24.
***
Meridian was all that it had promised to be in those opening hours: warm and inviting and a place where Lynette instantly felt at home. True to Scott's prediction, after the men of the neighborhood moved her boxes in - they then helped her position all her furniture and were done and gone by three in the morning - she was awakened the next morning by the neighborhood "Welcoming Committee." The Welcoming Committee was a group of six women who showed up at her house with a breakfast of donuts and scones and who insisted on coming in to answer any and all questions that Lynette had about Meridian.
Lynette let them in with some sense of worry. Kevin did not tend to react well to strangers, and especially not to large groups of them. And more than that, she knew that most strangers did not react well to Kevin. So when he ambled out in the morning, looking at the floor and refusing to speak a word, then bolted back into his room when he realized that there were strangers in the house, Lynette was prepared to lose all of her new "friends."
Surprisingly, however, not a one of them so much as blinked. Instead, one of the ladies - Gil's wife, a woman named Brenda who was equal in size and heart to her husband - looked her straight in the eye and said without hesitation, "Autism or Asperger's?"
Lynette was shocked, and Brenda laughed, a great, deep belly laugh that started at her toes and climbed up her legs and through her body until when it finally emerged it was so loud and joyous that it sounded like she was laughing at the funniest joke ever heard. It was such a loud laugh that Lynette would have worried that she was being made fun of if she couldn't see that the woman clearly had nothing but good feelings in her heart.
"Girl, you're in Mormon country now. We raise lots of kids and if we're not related to someone with a developmental disability, we've probably watched someone with one in one of our congregations. We have a young boy with Asperger's in our ward - that's what we call the congregations, we call them wards - and a little girl with autism. I know, I know," she continued without so much as pausing for breath, "girls with autism are rare, but we have one, the most darling little girl named Emma Kathleen Johnson, you'll meet her sooner or later I'm sure, she and her family just live about five houses down, you'll be right at home here, don't you worry..." and Brenda prattled on and on and on and spoke so fast and in such a friendly manner that Lynette barely noticed it when the woman moved her vast girth into Kevin's room, knocked quietly on the door and went in.
Lynette started to tell her not to bother, but before she could Brenda was kneeling in front of Kevin, not looking directly at him - a sure sign that she had, in fact, had experience dealing with autistic children - but rather talking to the side of him, as though his invisible twin stood right next to him. "Kevin, honey," she said, "I'm Auntie Brenda, and I know you probably don't much want to chat with me, but I'm your friend, and anything you need I'll be sure to help you with, okay?" And then, instead of engulfing Kevin in a huge, grandmotherly hug the way Lynette expected the woman to do, she had merely stood and left, again seeming to know intuitively that Kevin would not take well to the tactile sensation of a Brenda-sized embrace.
It was one of the best interactions that Lynette had ever experienced between her son and a stranger. It was so effective in fact, that Kevin actually came out of his room not five minutes later, sat down with his computer, and began typing as though the Welcoming Committee were not present at all.
Lynette was a bit worried when she heard the word "Mormon," thinking that perhaps these women had all come over in some kind of effort to convert her on her first day in Meridian, but aside from Brenda's first mention of it - and the fact that four of the six members of the Welcoming Committee nodded in assent when Brenda said that they were in Mormon country - no one else mentioned anything church related or tried to entice her to be baptized. No, that wasn't quite true. They did ask what Lynette's religion was, but when she told them they didn't pronounce hellfire and brimstone as her fate, but instead just told her where the nearest churches were of that denomination, and that was the last of it.
Gil and Brenda quickly became nearly constant figures around her house...along with their eight children. At first she thought that would overwhelm Kevin, but he seemed to enjoy the sense of rambunctious fun that the kids - who ranged in age from fourteen to three - brought with them whenever they came to visit. Lynette took to keeping a store of Oreos in stock for when "the horde," as Brenda jokingly called her brood, descended on her house.
"What about the man who called your husbands?" asked Lynette shyly during one of the rare breaks in Brenda's machine-gun quick conversational pattern.
"What, Brad?" asked one of the women, Jonelle, who was cut of the same cloth as Brenda and was clearly Brad's wife. "He farts too much and he cusses when he thinks I'm not listening, but other than that he's okay."
"No, you silly nit," said Brenda with a roll of her eyes. "She's talking about...Scott."
There was a pause in the conversation then, as though everyone was gathering their thoughts to tell her something important.
"He's quite something," Jonelle finally managed. "Quite something."
"Does he live on this street?" asked Lynette.
"No, dearie," said Brenda, patting her hand as though delivering bad news. "He lives a good three or four miles away."
"Then what was he doing driving around at one a.m. last night?" asked Lynette, feeling once again the familiar cold grip of fear in her belly. She had no need to escape from a supernatural fiend into the clutches of a natural one who was no less dangerous, and the fact that Scott was wandering around in the middle of the night did not speak well for his normalcy.
The women of the group again fell silent before Brenda, clearly their de facto leader, spoke again. "Probably just out wandering, poor dear."
"Wandering?" said Lynette.
"No one knows -" began Jonelle, speaking almost in a ghost-around-the-campfire voice.
"Oh, hush," Brenda said, cutting off her sister-in-law. "We know full well about him. Just not the details, that's all." She focused her gaze back on Lynette, and said, "He lost his family some years back. No one quite knows how, but -"
"We do too know how," said another one of the women. "They were killed. Katie looked it up on the internet."
"Hush, Sarah," said Brenda, shushing the woman just as she had done to Jonelle. "Point is that he hasn't seen fit to tell anyone himself, so what the internet says about him is gossip and untrue as far as I'm concerned, until such time as he decides to talk about it to our faces."
"The internet said he was a hero," said the woman, Sarah, a bit petulantly as though she didn't like the rebuke but accepted the justice of it.
"Well, that much I'd believe," said Brenda. Turning back to Lynette, she continued, "He's a good man, that much is sure. And if you're worried about what he was doing in your neck of the woods in the middle of the night, don't be. Scott Cowley is just that: meek as a choir boy. And a good man. We helped him move into his house about seven or eight years ago, and you could just tell within a few seconds."
Lynette felt a cool wash of relief flow through her. Thank goodness, she thought.
But out loud she said, "You said he was wandering?"
"He does that," said Brenda. "He can't sleep, I don't think. Nightmares or some such. So he spends a lot of time at night, just driving around. I asked him about it once and he said it relaxes him. So the fact that he was near when you pulled up was just coincidence, pure and simple. And the fact that he went and got Gil and the others rounded up to help you move in was just what others did to him when he arrived, so I'm sure he was just paying it forward, so to speak."
And that was the end of that. Almost. Because Lynette got the feeling that, given the chance, half the women in the group would have left their own husbands to be with Scott Cowley, and the other half would have at the very least asked him to date their daughters. She filed the information away in her mind. Hard to believe that someone so scarred of visage could be so tender of thought and heart.
But then, she thought, look at Kevin. Most people would dismiss him as being of less value than other human beings. There were even - and she shuddered at the thought - people who advocated for genetic testing, and abortions of any and all people who showed genetic markers of any kind of mental defect. Such people had no idea what they were missing. Kevin was trouble sometimes, he was hard to raise, he took a lot of patience, it was true. But he was also special, sweet, and had a heart that - when you managed to find a way through to it - was as pure as any "normal" person's, and more.
As though he could hear her thoughts, that first morning Kevin had come over and held out his laptop. A single word, "Breakfast," told her that it was time to bid goodbye to Brenda and Jonelle and Sarah and the other women, but as they left they all assured her that they would be back soon to make sure that she had settled in all right.
Lynette thanked them, and was truly glad that she had already made some friends on her very first day in the new place. But she also said goodbye with a bit of a sense of misgiving. Because while all the women she had met were wonderful -with the possible exception of Sarah, who had seemed to be a bit of a busy-body - none of them was really the person she wanted to have over that morning.
In spite of herself, Lynette found herself thinking of a scarred face, and light blue eyes. Of a man so broken hearted that he could not sleep for loss of his family, but so good hearted that he could not pass by a moving van without helping, even in the middle of the night.
She and Kevin said their prayers, and she said one thing that she had never before said, one thing that she never thought she would have said in the aftermath of Robbie's loss.
"Dear God," she said. "Thank you for this day. Thank you for our provender. And thank you for the nice man named Scott, and please bless us that he will again come to visit us."
She finished the prayer.
Kevin held out his keyboard.
He had typed, "Amen."
***