Small Town Girl

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Everybody smiled. Jay peeked toward Kate, but she looked as glad for them as everybody else. The only one not smiling was Fern, who looked ready to push back from the table and leave the food behind, but she stayed in her seat. Maybe because Birdie had her hand on her arm. Fern looked different sitting stiff and straight at the table in a print dress than she did appearing out of the moonlight shadows in overalls. More like a regular spinster aunt.

  They kept on around the table. Victoria blushed and said her family but she was looking at Sammy. Sammy wasn’t as shy. He came right out and claimed Victoria and being a senior so he’d graduate soon. They all knew what he was hoping would happen after that.

  Graham was next. He got that look Jay had come to know meant he was going to say something out of the way. “Getting that blamed house painted. And chocolate bars. What about you, Kate?”

  She stared down at her plate and ran her finger along the handle of her knife as though searching for what to say.

  “Come on, Kate. Say something,” Evangeline goaded her. “Or we’ll have to put everything back on the stove to heat it up again.”

  Kate made a face at her sister before she smiled and let her eyes touch on everyone at the table. “All of you,” she said. “Living in Rosey Corner with all of you.”

  Jay wanted to imagine her eyes lingered just a second longer on him. Then she was saying, “Fern, do you want to say something this year?”

  Mrs. Merritt spoke up. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, Fern.” Her voice was soft and kind. “We can skip over you to Lorena.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes as she stared across the table at Kate and then Kate’s mother. “You think I don’t have anything to be thankful for?”

  “Now, Fern, don’t be—” Graham started.

  She talked over his words. “Trees. Trees growing back.” She almost smiled.

  Everybody let out a breath and Aunt Hattie spoke up. “Trees. A fine reason to be offerin’ up thanks to the good Lord above.” She looked around the table. “Guess that just leaves Lorena and the new one. Sorry, son. They tol’ me your name again, but my old head don’t hold on to names like it used to.”

  “That’s all right,” Jay told her. “My name’s Jay.”

  “Like the bird.” Fern surprised him by speaking up.

  “Tanner,” Birdie added as she peeked first at Kate and then Jay. “You’ll have to go last, Tanner. It’s my turn now. I’m thankful for Trouble.”

  Aunt Hattie frowned at the girl. “Lands’ sake, chile, why in the world would you be thankful for trouble?”

  Birdie laughed out loud with obvious delight as Kate explained, “The dog, Aunt Hattie. She named her dog Trouble.”

  “What kind of name is that?” Aunt Hattie said.

  “One that unfortunately fits him,” Mr. Merritt said. “We have Jay to thank for that. So Jay, you want to join in with something you’re thankful for?”

  When Jay hesitated, Kate’s mother smiled at him. “You don’t have to if you’d rather not.”

  “Oh, surely the boy can come up with something.” Graham fixed amused eyes on him.

  Jay knew what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t. Not with Mike staring at him. Not right there in front of her family. So he kept his eyes away from Kate and looked at Birdie instead. “Birdie taking Trouble off my hands.”

  Everybody laughed the way Jay intended. Graham spoke up. “Poe could talk, he’d be saying the same thing.”

  “Wait. I’m not through.” Jay held up his hand and looked toward Mrs. Merritt as he added, “And brown sugar pie.”

  “Thank goodness. Everybody’s said something. We can finally eat.” Mike’s bride took a roll off the heaped-up plate of bread next to her and reached for the butter.

  “I never knowed you to be so anxious about eatin’, Evangeline.” Aunt Hattie leaned forward to peer around Mike toward her. “You in the family way already? Is that what’s give you such a hurry-up appetite?”

  “No, Aunt Hattie, I’m not in the family way,” Evangeline said, a little edge in her voice. “But we keep adding people to the table and we could talk all day about what we’re thankful for while the rolls get too cold to melt butter. And you know dumplings have to be warm.”

  The little woman gave her a hard look. “Blessings is worth counting.”

  “They certainly are,” Mike spoke up quickly. “And good food is one we can all count right now. We do thank you, Nadine, for blessing us with the work of your hands.”

  “I had plenty of help from the girls and Aunt Hattie.” Mrs. Merritt smiled at Mike as she started the mashed potatoes around the table.

  “Dig in, everybody,” Mr. Merritt added.

  Across from Jay, Aunt Hattie muttered something under her breath. Kate leaned over and whispered in the old woman’s ear. Jay had no idea what she said, but whatever it was, Aunt Hattie’s smile came back as she said, “You’s right, Katherine Reece. Blessings is abounding. Ain’t no call for frowning.”

  No call at all, Jay agreed as he finally let his eyes settle on Kate, the reason his heart was wanting to sing. She must have felt his eyes on her because she looked up at him. For a few seconds it was like there was no one else in the room but the two of them. But then Birdie was nudging his hand with the green bean bowl and Mike was eyeing him across the table. Jay dipped out some beans and stared down at his plate, but not before he saw Mike’s frown.

  Birdie wasn’t frowning. She was all smiles as she passed him the plate of dressed eggs. “I fixed these all by myself.”

  “Then I better take two,” Jay said. That made her smile even wider, and when he took a chance on glancing back across the table, Kate’s smile was waiting for him too. Mike had turned his attention to his pretty wife, but even if he had been still frowning Jay’s way, the smiles were outnumbering the frowns. The biggest smile was curling up inside Jay as the talk swirled around him, beckoning him again to feel at home here at least for this one day.

  That’s all any man had anyway. The one day. He remembered a preacher claiming that to be a Bible truth. That nobody could know about tomorrow and so he best grab hold of today. The preacher’s words were intended to pull people down the aisle to make confessions of faith before it was too late, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t just as true for everything a man did. This day Kate was smiling at him. This day his feet were under this family’s table. This day he was almost one of them. Tomorrow might change that. But now it was today.

  After they’d eaten all they could hold and stuffed pie in on top of that, the girls began helping their mother clear the table. With a curt nod toward Mrs. Merritt and a pat on top of Lorena’s head, Fern pushed back from the table and went straight out the back door.

  “She’s off to the woods.” Graham pulled out his pocket watch and stared at it. “Two hours forty minutes. That could be the longest she’s ever stayed at one of your dinners, Nadine. She must have liked it.”

  Jay thought about following her out, but he didn’t want to look cowardly. The men got up from the table and headed for the sitting room, but before Jay could sit down, Mike said, “Let’s go see how much that dog you gave Lorena has grown this week.”

  “Check on Poe too while you’re out there,” Graham said. “I ate too much to move for at least an hour. But you can tell him that I’ll bring him some of the leavings.”

  Poe barely opened his eyes a slit and didn’t bother raising his head off his paws when Jay delivered Graham’s promise. The end of the dog’s tail did come up off the porch to fall back down with a thump.

  “You don’t think he knows what you said, do you?” Mike asked. “I mean really.”

  “I think this old dog knows what Graham is going to say before Graham ever opens his mouth. That’s what I think.” Jay looked back at the dog, stretched out by the door. He wouldn’t move until Graham came out to go home. “Now Trouble on the other hand, he hasn’t figured out what anybody’s saying.”

  They walked across the y
ard toward the clothesline where Birdie had tied the pup to keep him from being a pest at dinner. The pen couldn’t hold him anymore. He’d figured out how to dig out of it. Now he was lunging against the rope that held him and barking for all he was worth.

  “No wonder. Barking like that, he can’t hear anybody,” Mike said.

  Jay leaned down and stroked the pup. “He’s lonely out here all by himself. That’s all.”

  “He does seem to have won over the family in spite of being trouble.”

  Jay had the feeling Mike wasn’t only talking about the dog any longer. He ran his hand down the pup’s back again. “He doesn’t aim to be trouble. He’ll get better with time.”

  “Time.” Mike blew out a long breath of air. “Never enough of it.”

  Jay stood and the pup jumped up on his leg, but Jay ignored him as he stared at Mike. “Everything all right with you?”

  “Right as rain,” Mike said. “And I’m supposed to be asking you that instead of you asking me. I’m the preacher.”

  “So you are.” Jay looked straight at Mike. “Say what you want to say and get it over with, Mike.”

  “Will it make a difference?”

  “No.” Jay thought he might as well be honest.

  “You don’t even know what I was planning to say.” Mike was squinting a little as if he was trying hard to see something he couldn’t quite make out.

  “I’ve heard a lot of it before.”

  “Not about Kate.”

  “No, not about Kate.” The pup was still jumping up on him, and Jay gave him a last pat before moving out of reach. Mike followed him as the pup barked frantically behind them.

  “She’s a great girl.” Mike had to raise his voice to be heard over the dog.

  “You won’t get any argument from me about that,” Jay agreed. When they kept walking away, the pup gave up on them turning him loose and plopped down on the ground to wait for Birdie.

  “You won’t hurt her?” Mike said.

  Jay didn’t know if he was asking or telling. Either way he could make the promise, but could he keep it? “I won’t want to.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike asked.

  “That I could get a draft notice in the mail any day. That I’m not a preacher and sometimes I can’t get everything to turn out the way I want it to.”

  “Nor can a preacher, my friend.”

  “Are we friends again?” Jay stopped walking and looked at him.

  “As far as I’m concerned, we never stopped being friends.” Mike reached over to give Jay’s shoulder a squeeze. “And to prove you think the same, you need to come to church.”

  “You going to preach at me again?”

  “Not at you. To you.” When Jay didn’t say anything, Mike went on. “Christmas is coming. Some of the best stories in the Bible are about Christmas.”

  “Maybe I’ll come,” Jay said. No Christmas wonder had ever lit up his head, and it wouldn’t this year either. But maybe there would be other kinds of wonder. Maybe there would be Kate.

  22

  Winter swept into Rosey Corner the last weekend of November. The good weather had lingered so long that the first blast of cold air seemed more an insult than the natural changing of the seasons. Up at the store, people huddled around the coal stove and talked about the war.

  Kate listened to what they said. She read the papers and tried to make sense of the news reports on the radio. Nothing was getting settled. The British forces made some gains in Libya against the Italians. The Russians were holding the line against the Germans with the help of bitter winter weather. The Japanese Premier Tojo was spouting threats against the Americans and British.

  “It’s nothing but talk. Those Japanese don’t want anything to do with us,” the men around the stove at the store assured one another. “It’s Hitler we need to be worrying about.”

  A few of the men like Kate’s father had gone over there in 1917 to win the war that was supposed to end all wars. They’d fought back the Germans then, holding on in the trenches across France. For men like her father, the war news had a familiar echo that dredged up bad memories. Kate thought it no wonder her father sometimes turned off the radio and chose his books over the newspapers.

  The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Mike urged them to count their blessings and then to covenant to pray. “For peace. For all of us. Prayer is powerful. It can make more difference than all the tanks in the world. Pray for victory for those standing firm against tyranny.” His voice was steady and strong, but Kate thought he looked worried.

  Everybody was looking worried. So worried that Kate felt guilty to be feeling so good. She hated the war. Terrible stories were coming from overseas. She wanted the Nazis to be defeated. She wanted the bombing to stop, the war to be over, but at the same time, life went on in Rosey Corner.

  Trouble kept chasing the cats up trees and finding muddy holes to dig and then making paw prints all over the house. Alice Wilcher kept coming into the store to poke Kate with reports of Carl’s latest California adventures and news that he’d be headed to Hawaii soon. Graham kept coming by to lean on the counter and groan about how long it was before baseball season came around again. Her father kept reading every night about Phileas Fogg’s trip around the world. Lorena kept racing out to meet Jay Tanner whenever he pulled into their yard. Kate’s heart kept leaping up into her throat each time she saw him.

  So in spite of the bad news from overseas, in spite of the chilly winds shoving them all toward the darker days of winter, her feet seemed ever ready to dance and her lips to smile. Her lips were ready to do more than smile. They’d kissed again. Brief, innocent touches of the lips when she walked out on the porch with Jay before he left at night. Sweet kisses that made her heart pound. With the slightest encouragement, she would have stepped into his arms and stayed there forever.

  Instead he held her away all through the week after Thanksgiving. Circling her like a wary dog unsure of his welcome. No bounding toward her with abandon like Trouble. Perhaps their dance in the moonlight hadn’t lit up his heart the way it had hers. Perhaps he was simply out for a good time with any girl available. Including Alice Wilcher, who claimed to have spent time with him in the moonlight too.

  Kate let her talk—Alice liked to hear the sound of her own voice—but she didn’t believe her. She didn’t want to believe her. Besides, Jay was at Kate’s house every night, and even if he didn’t race to embrace her, Kate sometimes thought he looked at her as though he wanted to.

  Even more telling than that, he was there. Mike had claimed Jay wouldn’t hang around long, but here he was, still in Rosey Corner. Every night he was sitting on the floor beside Lorena while Kate’s father read the next chapter. Every night Kate walked out on the porch and down the steps with him when he left. Every night she lifted her face toward his, all but asking aloud for a kiss. Each time he touched his lips to hers as though too aware of the light spilling out of the house behind them.

  Even when she walked with him away from the porch into the night shadows and let her hand brush his, he pretended not to notice. It seemed that now instead of her pushing Lorena between them, he was the one afraid of stepping too close. Yet, he kept coming back, even if he did act like somebody was looking over his shoulder whenever they were alone together. Then the answer came to her. Jay was feeling Mike looking over his shoulder. Kate had seen the two of them talking out in the yard on Thanksgiving. Mike had stepped between them with whatever words he’d said that day.

  She could have probably found out what Mike had told Jay from Evie, but Evie wasn’t the one to fix things. Kate fixed things. So on the Thursday after Thanksgiving when Jay came by the store to let them know he’d found a job at a feed store in Edgeville, she slipped off her apron without even asking her mother if it was okay for her to leave the store early. Feeling a little like Alice Wilcher, she took Jay’s arm and turned him toward the door as she asked him to take her for a ride.

  “Are you asking or telling?”
he said, but he was smiling as he opened the car door to let her slide in.

  “Telling,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought.” He shut the door and went around the car to climb in behind the wheel. Then he looked toward her. “Or were you planning to drive?”

  “I can, you know,” she said.

  “I do know. I’m thinking there’s not much you can’t do if you want to.”

  “Oh, there are a few things.”

  “Like?” He pushed the starter to rattle awake the motor.

  “Somersaults. Tori and Lorena can somersault like crazy and Tori can even walk on her hands. They’ve tried to teach me, but I’m hopeless.”

  “So are we going to practice somersaulting somewhere?” He put the car in gear and looked over at her with his foot on the brake. “Or are we finally eloping? I had a bath just last night and the tank is half full of gas.”

  Her heart leaped at the thought. They couldn’t elope. Not really. But the idea was tingling awake some interesting feelings inside her. “We can’t elope without doing some talking first.”

  “You’re coming up with a lot of rules about this eloping stuff. No smelling like cow barns. Now talking.” He pretended an exasperated sigh. “So then if we aren’t eloping, where are we going? Chicago? New Orleans?”

  She laughed. “I don’t think so. Not unless we can get there and back by supper. How about we just ride down the road a ways? Take me by the farm you worked at for a while.”

  She grabbed that out of nowhere. She didn’t care where they went. She didn’t even care if they did that much talking now. It was enough that she was sitting beside him and that he seemed to be glad of that. She shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat and gave herself over to the feel of the tires rolling down the road as he headed the car toward Edgeville.

  He broke the silence between them. “Hard day at the store?”

  “Not really. Just confining. Somebody has to be there behind the counter all the time, from opening time in the morning until closing time at night. And people can be a pain.”