Small Town Girl (11 page)

"He's very good to her."

"Very good to her! He might as well move right in! He plants her garden, fills her water softener, installs her new garage door! Hell, I'm surprised he didn't show up to do her hip replacement surgery this morning! I mean, every time I turn around I'm running into this guy.
What is going on
?"

Judy and Renee exchanged baffled glances.

"Maybe you'd better tell
us
what's going on," Renee responded. "The guy helps Mom—what's wrong with that?"

Judy added, "And we've known him our whole lives long, so, yes, what
is
wrong with that?"

Tess stood before her sisters caught in an unjustified bout of temper. How could she reveal—especially to Judy—that Kenny had set her off by ignoring her? If that didn't sound like a star with a bloated ego, what did?

"I send her money all the time. Plenty of money! What does she do with it? She could pay to have her garage door installed, and she could hire someone to mow her lawn, and have the Culligan man come and service her water softener, but instead she has Kenny Kronek do it. It just aggravates me, that's all! And you know what else hurts? The fact that I offered to buy her the house of her choice, a brand-new one so she wouldn't have to be replacing garage doors and everything else that's crumbling to pieces around the place. She could have a dishwasher, and a laundry room on the main floor, and an air conditioner and anything else she wanted, but she said no. For heaven's sake, have you taken a look at her kitchen cupboards lately? The Formica is worn right down to the underlayer in spots.
And her front steps are tilting and the sidewalk is cracking apart. Her bedroom carpeting is as old as we are, and the tile in the bathroom is still that god-awful putrid stuff that was put on when the place was built. I send her nice clothes from really good stores when I'm out on tour, and she wears that lavender polyester slacks set that she probably bought fifteen years ago. I just don't understand her anymore."

When Tess quit speaking, a deep, thoughtful quiet spread through the room. Judy and Renee exchanged discreet glances before the latter spoke quietly.

"She's getting old, Tess."

"Old! She's only seventy-four!"

"Old enough that she doesn't want change. She wants what's familiar."

"But that's absurd."

"Maybe to you, but not to her. There's a lifetime of memories in that house. Why would she want to move away from it?"

"All right, I'll concede that she probably wouldn't want to leave the house, but couldn't she update it a little?"

"You know what your trouble is?" Judy said. "You haven't been around to see her aging. You come home once a year or so and demand that she be the same as she always was, only she's not. Sure she gets stubborn, and sure she thinks that there's no use making changes at this late date, but if she's happy, leave her alone."

Tess stared at Judy. Then at Renee. "Is she right?"

"Basically."

"But does Mother have to look so shabby? Can't you get her to do something with her hair, Judy? You own a beauty shop."

"I've tried. She knows she can come in anytime for a style or a perm, whatever she needs, but it's always some excuse. Either her hips hurt or she has gardening to do."

"Oh, don't even
mention
gardening! That's the last thing on earth she needs is that garden!"

"It gives her great joy, her garden."

"It gives her hip aches, that's what it gives her."

"That, too, but you're not going to change her mind, so why try? She's had a garden her whole life long, and we all know she doesn't need to raise her own vegetables, but it makes her happy, so let her be."

"And while you're at it, let Kenny Kronek do what he wants for her," Renee added. "The truth is, he seems to be able to convince her to make changes when we can't. Jim told her I don't know how many times that she should have an automatic garage-door opener installed, because it hurt her hips when she bent down to reach the handle. He even offered to do it for her, but she always said no. Then one day she just announces that she's got one and Kenny put it in for her. I don't pretend to understand, but the two of them get along like peas in a pod, so I'm just grateful to have him around."

When Tess went into Mary's room for the last time that afternoon, she looked at her differently, trying to grasp the fact that she was aging, that at seventy-four she had a right to be getting a little feisty. Perhaps Judy was right. Perhaps coming home so seldom left Tess with the illusion that time was not marching on.

She pressed the four-leaf clover into Mary's hand. "That's from Casey Kronek. She came by to see how you are and said to give you this. She found it out in the pasture where she keeps her horse. Said to give you her love and tell you she'd be back to see you tomorrow."

"Oh, isn't that nice. That Casey's a sweet girl."

"Listen, Mom… I'm going to leave now but I'll be back tomorrow. Anything you want, you just let me know, and if you're uncomfortable during the night, you ask for a pain pill, will you?"

"I will."

"We're going to be going, too," the other girls said.

They took turns kissing her and left her looking drowsy and pale.

Outside, they took great gulps of the sweet air. They looked up at the blue spring sky. But they were all silent as they walked toward their cars. In the parking lot, Renee gave Tess a genuine good-bye hug, but Judy offered only a moue that passed for a kiss on the cheek but was not.

It felt like being released, driving away, even in Mary's old Ford Tempo. The spring day was glorious and had warmed up to eighty degrees. Creeping phlox and irises were blooming in front yards. Here and there, rhododendrons made a splash of color. Tess took her time, stopping at a Kroger supermarket and buying herself some fresh vegetables, low-fat salad dressing and boneless chicken breasts before heading back toward Wintergreen. Driving along the familiar roads, she found herself cataloging her mixed feelings about being home again.

There was something to be said for living away from family. Out there, in Nashville and beyond, she was clear of the daily reminders of her mother's health, of Judy's jealousy and all the other petty irritations that had cropped up in the twenty-four hours she'd been home. Being here had brought moments of nostalgia, but more often she became aware of how different she was from the girl who'd left. Her values and priorities had changed. Her pace had changed. Her acquaintanceship, scope and obligations. Was that necessarily bad? She didn't think so. What she had accomplished with her life had taken tremendous energy and commitment, so much, in fact, that on a day-to-day basis there was little room left in her mind for what she thought of as social trifles.

Judy's jealousy was a social trifle.

Mother's stubbornness was a social trifle.

When Tess was wrapped up in business she forgot about such things. At home, idle, they niggled and their importance in the overall scheme of life got blown out of proportion.

When she pulled up in the alley at five o'clock, another of those social trifles was waiting to irritate her: Kenny Kronek was mowing her mother's backyard, dressed in blue jeans, a white V-neck undershirt and a navy-and-red Cardinals baseball cap. He looked up but kept on mowing as she stopped in the alley and activated the garage door. Throughout the jockeying of cars, which took a while, he went on cutting swaths up and down the length of the yard, disappearing to the front, then reappearing in back. When her mother's car was tucked away and her own returned to the apron, Tess took her groceries and headed for the house. She and Kronek met head-on when she was halfway up the sidewalk.

Though they'd have rather snubbed each other, the woman they both loved had had surgery that day. They could hardly pass each other without mentioning it. He stopped and switched the motor to idle.

"How'd it go?" he asked, his weight on one hip, no smile on his mouth.

"Perfect," she snapped, as rudely as possible.

"And Mary?"

"Doctor says she's doing great. No complications at all. They'll be getting her up to stand tomorrow."

"Well, that's good news."

They both felt awkward, speaking with surface civility while wishing they need not.

"I met your daughter today," she told him.

He reached down, picked up a little stick from the grass in front of the grumbling mower and threw it into the garden. "She told me she might stop up there. I told her she should wait at least until tomorrow, till Mary was feeling a little better."

"She's quite refreshingly natural."

"Meaning she smelled like horses, right?"

Had he been anyone else, Tess would have laughed. Since he was Kenny, she forcibly refrained. "Some. But she apologized for it."

"She loves her horses." He still wouldn't look at her, but sent his gaze roving over the lawn and the backyard buildings, his weight once again on one hip in a stance she found cocky.

"She asked me to come and sing with your church choir."

He gave her a quarter of a glance and mumbled as if cursing under his breath, then scratched the back of his head under the cap, bouncing the red bill in front. "I told her not to bug you about it. I hope you don't think I put her up to it."

She remembered the crush he used to have on her in high school and said with enough sarcasm to nettle him, "Now, why would I think a thing like that?"

He squared the baseball cap on his head, gave her a drawn-back, deep, disgusted assessment from beneath its visor, then rolled away toward the mower, leading with one shoulder. "I gotta get back to work." He turned up the engine till it pounded their eardrums.

She leaned closer and shouted above the roar, "You didn't have to mow this lawn, you know! I was going to call my nephew!"

"No trouble!" he shouted back.

"I'll be happy to pay you!"

He gave her a look that cut her down to about the height of the grass. "Around here we don't pay each other for favors," then he added insolently, "
Ms. McPhail
."

"I was born
around here
, in case you've forgotten! So don't take that tone with me,
Mister Kronek
!"

He let his gaze clip the edge of her face and offered, "Oh, excuse me…
Mac
, is it?"

"Tess will be fine, whenever you choose to come off your high horse long enough to speak to me!"

"Looks to me like I'm the one who got off his high horse first today!"

"But you sort of forgot who I was in the house last night, didn't you?"

"Bet that doesn't happen too often anymore, does it?"

"No. People are generally better-mannered than that!"

They were both still shouting.

"You know, you always
did
have an attitude."

"I do
not
have an
attitude
!"

He let out a snort and began pushing the mower away, calling back over his shoulder, "Look again… Mac!" He could say Mac with such an insulting tone she wanted to run up behind him and trip him! Instead, she stormed into the house and slammed the grocery bag down on the counter, wondering when in the last eighteen years she'd been this riled. All the while she used the bathroom, and changed into a cooler shirt, and opened up the windows in the stuffy loft, and put away her groceries in the refrigerator, the mower kept droning around the house, reminding her he was there, circling.

To distract herself, she decided to call Jack Greaves, who informed her that Carla Niles was coming in to cut a new harmony track on "Tarnished Gold," and that he'd have it couriered to her tomorrow. She called Peter Steinberg, who ran some foreign sales figures by her and said Billy Ray Cyrus had called asking if she'd sing at a fund-raiser for a children's hospital in August. She called Kelly Mendoza and asked her to check their August calendar and get back to Cyrus; Kelly gave her a report on the day's mail and phone calls and said a fax had come in with the week's
Gavin Report
and that her current single, "Cattin'," had dropped one notch on the radio chart. Also, her custom-made boots had arrived from M. L. Leddy in Fort Worth. Would she like them sent down to Wintergreen?

While Tess was on the kitchen phone a car pulled up and parked behind Kronek's open garage door—the same car as yesterday, a white Dodge Neon. A woman got out and crossed the alley toward him. She was fortyish, wearing low-heeled pumps and a summer business suit of pale peach. As she approached him he stopped mowing and moved a couple steps in her direction. She was carrying a portfolio, which rested against her leg as the two of them talked. She pointed toward his house and continued casually gesturing while they discussed something. Kenny jabbed a thumb toward Mary's house and the woman glanced over briefly. Then she smiled and headed back across the alley while he returned to his mowing.

Who's that
! Tess wondered, watching the woman disappear into the glass porch.

A half hour later Tess was washing a head of lettuce when she looked out the window and saw the woman, who had changed into slacks and a white blouse, carrying a tray out the back door to Kenny's picnic table. A moment later Casey followed with another tray. The woman hailed
Kenny, who by this time had finished mowing Mary's yard and was halfway through with his own, and the three of them sat down to eat supper.

A mistress
? Tess wondered. Could it be Saint Kenny actually led a life of promiscuity? Certainly the woman was more than a mere housekeeper, changing clothes the way she had and joining the family for supper. There was an unmistakable air of familiarity among the three of them as they sat down to share the meal.

Tess caught herself wondering and spun away from the window. Who cares, she thought, as she put a chicken breast on to poach, then went into the living room to do what she'd been eager to do all day long. Armed with a small tape recorder, staff paper and pencil, she sat down at the piano to work on the song idea she'd had last night.

The old upright piano was badly in need of tuning, but the easy action of the keys and its exceptional resonance surpassed many on which she'd played. This was one of her favorite parts of the work she did. Composing seemed like play, always had. At times she found it ludicrous that she should be paid for doing something that gave her such absolute pleasure. Yet the royalties from her original songs brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. She'd always been imaginative, and the process of combining a theme, poetry, and music into one entity sometimes so captivated her that she didn't hear when she was being spoken to. During the years when she and the band had toured by bus she often wrote while they were rolling down the highway, setting down the words first, along with a basic melody line, to which she added chords by using a miniature two-octave electronic keyboard that she could hold on her lap and listen to through earphones. Sometimes her lead guitarist would work with her, especially on the more upbeat songs that would be guitar-driven.