Keys of Heaven Read Free Page B

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    Through the open doors, he heard the crunch of tires on gravel, rolling slowly past the house and coming to a stop on the wide piece of ground he’d paid Caleb to clear for a parking lot between house and barn. Not buggy wheels, but tires, which meant an Englisch car. It was either a curious tourist, drawn in by the small placard bearing a pot and the word ARTISAN that he’d ordered off the Internet, or it was—
    “Hello in there!”
    Ginny.
    Caleb grinned over his shoulder as Henry brought the wheel to a stop. “Hello,” he called as her curvy form appeared silhouetted against the light between the open barn doors. “Give me a second—I’m just pulling this bowl off and I can’t leave it.”
    “Take your time,” she said cheerfully. “Hey, Caleb. ’Sup?”
    Caleb, whose mouth ran a mile a minute, got inexplicably tongue-tied in Ginny’s presence. Henry could never decide if it was because she was an Englisch woman, or an African-American one, or simply because she was Ginny, and she tended to silence people while they adjusted to her brilliance, the way eyes had to adjust when they came out of a dark room into the sunlight.
    He lifted the bowl, still on the bat—the flat surface in the middle of the wheel—and took it over to the workbench, where he used his thumb and two fingers on its soft rim to pull a spout into shape that was wide enough to accommodate the thicker flow of cake batter. Then he cut it from the bat with his cutting wire and set it on the drying shelf.
    “There. Done.” The water in the deep sink was cold, fresh out of the ground, with a tendency to be hard, but it felt good as he washed his hands.
    When he was dry and presentable, he turned to Ginny with a smile, and she, as irrepressible in her way as Caleb normally was, gave him a hug instead of a handshake. “I hope that old thing isn’t interfering with my mugs.”
    Today she was wearing yellow jeans and a lime-green T-shirt with a quilt square and the words SISTERS’ DAY EVERY DAY written on it in curly script. Her earrings were tiny yellow birds.
    On any other woman, the effect would have made him flinch. But on Ginny, they made you feel like all the sunflowers in the field had turned their beaming faces toward you and all was right with the world.
    “Not a bit. I did five this morning, before I got started on the D.W. Frith order.” He smiled into her amber eyes. “I haven’t forgotten who my number one customer is.”
    “You’d best not.” She gave him a poke in the ribs and said, “But I’m not here on business. I actually have an afternoon off and I’m here to tempt you into two hours of dissipation and frivolity.” He took a breath, and before he could say a word, she went on, “I know those are foreign concepts to you, but for once in your life, just go with it and come with me, okay?”
    He hadn’t had a day off in two weeks—since starting the Frith order, in fact. Temptation flooded in, warring with the thought of the bowls and jugs that needed to be completed, glazed, fired, and shipped to arrive by the fifteenth of August.
    Ginny appealed to Caleb. “Help me convince him. A man can’t work twelve hours a day, seven days a week without losing it.”
    “Go on, Henry,” said Caleb, the traitor. “I’ll finish wedging this block of clay and clean up. It’ll all be ready for you tomorrow.”
    Henry wavered, but it was the pleading in Ginny’s eyes that did him in. The novelty of someone actually asking for his company was still too fresh, too unusual. He was powerless against it.
    Which was how he found himself on a sunlit hillside an hour later, looking out over the valley from under a big chestnut that had probably been there since the original Amish settlers had come to the township in the seventeen hundreds.
    “There, now,” Ginny said happily, setting out sandwiches, a basket of berries, and bottles of cold limeade she’d probably made herself to match her T-shirt. “Isn’t this