9

Sam Boyce, host of Green's radio talk show Hooked on Fishing, was questioned by police two evenings ago after a traffic snarl-up on Main Street. Witnesses said Boyce, pulling a trailer behind his pickup, was seen driving well below the speed limit, weaving from one side of the road to the other and ignoring all stop signs. A police spokeswoman said he claimed he was "trolling for a tornado, determined not to be surprised by one again."

—The Green News-Item

The mayor summoned me to her home for lunch five days after the storm hit.

When I rang the doorbell, Sugar Marie barked, and Dub McCuller opened the door, a kitchen towel in his hand.

I took a step back.

"Come in, Miss Barker," he said. "Eva's running a few minutes late."

"It's Craig," I said, frozen to the spot. "Lois Craig."

"I forgot," he said. "Congratulations. The Craigs are good people."

The last time I had seen Dub was the night he came to my house to tell me his brother, now dead, was the one who set a series of fires to run me out of town. He had apologized that night for suing me in order to regain control of the paper.

I wasn't exactly afraid of Dub, but I didn't want to have lunch with him.

Sugar Marie provided a welcome distraction, greeting me like her long-lost best buddy, but that didn't last. After sniffing and looking around, she seemed to realize I hadn't brought Holly Beth and slunk off in a pout.

"She's moody, isn't she?" Dub asked.

That could be the first thing he'd ever said that I agreed with.

"Maybe it would be better if I met the mayor downtown," I said. "We're both on tight schedules."

"She should be here any minute," Dub said. "I've got lunch ready and will leave you two to your business while I run errands."

Dub cooked lunch? Eva had mentioned the two were making amends after a long-standing misunderstanding, but I didn't realize it had come to this.

I glanced down at my shoes, intimidated not only by Dub but by Eva's white carpet. The cute hiking shoes I had bought for my honeymoon had been muddy since Sunday, and I slipped them off before walking in.

Dub chuckled. "Eva's frighteningly neat, isn't she?" he asked."I set a glass on the table without a coaster the other day, and she politely reminded me it wasn't a good idea."

Chitchat from this sixty-ish man, wearing jeans and an LSU polo shirt, was painful. I had dealt with him and Chuck after my friend Ed died and left the paper—and a large bank note—to me. I had fought the brothers, the Big Boys, for most of last year. No way was I going to forgive him for all of that at a little luncheon.

"I make you uneasy," Dub said, guiding me into the foyer of the house. "I hope you know how sorry I am about everything.I made so many mistakes. I'm trying to make things right with a lot of people."

"This is awkward," I said. "I've been working eighteen-hour days, my house blew away, and I don't have the energy for this conversation. Tell the mayor I'll catch up with her later."

As I opened the door, Eva whipped into the driveway in her new Cadillac so fast that I thought she might hit the garage door.

"Excuse me," Dub said, and walked through the living room and into the kitchen to greet Eva. I could hear the two talking in low tones, and heard a door close. I walked into the kitchen, feeling like a child who had thrown a fit.

Eva put her purse on the bar and picked up Sugar Marie.The mayor had perfected the leader-in-time-of-crisis look and wore tan linen slacks and a matching tunic, with a big, colorful scarf draped around her shoulders. If I had tried a similar outfit, I would have looked like a crone in a movie, the wicked woman who delivers poison apples to children. She looked calm and determined.

"So I hear you don't care for my choice of housekeepers?" she said.

I moved over to hug her, keeping a close eye on Sugar Marie. "Dub makes me uncomfortable," I said. "He did so much damage."

"Undeniably," she said. "It's your choice whether you forgive him or not. I know he is committed to being a better man."

Through the window over the sink, as she spoke, I saw Dub back out of the garage.

"He parks in your garage? Is he living here?" I blurted.

Eva's demeanor shifted into pure irritation, a rare look for her in any situation.

"Because you're a friend, I assume those questions were not meant to be insulting," Eva said. "He's helped out since the storm, taken care of Sugar Marie, done repairs . . . now that I think about it, taken care of me when everyone else in town is asking something of me. Of course he doesn't live here, but I thought it might keep gossip down if his truck wasn't parked out front."

"I'm sorry, Eva. I was rude. Dub caught me off guard."

"Enough of that," she waved her hand as though dismissing the topic from the room. "We won't have much time before reporters start hounding me or an unhappy citizen comes looking for me. Serve your plate and let's get to work."

"To work?" I asked, dishing up soup and salad into heavy white pottery dishes. I wondered on which of her many travels the mayor had found those.

"I need your brain," she said, escorting me into the dining room with two placemats, silverware, and water glasses in place.

"My brain?" At that moment it seemed fairly useless.

"I hoped we might have a quick private lunch and come up with a plan," Eva said.

"A plan?"

"Are you all right?" she asked.

I sipped ice-cold water from a crystal glass. "I can't tell if I'm acting crazy because I ran into Dub or because I'm sitting down to eat lunch at a nice table in a beautiful home."

Eva laughed, and I relaxed.

"Lois, it hit me yesterday that it's time to quit reacting and respond. We've made it past the crisis and we have to look at the future."

"Made it past the crisis?" I nearly choked on an almond in the salad. "Have you driven around town lately? Green is nothing but crisis."

"That's not the answer I'm looking for," Eva said, laying her spoon down. "I invited you here because I know you won't wallow in self-pity. We don't have time for that. We're facing major issues in Green, and I need help in deciding what to do next."

"Eva," I said, giving up the pretense of eating, "we're less than a week into this. Is that enough time to know what to do next? Most people can barely put one foot in front of the other."

"If we don't get proactive here, Green may never come out of this."

My mayor, a woman I admired greatly, had used the word proactive. I hated the word proactive. To make matters worse, I liked self-pity and was hoping to get a lot of mileage out of it during the next few weeks at least. I was exhausted. I wanted to finish my lunch, which, I had to hand it to Dub, was quite tasty. Then I would like to lie down on Eva's fancy brocade couch and take a nap, pulling that cashmere throw she bought in Italy over me.

Looking in the mayor's eyes, I knew a nap was not in my future.

"Do you have any strong coffee?" I asked.

"Dub turned it on right before you ran him off," she said with a smile. "Finish your lunch while I get you a cup."

When she returned, she not only had the coffeepot but a stack of white note cards and a large black marker.

"Are we going to make flash cards?" I asked.

"In a manner of speaking," she said. "We've got to flash forward and think of who is going to come out of the woodwork and what they're going to want, how we're going to meet real needs, and keep from doing the wrong thing."

"We might as well add unintended consequences and multiply the time and money it's going to take to get things done," I said.

"You're finally getting my point," Eva said. "We had a solid plan to deal with a disaster, and, with the Item's help, we've done a pretty good job with rescue. The true test is going to be recovery."

"Why not have a town meeting? Ask for input," I said.

"Clearly we're going to do that, but I wonder if there are other steps we need to take first. You're the only one I can think of who can help pull this together. You see the big picture, and you have enough of an outsider's perspective to analyze more clearly."

Her reference to my outsider's perspective stung. I felt like a lifelong resident—even if I didn't have a house at the moment.

"Hand me that marker," I said, and wrote the word future in large letters on one card and tradition on the next.

"Good point," Eva murmured. "We will have to tie the future to the past or everyone will be contrary."

"Change is next," I said. "Hopefully the storm blew away Green's resistance to change."

"I wouldn't count on it," Eva said. "We're going to do things differently, though."

"Urgency," I added. "We must have a sense of urgency. We don't have time to waste."

"But that will make people nervous," she said. "Maybe the word steady is better. People need to be motivated to do what needs to be done, but they won't want to feel rushed."

For the next forty-five minutes, we wrote word after word and discussed idea after idea, until a sketchy scenario emerged.

"Let's get the Green Forward group together tomorrow after the paper comes out," Eva said, "and see what they want to add."

Dub drove up as I was leaving and took a ladder and toolbox out of his truck. Across the street, a youth work crew with bright First Baptist Church T-shirts piled branches on the street. A couple of houses down I saw a woman delivering one of Pastor Mali's supply packages.

Sitting in my car, I pulled out the stack of cards and added one more word.

Compassion.

Wearing a mongrammed pullover, Gina was in the newsroom the next afternoon, and I invited her to attend the Green Forward meeting.

"This is a great group," I said. "They care passionately about making Green a better place to live. You'll get a good look at what small-town life is like."

Big mistake on my part.

The meeting, held in the newspaper conference room, started with an argument. Everyone was tired and wanted to get to the point. My desire for compassion lasted about five minutes.

The Cotton Boll Café, which usually provided food for the group, was swamped with orders from volunteers and those in need, and Iris came up with a bag of Linda's stale pretzels and lukewarm bottled water from the newsroom.

"We want to rebuild for the future while holding on to the traditions of the past," I said, opening the meeting. What had seemed poetic yesterday at lunch sounded contrived today.

"We're pushing this," retorted one of the downtown business owners. "We're trying to get things up and running, and you want us to talk about the future. We haven't even got all the dead buried yet."

"People aren't ready to look ahead," Pastor Mali, always a supporter of my ideas, said. "They're hurting. They need food and water, not strategies."

"We're not going to overlook their basic needs," I said, frustration flowing out of every pore in my body.

"With all respect, I believe Lois is saying that food and water are part of the strategies," Eva said. "We have immediate needs to meet and must be ready for what people will need in a week or two, then a month, and on down the line."

The mayor was trying to smooth things over for me. I hoped Gina hadn't noticed.

"I sort of see what you mean," the owner of an auto mechanic shop on the south side of town said. "With the new highway under construction, this could be the right time for businesses like mine to move."

"Move?" Rose, who had taken the week off from her postal job, asked. "What do you mean 'move'?"

"If I'm going to have to start over, I might as well do it now rather than later," he said. "I've been scoping out locations."

"That's one of the issues this group needs to take a stand on," the mayor said. "I'm hearing from lots of businesses who plan to relocate. We need to discuss zoning challenges."

"Not to argue with you, Mayor," said banker Jerry, who loved nothing better than to argue with her, "but zoning could kill this town. We've got to help people earn a living and we can't be saying no every time they turn around."

I wondered if he was already shaping his campaign message for the next election, but what he said made sense. It also troubled me.

"We have to find a happy medium," Rose said. "Small businesses were barely holding on as it was. But if we let people build anywhere and everywhere, this town will look like a junkyard."

Rose as a city planner? She juggled her mail route and antique mall—and exhibited that rare combination of common sense and good ideas.

"Ultimately, the town must decide what it wants to be," said Becca, owner of the flower and gift shop who had done such a spectacular job on my wedding. "Will we be quaint and charming, the way tourists want, or another little southern town that dried up?"

"I'd say it's every man for himself at this point," a businessman grumbled.

"I'm not going to jump through hoops to please some bureaucrat," said the auto repair guy.

"Depends on how much money that bureaucrat has," Jerry said with a laugh, nudging the fellow next to him.

"We also need to consider environmental issues," I said.

The word environmental might as well have been a bomb going off.

Nearly everyone in the room started talking at once, and I was tempted to get under the table. "Green is an old town.When buildings are rebuilt, we might as well take advantage of new technology," I said. "We can become a more energy efficient town and live up to our name. Green will be green."

"Green will be in the red," the banker said. "Do you know how expensive all that newfangled low-energy stuff is? That tornado might as well have wiped us right off the map if that's the direction we go."

"What do you mean we're an old town?" another business owner asked. "If you felt that way, why did you fight to keep the newspaper? You could have left it a family business with people who appreciate Green."

"I love Green," I said and took a breath to continue, but noticed Rose slightly shaking her head.

"We won't figure this out today," Rose said. "We need to commit to work together, not fight."

While we talked, Linda took notes and asked the occasional follow-up question. I noticed Gina, sitting away from the table, also scribbling away.

"You're not planning to put this in the paper, are you?" the banker asked.

"Yes, sir, I expect we will," Linda said, looking at me with a question in her eyes.

"Who is that woman over there?" he asked. "We didn't invite out-of-towners to this meeting."

"This is my former colleague, Gina Stonecash, from Washington," I said. "She's done a fine job in getting the word about Green out around the country."

"Thank you for that," Pastor Mali said.

"These meetings are off-the-record," Jerry said. "We don't need this spread around till the time is right."

"The time is right, if you ask me," Rose said. "People need to know what they're up against."

"Let people do whatever they want, wherever they want," the banker said. "Otherwise, by the time the highway bypass is finished, there won't be anything to bypass."

"We will work together to rebuild," Mayor Eva said. "Or we will watch Green fall apart."

"I've wasted too much time in this meeting," one business owner said. "I have real work to do."

"Me too," said another.

Before I could say "adjourned," most of the crowd had scattered.

"Lois, do you have a few minutes for an interview?" Gina asked. "I'd like to do a piece on the battle to rebuild and how the newspaper is a community leader."

I groaned. "Gina—"

She had the look I had used on sources many times in the past. One way or the other, a story would be written. Maybe I could do damage control.

"Sure," I said. "I'll meet you in the newsroom in ten minutes."

As she walked out, I tugged on one of the heavy chairs and sat down next to the mayor who was text messaging and going through e-mail on her phone.

"I think we gave the fine leaders of Green a little too much credit, Eva, when we decided it was time for recovery."

"We need to recover all right," Linda said, walking out of the room. "From this meeting."

Right then I remembered that for the first time since the group had begun, we had neglected to open with a prayer.