to hear the rest of the sentence, he wasn’t certain what would have happened. He pulled his arm free and stalked away, his cousin’s laughter following him out the door.
Chapter 11
CJ finished stocking the shelf with paint thinner, caulk, and a number of other related items and stepped away, admiring his work. He let go of a large yawn. He’d been up early to work on the house with Dennis, and he was supposed to go over there when he got off here at the store. Years of sitting in front of a computer had left him unfit for manual labor, and he was feeling it this morning.
He liked the fact that Artie had left the place just as it was years ago, with the exceptions of a few new products and the scarecrow in the corner. CJ had heard Artie talking to Cadbury once or twice, when he thought he was alone, and CJ had decided that as long as he didn’t hear the scarecrow answer back, everything would be fine.
In the last hour, not a single customer had come in, and the customer traffic had been light enough over the week and a half CJ had worked here that he wondered how Artie could afford to pay him. Not that CJ would have demanded it of him; the man had given him a place to stay—him and Thor—and didn’t begrudge the dog making himself at home in the hardware store. Right now, Thoreau was curled up by the front door, catching a stream of sunlight that came through the glass, content as could be. In the short time he’d been here, Thor had taken to small-town life, enough so that CJ felt a bit guilty about keeping him as a house dog for so long. An animal like Thor was meant for the wide-open places afforded by a town like Adelia, not the kitchen of a home in the middle of a subdivision.
As if he knew he was being watched, Thor opened his eyes and raised his head. CJ saw just the barest hint of a wag touch the tip of the dog’s tail but he didn’t encourage it, and in a few seconds the dog lowered his head to resume his nap.
For some reason, watching the dog made him think of Janet. Even though every conversation he’d had with her since leaving Tennessee had been just short of caustic, he almost missed the phone calls. While the conversations had been decidedly one-sided, and while she definitely hadn’t been referring to him in endearing terms, he found he enjoyed hearing her voice. Working on his marriage was one of the things his men’s group had been arming him for just before things took a quick trip south. He’d have probably bungled the whole thing anyway; he hadn’t been a quick, or even willing, study. He hated the whole men’s group thing. He liked the guys well enough, had even begun to think of a few of them as friends, but it didn’t take him long to realize that baring his soul to a group of men he’d known for only three months wasn’t high on his to-do list.
CJ’s conversion had caught him by surprise, because it was something that had happened without his having been aware that he’d been looking for it. The whole thing had just sort of snuck up on him—although that did nothing to make it any less meaningful, or welcome. Even so, it had been difficult for him to admit he had a need that he had to rely on someone else to fill, especially when he’d spent the last half of his life steering clear of problematic entanglements. He suspected that was a clue as to why his marriage was in the process of failing.
Pastor Stan hadn’t needed his psychology degree to recognize that. He’d accused CJ of “emotional truncation”—a term the pastor had coined and seemed particularly pleased by—and suggested that joining the Wednesday morning men’s group was the tonic he needed. It would provide, in Stan’s words, “a fellowship of like men who were learning what it meant to live in grace.” CJ had laughed at that, right in front of the pastor, and he’d only felt a little badly about it. One of the things that had always bugged him about Christians was their ability to take plain old words and turn them into these aphorisms that were like some kind of alternately pithy or pretentious religious code. He’d had