“My God, are you psychic?”

“For Pete’s sake, have you no experience at all?” She sat cross-legged on her bed and offered up her bowl of popcorn. He perched on the end of the bed.

“Actually, I do have experience, I’m just not interested in Gloria.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Is she ugly?”

“She’s pretty,” he said. “And nice. But she just doesn’t start my engine, if you get my drift.”

“Noah, be careful here. Don’t tell me more than I want to know.”

“She’s boring,” he said. “Nice, pretty, real determined and boring. She’s exactly the kind of woman people try to fix me up with—proper and polite. I don’t know what it is about being a minister, it’s like people don’t want me to get too excited. And also, like they think it’s good résumé material for a woman to land a preacher. Or something. I don’t get it.”

“Good night, Nellie.” She rolled her eyes. “Noah, I’m not sure it’s the minister thing that makes you attractive. You’re actually kind of cute.”

His eyes widened briefly. “I am?” he asked, though kinda cute was not exactly what a man was looking for by way of praise.

“Mmm-hmm. You kind of make a girl want to shave above the knees. That was a compliment by the way.”

“Is that a big deal? Shaving above the knees?” he stupidly asked.

She laughed. “Pardner, for my last job I had to shave above the—”

“Stop,” he ordered. And she laughed some more. He helped himself to a handful of popcorn.

“One minute you want to hear all about it, then it offends your little sensibilities,” she teased.

“They’re not little,” he said, opening his mouth and dropping popcorn inside. “Good popcorn,” he said. “Is this microwave stuff?”

“Yup, but not bad. I love popcorn. Sometimes my gramma and I had popcorn for dinner.”

“Really?” he asked. “Not real nutritious. I mean, as a meal.”

“Noah, we were poor. There were times we ran a little low. But we were happy. If my gramma was worried, it didn’t show. We used to giggle about ketchup sandwiches. Pickle and peanut butter sandwiches. Popcorn or rice and tomatoes.”

“Rice and tomatoes?”

“A couple cups of rice, a can of stewed tomatoes, voila. Another favorite for the end of the month was soft-boiled eggs on fried potatoes. Didn’t you ever have things like that when you were a kid?”

Not while growing up, he hadn’t. “There were times we had pretty simple dinners, but…” His voice trailed off.

Ellie grabbed a handful of popcorn and shoved it into her mouth. “What was your growing up like?”

He took a deep breath. “Ellie, I didn’t grow up poor. I grew up in a big house—practically a mansion. My father was a pretty famous preacher—he was on television. He still is—famous and on television. He was ten years younger than my mother. She inherited money, so before my father made his in the ministry, she had hers. I think it’s fair to say she made him what he is.”

“No shit,” she said, wide eyed, fascinated. “Oops.”

“Don’t worry about it—I’m getting used to it. I’m an only child, my mother is dead and my father and I don’t get along. But there was always plenty of money while I was growing up.”

“Well, there you go,” she said. “Money isn’t the answer.”

“No shit,” Noah said.

Ellie might’ve grinned if Noah didn’t look so serious. “So, did you always know you were going to be a minister?” she asked.

“Absolutely not. I was going to be anything but a minister. I wasn’t about to follow in my father’s footsteps—for a religious man, he sure had his failings. But while I was looking for some answers to questions I’d had since I was about five years old, I ended up studying religion, among other things. Go figure. I discovered parts of the ministry that had nothing to do with being on television or being famous that appealed to me in a very personal way. It took me a really long time to get there, though.”

“How long?”

“I was a student forever, Ellie. I have two undergrad degrees and two master’s.”

“Wow. And I didn’t even finish high school. Well, I got my GED later. So when did you get there? As you put it.”

He chewed thoughtfully. “This really is good popcorn. I could eat this for dinner.”

“Don’t get distracted, Noah,” she said. “When did you discover you were going to be a minister?”

“Oh, that. I was going to teach and counsel and study. Maybe get a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. I like counseling—at least some kinds. But all along I’d been doing some community service and I realized I was happiest when I was just being a good neighbor. When I was helping out, lending a hand, you know. And a minister’s role is complicated, but a lot of it is helping out, acting as spiritual support. It’s like a relay race, Ellie. The baton is filled with faith and knowledge and good works—like community service, food for the hungry, food for the soul, and as it’s passed to me, I can run with it to the next person, who can run with it to—” He stopped to laugh and shake his head. “That’s the part I gravitated to. I have a mentor professor, George. I landed in the seminary because he couldn’t stay out of my business and convinced me it would make me happy.”

“So you just went along with his idea?” she asked.

“Not really. It was more than that.”

“Well, for Pete’s sake,” she said, annoyed. “What more?”

He thought for a minute, chewing his popcorn. “It was about God,” he said. “Whenever I called out to him, he answered. Wasn’t always the answer I wanted, but there was always an answer. I ignored that as long as I could.”

She tilted her head in thought. “Now, that’s a good enough reason,” she said. Then she took one of his hands and pulled it toward her. “But these are not the hands of a preacher.” She ran her fingers over the calluses on his palms and fingers, then a long fingernail over a couple of thin scars on his forearm. “How did you get so rough? So messed up?”

“I worked on the docks and on fishing boats and markets in Seattle from the time I was eighteen till I went into the seminary a few years ago. I worked my way through college that way, I wanted to get as far away from my father and his lifestyle as I could. I got most of these scars the first year or two. It was tough, physical work.” He grinned. “I loved it, but I wasn’t born into it like a lot of the men I worked with. It took me a while to learn, and I got hooked, grappled, cut and scraped a lot.”

“Then why aren’t you still there?”

He shrugged. “It was time to move on. Past time—I’m thirty-five.”

She ate more popcorn. Then she thoughtfully said, “You can stop being ashamed of growing up rich now.” When he looked at her in shocked surprise, she said, “If I’m not ashamed of growing up poor, why should you be ashamed of growing up rich? I think it’s kind of cool. You shouldn’t let that hold you back.” And then she smiled at him.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Were you lonely growing up?”

“Growing up? Oh, hell no. I probably had too many friends. Of course, they were mostly friends in the same boat as me—not a dime to spare, not going anyplace, couldn’t even stay in school. But between my gramma and friends, I got by fine. Later, after I was a single mom with two jobs and my gramma gone, I was lonely all the time, but I was almost never alone. Growing up, I had friends. I always envied the girls who had good grades, cool clothes, went to lots of parties and stuff, but I wasn’t ever lonely.”

“Didn’t all those friends of yours have parties?”

She smiled blandly. “No, Noah. We hung out. Usually around a convenience store with a big parking lot.”

“You couldn’t get good grades?” he asked.

“Well, sometimes I did okay, but I’ve had at least one job at a time since I was fourteen. Full-time babysitting, housecleaning, waitressing, you name it. I worked when I was pregnant and I worked when the babies were small and my gramma watched them. Until she died. But I’ve always worked—from right after school till late at night and then on weekends. There wasn’t a lot of time to hit the books, know what I mean?”

He did know, but the difference was, he hadn’t been the mother of two children when he’d been working and studying. “Ellie, you’re smart,” he said. “You’re intuitive. You have common sense. I think you could do anything.”

She laughed at him. “I have done anything, remember?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, grinning back. “And now you’re working for a church. God must be shaking in his boots.”

“No doubt.”

“Listen, I’d better get going. I’ll see you in the morning.” He stood up. “So, can I come with you and the kids on Saturday?”

“I’ll think about it. But you have to promise to behave.”

“Thanks. That’ll give me something to look forward to.”

He stood in the open door and she held it a moment. “Noah? When did you stop having a relationship with your father?”

“Oh, jeez,” he said, dropping his chin. “We haven’t gotten along since I was a kid. He was continually disappointed in me.”

“But when, Noah? When did you give up?”

He looked at her steadily, peering into her large eyes. How did she know the things she knew? Could her grandmother have taught her so much about instinct? Or was she just plain an old soul? “When he didn’t come to my wife’s funeral,” he said.

And before she could respond, he walked down the stairs and away into the night.

As Noah walked away from Ellie’s apartment, he thought, that was wrong, the way that happened. That’s not the way you tell a friend about your past. And he realized suddenly, Ellie had become his friend. When you ask someone if you can join them for their very limited time with their children, that’s about friendship.

Yes, she was a friend now. She trusted him with her personal challenges, even if they might be embarrassing. But that was what was odd and admirable about Ellie—she might not want the town to know the details of her past, but she had no shame; she didn’t waste her energy on it. For such a young woman, she was comfortable in her own skin. And then he realized with a shock of sudden clarity, she didn’t treat him like a minister. She treated him like a friend. A regular man.

Too often, people approached him as someone whose approval they needed, and that was so far from his role. It not only made him uncomfortable, it created a barrier between him and friendship. And he didn’t want only friends in the clergy. Ellie? She didn’t much care if he approved of her. He loved that about her.

The only thing that seemed to rattle her were issues with her kids—their welfare and safety.

Noah, however, had enough shame for both of them. What kind of fool laments his sad childhood to someone who ate popcorn for dinner and slept beside her grandmother on a sofa bed her entire life? Or how about the way he dropped that bomb about Merry’s death? Ellie lost her boyfriend in an accident when she was a kid herself, a poor kid who was expecting a baby. She must have been devastated and terrified. But she somehow kept on trucking, determined. Hercules Baldwin. He would have to apologize to her in the morning.

He was behind his desk in his office the next morning when he heard the backdoor open. Lucy bolted for the door to greet Ellie. When he saw her in the doorway, he said, “I’m sorry, Ellie.”