Angels Unaware

flirted outrageously with him and lacked the decency to try to hide it. Being short, she’d look up at him with those China-blue eyes in the most adoring way, and he’d beam down at her, showing his dimples. It was all I could do to keep food down. Needless to say, he never looked at me like that. I was just as tall as him and could look him in the eye, and it’s a rare man who can stand that. Once, when Caroline was trying to reach something high in the cupboard, she apologized for her limitations, then coyly asked Luca to retrieve it for her. Her apology was insincere, I knew, because Caroline enjoyed being small. It made it easier to get people to do things for her. Luca shrugged off her apology and said that there was an old Eye-talian saying: “Tall girls are only good for picking fruit.” When he turned and saw that I had heard, he blushed and turned away.
I put up with this throughout the long summer, but I knew, come autumn, I’d have my revenge when classes started, and Galen highschoolers got a look at this foreign boy. They’d take him down a notch or two.
But it never happened. Luca’s classmates were standoffish instead of hostile, and even that turned quickly to a warm indifference and then to aloof affection. Through Caroline, who soaked up gossip like a sponge, I learned that just about all the girls in Galen thought Luca was good looking, that the boys liked him because he was good at games, and even the teachers liked him because he was so damned smart with books and could outshine almost all the natives. And it was this ability to make people like him that, more than anything else, settled my determination to rid myself and my household of his presence forever.
Things changed somehow at the inn after he came, and try as I might, they wouldn’t change back. Every night at dinner, Jewel would ask Luca and the girls about the events of the school day. Luca would proceed to regale them with stories of very ordinary everyday things, yet he managed to make them seem more interesting than they were, and everyone would laugh and beg him to tell more. Everyone but me.
Life was a serious business and having a court jester in residence didn’t change that. It wasn’t that I wanted dinner to be grave, but I would have liked to talk about what we should plant that year, or if we should plant anything at all in view of all my past failures to coax anything out of our rocky dirt. I wanted to talk about how we could make more money and whether it would be worth it to get a new wood stove. But the dinner conversation never got more serious than talk about how Miss Beehall’s bloomers showed when she bent down to pick up chalk.
Why everybody was so willing to provide an audience to his bragging, I had no idea. Maybe he was smart—almost smart as Jolene, maybe even smarter in his own language—but did he have to be such a know-it-all? When he first went to school, I’d decided to say yes when he asked me for help with his homework. I was a year his senior, after all. But he never asked. In fact, sometimes he used English words that I didn’t understand. So I was reduced to using words peculiar to Galen, so he wouldn’t understand. But even that satisfaction was short-lived. He was as quick to pick up Galen-talk as he’d been to learn French, German, and Spanish. I couldn’t trust a boy who spoke five languages. It just wasn’t natural, and it was just one more thing about him that kept me from liking him.
Then in the spring, I finally found someone who didn’t like Luca. His name was Joseph Gibbet and he stayed with us only one night on his way to New Hampshire. Board was always included with a room at the Hospitality Inn and so we sat down to dinner together. Our guest ate like a hog and didn’t say a word until he’d finished his dinner. But then he leaned back and lit a pipe and waxed playful. He said he was headed to New Hampshire, because he had found work there and dared us to guess his livelihood. He bet us a dollar that we’d never be able to guess, which set us all to pondering. Clearly, he wasn’t a coal miner or a railroad man. We demanded hints, and he cheerfully provided some. He travelled often; there was little enough work in any one state to keep him there for long. In many states, he was prohibited by law from working at all; in others, other people had the same job but did it in a different manner. There was a lot of measuring required to do it right and it involved climbing steps. Even when he didn’t perform his job particularly well, no one complained. “Give up?” he asked, gleeful as a small child. We all gave up, Jewel and the girls because they couldn’t figure it out, me because I never saw the sense in giving effort to something that would not substantially profit me or mine.
“I don’t give up,” Luca told him haughtily. “Give me one more clue.”
Joseph Gibbet tapped out his pipe, annoyed. “Pretty sure of yourself for a foreigner with no right reason to be in these parts.” Luca’s face was impassive. “…but all right….my name. My name’s a clue.”
Joseph Gibbet, Joseph Gibbet, Joseph Gibbet, I repeated to myself silently. I thought it was a silly sounding name and wondered if he had a silly job.
“You are a hangman,” Luca stated. Gibbet’s face contorted with rage and for a moment I thought he might stamp his foot through the floor like Rumpelstiltskin.
When moments passed and nothing was said, Jewel finally spoke: “Well? Is he right?”
“Yes,” Gibbet