Love in a Small Town (37 page)

They had moved up to Rennie’s old room—Mama had waved them away because she wanted to watch the television show
Home Repair,
which was featuring electrical wiring repair. Rennie, clutching the silk blouse she had been about to hang in her old bedroom closet, threw herself across the bed and gazed earnestly at Molly, who was propped against the pile of feather pillows. It appeared Rennie had slept on those pillows alone, that Sam had slept in the bed in what had once been Lillybeth’s and Season’s room and what was now the official guest room. Molly had seen the rumpled covers. But it was a short walk down the hall from that bed to Rennie’s. Molly was ashamed of her curiosity and refused to be so bold as to ask. It was not her business and right now she didn’t really think she wanted to know.

Rennie said, “Do you mind a whole lot about me and Sam, Sissy?”

“Of course not,” Molly answered quickly, and once she had said it, she had made it so.

Rennie said, “I guess it wouldn’t matter if you did mind.”

She didn’t say it without care, only matter-of-factly, and Molly knew it anyway. Then Rennie sat up, still clutching the silk blouse, rather wringing it, and Molly thought that the thing was going to be ruined.

“I know that I’m second place,” Rennie said, averting her eyes. “I imagine Sam looks at me and sees you. I’m not fooling myself about that, Sissy. I’ve seen for years how he looks at you, and a guy doesn’t stop yearning for a woman like that one day and start yearning for her sister the next. But there is
something
between us. We’ve both been knocked around a lot, and we know what that feels like. And Molly, I am about to be forty and I want a husband and children. And maybe being your sister, being so much like you, will make it so Sam will really fall for me after a while.”

Molly sat up, put her feet on the floor. “Rennie, you are making excuses as to why Sam could not look at you for yourself.”

Rennie began shaking her head.

“Yes, you are. I don’t know why you are. . . . Maybe you’re scared to think it could work out because then an awful lot will be required of you. You will have to
sustain
a relationship. Now, I will grant you that you and I are a lot alike. So what? So we are
both
his type. I’m sure there are a lot of his type around. What I think is that Sam has finally reached the point where you’re at. He’s wantin’ a home and family, too. He’s finally just got a good look at you when the time is right.”

Getting up, she took the blouse out of Rennie’s hand. “Let me hang this up. You are about to turn it into a rag."

Oh, Lord, she thought, as she wriggled the blouse onto a hanger. She did not know what she would do if this romance did not work out for Rennie. The entire situation made Molly feel tense and as though she should start paying some sort of penance, because she felt surely that if it did not work out, it would somehow be all her fault.

She looked at Rennie. “I cannot advise you, Rennie. I certainly have not proven to be a shining example of relationship wisdom lately. But what I guess I’m saying is don’t be too scared to take this opportunity and don’t discount Sam’s feelings. I know him enough to say that. He is not the type of man not to know exactly which woman he is lookin’ at.”

Molly felt better for having said that, and Rennie seemed to brighten, too.

“Oh, Sissy, will you go with me to look at houses?” Molly said she would, and Rennie went off to take a shower, humming happily the way a woman does who has just sunk into a new love. Molly went down the hall, intending to return downstairs and see if her mother had finished watching television. Passing the guest room, she glanced in and saw the rumpled bed where Sam had slept. At least supposedly. She could not seem to help wondering, and she put it down to her romantic streak.

Turning into the room, feeling the sudden need for straightening things, she pulled the sheets off the rumpled bed, wadded them on the floor and respread the coverlet. She gathered the bundle of sheets, and when she stood up, she found herself staring straight at the array of framed photographs across the bureau.

As if drawn by a cord, Molly went over and stared at the photo of her and Tommy Lee. Their wedding photograph. She had not seen this picture in a long time, she thought, as she took it up and peered closer. Softly, she touched her fingertips to Tommy Lee’s image. So young, children almost, the two people gazing back at her looked more scared than in love. They stood so close, pressing against each other, holding hands. Holding on to each other, she thought.

She set the photograph back in place and left the room. At the bathroom door, she called to Rennie through the door, “Hurry up, Rennie. We don’t have all day. It’s already afternoon.”

* * * *

Molly drove the Mustang because Rennie said she couldn’t really look at houses and drive, too, but she insisted on taking her car.

“My car is so much nicer, Molly, and you know
you
won’t drive the El Camino around with the air conditioner going and the windows down."

That was true; Molly couldn’t stand to waste gas and cold air like that. She could do so in Rennie’s car.

They went all over town, looking at prospective houses for Rennie, but then Molly got sidetracked and began visiting places she and Tommy Lee had lived. Her reminiscing started when they happened to pass by Montgomery’s garage, the first place she and Tommy Lee had lived together. She found the old building quite a shock. It was boarded up.

“It’s at least fifty years old,” Rennie said, “and it didn’t start out as much to begin with.”

“Gosh, how could I not know it was all boarded up?” Molly wondered aloud, her mind tumbling back with the years.

The Montgomery garage had been her and Tommy Lee’s first home together. They had rented the apartment on the top, and Tommy Lee had helped old Mr. Montgomery repair brakes in the garage below. Gazing at it, memories and feelings tumbled over Molly, how they had put a fan in the window in order to survive the heat at night and later had to stuff towels around the same window, trying not to freeze. She remembered their first night after coming home from their New Orleans honeymoon trip.

“I had a bad dream about a man in the room,” she told Rennie, “and when I woke up, Tommy Lee was vaulting over the end of the bed, yelling
‘Grrr.’
I went screamin’ after him, and we both ended up in the kitchen before we got fully awake. Tommy Lee said I had woke him up, whispering, ‘There’s somebody in here.’ I guess he was after whoever it was.”

He had held her so tight, even as they laughed and laughed about it. “Are you okay, Molly?” he’d asked repeatedly, worried about her and the baby she carried. She guessed he had had to worry about the baby she carried for most of those early years.

After Montgomery’s garage, Molly went to each of the places where she and Tommy Lee had lived. They had moved often, each time Tommy Lee made a little more money, each time they had another child.

This harking back annoyed Rennie, who was interested in houses to buy for herself,
now,
not old places for Molly to wax nostalgic over. While she kept pointing out houses, Molly was preoccupied with trying to remember the locales of where she and Tommy Lee had lived, even speaking her thoughts aloud—”Now, was it 1113 or 1013?”—and driving to each address in the order in which she had lived there, a further annoyance to Rennie.

“You are wastin’ time and gas goin’ from one end of town to the other,” Rennie said. “Why don’t you drive by them as you
come
to them?”

“I can’t remember them that way," Molly said.

With each place she would stop right in the middle of the street and tell Rennie a little something about when she and Tommy Lee had lived there, but pretty soon it was almost as if Rennie weren’t there with her, as if she were taking the tour through memory all by herself. It didn’t matter that the duplex, into which they had moved after Montgomery’s garage, had been bulldozed and a double-wide trailer with chain-link fence stood in place of the white clapboard building and picket fence. She remembered the double apartments and how lonely Beatrice Lessing had lived in the adjacent apartment with a dog she dressed in the baby clothes Savannah outgrew. Beatrice was company while Tommy Lee was out on the racing circuit as a mechanic for Jack Kemp. Sometimes Beatrice would watch Savannah for them so Tommy Lee and Molly could go out to eat or to a movie.

She and Tommy Lee had had a fight in that duplex apartment that Molly had never forgotten. Actually the fight didn’t begin at the apartment. It began over at a friend’s house, where Tommy Lee and some other men were working on a racing car. They left the women waiting in the house nearly all night while the men alternately worked on the car and chased around getting beer. At nearly one o’clock and Tommy Lee gone somewhere in their car, Molly took Savannah and walked home and locked the door against Tommy Lee and wouldn’t let him in for a day. She would have gone home to Mama, but Mama was back with Stirling then.

Molly sat and thought of all this until Rennie prodded her. “Would you please drive on? The air conditioner can’t hardly work with the engine just idlin’.”

Next Molly drove to see the first true house she and Tommy Lee had rented. It happened to be right down the street from Annette Rountree—Rennie pointed that out.

“I got pregnant with Boone in that house,” Molly said, staring at the small house. “Me and Tommy Lee had a big fight about him being out on the circuit, and then we made up and I was pregnant.” The house really needed painting now.

Their second house had been older but bigger and right across the street from the elementary school. Molly would stand in the yard and watch Savannah cross the street. Tommy Lee had come off the circuit then and was working up in Lawton for the Ford dealer; they had moved to this house because it had a huge garage, and Tommy Lee could work on cars back there to make extra money. He had caught the garage on fire, but he had saved the car inside. The house looked exactly the same, except the tricycle in the yard was one of the big plastic kind, not one of the little red metal ones Savannah and then Boone had shared. Tommy Lee used to wheel each one of the children up and down the sidewalk.

The next house was up in Lawton, but Rennie put her foot down about driving up there, so Molly drove out to the last house they had lived in before they moved to the Hayeses’ farm. It was out at the edge of town, closer to Tommy Lee’s parents. He had been helping his daddy farm then, in addition to working at a machine shop. This house she and Tommy Lee had bought. They had brought Colter home to this house. He had been a wakeful baby, and it got to where Molly would nurse him, and then Tommy Lee would walk the floor with him to get him to sleep.

By now Molly was crying, which made Rennie really irritated. “You don’t need to go around and see all these old haunts if you’re gonna cry about it,” Rennie said. “Would you please pull off the road before we get rear-ended.”

Molly pulled the car over, and Rennie insisted on taking over the driving. “I don’t want you wreckin’ my car and maybe gettin’ us killed just when I may have found the man of my dreams,” she said, shoving at Molly to get out of the seat.

Molly thought it just as well. She was overrun with memories, times past that she could not get back and in some cases would not want to get back. Although she could not get them back, however, they seemed to be clinging to her, bringing all their joys and difficulties and regrets down upon her at once. As she came around to the passenger side, the heat radiated up off the blacktop and gravel, and it seemed to shimmer up around the house. Molly stared at it, feeling as if she was any moment going to hear the kids’ laughter and Tommy Lee call out that he wanted a Coca-Cola.

It was Rennie’s voice that hollered, “Get in, Molly.”

Molly got in the car, and Rennie handed her a tissue and told her to wipe the mascara from under her eyes.

“Why don’t you just go back home to Tommy Lee?” Rennie said and pulled back out on the road.

“I can’t,” Molly said.

“Well, why not? You are plainly still mooning over him.”

Molly stared out the windshield. “That isn’t the whole of it, Rennie,” she said. “It takes a lot more than loving. It takes believing.”

Chapter 26

Can’t Keep A Good Man Down

When Rennie and Molly pulled down the driveway, they saw Tommy Lee’s Corvette sitting beside their mother’s house. Seeing the car surprised Molly, but what was curious was that it was parked on her mother’s side of the driveway. And then the back door to her mother’s house opened and people poured out.

“Savannah?”

Her daughter, pudgy and round, came hurrying across the grass, and Tommy Lee and Mama came behind her.

Molly and Savannah hugged, and then Rennie and Savannah hugged, and then Savannah went back into Molly’s arms, clinging like a child. Molly looked over her daughter’s shoulder at Tommy Lee and Mama. Mama had that speculative expression, and Tommy Lee definitely looked pained and confused. Molly noticed then that Stephen was nowhere in sight.

Savannah said, “Oh, Mama,” and buried her face against Molly’s neck.

* * * *

Savannah had driven all the way from Arkansas by herself. Molly’s mouth went dry as she looked at her daughter, who was huge with child, and thought of her driving all that way alone. Molly had been up to see Savannah three months earlier, and she remembered some of the roads were through lonely hills.

Savannah said, “I want to have my baby down here, with you and Grama with me, Mama.”

As she spoke, she nibbled on crackers and peanut butter that Rennie had brought from over at the cottage, Mama’s peanut butter being in the refrigerator and suspicious. They were around the kitchen table—Molly and Savannah, Mama and Rennie. Tommy Lee had been with them for a while, until he’d managed to slip himself out to the living room, where he had turned the television to a car race on the sports channel. Rennie was nibbling away on crackers and peanut butter, too, especially since Savannah had asked her to please not smoke in the room with a pregnant woman.