it’s the marriage, the sharing of life. When she was Deena’s age, she was caring for her parents, who’d had her late in life. After they died, she went off to college, then moved to Harmony to work at the library. The years passed, piling one on top of the other, and now she’s seventy-seven and the sand has nearly run out of her hourglass.
    It’s tolerable in the daytime, when she’s at the library. People are in and out, and there are books to shelve and the occasional teenager to rein in. In the spring, she has the book sale to occupy her attention. It’s the evenings that wear her down. The library closes at seven. She turns off the lights and locks up at five after, then walks the half block to her darkened, silent house.
    Across the street, she can see Owen Stout and his wife, Mildred, sitting in their chairs, talking or watching TV or playing Scrabble. Behind her, on the other side of the alley, the Grants can be seen going about their evening—the boys at the kitchen table doing their homework, Uly and his wife standing at the sink washing the supper dishes.
    She’d had someone once, a long time ago. He’d moved to town to work for the phone company. They’d met at church. He moved a pew closer each week, until on the fifth Sunday he’d worked up the nerve to sit in her pew and share a hymnal. He’d stopped by the library the next