Small Town Girl (34 page)

Kate went stiff. “Whatever differences Jay and I had are nobody’s business but our own.”

“I suppose so.” Alice flashed her eyes up to Kate’s face and then back to the handkerchief. “But what if you were wrong? And he wasn’t drinking. What then?”

“You weren’t there, Alice. I don’t know why we’re even talking about this.” Kate wanted to shove the girl toward the door, get her out of the store and away from her sight.

Alice blinked her eyes a couple of times and pulled in a deep breath. “You’re right. I wasn’t there.” She very carefully placed the folded handkerchief back in her pocketbook.

Kate mashed down her irritation with the girl. Having a curvy figure didn’t necessarily mean a girl was mature in other ways. She wasn’t much older than Tori. Maybe she didn’t know any better than to poke and prod and meddle. “Did you need any groceries, Alice?”

Alice snapped her pocketbook closed and pushed away from the counter. “A box of crackers. Mama made soup. And some peanut butter. Mama says to put it on our tab.”

“All right.” Kate got the crackers and peanut butter off
the shelves and sacked them up. “Soup sounds good on a day like today.”

She hoped Alice would pick up the sack and leave without saying anything else about her and Jay. Heaven only knew what the gossips would be saying tomorrow after Alice told them Kate wished she’d eloped with him. Sometimes it didn’t do to speak the truth out loud. If it was the truth. If only she knew the truth.

Alice stopped with her hand on the door to go out. She looked back toward Kate. “It was nice Jay bringing you the car to use while he was gone.”

“He didn’t bring it to me. He brought it to Lorena.” Kate wanted to tell her to just go on out the door. They could talk forever and nothing would be changed. She’d still be here at the store and Jay would still be in the Army. Somewhere. Maybe even in Africa by now or in the Pacific where the war was not going well.

“Lorena can’t drive.” Alice started to pull open the door, but again she stopped. She turned full around and rushed out her next words as though she needed to say them fast before she lost her nerve. “I know you’re smart, Kate. Smarter than I ever hope to be, but you aren’t always right. You can be wrong. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

Then she was out the door, slamming it behind her.

Kate stared at the door and muttered, “Goodbye, Alice. Don’t hurry back.” She had no idea what Alice was trying to tell her. Or even if she was trying to tell her something or only doing her best to be irritating.

The clock on the wall behind the counter ticked off the seconds. More than an hour before closing time. But at least a few people usually stopped by on the way home from work, and sure enough, the bell at the gas pump clanged as a car drove up. Kate grabbed her coat and hurried out into the cold air, glad to have something to get her mind away from Jay
Tanner and what she’d told Alice Wilcher about eloping with him. Alice was right. Sometimes Kate was wrong. She didn’t really wish she’d eloped with him. Stand up in the church and marry him, maybe. But not elope. The only reason he had ever asked her that was because he knew she wouldn’t.

At last Kate saw the last customer out the door and flipped over the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
. After she checked the washroom to make sure it was in good shape, she put her coat back on, turned off the lights, and stepped out into the chilly air. She never drove Jay’s car to the store. It was such a short walk from the house that it seemed a waste of gasoline to drive.

The thick clouds were making night come early. Icy rain hit her in the face and Kate pulled the hood of her coat up over her head. It would feel good to get home and see what her mother had fixed for supper. Maybe soup, like Alice’s mother. She looked over toward her father’s blacksmith shop, dark and closed up, but a lamp glowed in the window of Graham’s room above it. She slowed as she passed. She hadn’t talked to Graham for a couple of days, and it always made her feel better to talk to Graham. Maybe he’d even heard from Jay.

She shook her head and kept walking. She was getting as bad as Lorena, wishing for a letter. Wishing for what couldn’t be. But they might have gotten a letter from Mike. He was almost through with basic training, and then according to where he was assigned next, Evie might go join him until he shipped out. He was also hoping for a few days’ leave so he could come home and be the one to perform the marriage ceremony for Tori and Sammy.

Kate counted back the weeks since Pearl Harbor. Jay would be through with his basic training. He could already be on a troopship on the way to war. He could already be in the middle of the fighting. He could be dead.

She couldn’t keep thinking that. Else she was going to lose her mind. She was so deep in her thoughts that she didn’t
see Fern until she stepped up on the road beside her. “Fern, what are you doing out in weather like this?”

Fern peered at her from under the man’s felt hat she had pushed down on her head. “Don’t mind rain. Snow. Just weather.”

“You might catch something the way Tori has.”

“Might.” Fern pulled a bottle out of her coat. “Hattie said give you this for the sick girl. A tonic. So I was waiting for you.”

“You could have brought it to the store.” Kate took the bottle and slipped it down in her coat pocket.

“Thought about it, but that other girl was there. Her talk hurts my ears.”

“Yeah.” Kate could agree with that. “Well, thanks, and thank Aunt Hattie for us too.” She started on toward the house and was surprised when Fern kept walking along beside her. After a few steps, Kate said, “You want to come to the house? Get some supper to carry back to you and Aunt Hattie?”

“Hattie’s got beans. Cooked with a ham hock.”

Kate didn’t try to think of anything else to say. If Fern wanted to walk with her, Fern would walk with her. And if she wanted to say something, she’d take her time saying it. Throwing words at her wouldn’t hurry up the woman.

They were nearly to the edge of the yard when Fern said, “Did that Jay bird man write to the little girl?”

“Not yet.”

“Think he will?”

“No.” Kate felt like Fern, answering with as few words as possible. What was it about today that had everybody talking about Jay?

“Want him to?” When Kate hesitated, Fern added, “No use lying to yourself. Told you that already.”

Kate looked over at the older woman, bundled against the weather. Scarred by storms in her past, but changed in the
last few years by the way she cared about Lorena. “I don’t need to answer. You already know.”

The woman nodded. “Good to quit lying. Hattie says to tell you.” She shut her mouth tight and looked at Kate and stopped walking.

Kate stopped too. Across the yard, the house waited with warmth and food, but she couldn’t walk off without hearing what Fern had to say. What Aunt Hattie had told her to say.

“Jay bird man wasn’t drunk.”

“Why would Aunt Hattie want you to tell me that?” Kate stared at her in the dim light. “She knows I know drunk.”

“Drunk on him. Not in him.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Saw him. Rode on the fender of that car he give you.” Fern poked Kate’s chest with her finger. “Hattie worries about you. Thinks you’re getting skinny.”

“Tell her I’m fine.”

“Not fine. Lovesick. I know. I saw you dancing.” Fern blew out a loud breath of air. “Lovesick can make you crazy like me.” She made the sound that passed for her laugh. “No second chance for me, but Hattie says you can have one.”

“What does she think I can do? I don’t even know where he is.”

“You fixed things when the girl needed things fixed. You can fix this.” Fern poked her again before she turned on her heel and stalked away.

She didn’t turn her head, but Kate heard her anyway. “Don’t want to be like me.”

Kate watched her until she was out of sight.
Drunk on him. Not in him.
Could that have been true the same as it was once true for her father? When the whiskey had spilled on him after he quit drinking. Her mother had believed him. Why hadn’t Kate at least tried to believe Jay?

T
hey finished up basic. Perry went off to learn how to drive tanks, taking his never-ending supply of cookies with him and his Bible. He’d never given up talking to Jay about the Lord, but it was easy talk. Not preaching like Mike. Jay had always felt like he was failing when he couldn’t step up the aisle the way Mike wanted him to. But when Perry talked about the Lord, it was more like he was simply trying to get two friends together, just knowing they’d like one another if they’d only start talking.

Perry’s mother had sent Jay a pocket-size copy of the New Testament with the Psalms and Proverbs. Jay hadn’t ever written to her the way Perry said he could, but he supposed Perry telling her about how he liked her cookies had been enough to pull him into her family circle. Some women were like that. Always ready to mother anybody within hug’s reach, even when that hug had to be by mail.

That made him think about Kate’s mother. She hadn’t been a hugger the way he had a feeling Perry’s whole family would be. But she’d always accepted him. He wondered what Kate had told her about him being drunk. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been. Kate thought he was and that’s what she would have told her mother. If what he’d heard at the roadhouse
was true, Mrs. Merritt knew about dealing with a drunk. But she had never slammed the door on her husband’s love. Or maybe she had. Maybe they’d ironed out things after Mr. Merritt gave up the drink. It wasn’t always possible to know what had happened in other people’s lives. Even when they told you about it, it wasn’t the same as living through it.

He was sorry to see Perry go, and not only because of the cookies. Mrs. Franklin had stepped up to the plate for him there. He got mail nearly every week from her, telling him about what Mr. Franklin was doing on the farm and about those grandchildren she was relieved weren’t old enough to go off to war. It wasn’t a chore to write her back. But he did feel guilty when he posted the letters. At the same time he could almost see the sweet old lady smiling when she saw his letters in her mailbox, he could picture Birdie peering in the Merritts’ empty mailbox. He intended to write Birdie. He did. Just as soon as a knife stopped stabbing through him every time he thought about Rosey Corner.

Jay was more than glad the Army hadn’t decided he’d fit in a tank like Perry. Instead, an officer had come to talk to them, trolling for volunteers for a new unit open only to the strongest and the best. Jay was strong. He was tougher than the average man. Around him he could see other men thinking the same thing as they sat up a little straighter and listened a little closer. But then the officer had let them know they’d be jumping out of airplanes with parachutes. Some of the men smothered laughs as they sank back into their chairs, but not Jay. At the end of the man’s speech, he got in the very short line and signed up.

The next week he boarded a train to Fort Benning, Georgia. The officer had been right. The new training made basic seem like a picnic. But Jay took what they dished out and got tougher. They ran to everything. Walking was for other soldiers. Not a paratrooper. To be a paratrooper took something
extra. Something Jay wanted to prove he had as they climbed aboard an airplane for their first real jump.

It wasn’t that none of them were afraid. A man stepping out of a plane into the air for the first time would have to be more than a little crazy not to feel some nerves. For sure, Jay’s mouth went dry, his heart started beating too fast, and his hands were sweating as he grabbed the outside of the airplane door and pulled himself out into the empty air. Free-falling for one terrifying but amazing moment before the static line jerked out the parachute. Then he was floating high above the earth with dozens of parachutes dotting the sky around him. Before this, they’d jumped off towers. They’d learned how to land. But nothing in that training had prepared Jay for the heady feeling of being between heaven and earth.

Then that earth was rushing toward him. The field was flat, a good landing spot for first jumpers. He rolled on impact and absorbed the pain of banging into the ground. He was up at once, folding his parachute and running toward the sound of Sergeant Kerr counting the men off as they got to the truck.

“How was it, Tanner?” the sergeant asked. He was a couple of inches shorter than Jay and the skin on his face looked like dried leather. He hailed from Arizona where he said the sun never stopped shining.

“Fine, sir. Better than advertised.”

Sarge almost smiled. “Ready to go again?”

“Yes sir,” Jay said.

“Won’t be as much fun if you land in a tree next time.” Sergeant Kerr made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“I’ll try not to let that happen, sir.”

That night he sat on his bunk and wished he knew Perry’s address so he could write him about the jump. He wanted to tell somebody. He fingered the little Bible from Perry’s mother. For the last few seconds before he pushed himself out of the airplane, he’d had the weirdest urge to say some kind
of prayer. That could have been because the man behind him was muttering the Twenty-Third Psalm under his breath. Jay had almost whispered the words along with him.

He opened the little Bible and flipped through Psalms. He had forgotten there were so many. One hundred fifty of them. He leafed through the tissue-thin pages until his eyes caught on a verse in the middle of one of the pages. Verse eight in the hundred and thirty-ninth psalm.
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there
. Funny that his eye would catch on that. It could be a paratrooper’s verse for sure. Flying up in the heavens to make a jump and then training to be dropped behind enemy lines into the hell of battle.

Thou art there
. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe God was there. He just had never believed he was there for him, but maybe a man going to war might consider changing what he believed.

Jay shut the Bible and shoved it under his pillow. He should have told Perry to give the Bible to somebody else. From somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, a Bible story surfaced that he’d heard some preacher use in a sermon long ago. A prophet, Jay couldn’t remember his name, had told this widow woman to let him live in her spare room. And then her son died. She went out to the field where the prophet was working or doing something and told him straight out that she wished he’d never come around her. She was sure that the prophet being in her house had caused the Lord to notice her sins and punish her by taking her only son. In the Bible story, the prophet had fixed things. He’d prayed over the son and the boy had started breathing again.

But Jay didn’t have any prophets around to fix things when the Lord took notice of his sins. Look what had happened when he’d been sitting in a church pew, ready to believe the sermons Mike was preaching. The Lord had closed that door
fast. A little voice whispered in his head that it wasn’t the Lord who shut that door. It had been Kate. And what about Birdie running out of the school? Breathing and smiling.

Thinking about Birdie made him smile too. Made him want to tell her about jumping out of an airplane. She’d think that was something. How many months had it been? Five. Almost half a year. She’d probably given up checking the mailbox for a letter from him. His smile got bigger, and before he could change his mind, he pulled out a piece of paper. He wanted to tell somebody how it felt to jump out into the air. To just turn loose and trust the training. Trust the parachute. Trust.

Dear Birdie,

I’ll bet you’re surprised to get this. I haven’t forgotten you or Rosey Corner, but I’ve been busy letting the Army turn me into a soldier. Guess what I did today? I’d make you really guess if I was there to hear what you might guess, but since I’m not, I’ll just tell you. You wouldn’t ever guess anyway. I jumped out of an airplane. Don’t worry. I had a parachute and I didn’t land in a tree. My sergeant said that might happen next time. If it does, I’ll just climb down like a monkey.

How’s Scout doing? Living up to his new name, I hope. Scout sounds brave and smart. That might be a stretch for the old Trouble. Ha. Ha.

You keeping my car all polished up? You haven’t let Kate run it into any fence posts or anything, I hope.

He stopped and chewed on the end of his pencil for a minute. He wanted to write something to Kate. He wanted to write down the words,
I love you
. He’d said them and she’d shut the door on him, but maybe if he wrote them, she’d be readier to see them.
I love you, Kate Merritt
.

He couldn’t write that. For all he knew, Kate had a new
fellow by now. A new fellow she could trust. He sighed and started writing again. The letter was to Birdie, not Kate.

Tell Kate hello for me. Did you tell her what I told you to when I brought the car? About eloping? I bet that made her laugh. I hope everybody else is doing all right and that Graham and Poe are still out there chasing their old friend, Mr. Raccoon. I sure would like a piece of your mama’s brown sugar pie about now. Tell you what. You eat two pieces next time she makes that pie. One for you and one for me.

Well, I got to go. I just wanted to tell you about stepping out into the air and trusting the parachute. A fine thing. Trust. Remember, I’m trusting you to take care of my old heap. It sure will be nice to see you and Rosey Corner again once we win this war.

Your buddy,
Tanner

He stared down at his words a minute. Maybe he shouldn’t have put that about trust. It might make Kate remember him saying that the music stopped without trust.

He could mark it out. Start all over. Or tear up the letter and forget about writing altogether. He hesitated, but then he folded the paper and shoved it into an envelope. He wasn’t sure about the address, but Rosey Corner wasn’t so big that the mailman wouldn’t be able to find a kid named Birdsong. He printed her name on the envelope.
Lorena “Birdie” Birdsong
. Then he wrote his own name and address in the corner. He’d put it in the mail first thing in the morning. She’d write to him. Letters from her and cookies from Mrs. Franklin. If he didn’t watch out, the other guys would decide he hadn’t been telling the truth when he said he didn’t have any family.

The late afternoon sunshine was warm on Kate’s shoulders as she headed home from the store. A beautiful May day full of sunshine with birds singing and the fragrance of lilacs in the air. Nothing like the battlefields must be. Kate read the accounts in the papers, saw the pictures of ships blowing apart, soldiers marching into battle, while here in Rosey Corner spring had come the same as any other year.

But not really the same. Sunshine or not, the war shadow was over them all.

Just a couple of weeks ago, President Roosevelt had asked everyone in America to help win the war by sacrificing. He said they’d pay in hard work, sorrow, and blood. The sorrow was already happening.

The Japanese were winning in the Philippines. Bataan had fallen after months of hard fighting. Over thirty thousand American and Filipino soldiers killed or captured.

Kate tried to imagine that many men, but she couldn’t. And now they were all either dead or prisoners. Perhaps men she knew. Not Mike, thank the Lord. He was in Arizona, getting training, so she knew he was still safe. Evie was out there with him, but in her last letter, she said he expected to get orders soon. Evie was being stronger than Kate would have ever thought possible. She’d squared her shoulders and put on a brave face for Mike and the world.

She hadn’t been quite so brave when Kate was helping her pack for Arizona. She’d sunk down on her bed and let the tears flow unchecked. Kate dropped down beside her, put her arms around her, and wanted to cry too. But she didn’t. Instead she whispered things like “it’ll be all right” and other words that people always said when things were definitely not all right but they wanted them to be.

“I’m so afraid,” Evie managed to say between sobs. “So
very afraid. What if Mike . . .” She couldn’t voice her thought. Instead she covered her mouth with her hand and stared at Kate with wide eyes.

Kate gave her a little shake. “Mike is going to be fine.”