Connie Comes to Town

Whit's End is packed wall to wall, and John Avery Whittaker is trying to be in four places at once. He takes Freddy's order for a double fudge chocolate shake, answers a phone call from Marion about speaking to her Sunday school class, greets Tom Riley hauling in a heavy load from the dairy, and gets so tangled between the two conversations that he tells Marion the story of the Mount of Transfiguration can be found in Matthew, Mark, and Freddy. Tom, filling in behind the soda bar again, asks when Whit is finally going to hire somebody to help. Whit says he has been trying, but he hasn't found the right person yet.

Then Amanda comes looking for him. She and Bobby Novak have been put in charge of writing the questions for the next Bible Bowl, and Bobby won't cooperate. When Whit gets to the bottom of it, the problem isn't really the game. Bobby is bored. Around Odyssey, he says, they always do the same old thing, and he doesn't have any new ideas to replace the old ones. Whit tells him that a sense of adventure is hard to hold on to, but that it is mostly a matter of how a person looks at things. You never know where your next discovery will happen, he says. Excitement could be waiting right on the other side of that door.

The door opens, and a girl walks in asking for directions to Front Street. She has a newspaper want ad for a part-time clerk at the Fashion Center, and she introduces herself as Connie Kendall. She only needs work long enough to earn bus fare, because she is determined to get back to Los Angeles, where her father lives. While Whit points her toward Front Street, he also asks about her family and her experience - she waited tables the summer before - and then shows her one last ad in the paper, the one asking for a high school student to help run a busy soda fountain. That ad is his. Connie protests that she hasn't even filled out an application, but Whit points out that he already knows everything he would have asked, and Connie agrees to give the job a try.

Bobby walks her downtown to Miller's for a uniform, peppering her with questions about the ocean and movie stars, and admitting he has never been so bored as he has been in Odyssey. By the end of the walk he is offering to ride the bus to California with her, just to look out for her. Connie doesn't take him seriously.

Weeks later, with her ticket money nearly saved, Connie admits to Whit that she will miss the place. But when he learns she plans to leave her mother nothing but a note, and when he warns her how dangerous a big city can be for a girl on her own, she tells him she came to earn money, not to get lectured. Worse, Bobby has overheard enough to announce cheerfully that Connie won't be traveling alone, because he is going with her.

Whit takes Connie aside. She insists Bobby's choice is none of her business, but Whit tells her that isn't how people work. Every time you come in contact with another human being, he says, something happens, and neither one of you is ever quite the same again. God made people to depend on one another and to feel responsible for one another. Connie answers that she isn't into God, and she wants to know who is supposed to look out for her if she doesn't look out for herself. Whit admits that caring is risky business, and that people sometimes let you down - a lesson Bobby is about to learn the hard way. Then he offers her an idea that will cost her something.

That afternoon Bobby arrives with a suitcase, waiting for Connie so they can catch their bus. Tom Riley keeps him in his seat just long enough for the Bible Bowl to begin, and Whit introduces a surprise guest master of ceremonies: Connie Kendall. Stumbling over Melchizedek and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, she asks for a co-host, and Bobby is pushed up front to help her. Somewhere in the middle of the questions he whispers that they have missed the bus. Connie tells him there will be other buses.

Afterward, Bobby wants to know why she gave it up when she wanted to leave even more than he did. Connie says nobody talked her into it. She just got to thinking. She wanted California because she had friends there, and fun, and people liked her - and then she looked around Odyssey and realized she has friends here, and fun here, and people who like her here too. She will stay, at least for now. Bobby still wants to see California someday, and Connie doesn't argue. Any place you live, she tells him, is what you make it, exciting or boring or fun, and what you don't have always looks better than what you do have. Maybe if he went, he would only discover that things were better back home. Then she offers him a deal: she will tell him how to get a refund on his bus ticket if he will explain why people in the Bible have such impossible names.