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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

HOME SONG

 

A
JOVE
Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©
1994
by
LaVyrle Spencer

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

For information address:

The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com

 

ISBN:
978-1-1012-1930-0

 

A
JOVE
BOOK®

JOVE
Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

JOVE
and the “
J
” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

 

Electronic edition: October, 2002

Titles by LaVyrle Spencer

THEN CAME HEAVEN
SMALL TOWN GIRL
THAT CAMDEN SUMMER
HOME SONG
FAMILY BLESSINGS
NOVEMBER OF THE HEART
BYGONES
FORGIVING
BITTER SWEET
SPRING FANCY
MORNING GLORY
THE HELLION
VOWS
THE GAMBLE
A HEART SPEAKS
YEARS
SEPARATE BEDS
TWICE LOVED
SWEET MEMORIES
HUMMINGBIRD
THE ENDEARMENT
THE FULFILLMENT

To
Deborah Raffin Viner
and
Michael Viner
I love you both for bringing so much into my life, not the least of which is a friendship I treasure

 

 

I wish to thank Tom Cole, his wife, Joanne, and daughter, Jennifer, for their help with this book. Also, thanks to Marcia Aubineau, and Jon and Julene Swenson. Tom's help was especially valuable, and his willingness to read partial drafts of the manuscript and to offer suggestions was truly appreciated. It's absolutely an accident that I'd chosen the name Tom for my protagonist long before I'd met Tom Cole. My hero, along with his family, his school, and his past, are strictly fictitious.

 

 

Home Song

 

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest;

Home-keeping hearts are happiest,

For those that wander they know not where

Are full of trouble and full of care;

To stay at home is best.

 

Weary and homesick and distressed,

They wander east, they wander west,

And are baffled and beaten and blown about

By the winds of the wilderness of doubt;

To stay at home is best.

 

Then stay at home, my heart, and rest;

The bird is safest in its nest;

O'er all that flutter their wings and fly

A hawk is hovering in the sky;

To stay at home is best.

M
INNESOTA
lay green and vibrant, freshened by a night's rain that rinsed the late August sky to a watercolor blue. East of St. Paul, where the suburbs nudged the Washington County line, fingers of new streets flexed into the expanses of ripe grain, new houses sprouting where only fields and forests had lain before.

There, where the city met the farmland, a modern brick school building spread its U-shaped wings, bordered by blacktop parking lots on the north and east, and an athletic field on the south. Beyond the spectator stands, a stretch of whispering cornfield still held its own against the urban sprawl that threatened it, but its plight was clear: more development could be seen on the distant hills.

Across the highway, a small section of older homes, built in the fifties and sixties, straggled within shouting distance of the county road, where the speed limit had been lowered when the school went up five years earlier. Sidewalks had been installed then, too, though some taxpayers said they led to nowhere, petering out into sectors where tractors still
worked the land. The school district was growing at an alarming rate, however, and had been for years.

That Wednesday morning, six days before the start of school, a vibrant aquamarine Lexus pulled into the visitors' parking lot on the north side of Hubert H. Humphrey High. A woman and a boy emerged and approached the building along a lengthy stretch of sidewalk. Already the eleven
A
.
M
. sun had heated the concrete, but the janitors had propped open the double front doors to let the breeze blow through.

The woman was dressed in a gray no-nonsense suit, paler gray silk blouse, matching pumps—simple, but expensive—and a subdued scarf in shades of burgundy. Her streaked blond hair was cut in a conservative ear-length bob, blown back from a side part. Her only jewelry, a pair of tiny gold stud earrings, seemed a mere concession to femininity, which her style downplayed in every other way.

The boy was taller than she by a head and a half, wide-topped, skinny-hipped, athletic, erect in stature, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt lauding the Texas Aggies. He had dark hair and stunning brown eyes in a face that would—his entire life long—make females turn for a second look. Two generations earlier teenage girls would have called him a heartthrob; his mother's generation would have said he was a fox. Today, a pair of sixteen-year-old girls came out of the school building just as he entered; one gazed back over her shoulder and exclaimed to her friend, “Wow, he's
hot
!”

The office of Humphrey High sat in the dead center of the building, sandwiched between walls of glass. The front looked out across the main hall at the visitors' parking lot and the huge brick planter showcasing the school colors—red and white—in a bed of petunias. The rear of the office overlooked a lovely arboretum cared for by Mr. Dorffmeier's horticulture students.

Kent Arens held open the office door.

“Smile,” Monica Arens said pleasantly as she swung past him into the cool billow of air-conditioning.

“At what?” the boy replied, following her.

“You know how important first impressions are.”

“Yes, Mother,” he replied dryly as the door closed behind them.

Unlike the grounds, the office was in chaos: people were moving everywhere, dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts, collating papers, answering phones, using computers, clattering typewriters. Two janitors were painting the walls, while another wheeled in a dolly stacked with cardboard cartons. The blue carpet scarcely showed beneath the stacks of books, piles of stapled materials, and the general flotsam of maintenance work.

Monica and Kent picked their way through the commotion to a twelve-foot crescent-shaped counter that prevented all visitors from advancing further. From one of the numerous desks behind it, a secretary rose and came forward. She had a pudgy face, plump breasts, and short brown hair just beginning to gray.

“Hello. May I help you?”

“I'm Monica Arens, and this is my son, Kent. We've come to register him for school.”

“Sorry about the mess in here, but it's always like this the last week before school. I'm Dora Mae Hudak. I answer to ‘Dora Mae,' and I'm just the one to see.” She smiled at the boy. “You're new here this year.”

“Yes, ma'am. We just moved from Austin, Texas.”

She assessed his height. “A senior, I'd guess.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Dora Mae Hudak momentarily stalled in her tracks: she was unaccustomed to being called “ma'am” by high school
seniors. Most called her Dora Mae. Some addressed her “Hey, lady,” and occasionally one would break forth with “Yo! You . . . secretary!”

“Love those Southern manners,” she remarked as she reached for an admissions form and a student introductory booklet. “Do you know what classes you want to take?”

“Pretty much. If you have them all.”

“So you haven't seen our list of electives yet?”

“No, ma'am.”

She placed a pamphlet and a sheet of blue paper on the counter. “Classes are listed in here, and this is the admissions form, but we like all new students to talk to a counselor before registering. Our seniors are counseled by Mrs. Berlatsky. Hang on a second while I see if she's in.”

Dora Mae poked her head into one of the side offices and returned with a fortyish woman dressed in a thigh-length blue knit pullover and stirrup pants.

“Hi. I'm Joan Berlatsky.” She extended her hand. “Kent, welcome to Minnesota. Ms. Arens, hello. Want to come into my office where we can talk?”

They followed Joan Berlatsky into her office while she apologized for the mess. “It's like this every year, the custodians trying to finish up everything after the summer-school people finally clear out. It never seems like the building will be ready in time, but somehow, as if by magic, it always is. Please . . . sit down.”

They had a friendly talk, during which the counselor learned that Kent had a 3.8 grade-point average and was college-bound, and that he was concentrating on science and math and wanted to take as many honors classes as possible. His mother had already made arrangements for his records to be forwarded from his former high school, but they hadn't arrived yet. Joan pulled up class lists on a green computer
screen, and within thirty minutes they had settled on Kent's senior class schedule.

Everything went smoothly until Monica Arens said, “Oh, and who should we see about signing Kent up for football?”

Joan turned from her computer screen and said, “There might be a problem with that. The team has already been working out for two weeks, and it's possible Coach Gorman has the team roster all set.”

Kent's eyebrows beetled. He leaned forward anxiously. “But I've already lettered in both my sophomore and junior years. I was counting on playing my senior year, too.”

“As I said, the team has been working out since mid-August, but . . .” Joan frowned thoughtfully before reaching for her phone. “Just a minute. Let me call down there and see if Coach Gorman is in.” While the phone rang in the locker room, she said, “You probably already know that sports are really big here. Our football team took second at state last year, and our basketball team was the double-A state champion. Shoot, it doesn't sound like he's going to answer.” She hung up. “Just a minute. Let me go ask Mr. Gardner, our principal. He likes to meet all the new kids personally anyway. Be right back.” She had barely whisked around the corner before her head reappeared. “Want to ask Dora Mae for the computer printout of your schedule while I'm gone? It'll come up on the printer out here.”

The pair followed her to the outer office, where they stood before the crescent-shaped counter while a printer clacked and spewed forth Kent's class schedule.

 

Tom Gardner sat at his desk, facing his open office doorway with a phone at his ear, trying to reason with a textbook sales rep: only three business days to go before school
started, and his new tenth-grade English textbooks were nowhere to be found.

At Joan's appearance, he gestured for her to stay, holding up one index finger while continuing his conversation. “Our purchasing agent ordered them in January of last year. . . . Are you sure? . . . When? . . . In July! But how could that many textbooks just disappear? . . . Mr. Travis, my problem is that next Tuesday I'm going to have five hundred and ninety tenth-grade students coming through these doors, and English is a required course for every one of them.” After a lengthy pause he wrote down a bill-of-lading number. “To the loading dock? How big were the cartons?” He dropped the pencil, rubbed his forehead, and said, “I see. Yes, thank you, I'll check at my end. If they can't be located, do you have more in stock? . . . Yes, I will, thank you. Goodbye.”

Tom hung up and expelled a breath that puffed out his cheeks. “Missing textbooks. What can I do for you, Joan?”

“I've got a new transfer student out here you'll want to meet. He's a senior and he wants to play football. Will you handle it?”

“Sure,” he said, rolling back his chair and rising. As much as he loved his job as principal of HHH, Tom hated this last week before school. During these crazy days he became primarily a problem solver, working in the chaos left behind by the summer-school staff, who moved things they weren't supposed to move, hid equipment that was in their way, and stuffed incoming supplies into the most unlikely of places. Electricians were installing a new overhead lighting system, and some snafu had held up a batch of the fixtures, so there were no lights in the home economics department. A physics teacher he'd hired way back last May had called the day before and said she'd accepted a better offer from another
district and wouldn't be coming to work here after all. And now the textbook people claimed a trucking company had delivered thirty cartons of books onto a loading dock at the district warehouse on July 15, but nobody at this end had ever seen them.

Tom Gardner stuffed it all behind a calm exterior and focused on the facet of his job that he considered most important: the students.

This new one was waiting with his mother on the opposite side of the counter—a tall, dark, good-looking kid with an athlete's build who wanted to play football.

Joan led the way and made introductions.

“This is Kent Arens. He'll be a senior with us this year. Kent, our principal, Mr. Gardner.”

Tom shook hands with the boy and felt a hard paw with plenty of muscle behind it.

“And this is Kent's mother, Monica.”

The two began shaking hands as automatically as any strangers, but midway through the introduction a sixth sense buzzed through Tom.

“Monica?” he said, peering at her more closely. “Monica Arens?”

Disbelief widened her eyes.

“Tom?” she said. “Tom Gardner?”

“Well, for heaven's sake, this is a surprise.”

“That's you? Mr. Gardner . . . the principal here?” Her gaze shot to the brass nameplate beside his office door.

“That's me. I've been here for eighteen years, first as a teacher, then as principal.” He dropped her hand, for it was awkward holding it above the elbow-high counter. “Obviously you live in this school district.”

“I . . . yes . . . we . . .” She had grown flustered and her face began flushing. “I've just been transferred here. I'm an
engineer for 3M. I never would have . . . I mean, I had no idea you lived anywhere near here. I didn't even know what the principal's name was until Mrs. Berlatsky said it a minute ago.”

“Well, that's how it goes,” he said with an easygoing grin. “Paths cross, don't they?” He hooked his hands on his hips, letting his gaze linger on her affectionately. She remained flustered and offered no smile, only the impression that she was struggling to overcome some gross embarrassment. “And you have a family now . . .” He turned his attention back to the boy.

“Just one. Just Kent.”

He was truly a handsome young man, as tall as Tom himself.

“You know my mother?” Kent asked, surprised by the discovery.

“Way back when,” Tom replied. “In nineteen seventy-five.”

“But we haven't seen each other since,” Monica hastened to add.

“Well, enough about us. We've sort of left you out of the conversation here, haven't we, Kent? Listen, why don't the two of you come into my office, where there's less confusion and noise. We can talk in there.”

In his office, with its view of the arboretum and the football field beyond, they sat facing each other across his desk. The late-morning sun angled above the east wing of the school building and spread across the south windowsill, where a gallery of Gardner family photographs faced Tom's desk.

Tom Gardner tipped back in his swivel chair, loosely steepled his hands, and said to the boy, “So you want to play football, I'm told.”

“Yes, sir.”

The kid looked familiar. “You've played before? In your last school?”

“Yes, sir. I lettered in both my sophomore and junior years, and last year I was all-conference.”

“What position did you play?”

“Running back.”

Tom had been a coach himself; he knew what questions to ask to determine if the kid was a team man or a
me
man.

“What was your team like?”

“Just great. I had some really good blockers who were smart, and they really understood the game. It made it easy to play, because we sort of . . . well, you know, we understood what each other was doing.”

Tom liked the kid's answer. “How about your coach?”

Kent answered simply, “I'm going to miss him,” impressing Tom further. Once again, he had the strong impression he knew the boy from somewhere. Not only his facial features but his expressions looked awfully familiar.