Small Town Girl (5 page)

“Things bad here in Rosey Corner?” Jay asked. “It’s looking like all happiness to me right now.”

“Things is rosy here for a fact, but if I don’t miss my guess, the world is likely to come calling with all its troubles.”

Jay’s smile disappeared. “You’re talking about the war over in Europe. But that’s over there. We’re over here.”

“For now,” Graham said. “For now. We were over here last time too and ended up over there.”

“Did you serve in the World War?”

“Nope. I was studying to be a doctor and hoping to go over soon as I got out of school, but the war ended first.”

“So I should call you Dr. Graham.” Jay looked at him a little closer. He’d have never guessed him for a doctor.

The man shook his head. “Didn’t get that done either. Things happened. Some of those bad things, and I started down a different path. Made some good turns though and live with more freedom than most I know.” Graham’s smile came back. “But no need dampening the day with past worries. You’re looking like you got enough of them your own self anyhow.”

“Not at all. I live that free life too. Go where I want. Do what I want.”

“Ain’t got no family then.”

The man’s words skewered Jay, but he pretended not to be bothered by that truth as he said, “None that matter.”

“Family always matters. You can see that plain as day right here before your eyes.” Graham motioned toward the people in the yard. “We got family all over in Rosey Corner. Family families. Church families. Neighborhood families. Nobody goes wanting for family around here.”

Jay looked back at the people who had let Mike and his bride pass through them into the house. It would be cake cutting time soon. He didn’t see Kate anywhere, and he was sorry he’d let the man distract him so much that he didn’t know where she’d gone. “Yeah, I can see that. Same kind of place Mike grew up in.”

“I thought you grew up in the same town.”

“His growing up and my growing up were some different,” Jay said. “Guess I was free of that kind of family ties back then too.”

“A loner, huh?” The man didn’t wait for him to admit it. “Not a bad thing.” He narrowed his eyes on Jay before he went on. “If that’s what a man hankers after.”

“A free man does what he wants.” Jay kept his voice light.

“That he does,” Graham agreed. “Where you going from here?”

“Hard to say for sure.” Jay shrugged a little. “I may go north awhile. I hear Chicago is a busy town. A man should be able to find work there.”

“Why don’t you spend some time here in Rosey Corner? That is, if you don’t have nothing pulling at you. Victor, that’s the daddy of the bride, he lets me sleep up over his smithy. It can be kind of warm at times with the forge running, but it’s bearable with all the windows and doors flung open. I got an extra cot if you can keep Poe off it. Poe, that’s my dog. And truth be told, the poor old boy has a struggle climbing up on the cot these days anyhow. He might be glad for the chance to sleep on the floor.”

“He have fleas?”

“It’s likely, seeing as how he’s a dog. But he generally keeps them all to hisself.” Graham clapped Jay on the shoulder. “You look like a man who needs to take a pause in his traveling, and I could use fresh ears for my stories.”

“But a man has to work.” Jay didn’t know why the offer was tempting him. He’d left country living behind as soon as he got out of school. Cities were where life was happening. That was where he intended to be now. As far from the cow barns and cornfields as his car would take him.

Graham gave him another considering look. “Fact is, I do some odd jobs around Rosey Corner now and again. Just to keep from getting too lazy, but then folks find out you’re willing to paint a house, they all start wanting their houses painted. I could use a fellow like you. Somebody who wouldn’t have no trouble climbing around on a ladder to do the tall painting. I’ll split the profits even with you.”

“That might be too generous of you,” Jay said.

“Worth every penny if it keeps me from breaking my neck.
So what do you say? A couple of weeks wielding a paintbrush outside in the fresh air. Then you can be on your way to some big town where they’ll shut you up in a factory and make you screw bits and pieces together. I’d take the sunshine and rain every time.”

“I’ve never done much painting.”

“Don’t take no genius.”

Jay was smiling, getting ready to shake his head and thank the man for the offer, when Kate came out the door of the house and down off the porch straight toward him. Suddenly he was thinking a few weeks in a place called Rosey Corner might not be so bad. Give him a little change in his pocket before he moved on. October could be a beautiful month. He looked over at Graham. “Well, I’m no genius for sure. So maybe I’ll just take you up on that offer.”

“You know. I just thought you might.” Graham laughed. He looked from Jay to Kate and repeated, “I just thought you might.”

W
hen Kate saw Jay Tanner laughing with Graham out by the yard fence and then grinning her way like maybe Graham was telling him some embarrassing story about her, a little finger of irritation poked her. She thought about turning around and going back in the house. Let Mike come out himself and make sure his friend wasn’t left out.

They’d been all set to cut the cake when Mike noticed Jay hadn’t followed them into the house. Mike claimed the best man had to be there watching. Why, Kate had no idea. Jay Tanner didn’t look like a man who cared about wedding cakes, but Mike asked Kate to go find him.

Evie wasn’t pleased. She didn’t stop smiling. Oh no. People were watching, but Kate knew Evie. She saw the twitch at the corner of her eye and knew a flood of tears might not be too far behind. Evie did like things to go smoothly, and she was already holding the special knife she’d festooned with blue and white ribbons exactly the same as the one she’d seen in a magazine. She was showing Mike how to put his hand overtop of hers to make the first cut in the cake when he had looked around for his best man.

Kate was ready to get on with it too. So many people were crowded into Grandfather Merritt’s front parlor that
the place was as hot as her father’s blacksmith shop. Several of the men had out handkerchiefs, wiping off their faces, and a few of the more amply blessed ladies looked near to fainting. Worse, the icing roses and fluted edges on the cake Kate’s mother and Aunt Hattie had spent the better part of two days decorating were beginning to melt.

That morning Kate had declared the cake too pretty to eat, but Aunt Hattie had waved that off as nonsense. “Cakes is supposed to be eaten. ’Course it’s good this one will get some looking at first. It was a mite of trouble.” She’d licked a smear of frosting off her finger. “But nows we’re practiced. We can get yours done in half the time, Katherine Reece.”

“No cake for me,” Kate told her, picking up the icing spoon to scrape a taste of the sweet concoction out of the bowl. “I’m eloping.”

The word echoed in Kate’s head now as Jay Tanner kept staring her way. She should have scared the socks off him by grabbing his hand and pretending to say yes when he asked her to elope. Then the joke would have been on him.

He was a charmer. Had even charmed Lorena. Calling her Birdie. Kate would have to have a talk with her. She might only be ten, but a girl was never too young to learn to be careful around some guys. Guys like Jay Tanner. Kate had been reminding herself of that very thing since the first smile he’d sent her way last night had sent a strange little tickle up her spine. A tickle that had turned to a delicious little shiver while they were laughing and running down the road with Lorena between them. A dangerous man. She was surprised Graham wasn’t picking up on that instead of smiling like he’d just found a best buddy.

That made Kate want to frown even more. She was Graham’s best buddy. It didn’t matter that Graham was several years older than her father. Age disappeared between real friends. But she had a feeling now he was plotting something.
Something to do with her and Mike’s best man. Something he shouldn’t be plotting if the grin on his face was any indication.

Kate stopped halfway across the yard to call to them. “Hey, you two. Get on in here. They’re waiting on you before they cut the cake.”

“Aww, Kate.” Graham’s grin slid off his face. “You know as much as I love your sister I can’t be smothered in amongst all those people.”

“You can stand by the door, but you’ve got to come on. It’s so hot in there the icing is threatening to slide off the cake. That happens, Evie will be a puddle of tears.” Kate’s eyes touched on Jay. “Mike says his best man has to be in attendance and not lollygagging out here in the shade.”

Graham pretended a wounded look. “We weren’t lollygagging. We were talking business.”

“Business?” Kate gave Graham another suspicious look. “What business is that?”

His smile came back. “Men’s business.”

“Then it’s nothing I want to know about.” Kate waved her hand in dismissal. “But I’ve never known you to pass up a piece of cake.”

“If it’s anywhere near as good as your mother’s brown sugar pie, then I’m not wanting to miss out on it either.” Jay grabbed his coat off the fence, put his arm around the older man’s shoulders, and started him toward the house. “Let’s go, partner. We can finish our men’s business later.”

“Perhaps I’d best warn you, Mr. Tanner, that this man cannot always be trusted. Or believed.”

“Now, Kate,” Graham said. “Ain’t no need you talking like that about me. You know I never lie to you.” He winked at her. “Fabricate some fine stories now and again, but merely for your entertainment.”

“We’ll all have to be fabricating some good excuses if we make Evie wait much longer.” Kate turned away from them
toward the house. She didn’t want either of them to see the smile sneaking out on her face.

The cake eventually got cut, and the couple sampled the first cups of punch just the way Evie read in her magazines that it was supposed to be done. Then Evie and Mike slipped out the door, right behind Graham, who had stood half in, half out of the screen door. At least a dozen flies had taken advantage of the open door.

Kate kept waving them away while she helped Mrs. Patterson slice and hand out the cake. Things would have gone a lot faster if the woman hadn’t had to exclaim over every icing curlicue as she sliced through it. It took all Kate’s self-control not to grab the knife out of the woman’s hand so she could get the job done.

People were standing around all over the house, talking and forking in the cake. Aunt Hattie would be cleaning up the crumbs for a week. If she didn’t have to worry about being rude, Kate would have shooed them all out of Grandfather Merritt’s house the way Aunt Hattie was trying to shoo out the flies with her tea towel. Let them spill their crumbs and drinks out in the yard. For certain, her grandfather would have been having five kinds of heart attacks if he’d been there to see the people tromping in and out, slamming doors, poking around in the corners to see if there was anything of the man left there.

Few of them had ever been in the house while Grandfather Merritt lived there. They knew him. They did business with him. He owned the store and practically ran Rosey Corner. But he’d been a hard man who didn’t encourage company, not even that of his family. The few times Kate had carried him a pie or a jar of jam from her mother, the big house seemed full of brooding shadows ready to swallow her.

That had all changed when Aunt Hattie threw open the doors and started living in the house where she’d once been
a servant. Grandfather Merritt had told her to in the note he left when he took off for Oregon. He’d found a wife out there and hadn’t mentioned the first word about ever coming home in the two postcards he’d sent back to Rosey Corner. He was living a new life in the West where the past didn’t matter.

In Rosey Corner, the past would always matter. It made up the fabric of life, whether that cloth was newly woven or ripped and torn with spots worn bare. Her grandfather appeared to have shrugged off his Rosey Corner past, but it still lurked in the corners of this house. His chair and footstool in the parlor with a couple of account books on the table next to it. A cap hanging on a peg of the hall tree. His things waiting for him.

Kate’s father didn’t think he’d ever come home, but Aunt Hattie said people could surprise you sometimes. She wasn’t about to change things around except for the kitchen. “Mr. Preston never spent no time in the kitchen. He won’t notice I put up new curtains. It’s plumb amazing what some red checked curtains will do for a room.”

Some Rosey Corner people thought it wasn’t exactly proper, Aunt Hattie living in one of the biggest houses in the little town. They thought she ought to have given it over to Kate’s family, who were squeezed up in a house half its size. All four sisters had to sleep in the same bedroom with barely enough room to get around the two beds to pull the covers straight. But Kate was relieved that Grandfather Merritt hadn’t told them to live in the house. She couldn’t imagine getting up in the morning here and singing Lorena’s name song. Or reading romantic stories or writing poems about the sunshine streaking down through the trees in Lindell Woods. Sometimes the Lord blessed a person by letting her keep what she had.

That didn’t mean a person always got what she wanted. She heard Mike laughing out on the porch. She loved his
laugh. She loved the way he was always saying the Lord meant for his children to have a good time. That the Bible advised Christians to have a merry heart. She liked the way he listened to old Mr. Johnson with fresh attention, even though he’d heard his stories a hundred times. She loved the way he didn’t condemn her father or Graham when they didn’t show up at church every Sunday but simply said a man could worship on the outside of a church the same as the inside. She admired the way he was so close to the Lord that sometimes when she was reading about King David in the Bible she was seeing Mike’s face. He was a man after the Lord’s own heart. He’d already won hers.

And Evie’s. From the first Sunday he preached at Rosey Corner Baptist Church. Naturally, Evie had won out. Evie always won out. She had the looks. Kate had the backbone, but guys went for looks, not backbone. Even guys like Mike. Maybe especially guys like Mike who deserved the best.

She certainly didn’t deserve the best. Somebody who would yearn after her sister’s beau. Kate tightened her mouth and bent down to wipe a glob of icing up off the floor. She was going to block all thoughts like that of Mike out of her mind. Forever. He was Evie’s husband now. Her brother by marriage and by Christian love. That was how she would think of him from this moment on—as a brother. That was all. She had the backbone. She could do whatever she set her mind to do. And she was going to set her mind to be very happy for Evie and for Mike.

“I think everybody has cake now, Kate,” Mrs. Patterson said after Kate stood back up from cleaning the floor. “You go on out and join the young people. Us old ladies will clean up in here.” She smiled and gave Kate a knowing look. “That Carl has peered in the door a dozen times and we know who he’s looking for, don’t we?” She picked up the remains of the cake and laughed as she started toward the kitchen. “No need
in letting a few dirty dishes stand in the way of romance. No need at all.”

Kate wanted to tell her she’d rather wash a cabinet full of dishes than entertain romantic thoughts about Carl, but she bit back the words. Carl was Mrs. Patterson’s great-nephew. In her eyes, he was a prize catch. She thought Kate was lucky to have a boy like Carl making goggle eyes at her. Maybe she was. Kate sighed as she grabbed a napkin to wipe off her hands. Maybe Carl was the best she could hope for here in Rosey Corner.

She turned toward the door and spotted Grandfather Merritt’s hat again and thought of him way out in Oregon. Miles and miles from Rosey Corner. A little thrill went through Kate as she imagined the world beyond Rosey Corner. She could be like her grandfather and go somewhere, explore places she’d only read about in books. She could go on to school. Not some business school that taught shorthand and typing like the one Evie had gone to. But to college where the doors to learning would be thrown wide open. Where she could figure out her place in that world outside Rosey Corner.

Kate held in a little sigh. She couldn’t even figure out her place in Rosey Corner. Oh, she knew what she did. She took care of her sisters. She helped her mother at the store. She read every book she could get her hands on. She made up stories for Lorena and even wrote some of them down. She had a dozen notebooks full of words stuck under her bed. Dreams on paper. But that’s all they were. Dreams.

Dreams she wasn’t even sure she wanted to chase after. She loved Rosey Corner. She belonged in Rosey Corner. And there was Lorena. It made her stomach hurt to think about not being there if Lorena needed her.

As if summoned by her thoughts, Lorena popped through the door and grabbed Kate’s hand. “Come on, Kate. You have to help me sing Mike’s song.”

“Mike’s song? What song is that?” Kate asked as Lorena pulled her outside. A welcome breeze touched her face. It was good to be out of the stuffy house, away from the church ladies with their pointed remarks about Kate being the next bride.

“Oh, you know. That sweetheart one with the love light burning. I won’t remember all the words if you don’t help me.”

Kate peered down at Lorena. “What are you talking about? You know the words to every song you’ve ever heard.” Lorena collected songs the way some of the church ladies collected recipes.

Lorena ducked her head before peeking up at Kate. “Okay, I do know the words, but everybody will be watching.”

“So?” Kate said. “You sing at church all the time.”

“That’s church people. They have to be nice while they’re at church. But these are wedding people. They might laugh.” She tugged on Kate’s hand. When Kate didn’t move off the porch, she went on. “Please. For Evie. Please.”

“I’m sure Evie would rather Mike sang that to her.” The last thing in the world she wanted to do was sing a love song where Carl could hear her and decide she was singing to him. Even now he was coming across the yard toward her. To claim her.