“Minnie Hamilton.” I reached out to shake her hand. “Assistant director at the library, and bookmobile librarian. Nice to meet you.”

“You’re Minnie!” She looked, I was pleased to see, delighted. “How is it I’ve never met you?”

“Believe me, it took a lot of effort on my part,” Hal said. “Tabitha, this is Minnie. Minnie, this is my wife, Tabitha.”

Tabitha’s hair was a silky and bouncing white and her eyes were the bluest I’ve even seen. She had an open face that looked designed to be happy, and I found myself smiling at her just because she was smiling.

“How long have you been married?” I asked, trying not to sound amazed. Maybe opposites attract, but picturing the morose Hal and the sweet Tabitha as lifelong companions required more imagination that I had in me.

“Forty-three years,” Tabitha said, smiling and patting Hal’s hand fondly. “More than four decades of marital stress, discord, and strife. At least for me. Him, who knows? It’s not as if he ever talks to me about his feelings. But that works out, because I get to make my own assumptions about what he thinks and can act accordingly.”

I decided I liked Hal’s wife very much.

Hal himself was paying no attention to the two of us, because he was pulling out a vibrating cell phone. “Good morning, Sheriff,” he said, and got up to take the call outside.

“And now with him out of the way,” Tabitha said comfortably, “we can have a nice talk.”

I laughed. “Did you engineer that call?”

“Not this time,” she said. “But I know what will happen. He’ll talk to Kit for thirty seconds, come back in here, and say he has to go; then he’ll ask if I can make my own way home. He’ll barely listen to my response, because I can always get home, and he’ll hurry away, and I will never know why.”

“Sorry about that.” Hal was standing over us. “I have to go. Can you get a ride home?”

“Of course, dear,” Tabitha said, but he was already gone.

The two of us watched him cross the room and bang out the front door. I turned to face Tabitha. “You were wrong. That was only twenty seconds.”

We laughed so hard the other patrons turned their heads, including Bill D’Arcy, who famously didn’t even notice the stir in the restaurant last summer when the decade’s hottest movie star had stopped in for a cinnamon roll.

“Hal has told me a lot about you,” Tabitha said, wiping her eyes with a napkin. “But he never once said you were funny.”

“Didn’t want me to upstage him, probably.”