Small Town Girl

CHAPTER ONE

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."

Tess resisted rolling her eyes and stuck her sunglasses back on, following Mary inside. They went through a shallow living room that stretched across the entire front of the house, a west-facing room with bumpy stucco walls and well-used furniture, dominated by an upright piano. Three archways led off the opposite wall, the center one upstairs, the right one to the bathroom and Mary's bedroom, the left one to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Mary stomped through the left one, still talking.

"I thought country singers wore big hair."

"That's old, Momma. Things're changing in country."

"But you flattened all them pretty natural curls right out of it. I always loved them natural curls of yours."

"They want me to look up-to-date."

Mary's own hair could use some styling, Tess thought, studying a pinwheel of exposed skull on the back of her head. She'd given up coloring it and let it go natural, which proved to be a peachy gray. The remains of an old set clearly disclosed the need for an update. More important, however, was the pained gait with which she moved, lurching sharply to the right each time she put weight on that leg, using whatever furniture or walls were available for support.

"Are you sure you should be walking, Momma?"

"They'll have me off my feet plenty after the operation's over. Long as I can hobble around I'm going to."

She was a squat, squarish woman of seventy-four, wearing a disgusting old slacks set made of polyester knit that had begun to pill. The pants were solid lavender, the top had been white once, and was stamped with a cluster of pansies so faded their edges had lost distinction. The outfit had to be a good fifteen years old. Tess wondered if this was what her mother had worn when she went to tour the hospital today. She also wondered about the stylish silk trouser outfit she'd had shipped from Nordstrom's last fall when she'd been on tour in Seattle.

"The kitchen looks the same," she remarked while Mary turned on the water and began filling a coffeemaker.

"It's old but I like it this way."

The kitchen had white metal cupboards with brown Formica tops that were so worn they looked white in places. No matter how many times Tess had scolded Mary for not using a cutting board, she continued doing her chopping directly on the Formica to the left of the sink. The kitchen walls were papered in a ghastly orange floral, the two windows hung with orange floral tie-backs from a mail-order catalogue. There was a wall clock with a painting of a lake on its face, an electric stove with a chip in the porcelain where Judy had clunked it with a kettle one time when all three girls were fighting about who would make the popcorn. And beside the stove, on the dull brown Formica countertop, a homemade pecan pie loaded with about three hundred calories per slice.

Tess's eyes moved no further. "Oh, Momma, you didn't."

Mary turned around and saw what Tess was ogling. " 'Course I did. I couldn't let my little girl come home and not find her favorites."

What was it about being called her little girl that touched a nerve in Tess? She was thirty-five and had been gone from home since she'd graduated from high school. Her face and name were as familiar to most Americans as those of the president, and her income topped his many times over. She had accomplished it all with her own talent, creativity, and a business acumen worthy of Wall Street. But her mother insisted on referring to Tess as "her little girl." The few times Tess had corrected her, saying, "I'm not your little girl anymore," Mary had looked baffled and hurt. So Tess let it pass this time.

"Are you making that coffee for me?" she asked.

"Can't have pecan pie without coffee."

"I really don't drink coffee much anymore, Momma… and I really shouldn't eat the pie either."

Mary glanced over her shoulder. Her exuberance faded and she slowly shut off the water. The baffled look had entered her eyes again, that of one generation struggling to understand the next. "Oh… well, then… shoot…" She glanced down dubiously at the half-filled pot, then turned on the tap and resumed filling it. "I'll go ahead and cook some for myself then."

"Do you have any fruit, Mom?" Tess went to the refrigerator and opened the door.

"Fruit?" Mary asked, as if her daughter had asked for patй de foie gras.

"I eat a lot of fruit now and I could sure use a piece. I haven't eaten since breakfast."

"I've got some canned peaches." Mary opened a lower cupboard door and attempted to lean over stiffly.

"Yeah, that'll be great, but I can get 'em. Here, why don't you sit down and let me?"

"It's no better when I sit. I'll do it. Why don't you get your things out of the car and take them upstairs?" Mary had found the peaches and was taking a can opener from a drawer. Tess reached into the drawer and covered her mother's hand.

" 'Cause I came home to take care of you, not the other way around. Now here, you give me that."

The peaches were packed in heavy syrup and had a rubbery skin surrounding mushy insides, but Tess took a fork and began eating them straight from the can, wandering around the kitchen, glancing at some notes that were pinned on a small bulletin board by the phone. The bulletin board itself had an ugly frame of molded plastic made to resemble spilled green peas. It held school pictures of her nieces and nephews, a reminder to check the long-distance bill to see if they'd charged a wrong number, and some grocery cou-pons cut out of magazines. Tide-twenty-five cents off. Once again Tess wondered what her mother did with the money she sent her. It was irritating that Mary would continue to use twenty-five-cent-off coupons when it was so damned unnecessary!

Mary opened the refrigerator and said, "I made your favorite hot dish-hamburger and Tater Tots. I suppose I could put it in the oven now but"-she checked the wall clock-"it's only four o'clock and it'll take an hour to cook. Five o'clock is too early to eat, so maybe we ought to wait a while and-"

"The peaches are fine for now, Momma. I know you don't usually eat till six."

She watched the concern fade from Mary's face once she was reassured the danger of altering the supper hour had passed. Tater Tot hot dish had been Tess's favorite when she was twelve years old. These days, beef was a once-a-week meat, and deep-fried Tater Tots never passed her lips. Not when she had a collection of custom-made concert clothes in size seven that cost between eight and ten thousand dollars apiece. She took the can of peaches to the kitchen table and sat down. In the middle of the table a potted plant sat on the worst-looking plastic doily Tess had ever seen. It, like Mary's shirt, had been white once. It was now as yellow and curled as an old fish scale.

Mary poured herself a cup of coffee and sat, too, lowering herself gingerly to the chrome-legged chair with a cracked vinyl seat that was hidden beneath a tie-on cushion of brown-and-orange floral. She glanced at Tess's oversized white T-shirt that was silk-screened with four faces and a logo.

"What's that, then, 'Southern Smoke'?" she asked.

Tess glanced down at her chest. "Oh, that's the name of a band I know. They've been trying to break out, but so far it hasn't happened. I've been sort of dating one of the guitar players. This one… see?" Tess spread the shirt and pointed to a bearded face.

Mary squinted. "What's his name?"

"Burt Sheer."

"Burt Sheer, huh? How long you been seein' him?"

"Oh, just a couple of months."

"Is it serious?"

"In this business?" Tess laughed. "It better not be."

"Why not?"

"With his schedule on the road, plus me gone all over America singing a hundred and fifty concerts a year? Plus I'm cutting this new album right now that's taking an enormous amount of time, and doing promotions whenever and wherever the label thinks I should… well, anyway, I've seen Burt exactly four times. And a couple of those times I had to argue with Jack because he thought I should go home and get some sleep instead of going to hear Burt's band at the Stockyard after I finished in the studio at ten P.M."

"What's the Stockyard?"

"A restaurant and club we go to."

"And who's Jack again?"

"Jack Greaves… my record producer."

"Oh, that's right." Tess watched the gleam of hope fade from her mother's eyes and knew Mary really did not see. She would never accept the fact that her youngest daughter had chosen a career over marriage and children. To a consummate mother like Mary McPhail that was tantamount to squandering your life.

"Which reminds me-I really should call Jack. He's laying down some harmony tracks on one of my new songs and I need to talk to him about it. It'll just take me a minute."

She called, using her credit card, from the wall phone at the end of the kitchen cabinets and reached Jack at Wild-wood Studio, where she knew he'd be working.

"Hi, Jack!"

"Mac! Good to hear from you. You at your mother's?"

"Yes, sir. Got here safe and sound."

"How's she doing?"

"Middling."

"Well, now, you tell her I hope it all goes well for her."

"Thanks, I will. Hey, I listened to 'Tarnished Gold' all the way down, and the harmony on the word 'mistaken' still bothers me. I think it's got to be an E-flat instead of an E. When it becomes a minor it gets an edge that puts added pathos on the word itself." She sang the phrase, gesturing with her hand as if directing the quartet of canisters on the kitchen cupboard to sing along. "Know what I mean, Jack?… Can you get Carla back in there to record it again?… She still having trouble with her voice?… Well, ask her, will you?… Thanks, Jack, then FedEx it to me as soon as you've got it, but don't spend a lot of time mixing it till I've heard the new harmony, okay? You've got my mother's phone number and address, right? I won't be here tomorrow-tomorrow's the surgery-but I'll call you from the hospital. Sure. Thanks, Jack. 'Bye."

When she'd hung up, her mother wore an astonished expression. "You'd record something again just because of a single word?"

"It's done all the time. Sometimes we record an entire harmony track and never use it at all. Last week Jack had a concert violinist in the studio at my insistence, 'cause a violin's got an entirely different sound from a fiddle and I thought that this one song should have a violin solo in one spot where-"

The phone rang, interrupting, and Mary began to push herself up. She winced and Tess said, "I'll get it. Momma. I'm right here." Tess reached for the wall phone and answered, "Hello?"

"Oh… you're there." It was her sister Judy, with little warmth in her voice. "I was just calling to make sure."

"I'm here. Got in about a half an hour ago."

"You drove, I hear."

"How'd you hear?"

"People around town saw your license plates."

Tess turned her back on Mary and said more quietly, "I thought I should have my own car while I'm here. Four weeks is-" She stopped herself short: her mother could hear quite plainly.

Judy said it for her. "A long time… I know. I'm the one who took care of her last time, remember?"

For several seconds silent animosity crackled along the phone line while the two sisters relived the conversation in which Judy had ordered her younger sister home.

Finally Judy asked, "How's she feeling today? She had to go over to the hospital to have a pre-op check and go through some kind of little explanation and tour thing. I suppose it tired her out."

Tess turned to Mary. "Judy wants to know how you're feeling, Momma."

"Tell her I'm just fine. Nurse says my hemoglobin's normal and my lung capacity's good, so everything's set for tomorrow."

Tess repeated the message and Judy said, "Well, give her my love. Tell her I can't come over tonight but I'll be at the hospital before she goes into surgery in the morning. You have to have her there by six o'clock. Her surgery's at six-thirty. Did she tell you that?" Judy's voice snapped out the question.

"Don't worry, she'll be there."

"All right, then. Guess I'll see you there, too."

Mary began pushing off her chair again. "Just a minute, let me talk to her."

"Just a minute, Momma wants to talk to you."

Mary got up with great effort and made her way to the telephone. While she was speaking Tess moved away and stared out the double window beside the kitchen table. It looked out on the side yard, where some overgrown rhododendron bushes divided the property from the Anderson place next door.

"Hey, dear. Listen, thank you for picking up those groceries for me. I'll pay you when I see you… No, no, no, you're not going to pay for my groceries! I'm fixin' to pay you back. I just appreciate your picking them up for me. How did Nicky do at his track meet?… Oh, isn't that wonderful… And did Tricia find a dress for the prom?… Clear down there! Couldn't she find nothing in town?… Well, she'll look darling, I'm sure. You tell her I said to have a real good time and I'll be thinking of her Saturday night… Okay, I will… yeah… yeah, 'bye."

Listening to Mary's end of the conversation, Tess felt light-years removed from her family. They shared a day-to-day flow of relationships and concerns that she had given up when she left home. Phone calls from Houston and Oklahoma City were not the same as groceries dropped off and put in a refrigerator, or grandchildren's lives bumping up against their grandmother's on a daily basis.

On the other hand the scope of their concerns seemed almost trivial to Tess when compared to her own. Had they sung at governors' mansions, or accepted awards on prime-time TV? Had they filled an auditorium with thirty thousand fans whose ticket fees meant the livelihoods of dozens of people, from studio technicians to DJs, stage hands to producers, all the way from L.A. to New York? Had they worried about meeting a deadline for delivering a finished album whose advertising, promo and shipping date had been determined even before all its songs were written?

Prom dresses, track meets and groceries-none of them touched Tess's life anymore. And she wanted it that way.

Mary hung up and said, "I swear… Judy's got her hands full this week. She gave a wedding shower for Rachel on Tuesday, and prom is coming up this Saturday and every girl in school has made an appointment to have her hair fixed, so she's awful busy at the shop. Seems like Nicky's got some sporting event every night after school that she's got to try to run to, then on top of all that, Tricia insisted on drivin' clear over to Cape Girardeau to look for a prom dress. I keep telling Judy that sometimes she should just say no to those kids."

"Like you said no to us?" Tess replied.

Mary looked surprised. "Didn't I say no to you?"

"Couple of times that I can remember. Once when I wanted to get me a padded bra 'cause I had this huge crush on Kelvin Hazlitt, who was two years older than me and didn't know I was alive. I thought if I had some breasts like… well, you know"-Tess made two slings of her hands and bounced them at breast level-"like a pregnant rhinoceros, then Kelvin would ask me out. I'm still blamin' you 'cause he didn't."

Mary chortled and hobbled toward her coffee cup. "Kelvin Hazlitt's been married three times already. Good thing I said no."

"One other time you said no was when I wanted to get a tattoo."

"A tattoo! Lord, I don't remember that."

"Sure you do. Mindy got one, and I thought I needed everything Mindy had. By the way, what do you know about Mindy? I drove by her momma and daddy's house and couldn't help wondering where she is now."

"Mindy's back. She and her husband have an appliance store here, and they've got two or three kids in school. One of 'em's in the same grade as one of Renee's, I think."

While Mary went on talking, Tess put away her peaches in the fridge and dropped her fork into the sink. Through the window above it she had a clear view of Mrs. Kronek's backyard, across the alley. The block was dissected by that unpaved alley, and the two lots were laid out like mirror images of each other, one on each side. Houses, sidewalks, clotheslines, gardens and garages matched as perfectly as spots on a butterfly's wings. The garages were old, and single, and sat snugged up against the alley so tightly that their doors were perpendicular to it. While Tess was looking out, the garage door across the alley began to rise, then a car nosed up the alley, veered off and pulled into Mrs. Kronek's garage. A moment later a tall man in a business suit emerged, carrying a briefcase. He left the garage door open, glanced this way, then went up the sidewalk to Mrs. Kronek's back door.

"Who's that?" Tess asked.

Mary came over and took a look. "Why, that's Kenny Kronek, you remember him."

"Kenny Kronek?" Tess watched him climb the steps and enter the glassed-in back porch. He was tall and lean and dark-haired, and the wind blew his tie sideways as he glanced over this way once more before the door slammed behind him. "You mean that dork who used to get the nosebleeds in school all the time?"

"Tess, shame on you. Kenny Kronek is a nice boy."

"Oh, Momma, that's what you always said, because he was Lucille's boy, and she was your best friend. But you know as well as I do that he was a dork of the highest magnitude. Why, he couldn't walk a chalk line without tripping on it. And all those pimples! I can still smell the acne medication on him."

"Kenny took care of his mother till her dying day, and not every nice person in this world is coordinated, Tess. Besides that, he's a real good father and he takes real good care of the property since Lucille died, so I don't have a complaint in the world about him."

"You mean somebody actually married him?"

"Well, of course somebody married him. A girl he met in college. Stephanie. But they're divorced now."

"No wonder," Tess mumbled under her breath, turning away from the window.

"Tess," her mother scolded with a gentle glower.

"Well, he was always"-Tess's hands stirred the air as if to turn up the right word-"looking at me. You know what I mean?" She faked a shudder. "He was such a creep."

"I never thought so."

"Not you, but every girl in school, that's for sure."

"Oh, Tess, come on."

"Well, it's true. The only class we were ever in together was choir when I was a junior and he was a senior, and remember when we went to Choir Festival in St. Louis? We went on the bus, and Kenny came over and sat with me and I couldn't get rid of him. There he sat, with his pimples and his long, gawky neck with that Adam's apple that looked like a grapefruit in a sock, blushing so hard I thought he was going to have a nosebleed right on the spot. And his hair-mercy, Mother, remember how he used to comb his hair! So we're on this bus trip, and he comes over and sits with me and he tries to hold my hand!"

"Well, what's so wrong with that?"

"Mother, it was the seventies! Half the girls I knew were already sleeping with their boyfriends and Kenny Kronek-the nerd of all nerds-comes over and tries to work up the courage to hold my hand! I swear, all my friends teased me so bad I thought I'd die."

"You kids were so mean to him."

"Mom, there were kids you hung out with and kids you didn't, and Kenny Kronek was definitely in the latter group."

"Still, you could have been a little nicer to him."

"No, I couldn't. Not to that nerd. All he had to do was look around at everybody else to see how idiotic he looked and try to improve himself. Only he never did. If he wanted to hang with us he could have worked a little harder at it."

Mary wasn't one to show her displeasure overtly, but there were signs-a tightening of a facial muscle, the persnickety way she picked up her coffee cup and carried it to the sink. Quietly she suggested, "Why don't you get your bags out of the car and park it back by the garage. It's probably better if you don't leave it on the street overnight, an expensive thing like that."

Tess knew when she was being chastised and it put a knot in her chest. What was it about her mother's displeasure that weighed heavier than that of others? Tess could handle herself out in the business and entertainment world like a pro, could make choices and decisions and lay down music that created respect-even awe-in those around her, but she hadn't been home one hour and already she felt the strictures of trying to return to a place she'd outgrown.

She drove around the south end of the block and headed up the alley past sheds and garages where she used to play hide-and-seek and kick-the-can when she was little, past backyard tulip trees and grapevines gone rambling over things they hadn't ought to ramble over. There were piles of blackened lumber and burning barrels that were used no more. Every place had a garden. The yards were green and old enough that their lot lines had become obscured by trees that had seeded themselves beside sheds, and by bushes that had ranged into the adjoining property. But here in Wintergreen, just above the bootheel of Missouri, where neighbors truly were neighbors and had been for twenty and thirty years, nobody cared about lines of demarcation.

Mary's garage was as old as the others and needed painting. Surprisingly, however, it had a new door. Nosing the car up to it and getting out, Tess glanced at the place across the alley. Everything painted, no ranging grapevines and not a piece of junk anywhere. Good for Saint Kenny, she thought sarcastically, grabbing her duffel bag and heading for the house. On the way through the backyard she noticed that her mother had somehow managed to put in a garden already. Tradition, this garden, no matter how unnecessary it was, and no matter how it must have hurt Mary's hip to get down on her hands and knees and plant it. Tess noticed that it was well established due to an unseasonably early spring, and supposed that during the next four weeks she'd end up having to care for it, which would positively ruin her nails! And her nails were one of her trademarks.

The back stoop was three steps high with a black iron handrail on one side only. Tess wondered how Mary would climb them after her surgery. Inside was a small landing with the basement door straight ahead, and the kitchen up a single step to the right. When Tess reached the house and bumped through the kitchen with her duffel bag, she called back over her shoulder, "Hey, Momma, you shouldn't have put in that garden this year with your hip so bad."

She was in the living room rounding the center arch when Mary called back, "Oh, I didn't put it in. Kenny did it for me this year."

Tess came up short and backed down the one step she'd climbed. She shot a look at the kitchen archway. All she could see was one chrome leg of the kitchen table and the window beyond it, and in her imagination, pimply Kenny Kronek planting her mother's tomatoes.

"He's got a rototiller," came Mary's voice, "and he offered, so I let him."

Saint Kenny the Rototiller, Tess thought wryly as she clumped upstairs.

Mary yelled, "And did you see my new garage door? He installed that for me, too."

Tess stopped in her tracks, resting the duffel bag on the step at her knee. The nerd installed the garage door, too? What was he after?

The upper story of the house was laid out shotgun style, its ceiling shaped like the roofline with a window at either end. The girls had called it "the barracks" when they were growing up, sleeping in three single beds whose headboards were pushed into the south roof angle. The stairs emerged onto the east end of the expanse with only a sturdy homemade railing to keep anyone from falling off the floor above. Straight ahead, at the top of the steps, was a window giving a bird's-eye view of Saint Kenny's yard. Tess whisked past it without giving it so much as a glance, executed a U-turn around the handrail and looked down the length of the room.

The beds hunkered along the left with a stack of drawers beside each one. On the far end a small dressing table stood beneath the window, and on the right, kneehole closets filled the space beneath the eaves. She dropped her duffel on the farthest bed. They had earned their distance from the stairs by birth order; closest to the stairs and the downstairs bathroom was the oldest, Judy; middle bed was Renee's, and way over at the farthest end was Tess's, because she was the baby. She had always hated being referred to as the baby of the family, and felt a ripple of smug satisfaction at being the one who went off and did the best.

She stood looking around, then wandered to the dressing table where she had first written in her diary that she wanted to be a singer; where she had learned to put on makeup from Renee; and had sat staring out at the street with a puckered mouth when she'd been sent to her room as punishment. For what? It was hard to remember now, but there had been times. Times when she'd needed it, she supposed.

The top of the dressing table held an empty perfume bottle from Love's Baby Soft, and a framed photograph of Judy with two of her high school girlfriends; a pink glass dish containing a pearl button, a small ring, a cloth-covered ponytail holder and some dust. Dented into the top of the table, painted over in the years since, was the name Elvis,

pressed there in ballpoint pen by Tess in 1977, the year he died and she graduated from high school. She'd grown up listening to Elvis and he had been her idol: if he could do it, she could do it. She brushed the word with her fingertips, as if it were a headstone, then switched on the familiar little lamp with the cheap flared plastic shade. She switched it off again and opened the single dressing-table drawer. Something went rolling and she reached inside and pulled it out: a tube of Bonne Bell root-beer-flavored Lip Smackers. She removed the cap and sniffed it. Nostalgia came rumbling like a tidal wave-being thirteen again and getting her first pair of panty hose; being fourteen and wearing these adolescent perfumes; being fifteen and going out on her first official dates with boys. She rubbed the Bonne Bell on her lips. It had turned sticky with age and she swiped it off with the side of one hand and dropped the tube back where it had been.

Bracing her palms on the tabletop she put her face near the window and glanced down at the street where she had watched for cars when her dates had come to pick her up. The trees in the front yard had grown. From up here she could see even more clearly the cracks in the sidewalk, the thin spots in the grass, the weeds. The sun was hovering just above the houses across the street where she used to babysit. On the lawn the dandelions were closing up as the afternoon waned.

And down below, her mother was calling, "Tess? Should I put the hot dish in now?"

She murmured to herself, "Yes, Momma, because the world will fall off its axis if it's not on the table at the crack of six." She pushed off the dressing table and called, "I'll do it, Momma! Just let me hang up some clothes first, okay?"

"Well… okay," Mary replied with grave doubt, then added, "but it's ten after five already and it really should bake for a full hour."

Tess couldn't help shaking her head. The normal schedule of a professional musician meant rising near noon, doing studio work from about two till nine, with a caterer bringing food in around six. On concert nights it meant performing between eight and eleven and eating supper around midnight; if you were playing clubs and doing a bus tour, packing up at one in the morning and eating your last meal of the day while you were rolling down the highway.

But Tess dutifully hollered down, "I'll be right there, Mom!"

Her mother had already put the hot dish in the oven but she let Tess set the table and get the rest of the meal ready. Mary's suggested accompaniments to the fat-filled Tater Tot hot dish were toast (with real butter and homemade raspberry jam), coffee (with cream and sugar, of course) and pecan pie with whipped cream (the real kind, not Cool Whip-add forty calories for the whipped cream, Tess thought).

A discreet inventory of the refrigerator turned up a head of cabbage but no lettuce, cheddar cheese but no cottage cheese, sour cream but no yogurt, and whole milk but no skim. Just what were these groceries Judy had dropped off anyway?

In the freezer, thank goodness, Tess found a bag of frozen broccoli. "Mom, do you mind if I cook this?" she asked.

Mary stared at her daughter as if her feelings were hurt. "There's vegetables in the hot dish."

Potatoes soaked in oil, plus rich cream of chicken soup.

"If you're saving it for something else-"

"No, no, go ahead and cook it!"

Tess did, but when the main dish was hot and bubbling it smelled so delicious and looked so tempting she dug into it like a soldier after a foot march. She guzzled the damned whole milk, too, because it was the only milk in the house, and had a half a piece of toast slathered with butter and jam. Mary smiled in satisfaction, watching her.

When their plates were clean, Mary began slicing a piece of pie. "I'll just cut you a small one."

"I can't, Momma, honest. It looks delicious, but I just can't."

"Oh, nonsense." Mary pulled Tess's plate over. "I made it just for you. What's one little piece of pie going to hurt? If you ask me, you look like a scarecrow. You could use a little meat on your bones."

"Please, Momma, no. I can't."

Mary slapped a wedge on Tess's plate anyway. "Just don't put any whipped cream on it, that way it won't be so fattening."

Tess was eating a single obligatory bite of pie when someone tapped on the back door and opened it without waiting for an answer.

"Mary?" he said and stepped inside, into the tiny back entry, no longer wearing a business suit but a red wind-breaker, no longer carrying a briefcase but hefting a forty-pound sack of pellet salt on his left shoulder.

"Oh, Kenny, it's you," Mary said, going joyful in an instant.

"I brought your softener salt," he said, turning slowly beneath his burden and opening the basement door. "I'll take it right down."

"Oh, thanks a million, Kenny. Tess, get that light for him, would you, honey?"

"I got it!" he called as the basement light switched on. His footsteps thumped down, there was a pause while he slit open the bag, then the salt rattled into the plastic softener vat, and he came back up. Fast, as if jogging. "Got one more. Be right back."

When the door slammed Tess whispered, "He comes right into your house without knocking?"

"Oh, Tess, this is Wintergreen, not Nashville."

He was back in a minute with the second sack, carried it downstairs and emptied it into the water softener before returning to the main level. When he closed the basement door and climbed the single step into the kitchen, Tess stuck a second bite of pie into her mouth and fixed her eyes on her plate, as if he'd heard all the nasty things she'd said about him only minutes ago. She needn't have worried, for he gave her not so much as a glance. He shuffled to a stop beside Mary's chair, looking directly down on her, brushing off his hands and making his windbreaker whistle. "There. All filled. Anything else you need while I'm here?"

"I don't think so. That'll hold me for a while. Kenny, you remember Tess, don't you?"

He gave Tess a negligible nod that dismissed her as if she were still back in Nashville. It was brusque enough to be rude, and accompanied by not so much as a single word of greeting. She wasn't sure if he still had pimples or not because she couldn't find the wherewithal to raise her eyes.

While she went on eating her pie, Mary said, "How much do I owe you, Kenny?"

He fished a receipt out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. "Seven-eighty."

Mary said to Tess, "Honey, could you get my purse? It's hanging on the closet doorknob in my bedroom."

Tess went gratefully. In her wake she heard Mary telling him what time Tess had arrived, and him changing the subject, asking her if everything was set for tomorrow morning. When Tess got back with the purse, he stepped out of her way and said nothing. Mary dug out the money and handed it to him while Tess resumed her chair.

"There you are. Seven dollars…" After the bills she counted out some coins into his palm. "And eighty cents."

"Thanks," he said, dropping the change into a tight side pocket of his blue jeans and reaching toward a rear pocket for his billfold. He had turned his shoulder on Tess again, and a quick glance gave her a view of his trim backside as the billfold slipped out of sight. "So everything's all set for tomorrow?" he asked Mary. "Blood work turned out fine? And you've got that walker all polished up?"

"Yes, sir, I'm all set."

"Scared?" he inquired with an easy casualness.

"Not much. Been through it before, so I know what to expect."

"So you don't need anything?"

"No. Tess is taking me to the hospital in the morning at six o'clock. That is, if I can get in that little car of hers. I don't know what it's called but it cost more than this house. Did you see it in the alley, Kenny?"

The room grew painfully silent. What could Kenny do but answer, still avoiding a direct glance at the younger woman.

"Yeah, Mary, I sure did."

"She drove all the way up from Nashville just to take care of me."

When he turned to level his impersonal gaze on Tess, what could she do but acknowledge him?

"Hello, Kenny," she said colorlessly.

"Tess," he said, so coolly she wished he hadn't spoken at all. The dorky hairdo was gone and so were the pimples. He wasn't a bad-looking man, taller than she'd have guessed, brown-eyed, dark-haired, with conservative lines everywhere. But so cold to Tess. After giving her the requisite hello, he turned back to Mary and dropped to a squat beside her chair, resting his fingertips lightly on her knees. "Well, now listen, you…" While he went on encouraging Mary with warmth and deep caring, Tess escaped from the table, ostensibly to get the coffeepot, actually to hide her mortification at being ignored. Tess McPhail, who'd had her picture on the cover of Time magazine, and who'd been invited to sing at the White House, and whose appearance on a stage made fans scream and chant and sometimes get held back by police. Tess McPhail got snubbed by that nerd upperclassman, Kenny Kronek.

"I'll be thinking of you in the morning," he said quietly to Mary, "and I'll be up to see you as soon as you're feeling up to it. Casey says to tell you hi and good luck and she'll be coming up, too, when she can. Now, you be good, and no dancing till the doctor tells you to, okay?"

Mary patted his hands and laughed. "My dancing days aren't over yet, Kenny, so you better keep your eye on me."

He laughed, too, and rose. "Good luck, Mary," he said quietly, then took her by both jaws, leaned over and kissed her forehead.

"Thanks, dear."

The kitchen was small. He turned to leave and found Tess in his way, the coffeepot clutched in her right hand, her eyes bulging with anger. '"Excuse me," he said, and moved around her as if she were a stranger on an elevator. When the screen door closed, she was left behind, blushing.