Love in a Small Town (5 page)

Rennie kind of laughed and shook her head sadly. “We’re all just like her,” she said. “I see myself making her facial expressions, and I have her hands. Look.”

She came over, sat beside Molly on the bench, and they each held out their hands. “Oh, Lordy,” they said in unison.

“It’s Collier blood, Molly, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Mama gets more and more like Grama used to be, and the older we get, the more like Mama we get. Kaye is almost her spittin’ image.” Rennie drew deeply on her cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. “Except on Kaye it doesn’t come off as well. Mama has such flair, but on Kaye it tends to come out ridiculous.”

Molly thought that was true. It made her sad for Kaye. Made her just want to cry, and now she was looking at her wedding band and having a very hard struggle with tears.

“You know,” she said, lifting her eyes to look at herself and Rennie in the mirror, “when Shirley down at the IGA found out I was about to be married twenty-five years, she was so surprised. People are always surprised to find out I’ve been married so long. Sometimes I find a way to mention it, just to see their reaction.” Rennie was the only person on earth Molly would admit that to.

“But what do they think—that I’m supposed to have my hair cut and curled and be wearing elastoband slacks? Lord, Rennie, twenty-five years sounds so long, but it really isn’t. Sometimes it seems like just yesterday Tommy Lee and I were in that little apartment over Montgomery’s garage and spending all Saturday night tanglin’ the sheets.”

She remembered that more clearly than she would have thought possible. And she yearned for something from those times, not only the passions but the sense of hope and expectation.

After a minute Rennie said, “I’ve told you before, Sissy, what you need is a red-hot affair. There is nothin’ like an affair to give a woman new life . . . and to fire up a marriage.”

“And what do you know about marriage?” Molly countered.

At thirty-nine, Rennie had never been married. She’d had more than one offer, and she had lost one man she wasn’t likely to ever get over, but she was terrified of commitment, just as all of them were.

“I may not have marriage experience, but I do have affair experience,” Rennie said, making Molly chuckle. “Besides, I don’t have to fly like a bird to know the dynamics of it, and I know enough about men to know they have a pure idiotic need for competition to stir them up sometimes. Just look how they are about football.”

Rennie could always make Molly laugh. Then she sighed and shook her head. “Try havin’ an affair in Valentine. Everyone would know of it within twenty-four hours.”

“Well, I know one man who’d be perfect for you,” Rennie said, raising her eyebrow. “Sam Ketchum.”

“Good grief,” Molly said.

“He would. . . . You know he would. You like him, and he looks at you.”

Molly shook her head. “Sam doesn’t live here, remember? He only visits. And I wouldn’t know how to have an affair.”

“Oh, Sissy—you learn how to have an affair by having one."

Molly didn’t reply. She’d only taken a few puffs of the cigarette, and it had a long ash now. She put it out in the crystal ash tray, got up, went to the window and pulled back the curtain to peer through the blinds. As she moved the curtain, the sweet musky scent fluttered up to her again.

Her gaze went far out at the back of the sweeping lawn to the wooden fenced corral, touched on Marker, and then moved on to the small horse barn with a rusty running horse weather vane tilting on the top of it. Memories came rushing back to her again, filling her and flowing over with such a force that some had to leak right out.

“The first time Tommy Lee and I did it was out there in the horse barn,” she said.

Turning, she pressed herself back against the faded flowers of the wall, gazed at the cracked ceiling, and fingered her wedding band. The scene kept rolling on inside of her, making her heart beat rapidly—the fresh scent of the hay and the hot scent of Tommy Lee, the pricks of hay through the clothes they spread out, and the sweet pain that took hold of her body and wouldn’t let go.

“And I was like Mama then, too,” she said, her voice scratchy, “because it was after we’d had an awful fight, and I got pregnant right then and there.”

She looked at her sister. “The whole rest of our lives has been because of that.”

Rennie’s gaze shifted downward. Molly smelled the faint sweet musky scent of the cottage and wondered if it had been doubts about their lives that had brought all the women before her to this house.

Then Rennie came over and put her arm around Molly’s shoulders and squeezed her. Molly laid her head against Rennie’s.

“Oh, Sissy,” Rennie said after a second, speaking very seriously, “come on up to Lawton with me. You can have an affair there.”

Half laughing, half crying, Molly turned her face into Rennie’ s neck.

Suddenly a loud pop sounded from the living room, and beside them the old black fan quit humming. “Shimmy!” they heard Mama say.

* * * *

Tommy Lee simmered all day long and into full dark. He felt like an engine running hot, the oil burning and the metal beginning to warp.

He worked in his shop until dark and the june bugs and moths were fluttering around beneath the lights. Instead of turning on the air-conditioning, he had left the doors wide and used the big fan. He’d wanted to keep an eye out the door for Molly, should she come. But she never did, and finally he turned off the fan and switched off the lights, pulled down the garage door, and clicked the handle into the locked position.

He stood there a moment under the Milky Way and looked toward the driveway entry. He could hardly believe that Molly hadn’t returned.

Jake was lying at the foot of the back porch stairs, his nose pointing at his empty feed bowl. Tommy Lee took the bowl up onto the porch, switched on the light, and looked around until he found the dog food. He felt awkward; it was Molly who always fed the animals.

When he brought the filled bowl and set it in on the walkway, the dog sniffed at it, as if it wasn’t to be trusted, coming from Tommy Lee’s hand. Tommy Lee felt so annoyed that he almost kicked the bowl.

Leaving the dog, he went back up the stairs and into the house. The kitchen was dark. He wasn’t used to that. It seemed so strange that for an instant he even felt he was in the wrong house. Molly’s radio played out into the dark, and now the blinking green light on the telephone answering machine showed there had been three calls.

He switched on the overhead lights and went over, around the trash can still in the middle of the floor, and shut off the radio. Then he pressed the button on the answering machine. He kind of held his breath. Maybe one of the calls had been from Molly. He cursed himself for not coming in to check earlier.

He listened to Savannah’s entire message about coming home and how the baby was due in six weeks, and then the second call, which had been Colter, just calling to say hello.

“Just wanted to let you know I’m alive and well,” Colter said. “Could use a twenty, like always,” he teased.

Tommy Lee thought of Molly and how she’d cried after leaving Colter down at the university in Austin last fall. She’d cried so hard that she’d made herself sick, and he’d had to pull the car over to let her vomit on the side of the road. He’d been real worried about her then. Colter was her baby, the one she’d almost lost.

Rubbing his forehead, he waited to hear the third caller. It was Lillybeth, Molly’s sister, calling from Oklahoma City, saying she had bought plastic plates that looked like crystal for the anniversary party.

The reminders about the anniversary party made him get all tight. He switched off the answering machine. Then, his steps heavy, he went up the stairs.

The bed had some of Molly’s clothes strewn on it. In the bathroom a drawer was partially open, and there were empty spaces around the sink where Molly’s various lotions and things usually sat. Tommy Lee turned his back on the sink and the mirror and began shedding his clothes.

He showered and dressed in clean jeans and T-shirt and slipped his feet into his comfortable canvas boaters and went back downstairs without letting his gaze settle again on the empty places in the rooms.

Moving around the trash can and slivers of china, he got slices of ham and cheese from the refrigerator, threw them on a plate along with some bread, and poured a glass of milk. He took up his meager supper and went out to sit on the front porch steps. The only light was what filtered through the house from back in the kitchen, and from the bright stars above. The night air stirred lightly and brought with it the sweet scents of new-mown hay and moisture off the leaves. Jake came padding up and lay down at a respectful distance.

Tommy Lee felt a little foolish because in that moment he was sure glad for the company. He tore off a piece of the ham and fed it to the dog. He was glad to see the dog take it.

Looking down at the porch floor, Tommy Lee thought how different life at this house had been from life at Molly’s house—at any of the houses Molly lived in, because she was always moving around. Dogs and cats had always been coming and going at Molly’s house. Molly had been allowed to sleep with them even. Things had been so noisy at Molly’s house, smoky with cigarettes and ringing with laughter and radio music and bright with colors.

Suddenly he realized he was smelling the scent of the boxwoods that grew around the porch, and he remembered a day, back when they were kids, that Molly had sat in this very spot with him, at the edge of the porch with their feet on the steps. He remembered she had ridden all the way from town on her bike. His mother had forbidden him to ride to and from town on his bike, because of the danger along the county highway, but Tommy Lee occasionally used to do it anyway. His life had been so filled with don’ts; he’d been envious of Molly, whose life seemed to have no rules at all. He remembered Molly’s hair had been in pigtails that day; she’d had on a shirt and jeans and boots, like always, just in case they got to go riding the old mare.

He’d been nervous, as he always was when she was here, wondering what she would think of his house, clean as a hospital, and worried that his mother might tell her to go on along, like she sometimes did his friends.

He probably could have counted on one hand the number of times Molly had come to the house before they were married. Back then he hardly ever had friends over. His mother said she didn’t like the mess they tracked in, and his dad never liked kids around.

His parents had been nearing forty when Tommy Lee was born. They’d had their lives set and went on living them in a perfectly orderly and quiet fashion. The drawers in their house were all arranged with little boxes to hold various objects, and the furniture was arranged squarely with the walls. His mother wiped over the windowsills and floors daily. His father had a hook and bin for every single tool in the barn, and every morning at six o’clock, after downing three cups of black coffee, he put on his work boots that sat on the back porch and headed out to the barn. He would only return at noon and again at six in the evening, each day, except Sunday, when the routine included morning services at the Valentine Baptist church.

When his dad had spoken, it was in one- or two-word sentences, “Yes,” “No,” “Chores first.” Once, when a calf Tommy Lee had been raising had gotten cut up in wire and his dad had brought it into the kitchen to tend, his mother had started berating them both. His father had said sternly, “Leave off,” and his mother had shut up like she’d had a cork put in her mouth. His parents would sit in the living room for evenings on end, his mother reading and his dad reading and neither ever talking to each other. They might make a comment to Tommy Lee or to the air, but not to each other. Though they slept in the same room, it was in twin beds.

Tommy Lee had known his parents loved him fiercely, although he didn’t believe either one of them had loved the other, and that had always made him sad. He had loved them, respected them, but he certainly hadn’t understood them, and he’d been a little embarrassed by the way they were, so regulated and stern and standoffish.

That particular day when Molly had come, rather than tell her to get along, his mother brought them out two little bottles of Coca-Cola.

“You need some boxwood bushes around this porch, Mrs. Hayes,” Molly said. “They have a nice smell in the summer, and it’s really nice to sit out on a porch at night with boxwoods smelling.”

His mother answered, “Bushes give critters somewhere to hide and draw bugs.” Then she went back in the house.

For the years afterward, the front porch had remained just as bare and unrelenting as it always had been, until Molly and Tommy Lee moved in to make the house their own. That very first week, Molly planted boxwoods around the porch. Then she had gone on to paint the porch bright blue and the house yellow and inside a number of different colors, none of them white. There were times now when Tommy Lee didn’t recognize the house as the one he’d grown up in, and mostly he was glad.

He tilted up his glass and drank his milk. He didn’t want to do any more thinking about him and Molly.

He considered going inside, sitting in his BarcaLounger and watching television and falling asleep. But the thought made him sick. It made him suddenly feel like he would burn up if he tried to do that. He’d managed to swallow half a sandwich, and it seemed to lodge in a hard ball at the top of his stomach. He took the plate of food and plunked it in front of the dog.

“Here, buddy. Help yourself on my plate.”

As if the dog had understood the argument Tommy Lee had had with Molly that morning, he gingerly picked up the food and moved it over to the porch floor, then ate it.

The next moment, Tommy Lee was on his feet and going back through the house. He grabbed his keys from the hook and went on out and across to the shop, where he backed the red-and-white Corvette out of the third bay and took off with tires throwing gravel.

The night wind buffeted his hair and shoulders but didn’t cool him. Tommy Lee felt like he was on fire. He was mad, as mad as he could ever remember being.