Let This Mind Be in You

Whit is going away. He has board meetings in Chicago for the whole weekend, and since Friday and Saturday are the busiest days for the kids at Whit's End, closing the shop is out of the question. So he hands Connie and Eugene a note with everything they need to know, including the phone numbers where he can be reached, and tells them the simplest thing he can think of: run the place the way he would. Connie hears something a little different. She hears that she is supposed to be Whit.

She starts with the sweater. When she turns up for her shift the next day wearing one exactly like his, Eugene notices right away, and Connie explains her reasoning as if it were obvious - if she is supposed to be like Whit, she ought to dress like him too. Eugene has bigger things on his mind. The paint company has delivered cans of both ivory and light blue because the driver could not remember which color Whit ordered, and Eugene, who never assumes anything but weighs the evidence and reaches conclusions, decides Whit must have meant to repaint the Bible Room in ivory. He gets out a brush and gets to work.

That closes the Bible Room, which is unfortunate, because Jack and Lucy arrive with an argument they were hoping to settle there. Jack has told Lucy about the time Jacob wrestled an angel and won, and Lucy does not believe him. Connie volunteers to answer instead. Whit tells stories, so Connie tells a story, and it comes out as a tangle of sunrises and hymns and half-remembered names until the two kids politely decide to wait for Mr. Whittaker. Things get worse upstairs, where the Bible Verse Mirror has jammed on a single verse and repeats it endlessly. Connie insists she has been around Whit's inventions long enough to know how to shut one off. She flips switches, hunts for a plug, and finally loses her temper with it, and the mirror goes silent in a way no repair manual would recommend. Then Jimmy Barclay comes to her with a real problem. He got sent to the principal for shoving a boy who shoved him first, and he cannot decide whether to tell his parents. Connie, doing her best Whit impression, tells him to forget the whole thing.

Jimmy's father hears about it and comes to the shop, not angry so much as serious. What he wants with his son is trust, the kind where Jimmy tells him things whether or not there will be a punishment, and Connie's advice chipped away at it. Connie apologizes, means it, and then snaps at a little girl over a spilled milkshake and feels smaller still. By the time she finds Eugene and his paint, the sweater is off and she is calling herself a failure.

Eugene, of all people, sees the problem. Whit never told her to be him. He told her to be like him - to take what he has taught her and use it. Connie cannot be John Avery Whittaker, because she is Connie Kendall, and Whit never wanted anyone else. When Whit comes home he finds a broken mirror, a Bible Room painted with the shed's ivory, and two helpers who never read his note and never once picked up the phone because they did not want to bother him. He forgives them both and wonders aloud what he is going to do with them. And Connie, being herself again, asks him for the story about Jacob.