Small Town Girl (17 page)

"Hello there," she said cheerfully from the doorway. "Is there anyone in here with a brand-new hip?"

"Faith," they all chorused. "Hello!"

Tess straightened up and took notice of this woman whose car was parked across the alley most nights after work.

"Mary, dear, how are you? The nurses tell me that you've been up already and have taken a few steps. I'll bet you're glad it's over and all you have to do is file your insurance papers." She set down the flowers and kissed the patient's cheek. Then she stood at the bedside squeezing both Mary's hands, and looking right into her eyes. "I'm so glad the worst part is over for you. I can't tell you how many times I thought of you day before yesterday."

"Oh, thank you, Faith. That means so much to me."

"Kenny sends his best and tells me to give you a big kiss, so that's from him. And the irises, too. I picked them in his yard."

"They're absolutely gorgeous. Thank you again."

"And something from Casey, who says she'll try to come up tonight after supper." From her purse Faith extracted a card. "She made it." Mary read it aloud.

"Certain people leave a glow,

Love-dust everywhere they go,

Smiles and cheer and happy-dom,

Hurry home and sprinkle some."

Everyone murmured appreciatively and the card got passed around. When it reached Tess she read the additional note Casey had put at the bottom. " 'Hospitals are best when you're getting out of them. Glad you're coming this way soon. Miss you! Love, Casey.' "

As Tess closed the card, Faith said, "Mary, I haven't met your other daughter yet, though I waved to her from the back step last night." She approached Tess and took both of her hands as she'd done to Mary earlier. "I'm Faith Oxbury."

Tess squeezed back. "Hi, Faith. I'm Tess."

"And you're every bit as pretty as your pictures." Faith had the rare combination of sincerity and candor that struck the perfect chord with Tess. She recognized immediately what a genuinely kind woman she was. ' "Thank you."

"And as nice, if Casey can be believed." Tess chuckled at Faith's directness. "Thank you again."

"She thinks you can walk on water. That's all we've heard around the house since you came home is Mac, Mac, Mac. You have that girl absolutely glowing."

"Well, I don't know why. I didn't do much."

"You respected her music, that was enough. I think you have a disciple for life."

Faith finally released Tess's hands.

Tess said, "So she told you she and I are writing a song together?"

"Told us! Why, that's all the girl can talk about! She's been up in her room playing her guitar and singing constantly since you got here."

"I didn't know she played guitar."

"Oh, yes. Since she was ten and her hands got big enough."

"Well, I'd like to hear her sometime." That was a statement Tess rarely made, but speaking the words today, she truly meant them. Undiscovered talents were always trying to get to her, perform for her, but most were not allowed. Yet Casey she welcomed, for reasons she had not clearly defined.

Faith was saying, "I'm sure all you'd have to do is say the word and she'd have it at your door. Her father is concerned that she's bothering you, though, coming across the alley too much."

"Oh, no, not at all. Will you tell her, by the way, that I like the second verse?"

"Second verse?"

"She'll understand."

Faith smiled. "I'll tell her."

Tess liked Faith Oxbury. There was nothing about her not to like. She was very genuine, charitable, kind to Mary, obviously as dear a friend to the entire family as Kenny was, and more than likely a wonderful influence on Casey.

What bothered Tess was that she found herself analyzing Faith not in light of all this, but in light of the fact that she was, from all apparent evidence, Kenny Kronek's longtime paramour.

At seven o'clock that evening, Kenny and Faith had the house to themselves as they got ready for their weekly night of bridge. Casey had driven her rusty pickup over to Poplar Bluff to visit Mary at the hospital, and Faith had finished putting away the sandwich fixings from their quick supper. She closed the dishwasher, hung up the dishcloth underneath the sink and took a squirt of hand lotion from the bottle she kept on the windowsill. Rubbing it into her hands she passed through the living room to the only downstairs bedroom, the one she always used to change her clothes whenever she was here. It had been Kenny's parents' room, but after they were both gone, he'd never wanted to use it as his own. He always said, "It was theirs. It's where I remember the two of them being. I'm just as comfortable upstairs."

His mother had been a widow already when Kenny's wife, Stephanie, declared out of the clear blue sky that she didn't want to be married any longer and was leaving Casey and him and taking a trip to Paris, which she'd always wanted to see, and from there she didn't know where. All she knew was that living in this small town with its change-lessness and dearth of culture was strangling her. She was sorry, but she simply had to go.

It was natural that Kenny, left in shock with a seven-year-old daughter, move back in with his mother, who took care of both of them until she had a stroke and lost the use of her left hand. Then the two of them took care of her until she had died two years ago. It had been a workable exchange and they'd gotten along extremely well.

Since her death, the house had remained largely unchanged. It had been Kenny's home for most of his life and he liked it as it was, even though it had only one bathroom, and that on the main floor next to his parents' old bedroom. The bathroom was a barn of a room, papered in yellow nosegays with a huge claw-foot tub and a lot of wasted space. It had a wide window that stretched from shoulder level down to ankle level—peculiar in a bathroom, Faith had always thought—but it looked out into a huge ornamental pear tree and had a white shutter on its lower half, so privacy was no problem. The room still held an antique washstand shaped like a small dresser in which Lucille had kept towels. On top of it, the attached towel bar still held two of Lucille's embroidered linen towels, which Faith washed and starched and ironed twice a year when they got dusty.

Faith was getting a washcloth out of the top drawer when Kenny came clumping downstairs and stopped in the bathroom doorway. He watched her as she wet the cloth and wiped off her face, peering in the mirror above the wall-hung sink. She was dressed in a pair of pleated beige trousers, beige flats and a white rayon blouse with pearl buttons and pleats down the front.

Circling wide around her eyes with the damp washcloth, she said, "I hope I don't get Midge Randolph for my partner tonight. She always plays for blood."

Kenny was thinking of something else. "I had an interesting talk with Casey after you went home last night," he told her.

"About what?" she asked, taking a compact from a glass shelf above the sink and snapping it open.

"About a number of things. You and me mostly."

Faith rubbed powder on her face. "What about you and me?"

"She was wondering if we're ever going to get married."

Faith closed the compact and opened another. "Sounds like the same conversation I had with Casey," she said, applying rouge with a foam pad.

"Are we?" Kenny asked placidly.

"I don't know, Kenny. Are we?"

He wandered into the room, propped a hand on the towel bar of the dresser and let it take his weight. "We haven't talked about it for quite a while."

"I assumed you didn't want to talk about it."

"Well…" he said, and let the thought hang.

She put the rouge on the shelf.

"Well…" she said, using exactly the tone he had used.

"Casey thinks we should."

"Mmm…" She was applying rose lipstick; in the mirror he watched her open her lips and curl them against her teeth. When her lips were coated she took the time to rub them together and put .the lipstick away before speaking again. "I suspect Casey's worried about your welfare and would like to know you'll be tied up with somebody for life after she's not here to watch over you anymore."

"That's about right. But I told her you'll still be here."

She smiled at him in the mirror. "Of course I will. Goodness, where else would I be after all this time?" She pulled a Kleenex from a box on the back of the toilet, blotted her lipstick and dropped it into a plastic wastebasket. She picked at a couple of curls around her face that had been pushed back by her powder puff, and began tucking her cosmetics into a small zippered case.

"Nothing's changed in the Catholic Church, and I know it means a lot to you, being able to go to Communion."

"Yes, it does. I'm… well… I'm content if you are, keeping things the way they are."

"Fine with me." Kenny kept leaning on the towel bar, watching her as she smoothed a hand down her torso and retucked her blouse neatly into her waistband. "Casey asked me something else last night."

"What was that?"

"She wanted to know if you put out."

Faith swung around and tried to stop herself from laughing, but could not. A soft ladylike snort escaped as she covered her lips.

"Oh, good gracious. What did you tell her?"

"I told her, "On occasion."

"You did not."

Kenny dropped his hand from the towel bar and grinned, moving toward her, letting his head tip to one side. "No, I didn't, but if I remember right, you do put out now and then, don't you?"

"Kenneth," she chided, dropping her gaze like a blushing virgin.

He walked up against her and joined his hands on the shallows of her spine while she put her arms around his shoulders, leaning back and looking up at him.

"It's been a while," he said, "and we have the house to ourselves."

"I just freshened my makeup."

"We have twenty minutes before we have to leave for Laurie and Yale's."

She checked her watch over his shoulder. "Fifteen," she corrected. "But… well… all right."

They went up to Kenny's room, where Faith removed her slacks and pantyhose, and laid them neatly on a chair. He threw his trousers and shorts on the foot of the bed and said, "Why don't you come over here on the edge of the bed?"

Obediently she went where he suggested, and arranged herself in suitable fashion that would mess them both up the least. His shirttails got in the way and she held them aside. When he made overtures as if to incite her to orgasm, she said, "We don't have time, Kenny," and he obediently desisted. Reaching his own orgasm, he grunted softly. These were the only verbal exchanges they made during the coupling, although when it was over they smiled at each other. Then he kissed her for the first time that night, and she said, "We'll have to hurry because Laurie likes to get started on time."

When they left the house together, Faith was just as neat and tidy as she'd been at work that day.

At nine o'clock that night Tess was just eating her supper—flatbread topped with herbed tomatoes and goat cheese, broiled. She was sitting at the kitchen table barefoot, in her baseball cap and a huge white Garth Brooks T-shirt, turning the pages of a JCPenney catalogue that had arrived in her mother's mail that day. The radio on top of the refrigerator was tuned to KKLR in Poplar Bluff and Trisha Yearwood was singing "Thinkin' about You."