Monday, Monday: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook Page B

stopped her from going, it would not be her arm. It would not be a crazy guy up in a tower.
    One series of pictures had the caption “Softhearted city girls learn to kill chickens for their dinner.” She wasn’t thrilled by the look of the knife whacking the head off or the picture of the volunteer nursing a man with leprosy by coating his arm in hot wax. But she could do those things. She could do all of that.
    She studied all the pictures. Two guys were herding sheep in Bolivia, and she liked the way they looked. In Gabon, volunteers stood talking with Albert Schweitzer at his jungle hospital. Schweitzer wore a white safari hat and a bow tie. In Sarawak, a volunteer wore a headdress and loincloth, and his leg was painted to look like a tattoo. His glasses reminded Shelly of Wyatt Calvert’s. He was tall like Wyatt, too. In another picture a girl sailed a canoe in the Indian Ocean. The sail was made of patchwork, and the sun shone through it romantically.
    Shelly turned back to the guys and the sheep in Bolivia. She wondered if guys like that would have any interest in her now, with her arm and her breast as they were. She would look better with time. But how much better? The doctor had been vague about that.
    She was still looking at the guys herding the sheep when the phone rang in the kitchen, and she found herself talking to an old boyfriend from junior high, who was calling from Texas Tech. “I just found out that you were one of the people that got shot,” he said. “My mom told me.”
    “I’m okay,” she told him. She was tired of talking to people who couldn’t really understand. “What about you? How’s Tech?”
    They talked awhile, but even before she hung up, she felt lonely. No one she knew had any idea what it was like to have a bullet through your breast and your arm, and she didn’t want to explain. Wyatt Calvert and Jack Stone were the only people who could ever understand what it was like out there on the plaza.
    She got Wyatt’s number out of a drawer and stood looking at it, wondering what he would say if she called him. She wasn’t sure what his wife would feel about that. At last she dialed the operator and asked to make a person-to-person call to Wyatt Calvert in Austin. His phone rang and rang, and Shelly waited, wrapping the phone cord around the puffy fingers ballooning from the cast. Finally, a woman answered. “Hello?” She sounded distracted. Her voice was muffled by the hissing long-distance, and Shelly heard music and voices in the background. “I have a call for Wyatt Calvert from Shelly Maddox in Lockhart,” the operator said.
    Shelly noticed a pause, and then the woman dropped her voice and whispered to someone, “It’s Shelly Maddox from Lockhart.”
    Wyatt’s voice came on the line. “This is Wyatt.”
    When the operator connected them, Wyatt said, “Hey, I’m glad you called. How are you? How’s your arm?”
    “It’s all right. Is this a bad time? It sounds like you have people there.”
    “It’s not a bad time at all; it’s just hard for me to hear. My wife’s having a party for some girls from her sorority, so it’s pretty loud. Are you feeling any better?”
    “Much better.”
    “And I guess you’re still in the cast?”
    “For a couple more weeks,” Shelly told him. “Unless I chew my arm off first.”
    The background chatter grew louder above “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. “What did you say?” Wyatt asked. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you. They’re in the other room, but they’ve got the radio turned way up.”
    “I have to wear the cast for a couple more weeks,” she said.
    “Will you be coming back to school?”
    “I plan to, but I don’t know when. The doctor told my mom I shouldn’t go back this year. I will if I can, but my dad doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”
    “Well, he’s the sheriff,” Wyatt said.
    “Of Lockhart. Not of me.”
    “But maybe you should take it easy and just rest up for a