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sitting higher in his seat. Alex Trebek walked onto the stage in his natty suit and greeted the three contestants, then pointed to the board, where the computerized jingle heralded the first round’s categories.
A method of working this metal was not mastered until 1500 B.C.
“What is iron?” Jack said.
A contestant on the television rang in. “What is iron?” the woman repeated.
“That’s correct!” Alex Trebek answered.
Addie looked up at Jack, then at the TV, and smiled. “Jeopardy! fan?”
Jack shrugged. “I guess.”
In the 1950s, this Modesto, CA, company became the first winery with its own bottle-making plant.
“What is E. & J. Gallo?”
Addie set down the salt container she’d been holding. “You’re more than just a fan,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “You’re really good.”
Nine of the twelve chapters in this book of the Bible set in Babylon revolve around dreams and visions.
“What is Isaiah?” Addie guessed.
Jack shook his head. “What is Daniel?”
In the original Hebrew of his Lamentations, each verse in three chapters begins with a new letter, from aleph on.
“Who is Jeremiah?”
“You know a lot about the Bible,” Addie said. “Are you a priest or something?”
He had to laugh out loud at that. “No.”
“Some kind of professor?”
Jack blotted his mouth with a napkin. “I’m a dishwasher.”
“What were you yesterday, then?”
A prisoner, thought Jack, but he looked into his lap and said, “Just another guy doing something he didn’t really like doing.”
She smiled, content to let it go. “Lucky for me.” Addie took the mop that Jack had brought from the kitchen and she began to swish it over the linoleum.
“I’ll do it.”
“You go ahead and eat,” Addie said. “I don’t mind.”
It was these small kindnesses that would break him. Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he’d promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again. But here was Addie, taking him on faith, doing his work to boot-even though, according to Delilah, fate had screwed her over, too.
He wanted to tell her he understood, but after almost a year of near silence, words did not come easily for him. So very slowly, he took a handful of French fries and set them on Chloe’s untouched plate. After a moment, he added his pickle. When he finished, he found Addie staring at him, her hands balanced on top of the mop, her body poised for flight.
She believed he was mocking her; it was right there in the deepest part of her eyes, bruised and tender. Her fingers wrung the wooden handle.
“I . . . I owed her, from this afternoon,” he said.
“Who?” The word was less than a whisper.
Jack’s eyes never left hers. “Chloe.”
Addie didn’t respond. Instead, she picked up the mop and began to swab with a vengeance. She cleaned until the floor gleamed, until the lights of the ceiling bounced off the thin residue of Pine-Sol, until it hurt Jack to watch her acting fearless and indifferent because she reminded him so much of himself.
By the time Addie pulled the door shut and locked it behind her, it was snowing outside. Fist-size flakes, the kind that hooked together in midair like trick skydivers. Inwardly, she groaned. It meant getting up early tomorrow to shovel the walkways.
Jack stood a distance away, the lapels of his sports jacket pulled up to shield his neck from the cold. Addie was a firm believer that someone’s past deserved to stay in the past-she herself was surely a poster child for keeping secrets. She didn’t know what kind of man walked around in a New Hampshire winter without a coat; she’d never met someone who was bright enough to know the answers to every Jeopardy! question but willing to work for minimum wage in a menial job. If Jack wanted to lie low, she could offer him that.
And she wouldn’t think about his unprecedented reaction to Chloe.
“Well,” she said, “See you tomorrow morning.”
Jack