A Light in the Window

The second installment in Jan Karon's Mitford Years series follows Father Timothy Kavanagh, the sixty-one-year-old Episcopal rector of Lord's Chapel and lifelong bachelor, as he returns to the small mountain village of Mitford after a summer in Ireland. His household includes Dooley Barlowe, a twelve-year-old boy he took in the previous year; Puny Bradshaw, his devoted house help; and Barnabas, his large black dog.

Almost immediately, Father Tim faces the romantic pursuit of Edith Mallory, a wealthy, recently widowed parishioner who deploys casseroles, sherry, and physical advances to win his attention. His church secretary, Emma Newland, warns him repeatedly, but Edith corners him again and again, at one point trapping him overnight at her house during a rainstorm.

Meanwhile, Father Tim struggles to connect with his next-door neighbor, Cynthia Coppersmith, a children's book author and illustrator in her fifties whose warmth and candor have been quietly drawing him toward love. Their schedules never align, his phone calls go unanswered, and when Cynthia spots him stepping out of Edith's car at dawn, she slams her door without a word. Before he can explain, a moving van appears at her house. Cynthia has taken her editor's apartment in New York to finish illustrations under a pressing deadline.

Father Tim is devastated. He berates himself for never reading her books, never asking about her life, and treating her as though she barely existed. He confides in Homeless Hobbes, a friend who lives along Little Mitford Creek, admitting simply, "It's a woman."

During this period, construction begins on Hope House, a nursing home funded by Miss Sadie Baxter, the village's elderly benefactress. The project is overseen by Buck Leeper, an abrasive job superintendent with a volatile temper. Separately, Miss Sadie discovers a birth certificate among her late mother's belongings revealing that her mother had an illegitimate daughter before her marriage. When Father Tim takes Miss Sadie to visit Olivia Davenport, a young heart-transplant recipient romantically involved with Hoppy Harper, Father Tim's doctor and close friend, Olivia shares the story of her own grandmother's illegitimate birth and produces a red velvet child's coat that Miss Sadie recognizes. The women realize they are related: Olivia is Miss Sadie's grand-niece.

Father Tim eventually finds Cynthia's white cat, Violet, on his windowsill. He catches the cat and races through the hedge, but Cynthia takes Violet and shuts the door in his face. Furious and desperate, he calls and says, "I'm coming over to see you. Pray for me." In her studio, they have a heated exchange. She accuses him of ignoring her and of breaking his promise to consider going steady. He explains the Edith incident and his many failed attempts to reach her. They reconcile, weeping. He asks her to go steady, and she says yes.

Cynthia returns to New York, and they sustain their relationship through letters and phone calls. Their correspondence grows increasingly tender, with Father Tim calling her "my dearest" for the first time in his life. She invites him to visit, but he refuses, paralyzed by his fear of flying and large cities. When he calls her apartment one evening, a man answers, saying Cynthia is getting dressed. Father Tim hangs up without identifying himself, consumed by jealousy.

A historic blizzard buries Mitford. Power fails, and Father Tim and Dooley survive by their study fireplace. On Christmas night, Cynthia reaches him by phone and explains the man was James McNeely, her editor and friend, who had briefly returned to his own apartment. They exchange "I love you" for the first time.

Through the long winter, their letters deepen. She writes of discovering a vast, hidden place within him that has scarcely been visited by anyone. He reveals painful memories of his cold father. She assures him they share the same ideal of waiting for intimacy within marriage.

Miss Sadie proposes using her remaining inheritance to send Dooley to a boarding school that can nurture his dream of becoming a veterinarian. Father Tim resists because he dreads sending Dooley away but recognizes the opportunity.

When Cynthia calls in tears, exhausted from overwork and furious that Father Tim will not visit, he makes a sudden decision and flies to New York, only to learn that she flew to Mitford that very morning to surprise him. He returns home, and they embrace on her staircase. She tells him, "I'm not going to ask you to marry me. You'll have to do the thing yourself, my dearest." He gives her his mother's amethyst brooch with pearls before she returns to New York.

A tall, red-haired woman appears on Father Tim's doorstep, introducing herself as Cousin Meg Patrick from Sligo. She moves into the guest room, locks the door, and types on a manual typewriter through the night, claiming to be writing about descendants of the Irish Potato Famine.

A misunderstanding widens the rift between Father Tim and Cynthia. Roses arrive at his office, and he assumes they are from Cynthia, calling to thank her effusively. She says coldly that she did not send them. The card reveals they are from Edith, expressing gratitude for his prayers about a benign lump.

The community faces upheaval when Edith raises the rent on the building housing the Main Street Grill, the restaurant run by Percy Mosely that serves as the village's social hub, beyond what Percy can afford. Father Tim's friends pressure him to intervene, but his negotiations fail. On the final night of packing at the Grill, Father Tim discovers the building's floor joists are rotten and dangerous. He and Ron Malcolm, his retired-contractor friend and building-committee chairman, confront Edith with the evidence. Because the building must be condemned for repairs, the dress shop she planned to install cannot move in. Father Tim negotiates a five-year lease with a modest rent increase, and Edith reluctantly agrees.

Obeying a persistent inner prompting, Father Tim visits Buck Leeper at his cottage. Buck, after violent outbursts, confesses the secret he has carried since he was seventeen: He put his younger brother in the cab of a backhoe on a rain-soaked job site, the machine pitched into a hole, and the boy was killed. Father Tim sits through the storm of rage and grief, praying silently.

Soon after, Dooley and his best friend Tommy sneak onto the Hope House lumber pile. Tommy falls, suffering a severe leg gash and a head injury. Father Tim is consumed with guilt for failing to enforce Buck's earlier warning to keep children off the site. Tommy eventually recovers, and the experience draws both Buck and Dooley into quieter, more reflective versions of themselves.

Puny uses a key that Meg dropped on the landing to open the guest room and discovers chaos: garbage, soiled clothing, obscene manuscript pages, and the amethyst brooch that had gone missing from Father Tim's dresser. Father Tim orders Meg out and later learns she is a fraud who travels from household to household posing as a long-lost relative.

June arrives in a rush. Father Tim gives Puny away at her wedding. Bishop Stuart Cullen confirms both Dooley and Cynthia at Lord's Chapel. Olivia and Hoppy Harper marry, and Miss Sadie hosts their reception in the restored ballroom of Fernbank, her grand estate. Father Tim has arranged for Roberto, the grandson of the Italian artist who painted the ballroom's angel ceiling as a boy, to fly from Florence. When Roberto delivers his grandfather's message across nearly eighty years, Tempo è denaro! (Time is money), the three Italian words young Sadie had memorized as a child, she laughs as no one has ever seen her laugh.

On his sixty-second birthday, Father Tim jogs to the highest point in Mitford and watches the sunset. He remembers a green marble he treasured as a boy but lost through carelessness and realizes he has treated Cynthia the same way. The weight lifts from his heart. He runs home and finds Cynthia standing at his door, holding it open. He senses he has arrived at a destination he has been running toward all his life.

The following Sunday, the Lord's Chapel bulletin publishes the banns of marriage, the church's formal announcement of an intended union, between Cynthia Coppersmith and Father Timothy Kavanagh.