Endless Chain by Emilie Richards Page B

couldn’t care for them or pay the vet bills, and planned to have them put down. Bed was abused by local boys who had nothing better to do last summer. I barely rescued her in time.”
    “Lucky dogs, then.” She looked up from petting Bed. “Do you rescue everything?”
    “It’s gotten me in trouble.”
    She wondered what kind of trouble. She got to her feet, and so did he. One by one he let the dogs go, and they came to her to be petted, too. She ruffled their ears, not even needing to stoop.
    “You’re okay?” he asked.
    “I’m okay.” And she was. The dogs were no longer strangers.
    “I’ll just get coffee going.”
    She’d had two cups already that morning. She shouldn’t have more, but she ignored her own silent advice. “Do you need help?”
    “You can keep me company if you’d like.”
    She followed him into the kitchen, where a gentle breeze rattled the plantation shutters on double windows. The walls were a rich terra-cotta color, but the items on the walls were most interesting. “Lunch boxes?”
    He turned from retrieving the coffeemaker from a cabinet. Clearly his addiction to caffeine was not as pronounced as hers. “What lunch boxes?” he asked with a smile.
    The one wall in the room that didn’t hold cabinets had been covered with shelves. She estimated fifty lunch boxes were on display. “There are more lunch boxes here than in a school cafeteria.”
    “I have even more.”
    “More?”
    He opened a new can of coffee. She recognized the familiar figures of Juan Valdez and his faithful mule. Even if Sam wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, at least he bought Colombian.
    “I probably have a hundred lunch boxes.” He glanced at her, possibly to see if she was laughing yet.
    “It’s a slice of popular culture.” She walked closer to examine some of the collection. “The Flintstones. Scooby Doo. Superman.” She leaned closer to the familiar caped figure. “That one is older than the others.”
    “One of my favorites.”
    “They make your kitchen come alive.”
    “Thank you. I was waiting for you to ask me why I have them.”
    She cocked her head. “I can only assume you eat lunch often.”
    He fished through several drawers before he came up with a measuring spoon and began to scoop grounds into the filter.
    “My mother and father worked hard for everything they had. There were three children, me, and my brother and sister, Mark and Rachel. We had everything we needed, but if we wanted something our parents saw as a luxury, we never got it. Lunch boxes were a luxury.”
    He was telling the story without a trace of self-pity. She realized she was smiling.
    He went on. “One day, when we were all grown up, Mark, Rachel and I were sitting in a restaurant trying to top each other with terrible stories of our childhood.” He went to the sink to fill the pot with water. “There were no terrible stories, but there were two empty bottles of good Merlot on the table, which made the exercise worthy. I told them my worst memory was the year I had to take my lunch to school wrapped in newspaper, because Mom decided newspaper was cheaper than buying lunch bags.”
    “And this reminded you to go out and buy a hundred lunch boxes?”
    “No, but for Christmas Mark and Rachel each bought me one. In one fell swoop I got Pac-Man and The Empire Strikes Back. ” He glanced at her and smiled a little. “You have no idea how badly I wanted Pac-Man when I was in first grade.”
    He poured the water into the coffeemaker and replaced the pot before he turned it on. “The joke spread. Pretty soon everybody was giving me lunch boxes. I still get them. I’d be buried in them, except that I use them as prizes in Sunday school.”
    She was entranced. “Prizes?”
    “Every year we have a lunch contest on the last Sunday in June. All the children bring the strangest lunch they can think of. But it has to be something they’ll eat. Six winners get their choice of lunch boxes, at least the ones I have