Small Town Girl (2 page)

Verse 3

Heard a lot of talk about the boy next door

He's a pan of yesteryear I see no more

Circumstance took us eighteen years apart

Took him just one night to soften up my heart

Say good-bye

Mustn't cry.

Verse 4

Hometown girl departing on a one-way flight

Something deep inside her somehow set a-right

Runs her tearful eyes across the faded kitchen wall

Whispers, Mama, please don't change at all

Must return

There's more to learn.

One-way traffic crawlin' round a small town square…

The black 300 ZX with the smoked windows looked completely out of place in Wintergreen, Missouri, population 1,713. Heads turned as it downshifted and growled its way around the town square behind Conn Hendrickson's lumbering Sinclair fuel oil truck and Miss Elsie Bullard's 1978 Buick sedan, whose speedometer hadn't seen fifty since she drove it off the showroom floor. On the open road, Miss Elsie cruised at forty-five. In town, she preferred a genteel fifteen.

The Z came up short behind her. its stereo booming through the closed windows. The brakes shrieked and its rear end vaulted, drawing attention to the Tennessee vanity plates.

MAC, it said.

And MAC said it all.

Four old men stood out in front of Wiley's Bakery with coffee on their breath, sucking toothpicks, following the car with their eyes.

"There she is."

"She's back."

"Showin' off some, too."

"Shoo-ey. 'At's some car she's herdin'."

"What's she doin' here anyways? She don't come back too often."

"Her momma's havin' her other hip surgeried. Come back to help her out awhile's what I heard."

"How can she see out them there windows?"

"Always figgered people who needed windows that black got somethin' to hide, ain't that right, Delbert?"

They watched the sleek machine follow right on Miss Elsie's tail. The traffic around the town square moved oneway, counterclockwise, and on this lazy Tuesday in April, Miss Elsie, just off her volunteer stint at the Three Rivers Nursing Home, was hankering for a strawberry ice-cream cone from Milton's Drugstore. She putt-putted around four sides of the square at the speed of a candle melting, searching for just the right place to park; the Z followed her around three, a scant yard off her heavy chrome bumper.

Inside the sports car Tess McPhail interrupted her singing and said aloud, "Move your ass, Miss Elsie!"

For the last five hours she'd been listening to her own voice on a rough cut off the upcoming album she'd been recording in Nashville for the past several weeks. Her producer, Jack Greaves, had handed the tape to her on her way out of the studio yesterday, and said, "Give it a listen on your way up to Missouri, then call me when you get there and let me know what you think."

The tape continued playing as Tess impatiently tapped the leather steering wheel with a long persimmon fingernail.

"Elsie, would you
move
it!"

Miss Elsie, her sprouty white hair creating a fuzzball silhouette, retained a two-handed death grip on the wheel and continued around the square at the same snail's pace. She finally reached the corner, turned left and got out of Tess's way while Tess squealed around a right, speed-shifted, laid on the gas, and burned her way up Sycamore, muttering, "Lord o' mercy,
small towns
."

This one hadn't changed since she'd left it eighteen years ago. Same red-brick courthouse in the town square, same tired storefronts around it, same old World War II veterans watching the traffic and waiting for the next parade to give them something to do. Same aging houses along Sycamore. Though the hickories and elms were bigger, most places looked just like when Tess had graduated from high school. There was Mindy Alverson's house: did her parents still live there? And what had happened to Mindy, Tess's best friend back then? That was where Mrs. Mabry used to live. She had taught geometry and could never instill the tiniest flicker of interest in Tess, a girl who had drifted her way through any class that wasn't related to music or creative arts, insisting she wouldn't need it, not when she was going to be a big country western singer after she graduated. And there was the house where that snotty Gallamore girl used to live, the one who landed the lead role in the class play the year they did
Oklahoma
! Tess had wanted to play the part of Laurie so badly she'd cried when the cast had been announced. Everybody said she should have gotten it; it was only because Cindy Gallamore's father was on the school board that she got picked instead.

Well, she'd shown Cindy Gallamore, hadn't she? She wondered what old Cindy was doing now. Probably giving herself home perms and changing diapers in one of these dismal little cracker boxes while Tess McPhail's latest number-one country hit wafted from the radio behind the piles of dirty dishes on Cindy's kitchen cupboard.

Tess reran the tape of "Tarnished Gold" one last time, listening with a critical ear. Overall, she liked it. Liked it a lot, with the exception of one single harmony note that continued to bother her after listening to the cut perhaps fifty or sixty times during her drive up.

She passed Judy and Ed's house on Thirteenth Street. The garage door was up and a car was visible inside, but Tess went on singing harmony with herself and gave the place little more than a hard-edged glance. Judy and her damned peremptory summons.

"Momma's got to have surgery on her other hip and this time
you're
taking care of her," Judy had said.

What would Judy know about the demands of a major career? All she'd ever done was run a beauty shop. Why, she hadn't a glimmer of what it meant to be pulled away from your work midway through recording an album that a whole record label was planning to release on a date that had been set more than a year ago.

But Judy was jealous, always had been, and throwing her weight around was how she got even.

The last thing Judy had said on the phone was, "You're going to be here, Tess, and don't try to get out of it!"

Then there was Tess's middle sister, Renee, on the other side of town, whose daughter, Rachel, was getting married in four weeks. It was understandable that Renee had plenty to do during these last few weeks before the wedding, but couldn't they have scheduled it and the surgery a little further apart? After all, Mom had known she needed this second hip replacement ever since she'd had the first one two years ago.

Tess turned onto Monroe Street and memories rolled back while she traveled the six-block stretch she had walked to elementary school every day for seven years. She pulled up at the curb in front of her mother's house, killed the engine and stared at the place. Lord, how it had deteriorated. She unplugged her cellular phone, removed the tape from the deck, got out of the car and stood beside it, pushing her narrow-legged jeans down off her calves, a size-seven woman in oversized sunglasses, cowboy boots and dangly Indian earrings made of silver and turquoise, with hair the color of an Irish setter and fair, freckly skin.

Her heart sank as she studied the house. How could her mother have let it get so shabby? The post-World War II bungalow was made of red brick, but the white wood trim was peeling and the front steps were listing badly. The yard looked just plain pitiful. The sidewalk was pitted, and the arbor vitae had grown taller than the living room window. Dandelions spangled the yard.

What does Mom do with all the money I send her?

Years past, Mary McPhail wouldn't have stood for any kind of weed disgracing her lawn. But that was when her hips were healthy. Tess reached into the car, shouldered an enormous gray bag of bread-soft leather, slammed the door, then headed for the house. Walking up the cracked side-walk she was reminded of how her little girlfriends used to push their doll buggies along it while she took Melody, her singing doll, and put on performances on the front steps.

As she approached those steps now, her mother appeared in the door above them, beaming. "I
thought
I heard a car door!" Mary McPhail's joy was unmistakable as she flung open the screen door and both of her arms. "Tess, honey, you're here!"

"Hey, Momma." Tess vaulted up the three steps and scooped her mother up hard. They rocked together while the door sprang shut and nudged them inside a tiny vestibule. Mary was half a head shorter and forty-five pounds heavier than her daughter, with a round face and metal-rimmed glasses. When Tess pulled back to see her, there were tears in Mary's eyes.

"You sure you should be up walkin' around, Momma?" You could still hear southwest Missouri in Tess's voice.

" 'Course I should. Just got back from a tour of the operating room and they drawed some blood and made me blow into some little plastic tube to see if I got 'nuff air in my lungs to withstand the operation, and I do, and if I can manage all that, I can hug my daughter hello. Take them durned glasses off so's I can see what my little girl looks like."

Tess smiled and removed her sunglasses. "It's just me." She held her hands out at her sides.

"Just you. That's for sure -just you who I haven't seen for nine whole months." Mary shook her finger under Tess's nose.

"I know. I'm sorry, Momma. It's been crazy, as usual."

"Your hair is different." Mary held her in place by both elbows, giving her the once-over. Tess's hair was cut in a shag that fell in disheveled layers well below the neck of her T-shirt in back, while in front it just covered her ears.

"They styled it for my next album cover."

"Who?"

"Cathy."

"Who's Cathy again?"

"Cathy Mack, my stylist—I've told you about Cathy."

Mary flapped a hand. "I guess you have, but you got so many people working for you I can't keep 'em straight. And land, girl, you're so skinny. Don't they feed you down there in Nashville?"

"I work at keeping thin, Momma, you know that—and you know it doesn't come naturally—so please don't start pushing food on me already, okay?"

Mary turned away and hobbled into the house. "Well, I should think, making the kind of money you do, that you could eat a little better."