Heartbreak Town

by Marsha Moyer

  "I am not," Mama said loudly, "a part of your family."

  "What? What are you talking about?"

  "When your sister-in-law was in the hospital, did anybody call me?"

  "No, I had to hear about it right here in the Food King, from that bigmouth Marcel Compton, of all people. Don't you know she was happy to fill me in on all the things not one of my own blood kin bothered to tell me about!" I wished she'd keep her voice down. "And then, when the lot of you were running around town like chickens with your heads cut off, did anybody so much as think of asking me to help? I'm home most all day, you know, except for church and Bible study and prayer circle. I don't get around like I used to, not with this hip, but I think I'm capable of watching a couple of babies for an hour or two, or carrying somebody to the doctor."

  "Mama, I'm sorry. We just didn't think—"

  "One minute!" Kenny Federline hollered, but neither Mama or I budged. I thought nothing in my life could ever equal the humiliation I'd felt when I was six years old and my daddy left us, or when I'd thrown Jude into the back of my truck and driven away from Ash in the middle of the night, but I was wrong.

  "That boy you married," Mama said. "He treats me better than the rest of you—you Hatches."

  Before I could think what to say to that, she turned and made her way slowly, laboriously, favoring her right hip, up the aisle and past Kenny Federline, around the corner, out of sight. I heard the automatic doors whoosh open and shut again.

  I bent and picked up her abandoned grocery basket and carried it to the front of the store. "I guess she decided she doesn't want these," I said, handing the basket to Kenny, who made no effort to hide his irritation. Marcel Compton rang up my box of unsweetened chocolate, her mouth a deliberate straight line, even though I knew that when the store opened bright and early the next morning, she'd be telling everybody who passed through her lane about how Patsy Hatch had put her ingrate daughter in her place, right in the middle of aisle 12.

  As I climbed into the Blazer, I realized I'd forgotten my milk. But Kenny Federline was locking up behind me, and anyway, I didn't fancy going back to the Food King for a while. I drove home to my empty house and put the chocolate in the pantry. My taste for brownies was gone.

  "She's head-tripping you," Geneva said the next afternoon as we sat in the bleachers at Old Settlers Field, watching our team get trounced by the visiting White Pine Bulldogs. "Face it, Lucy, she's been doing this to y'all your whole life."

  "Yeah, but this was worse," I said. "She was in polyester pants, Gen. And Keds. No lipstick, her hair all over the place. And her hip—I think it's bothering her more than she's been letting on. She was limping really bad."

  "Dove's been trying to get her to some clinic down in Tyler for months," Geneva said. "Dr. Fisher says she needs a hip replacement, but she won't hear of it. Says Jesus is gonna take care of it."

  "I tried calling her this morning, but she hung up on me. Then I drove by her house on the way over here, but she wouldn't answer the door, even though her car was right there in the carport, big as life."

  "I'm telling you, she's playing you like an old guitar. Where was she the whole time you and the boys were growing up? And remember how she acted when Mitchell died? Trying to shame you into thinking it was your fault, dragging her preacher into it? Trust me, there's no way on God's green earth you can get on Patsy's good side. I don't even think she's got a good side. She's the one who built the wall, and now she wants the rest of you to feel guilty for it."

  Dove just snorted when I told her about my run-in with Mama in the Food King. We were at her kitchen counter making her famous tomato, onion, and mozzarella salad for Sunday supper. Through the window we could keep an eye on Jude running loops through the backyard grass, chasing some bug or shadow or imaginary enemy.

  "It wasn't funny, Dove," I said. "She stood there looking like a bag lady or something, telling me I was going to hell. That we all are, all the Hatches. Now she won't even pick up the phone or answer the door."

  "That mule-headedness is a Munroe thing, not a Hatch thing. She's as bad as the rest of us, maybe the worst of the bunch."

  "Geneva said you've been trying to talk her into getting her hip replaced, but she won't listen."

  "I haven't been tryin' to talk her into a thing. It's the doctor wants her to have the operation. I just told her I'd drive her down there to get it done. If she'd rather spend the rest of her life gimpin' around like she just got throwed off a bull, let her. I'm not losin' any sleep over it, and neither should you."

  "She looked awful, though. I mean, I don't think I've ever in my life seen her without lipstick, much less wearing a baggy old sweater and pants." I set down my knife and turned to Dove. "Oh Lord. You don't think she's…"

  "What?"

  "Going batty again. Like she did when my daddy left."

  "Your mama ain't batty, Lucy Bird. She weren't then, neither—just sad and scared. You can't hardly blame her for that. What came after, though—that's the part I can't forgive."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The way everthing she had goin' for her—you kids, ever-thing she coulda had ahead of her—she let it go right along with your daddy." Dove scraped chunks of tomato from the cutting board into a big ceramic bowl. "You remember when you first took up with Ash, how I cautioned you about turnin' out like your mama, throwin' your whole life after some man? Well, this is what I was talkin' about. Here she is, closin' in on seventy years old, and she ain't got nothin' to show for it but a whole lotta sadness and meanness. Oh, she gives good lip service to the Lord, but that's just blowin' smoke, far as I'm concerned. You ask me, chasin' after Jesus is the only way she knows to make up for everthing she didn't do in her time on earth."

  "Like what?"

  "Like doin' right by you kids, for starters. Bern' a proper mama to y'all. She give all that up to sit around chewin' her heart out over Raymond Hatch. Turnin' all that hate and anger in on herself. Do that long enough, it gets so that's the way you see the whole world, through that black cloud. I reckon your mama don't know no different anymore."

  "She wasn't like this, though, was she, before my daddy left?"

  "No, she weren't." Dove rinsed her hands and dried them on a dish towel. She seemed about to say something else, then thought better of it. I thought of Ash's own daddy, who'd run out on him and his mama when Ash was barely three, and his mama, who, so the story went, cracked up not longer after and turned Ash over to the state, to be raised by a family called Keller. His mama, last I'd heard, was still living in a big, rambling lake house that had belonged to her family in White Pine, not thirty miles away, but Ash hadn't spoken to her in as many years or longer. I wondered why, if I wanted so badly for us to escape the mistakes the ones before us had made, the ones we carried in our blood and bones, we weren't trying harder to do a better job of it.

  "So this is all my daddy's fault," I said.

  "No, honey. He mighta been the one took off, but it was Patsy chose to let it eat her up, body and soul. That's a fact, and don't you forget it." Dove turned and set the bowl in the middle of the table. "Anyhow, I seen her not four hours ago, headed home from church with her nose in the air, dressed to the nines, like any old Sunday. High on Jesus and no use for the rest of us sinners.

  "Now, reach in that icebox yonder and hand me the cheese, and call that youngun of yours in for supper."

  It was a Thursday evening the last week of May, the night before the final day of school. There would be a little graduation ceremony the next morning for Jude and Lily's class, launching them from kindergarten into the first grade. It was purely symbolic; after all, the kids attended the same school, Mooney Elementary, from grades K through 6. But Miss Kimble liked the idea of marking the day, and so we would all gather in the school auditorium to watch our offspring march across the stage in their miniature caps and gowns to receive their miniature diplomas, capturing it all on film and video for posterity. Dove was making lunch for the family afterwards. I'd
called

  Mama two or three times to invite her, but when I finally got her to pick up, she said, in a curt voice, that she was going on a bus trip that day to the outlet mall in Grapevine with the Golden Halo club from First Baptist. It irked me a little, that she'd rather spend the day shopping for cut-rate towels and blouses than watch her youngest grandson mark the conclusion of his first year of school. More to the point, it seemed to me that if I was making the effort to extend an olive branch in her direction, the least she could do was reach out and take it.

  I'd bathed Jude and tucked him in early in anticipation of the next day, and after the supper dishes were washed and put away, I poured myself a glass of iced tea and carried it out to the front porch. Summer had snuck up on us almost without my noticing. I was struck, as I sat down on the steps, by how much light the sky still held at nine o'clock, the woods full of the sounds of frogs and birds I'd been hearing all my life but never once seen. I had a sudden memory of myself standing on the front porch of the house I'd shared with my first husband, Mitchell, holding my after-supper coffee and watching night roll in over fields green with corn and sorghum, dotted with cows. Somewhere between the day I'd married Mitchell and the day he died, the sense of contentment I'd felt had turned to a restlessness I couldn't put my finger on, a small but perpetual itch, like a mosquito bite in a hard-to-reach place. If you'd told me back then where I'd find myself tonight, I wouldn't have believed it. If you'd told me, when I met Ash and fell in love with him, that seven years later I'd still be trying to reach that itch, I'd have laughed in your face. One of the troubles of thinking you've got it made is that you can't see beyond your own satisfaction, until one night you find yourself wondering where it all went, or what made you think it was what you wanted in the first place.

  Headlights turned in off the highway, rising and falling as they wound up the road through the trees, approaching the house. A small blue Toyota pulled in next to my Blazer. The driver's-side door opened and the dome light came on, just long enough for me to spy a lone figure as it climbed out and slammed the door shut, then stood in the growing dark, studying the house over the roof of the car.

  I stood up, setting my iced tea on the porch rail. "Can I help you?"

  "Jesus!" a voice yelped. "You scared the shit out of me."

  I was trying to decide whether I ought to step inside and get the shotgun, or at least the umbrella, when the voice said accusingly, "Who's there?"

  I opened the screen door and switched on the porch light. "I think that's supposed to be my question." It was hard to get too worked up about somebody who sounded like Alvin from the Chipmunks. He wasn't much bigger than Alvin, either. In faded jeans and a T-shirt from one of Willie Nelson's Fourth of July picnics, his shaggy brown hair fell over his shoulders and into his eyes, which were magnified behind thick, black-rimmed glasses. He looked like Buddy Holly's long-lost son. Or grandson, probably—the kid couldn't be a day over eighteen.

  "Oh my God," he said. "You're Lucy! I feel like I practically know you!"

  "You do?" I had a sick feeling in the pit of my belly. I hoped this wasn't going to be one of those made-for-TV moments where I learned that Ash had sired a son he'd never heard of with some one-night stand or old girlfriend.

  "You're a legend, aren't you?" the boy said. " 'The Place Love Calls Home'? All that stuff about summer air and auburn hair?"

  "It's just a song," I said. "Written a long time ago."

  "Are you kidding me? It's a classic. One of the best country love songs ever written. It's an honor to make your acquaintance, Miz Farrell." He leaned toward me and stuck out his hand.

  "And you are?"

  "Hardy Knox."

  I tried to keep from laughing out loud. "Is that your real name?"

  "'Fraid so. My daddy had a pretty whacked-out sense of humor."

  "And let me guess," I said. "You're Ash's number one fan." Over the years I'd gotten used to groupies of both genders popping out of the woodwork. You found them hanging around every backstage door, the tour bus, hotel lobbies and corridors. Every now and then one tracked Ash down at the house outside Nashville, or managed to get hold of our unlisted number. But I was pretty sure this was the first time anybody had gone to the trouble of trailing him to northeast Texas, a spot so deep in the Piney Woods it wasn't even on the Rand McNally road map.

  "Well, yeah. But I'm kind of a colleague, too. That is, I write songs. I'm not quite where he's at yet, but I'm gonna be, someday." I wanted to say I truly hoped he wouldn't be where Ash was now—a burned-out drunk—but he looked so green and hopeful, I couldn't bring myself to do it. "So, is Ash home?" He stood bouncing on the toes of his sneakers, peering around me, like Ash might stick his head out the screen door any second and invite him in for a brew and a hootenanny.

  "Ash doesn't live here, actually."

  "But I heard he came back down here at Easter. After the rehab thing didn't work out, and his record company dropped him."

  "How do you know all that?"

  "Those bastards at Arcadia… Sometimes I hate Nashville. Every other day I swear I'm never going back." I noticed, as he grinned at me, that he hadn't answered my question. His teeth were slightly too large for his mouth and there were too many of them, but there was something endearing about Hardy Knox.

  He looked like somebody you wanted to feed milk and cookies and tuck in with a blanket and a bedtime story. "So, if he's not here, where is he?"

  "Well, for the time being, he's living in a trailer out back," I said.

  "Y'all haven't split up, have you?"

  "Not officially. But we— Wait a minute. Why am I telling you this?"

  He grinned again, his eyes glinting behind the lenses. "Because I just drove five hundred fucking miles to save your husband's career."

  All of a sudden he looked a lot less endearing. I reminded myself that the word fan was short for fanatic. Suppose, in spite of his floppy hair and diminutive frame, Hardy Rnox was a stalker, a psychopath? For all I knew, there were warrants out for him in all fifty states.

  "Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you wasted your gas," I said. "Ash doesn't want saving. He's given up the music business. Gone back to being a carpenter."

  "Give me a break. Guys like Ash don't give up music! He's one of the best songwriters I ever heard."

  "You know it and I know it. But Ash doesn't want to hear it."

  "I need to talk to him," Hardy said fervently. "I mean, if I could just… Will he be back later? Do you think I could wait?"

  "I don't think you should get your hopes up."

  "I'll take my chances, if that's okay."

  I considered him a minute, his skinny frame and scruffy hair, those glasses. "I'm afraid I can't ask you in."

  "Oh sure, I understand. I've got my guitar." He gestured toward the car. "Will he be long, do you think?"

  "He gets back around dark, most nights. Not always, though. I can't say for sure."

  "I just drove down from Nashville, Miz Farrell. You know what it's like there. I'm pretty good at waiting around for stuff to happen."

  "Well." I picked up my glass and moved toward the door. "I'm going inside now."

  "Sure. Nice to meet you."

  I hesitated with my hand on the knob. "Can I— Would you like some iced tea or something, while you wait?"

  "I stopped at the DQ in town, thanks." He gazed at me hopefully for a beat or two. "But I wouldn't say no to a beer, if you've got one."

  "Sorry. I don't keep it in the house anymore."

  "No, ma'am. I can see how you wouldn't."

  "Good night, then."

  I bolted the door behind me, then went into the kitchen and set my glass in the sink, my heart beating fast. I thought about what, if anything, I should do. On the one hand, calling the sheriff seemed like overreacting; after all, I'd told Hardy he could stay. On the other hand, the world was such a crazy place nowadays. Even here deep in the woods of East Texas, folks cooked meth in trailers, fought each other with
knives and guns. Just a month or so before, a man had run over his wife with their pickup in the parking lot at Wal-Mart because she'd bought the wrong brand of cigarettes. And the Klan was still as old and proud and dug-in as the Baptist church, in some corners. I knew what people were capable of.

  I stuck my head into Jude's room, where he slept with his face turned toward the glow of the night-light, breathing through his mouth. Crossing to the bed, I touched the edge of his blanket, straightening it. His rust-colored hair was growing out, practically to the tops of his ears now. Since last fall, he'd loved going to the barber every other week with my brothers, but lately he wanted to wear his hair long, like his daddy's.

  I double-checked the front door, then went down the hall to my bedroom, where the window was open a couple of inches. Through the screen I could hear the familiar sounds of the woods as full dark came on, the far-off hum of a semi out on the highway: everything the way it usually was, forever and ever, amen. And down underneath it all, as soft as a whispered promise in the dark, the sound of a guitar.

  I woke to the sounds of voices, doors slamming. I switched off the lamp and went to the window, but there was nothing out front except my Blazer and Hardy Knox's little blue car. Hurrying through the dark house, I made my way down the back hall and, as gently as I could, inched open the door.

  Ash's truck was in the yard, and behind it, against the pale bulk of the trailer, two silhouettes. Through the screen I couldn't make out what they were saying, just voices going back and forth. Then Ash went up the steps, and the door shut with a bang. Inside the trailer, the lights came on.

  I crept back to bed, undressing in the dark. As I lay back between the sheets, I heard Hardy's guitar start up again out front. I listened for a while, but it made me too sad to sleep, and finally, I had to get up and shut the window.