Talk of the Town

by Lisa Wingate

  “You’re not old, Imagene.”

  I sighed into the phone. If it was the kids, I’d have kept up a front, but Donetta knew how things were. “I feel old, Netta. I’m afraid there’s nothing good left ahead of me. Some days I just wish …” Some days I wish I wouldn’t wake up. “Well, it don’t matter.”

  “GiGi, don’t talk that way.” Donetta knew what was in my mind. With friends like us, there’s a lot that doesn’t get said, just understood. “American Megastar’s on its way to town. We got TV people staying right on the second floor of the Daily Hotel. Our own little Amber Anderson’s gonna be a singin’ sensation, and when they finally do break the news, our hotel will be right in the middle of it. Land sakes, what could be more excitin’ than that?”

  “Who knows if we’re even right about everything.” It wasn’t nice of me to rain on Donetta’s parade. Opening the curtains, I headed downstairs, hoping the sun in the kitchen would perk me up.

  Donetta puffed a breath into the phone. “Pppfff. We’re right about it.” She said it in that mysterious tone that made me think about her staring into the window the day before. “It’s quiet around here this morning, but you just wait until I get a little more time with my two new guests. I’ll find out exactly what the scuttle is.”

  “You’re down to the hotel already?” I blinked at the clock on the coffeemaker. It wasn’t even seven yet.

  “Buddy Ray came by the house on his way home this morning and he told me what’d happened. I figured I’d better get down here just to make sure everything was all right. Looks like maybe they were up for a while after you and Buddy Ray left. Someone had nachos and pecan pie down in the exercise room. I saw the leftovers in the trash. There was two root beers and two plastic forks.”

  “Oh my,” I said, thinking that Bob would probably have a fit about Donetta’s guests going in his café in the middle of the night.

  Donetta must have heard my mind working. “They left a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, so I don’t reckon Bob’ll mind much. Guess they must’ve come in hungry last night.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Uh-oh …” Donetta whispered. “There’s water on upstairs. I better go. I got pecan rolls, toast, and breakfast casserole all fixed to put out on the bureau before they come down. If there’s any trouble with Bob about the nachos and the pie, you smooth it over when you get in to work, would’ja? I don’t want him fussin’ at my guests. Tonight, I’ll be sure to leave a little snack down here in the exercise room in case they get hungry. Just tell Bob to behave hisself if they come over there, okay?”

  “I will,” I said, and I hung up.

  Thinking about what might have gone on at the hotel last night, I got a little more interested in the day. By the time I’d dressed and fixed my hair, I headed to town with a fresh enthusiasm and a pretty good wind in my sails. I was looking forward to seeing what would develop.

  When I got to the café, Bob had already opened and was greasing up the fry grill. He was whistling “Hollywood” again, so I could tell he was in a pretty good mood. He didn’t even mind that Donetta’s hotel guests had been in his café last night. First of all, they left a good tip, and second, he figured that would increase the chances of the Daily Café making it onto American Megastar.

  “You tell ’em to come on in anytime. Anytime at all,” Bob said as the crew got ready for the breakfast rush. “Anything they need—breakfast, lunch, tour of the town, Daily history, or filming permits—they can just come see me. I’ll be happy to do my part to make Amber’s hometown show worthy of the next American Megastar champion.” He struck a pose as the door opened, then let his belly drop back down and returned to the grill when it was only Harlan Hanson, coming to pick up his egg on toast before heading off on his mail route west of town.

  All morning long, Bob posed for the door, and he was a little disappointed when neither of those Hollywood folks came into the café. By the time breakfast was over, he looked down-in-themouth, muttering to himself as he scraped off the fry grill. Word was that Amanda-Lee had been all over town yesterday. Couple that with Carter showing up, not saying too much about who he was or why he was there, and Daily gossip had been at a fever pitch in the café all morning long. Belva, from down at the Daily Hardware, said that Carter sure looked familiar to her when he came in the store yesterday, but she couldn’t place where from. She thought maybe she’d seen him on TV before. Bob said if he got a good look he could say for sure, since he watched a lot of TV and never forgot a face.

  When someone mentioned that Donetta was handing out pecan rolls and casserole for breakfast, Bob figured out that was probably why the hotel guests hadn’t showed up to take a morning meal at the café. While Bob was busy working up a head of steam about Donetta stealing his breakfast customers, I decided to scoot off to Wal-Mart. Hanging my apron on the wall, I grabbed my purse and headed for the door. “I’ll be back before lunch.” I didn’t wait for an answer—just hurried out before Bob could blow a gasket.

  On the drive to Wal-Mart down in Austin, I thought about Amanda-Lee and Carter and wondered where they were right now. The drive passed quicker than usual, and it seemed like I was pulling into Wal-Mart in just three shakes of a lamb’s tail. I tried to imagine what might be going on back in Daily as I went inside to pick out Donetta’s paint. My mind conjured up a picture of Bob posing with his spatula, and that made me laugh as I stood absently pulling cans of winter-white latex off the shelf, still thinking about Daily, not able to focus on calculating gallons. I was zoned out to the max, as my teenaged granddaughter would have said.

  I didn’t even notice at first when a stock boy came up and offered to help load paint.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “I thought you might need some help.”

  “Oh …” It’s hard to know how to respond to an offer like that at my age. Part of me says, Isn’t he a sweet young man, being so conscientious about his job? But another part of me says (and I hate this part), You look so old the boy thinks you can’t heft a gallon of paint. The two are like angel and devil on my shoulders, and it’s always a toss-up as to which one gets hold of my mouth.

  “How many of these do you need?” the boy asked.

  “Maybe around ten.” I realized I probably could use help with lugging that much paint.

  Raising an eyebrow, the boy motioned down the aisle. “It’d be a lot cheaper to get two of those five-gallon buckets, ma’am.”

  Bless him for trying, but I’d already looked at the five-gallon buckets and decided it was a physical impossibility. “Too heavy,”

  I confessed. There was a time when I could sling fifty-pound sacks of feed into a pickup without even a wink.

  The bright-eyed boy gave an understanding nod. “I can load the buckets for you.” He started to put the one-gallon cans back on the shelf, but I stopped him.

  “Trouble is, son, even if you load the buckets for me, I can’t get them unloaded at the other end.”

  The boy turned red, said, “Yes, ma’am,” and finished putting in ten one-gallon cans. All that paint in one cart was quite a load, so I grabbed the front of the basket and tugged it along, while he pushed from behind, and we headed for the checkout lines. The cart was squealing like a pup with its foot in the gate by the time we made it to the cash registers.

  Standing at the checkout line, I looked again at that stock boy with my load of paint. You’ve done gone round the bend, Imagene, I told myself. The barn door’s open and the cows are gone. Of all the things you’ve ever let Donetta Bradford talk you into, this is the craziest. How in the world are we gonna clean and paint four hotel rooms before Saturday evening?

  A weak, weighted-down feeling settled over me, as if all my muscles had suddenly gone limp. I wanted to sit down on the bench by the door and cry, which was a silly response to a load of paint. Donetta could always return it whenever she came to her senses, but it hit me at the strangest times that I wanted Jack. He would know exactly how to handle Donetta’s crazy p
lan, and he’d be able to lift the paint. I never pictured myself living without someone who could lift the things that were too heavy for me.

  I stood there, froze up in the checkout line, trying to decide whether I should really go through with the purchase. It’d just make more complications, having to return all that paint… .

  Still, I’d promised Donetta… .

  Maybe all this was too heavy for the back of the van. What if I blew out a tire on the way home? I’d be stuck on the highway alone with a load of paint stacked on top of the spare.

  I probably should have turned to prayer at that point, but instead I turned to the tabloid newspapers. The latest editions of The National Examiner, Inside Track, Worldwide Scoop, and Celebs Magazine were sitting there in the racks, and there’s something healing about finding out that other folks have got it worse than you. It wasn’t the most Christian attitude, but I was glad not to be the eighty-two-yearold Chinese grandma giving birth to a baby sumo wrestler, or the real-life mermaid living in a fountain on Long Island, or the woman who’d had her storage shed squashed by an alien landing. (Those aliens even had the nerve to take a dip in her goldfish pond, and now it was a crime scene. There was no telling what might happen to the fish, having been exposed to radioactivity and all.)

  I finished the front page of Worldwide Scoop and moved on to The National Examiner. Holy mackerel, there was Amber Anderson, hugging some boy, and it wasn’t Buddy Ray! Heavens to Betsy, she was on the cover of Celebs Magazine, too, splashing around at the beach with that same fella, next to a headline that was big enough for me to read even without my glasses. “Gospel Girl Goes Gaga,” and in smaller letters I had to squint at a bit, “Amber Anderson’s Romantic Romp With Justin Shay.” On the cover of The National Examiner, the headline read “Good Girl Gone Bad?” Below that, there was a picture of some old coot in overalls and a long beard, sighting in a rifle. He was half-covered with the headline “Amber’s Family Threatens Shay—Hands Off Amber or Else!”

  What a horrible lie. That wasn’t Amber’s grandpa any more than I was. Verl Anderson was about the mildest mannered man I’d ever met. He probably didn’t even own so much as a little old twenty-two rifle for picking off snakes and armadillos—not much need for a rifle with five hundred stray cats prowling the barnyard. The only time I’d ever seen Verl Anderson get red in the face was when Ty Bennett’s goats got out and ate the Andersons’ garden plants. Even then, Verl was pretty forgiving, especially considering that Amber and the boys needed to sell the vegetables on the roadside to get money for school clothes and things they couldn’t buy on food stamps. Which is not to say that Verl was a sterling person, being a heathen and a drunk and all. He’d never done right by those poor kids, but he sure wasn’t a gun-toting hillbilly with a foot-long beard and a mean glint in his eye.

  Looking around to make sure there wasn’t anyone I knew in Wal-Mart, I picked up both newspapers and slid them onto the checkout stand, upside down, as the girl started with my order. She stopped for a minute to read the back cover of The Examiner, where a woman had lost two hundred pounds and got a bikini body just by taking pills. I couldn’t help looking on with the cashier.

  I checked the other cashier stands again, just to make sure no one was watching. It’d be my luck the pastor’s wife or one of those uppity ladies from Betty Prine’s Daily Literary Society would happen to be in the store today. All I needed was for it to get around that I was seen at Wal-Mart buying paint and smutty magazines. No telling what kind of rumors could come out of something like that.

  The tension eased up a bit when the checkout girl finally tucked my magazines into a bag and gave it to me to hold. I couldimagine what Donetta was going to say when she saw the headlines. If any of these reports about Amber was true, there could be trouble ahead—for Amber, and for Daily. No doubt those folks at American Megastar wouldn’t like it that a girl who was supposed to be a fine Christian young lady was out and about with some Hollywood playboy. What in the world was going on in Amber’s head? Here she was, with one chance to pull herself and her brothers out of that hardscrabble farm, and she was flushing her good fortunes, and Daily’s, right down the drain.

  This spate of bad news about our little hometown singing sensation might affect the need for paint. It surely might.

  Chapter 9

  Mandalay Florentino

  After spending all morning attending the Friday logistics and production meeting via phone, I’d anticipated that a drive through the countryside to scope out Amber Anderson’s childhood home would feel like a minibreak. A little fresh air and sunshine were just what I needed. I left well supplied with leftover pecan rolls, and even the lack of adequate directions and a maze of twisting, curving, poorly marked country roads did little to dampen my spirits. I wandered through the hills, taking in the landscape of clear-running streams and craggy limestone bluffs towering high over the road. At a river crossing, I slowed on an old bridge, listened to the music of the tires clicking over the weathered wooden deck, sending a soft ping, ping, ping along the rusted metal girders.

  Near a farmhouse in the distance, a trio of young boys were wading and skipping stones. The dappled shade of overhanging live oaks and sycamores slid over their tanned skin as they ran through the water, sending up showers of sunlit drops. For a moment, I had the strongest urge to pull the car off the road, abandon my work, and join them.

  Laughing at myself, I shook off the notion. I’d finally found Caney Creek Road, which meant I couldn’t be far from the Anderson place. Letting my foot off the brake, I allowed the car to drift onward, up the hill and past a field where longhorn cattle grazed in a sea of blue wild flowers that seemed to stretch on forever. What a beautiful day. What a quietly breathtaking place. On camera, it would be incredible… .

  Fifteen minutes later, stopped on a rocky slope in front of what I’d guessed was my intended destination, I experienced a wave of conflicting emotions that thickened the air in the car until it was oppressive. Opening the window might have helped, but the odor of a poultry farm down the road blanketed everything with a noxious smell. I rubbed my eyes, looking for a name on the offkilter mailbox, an obvious victim of a drive-by box bashing that had left the door hanging permanently open, like a lolling metal tongue. There was mail inside, but without breaking a half-dozen federal laws, I couldn’t check the recipient’s address.

  Even if this was the Anderson house, where Amber’s grandfather and her brothers still lived, did we really want to bring a film crew here? It was worse than I’d ever imagined. What Amber had described as a little farm by Caney Creek was actually an ancient mobile home with faded aqua paint and a sag in the middle. The windows were covered with aluminum foil and dirt, blocking out the sun. A combination of plastic sheeting and tarps, held in place by silver tape and weighted down with twenty or so old tires, covered the roof, presumably to keep out the rain.

  Behind the trailer, an old barn listed to one side like a slowly sinking ship, its damaged hull patched with road signs, scraps of plywood, metal sheeting, cardboard. A goat alternately chewed on remains of a grocery store banana box and paused to chase away a curious chicken. The entire spread, perhaps four acres or so, bounded by a chain-link fence that had seen better days, was a cacophony of dogs, cats, and farm animals. Goats, sheep, and chickens roamed freely around the place, and a black and white calf played on the front steps, climbing up, then jumping off and cavorting through the yard. The only place the animals didn’t seem to be welcome was a small orchard and garden separated by a fence covered with honeysuckle and blackberry brambles.

  My mind drifted to one of Amber’s previous background interviews. I could picture her sitting in the confessional set we affectionately called The Box, smiling for the camera and, for America’s viewing pleasure, painting a rosy picture of her childhood.

  “In the summertime we had blackberries, and fresh lettuce, and homegrown tomatoes.” The melodiousness of her voice made the words sound lyrical. “My grandaddy’d hel
p us pick tons and tons of berries and divide them all up, and we kids would head off to town with a wagonload of the freshest blackberries, and sometimes tomatoes, and we’d sit on the street corner down by the old bank building with a sign. Folks were always so nice when they’d stop to buy some. You just haven’t really lived until you’ve had homegrown fruits and vegetables. Those old store tomatoes are all pink and hard, and store-bought blackberries, even if you can find ’em, don’t taste like anything. The wild kind taste lots better, and you know, most folks don’t even know that anymore. They’ve never had anything but the store-bought stuff that’s all sprayed with chemicals to make it grow faster. I always did feel sorry for folks like that—ones who don’t know how things taste when they just have air and sunlight. And kids—I feel sorry for kids who have to live in places where they stay inside and everyone’s scared of their neighbors and stuff.”

  Sighing, Amber looked at her shoes, kicked a stray sound cord back and forth underneath a silver cowboy boot someone in Wardrobe had given her to wear. “If I had a million dollars, I think that’s one thing I’d do. I’d make a place for kids to go out in the country—all kinds of kids—little black kids, and little Chinese kids, and little kids from Iraq and other places. Kids ought to know what it’s like to pack a lunch and hike off down the creek looking for good swimmin’ holes, and pick wild blackberries and hog plums, and take the honeysuckle flowers and pull out the stems to taste the honey inside. When the honeysuckle blooms around our house, you can close your eyes and think you’re in heaven. Every little child ought to know how that feels.”

  Amber’s big blue eyes fell closed, and she took in a long breath of climate-controlled studio air. She looked like a little girl, her full lips pursed in a slight smile, dark lashes fluttering against her cheeks. Finally, she shook her head and opened her eyes, tucking her hands between her knees and shrugging. “I guess that sounds kind of silly.” She paused, as if she were waiting for the cameraman to answer, which of course, he wouldn’t. “I can’t help it, I’m a dreamer.” She let her hands slide further between her thighs, as if she might fold herself up and disappear. “I spent a lot of hours up and down Caney Creek, imagining things and making up games of let’s pretend so we all wouldn’t be bored.”