Secrets in the Sand

by Carolyn Brown

  She glanced at the table to her left and saw that Clancy still had a bewildered look on his face, as if his eyes couldn’t believe his ears. Angel could still list his every accomplishment. Quarterback from tenth through twelfth grade, taking the team to the state championship all three years. Debate champion, too, winning the regional trophy during his senior year.

  Angel would bet dollars to doughnuts that if Clancy had to hop up on the stage right now and speak, he’d be as awkward as he’d been that summer night just before everyone was leaving for college. He couldn’t hide his feelings then, and he obviously still hadn’t learned how. Because his long face told her he was having a hard time dealing with her putting on a show for the alumni organization. In fact, his ego appeared to be severely deflated.

  “We’ll have a fifteen-minute break while we grab something to drink.” Allie pulled her microphone close to her face. “See y’all in a quarter of an hour.”

  ***

  Before Clancy could make sense of his thoughts, Angel had gone out the side door, surrounded by her band. He stretched out his long limbs, amazed that he’d sat still for an hour and a half while memories and her presence tormented him. He smiled and nodded at several of his old friends as he made his way to the doors leading out to the balcony, from which he could see the bus parked in the lot behind the ballroom. It was black with gold metallic lettering that sparkled in the light from the streetlamps. The word Angel had a crooked halo slung over the capital A, and The Honky Tonk Band had little gold devils with pitchforks sitting on each o.

  He remembered the nights when she’d sung along with the radio in his new red Camaro, and he hadn’t been able to tell which was the real singer and which was Angela. Who would have ever thought she’d be running around in her own bus with a band of women who looked like candidates for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders?

  Tonight had been crazy. Clancy hadn’t even thought about Angela showing up. She was almost the one voted most likely not to succeed. Although hardly a day had gone by in the past ten years that something didn’t make him think of Angela Conrad, he’d long since learned to disassociate himself from what had really happened that summer. It was as if it happened to someone in a book, and he’d just read about it. He hadn’t really sat on the creek bank with her late into the nights and let the minnows nibble their toes. He hadn’t actually walked away that last night, knowing she was crying. No, it couldn’t have been him. It was someone else in a novel or a movie, and he just remembered the details too well.

  ***

  “Whew.” Allie dabbed her face with a tissue. “Pretty lively crowd for a bunch of has-beens.”

  “Hey.” Angel giggled nervously. “I graduated from this place. I belong to that crowd.”

  “Yeah, like I belong at the pearly gates of heaven.” Susan’s blue eyes twinkled. “You outgrew them years ago. Don’t let these hicks make you think you still belong to their world.”

  “Thanks.” Angel pretended to slap her cheek. “I needed that.”

  “Well, I can see why you were so stuck on that Clancy. He fills out them Wranglers pretty damned good.” Patty sighed. “And those big, wide shoulders about gave me the vapors.” She fluttered her long eyelashes. “Maybe you oughta give him another chance, Angel. Lord, handsome as he is, I’d give him a chance if he wasn’t already wearin’ your brand.”

  “Hell,” Angel snorted. “He never wore my brand. He’s free for the taking if you’re interested. I don’t think he’s still married. If he is, his wife didn’t come with him. But rest assured he’s about as trustworthy as those two little devils painted on the side of this bus.”

  “No, thanks,” Patty said, putting on fresh lipstick. “You can keep him. Then tame him or kill him, but don’t give him to me.”

  “Me neither.” Mindy gulped in the hot night air and looked up at the starlit sky to see if there might be a stray cloud with a few raindrops to spare. “Hey, look up on the balcony when you come outside, Angel. Clancy’s up there staring down here like he can’t believe his little eyeballs.”

  “Yeah? That’s nothing new. He always did look down on me.” Angel was suddenly tired. Her bones ached as never before during a performance…and so did her stupid heart. “Another hour and a half and we’ll take this bus home and park it. Then I’ll forget about Clancy Morgan and get on with life. I was here for closure, and I’ve got it.”

  “Sure, you do.” Bonnie chuckled. “You’ll forget Clancy when you’re stone-cold dead and planted six feet down. Women don’t forget first loves, and they never forget a first love who did them dirty.”

  Chapter 2

  Angel flipped the light switch just inside the massive doors of her office and slipped off her shoes. She padded across the thick ivory carpet and plopped down in an oversize blue velvet chair behind an antique French provincial desk. She tossed the alumni newsletter on the desk, laced her hands behind her head, and tried to calm down.

  She’d gone to the reunion to give her former classmates a dose of comeuppance. She had planned to leave with a smile on her face and never think about any of them again. Several former acquaintances had made a point of stopping by the stage between songs and saying hello to her, but Clancy left just after the last song without a word. But then, what could he say? He’d made his choice ten years ago, and there was no room for a change of heart.

  Angel got up and went to the window. Patty was the last one leaving the parking lot. The other girls had already left in the early-morning darkness. Next Friday they would be playing at a honky-tonk just south of Davis, Oklahoma, and then a new band called The Gamblers would pick up the bus and have it repainted with their logo. It was high time for the Honky Tonk Band to go out with a flourish and retire. The girls enjoyed performing, but they needed their weekends these days. Allie was married and her husband, Tyler, complained that he never saw her on weekends. Susan lived with her boyfriend, Richie, and they needed more quality time together.

  Bonnie was engaged and planning an October wedding, and Mindy was in the middle of a divorce. Besides, none of them were getting any younger. Angel sighed, thinking about how she could catch up on all the work at the farm when she stopped touring, and she had this oil business to run as well.

  She thought about Tishomingo again. Main Street had changed a little in the past ten years. The courthouse was new, and the café where she and her grandmother had an occasional burger had a different name these days, and there was a new chiropractor’s office on the corner of Main and Broadway. Blake Shelton’s businesses were where a clothing store and a drugstore used to stand. She’d looked upstream at Pennington Creek when they’d crossed the bridge over it into town and noticed that it hadn’t changed at all. The same trees still shaded the sandbar below the dam, and the memories of what had happened night after night on a blanket in the privacy of those trees were so real, she could almost smell Clancy’s aftershave.

  Angel picked up the newsletter and began to read. Each page had a classmate’s name at the top and a summary of their accomplishments in the past ten years. Apparently, almost everyone had sent in the questionnaire no matter whether they could attend the alumni banquet and the dance. She found her own bio and reread it. I’m not enclosing a bio, but my band and I—Angel and the Honky Tonk Band—will play for the dance free of charge if you would like. Let me know at the following address. Angela Conrad. She’d added a box number in Denison, Texas. But no one knew that she had rented the box for one month just for the return answer to her letter.

  She scanned down the letter to what Clancy had written. Since leaving high school, he’d graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in geology and chemistry and a minor in education. Then he’d enlisted in the air force and had been stationed in Virginia for most of his four-year career and had gone to graduate school for a master’s in education. Just recently he’d come back to Oklahoma and started teaching in an Oklahoma City
high school. Under Marital Status, he had marked an X beside Divorced.

  So, he probably had married Melissa after all. But what had happened? By small-town society’s rules, Mr. and Mrs. Clancy Morgan were supposed to be living happily ever after. Suddenly, Angel wished she had subscribed to the Tishomingo weekly newspaper. Then at least she would have known who’d married whom, who had children, and so forth.

  When her granny had driven their old green pickup truck out of Tishomingo that long-ago fall day, Angel hadn’t even looked back in the rearview mirror for one last glimpse of the place where she’d lived since she was three years old. She hadn’t left anything behind but heartaches, and she didn’t need to look back at the fading lights of town to recapture them. They would be with her forever.

  She looked through the newsletter to see what Billy Joe Summers was doing these days. She hadn’t seen him at the dance even though she’d scanned the ballroom several times to see if there was a six-foot, five-inch gangly man standing shyly on the sidelines. Billy Joe had always been nice to her, and that awful night on the sandbar when she’d sat with her feet in the warm water, it had been Billy Joe’s name that Clancy had mentioned so scornfully.

  “Hello again, Mr. Henry.” Angel picked up a worn teddy bear sitting on top of her filing cabinet and held him, just for old times’ sakes. Mr. Henry had listened sympathetically to all her tales of woe in the years since she’d been given him for her fifth birthday…and here she was, still feeling sorry for herself.

  She wondered how her memories of Tishomingo could still be so vivid. After all, she hadn’t ever wanted to go back, even though she and her granny had lived there for fifteen years, since the day she’d turned three years old. Angel had spent her babyhood in nearby Kemp, and although they visited her great-grandpa at the farm there a couple of times a year, she couldn’t recollect anything about it.

  When Angel had turned eighteen, her great-grandpa Poppa John had died and left his twenty acres to his only child—Angel’s grandmother. After his estate had been settled, Angel and her granny had left Tishomingo and gone back to Kemp. And it hadn’t happened a minute too soon, in anyone’s opinion. Memories flooded her mind. “Don’t stay out late, Angela. We’ve got to pack in the morning,” her granny had reminded her. “Got to be out of the house before midnight or pay more rent, you know.”

  “I know.” Angela had gone out the front door and walked west toward the dam. All summer she’d gone swimming every evening in Pennington Creek, and it was a good thing August had arrived, because her bikini was beginning to look as worn-out as her jeans. Most times, it seemed like just a hop, skip, and jump from her house to the swimming hole, but that evening the walk took forever.

  Angel had shimmied out of her shorts and shirt, tugged the top of her bikini down and the bottoms up before she sat down on the sandbar and waited for Clancy. She picked up a twig and drew an interlocking heart in the sand. She put her initial in one heart, Clancy’s in the second one, and wrote baby in the part that interlocked. She loved him, and he loved her. The secret that they had been hiding all summer would come out as soon as she told him her news. Sure, they were young, but she had a scholarship, and he didn’t have to go to Oklahoma University. The important thing was that they would be together.

  She soaked her feet in the lukewarm water while she waited. Clancy wouldn’t be there for another half hour so she thought about all the scenarios lying ahead. She’d known the first time they’d accidentally met each other in this very place that she was flirting with big trouble, but she’d been in love with Clancy Morgan since kindergarten. If he would just touch her hand or kiss her one time before she moved away, she could survive forever on the memories. That he didn’t want anyone to know they were dating stung a little, but now their secret would be out in public. Clancy was a good guy. He would do the right thing.

  She was so deep in her thoughts that she didn’t even hear the car tires crunching on gravel when he drove up close to the sandbar. He sat down beside her, and she quickly ran a hand over the heart she had drawn. He was a smart guy. If he saw the secret in the sand, he would know immediately why she was smiling so big. She wanted to tell him and then feel his arms around her, and hear him telling her that everything would be fine.

  Clancy plopped down on the sandbar. Usually he drew her into his arms and kissed her the minute he arrived, but not that night. “We need to talk, Angela.”

  “Yes, we do,” she said as she scooted over closer to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’ll go first. I’m pregnant.”

  Her heart broke when he pushed her away. It shattered into a million pieces when he said, “I can’t marry you or even live with you. Billy Joe has been in love with you since first grade. He won’t care if the baby isn’t really his.”

  “Go to hell, Clancy,” she’d found enough courage to say. “I don’t need you anyway. I can take care of myself. They don’t stone women for being single mamas, so just go.”

  There had been a lot more to the fight, but she couldn’t bear to remember any more of the details. She wiped away a tear as that last visual of Clancy popped into her mind.

  With a shrug and a relieved expression, he had turned and jogged up the bank to his car. She watched the trail of dust follow him all the way to where he turned left to cross the bridge, and when the Camaro was out of sight, Angela had buried her face in her hands and sobbed, heartbroken and alone.

  Angel pulled her thoughts back to the present and wiped away the tears. She returned to the newsletter page and flipped through until she found Billy Joe’s bio. He was living in San Francisco, where he was working as a computer technician. Under Comments he had written: I want to tell Angela Conrad hello wherever she is. I’m married to Stephen and we have an adopted son, Adam. We are both very active in the gay rights movement and have had articles published in several papers and magazines.

  Her amused response started as a weak giggle, grew into a chuckle, and then a full-fledged roar. So Billy Joe had finally come out with the news. She hoped Clancy Morgan had read Billy Joe’s contribution to the alumni newsletter. Perhaps it would help him remember his asinine remark to her that long-ago night beside Pennington Creek.

  ***

  Clancy let himself into the house where he had grown up. His father had died while he was in Virginia with the air force, and now his mother, Meredith, lived there alone. She was already sleeping, so he tiptoed to the dining room where he turned on the light above the table and set his newsletter down.

  He put on a pot of coffee, and when it finished dripping, he poured himself a mug, sat down at the table, and turned to Angela Conrad’s brief bio. His heart fluttered softly, then dropped to a dull ache when he read what she’d written. He still didn’t know anything, except that she probably lived in Denison, since she gave a box number there. She’d given no personal information and Clancy wondered if she was married, single, or divorced. She didn’t mention if she had a child or children, and she was still using her maiden name.

  Clancy burned his lip on the hot coffee and swore softly. “Damn it all,” he muttered, but he was angry with more than the coffee. He was mad at himself all over again as he remembered that hot August night when he’d gone to see her to break it off. Angela had been waiting for him in her usual place, with her feet in the water, wearing the same bikini that she’d worn all summer. Her jean shorts and that orange T-shirt that was too big for her were tossed up on the creek bank. Her brown curls were pulled back into a ponytail, and she looked like a little girl. But then she was only five foot three and barely weighed 110 pounds.

  He remembered telling her to marry Billy Joe Summers and her telling him to go to hell. And he’d never seen her again, from that night until now.

  That night he’d gone to the Dairy Queen. Melissa was there and had flirted with him. They both wound up at Oklahoma University and started dating during the first semester. At the end of the f
irst semester, he had casually asked a former classmate about Billy Joe and Angela and learned that both had left Tishomingo at about the same time, and that was all anyone knew.

  He and Melissa had married right after their college graduation, and she’d taught school while he was in the air force. He’d thought they were doing fine until the year she’d come home and told Clancy she wanted out. She’d fallen in love with the principal of her school, and they were planning to marry as soon as the divorce was final. That had ended what he’d thought would be a military career. Clancy had come back to Oklahoma, gotten his master’s degree, and landed his present job teaching chemistry at an Oklahoma City high school.

  He turned the pages until he found Billy Joe Summers’s name. Maybe Billy Joe lived in Denison too…and maybe he’d married Angela after all, and they had had that pack of kids and she and her band played border-town dives just to pay the bills.

  But when Clancy read Billy Joe’s page, he felt just plain foolish. Billy Joe was gay, and Angela sure hadn’t looked poor. Two-bit bands that played for border-town dives didn’t have customized buses, and none of them had smoke machines and their own knockdown stages, and none of them played at alumni reunions either. Angela and her band had done well. Evidently, they hadn’t hit the big time, but she and Billy Joe had both done well. And now her name was Angel.

  He’d called her that sometimes, he realized.

  So just what in the hell was she up to? None of your damn business, his conscience told him. You gave up any rights to know what she was doing with her life that August night down by the creek when you were eighteen years old.

  He turned out the light and went to the living room where he leaned back in his father’s recliner and thought about Angela Conrad. His angel—once upon a time.

  ***