“Who’s that?” Tess asked.
Mary came over and took a look. “Why, that’s Kenny Kronek, you remember him.”
“Kenny Kronek?” Tess watched him climb the steps and enter the glassed-in back porch. He was tall and lean and dark-haired, and the wind blew his tie sideways as he glanced over this way once more before the door slammed behind him. “You mean that dork who used to get the nosebleeds in school all the time?”
“Tess, shame on you. Kenny Kronek is a nice boy.”
“Oh, Momma, that’s what you always said, because he was Lucille’s boy, and she was your best friend. But you know as well as I do that he was a dork of the highest magnitude. Why, he couldn’t walk a chalk line without tripping on it. And all those pimples! I can still smell the acne medication on him.”
“Kenny took care of his mother till her dying day, and not every nice person in this world is coordinated, Tess. Besides that, he’s a real good father and he takes real good care of the property since Lucille died, so I don’t have a complaint in the world about him.”
“You mean somebody actually married him?”
“Well, of course somebody married him. A girl he met in college. Stephanie. But they’re divorced now.”
“No wonder,” Tess mumbled under her breath, turning away from the window.
“Tess,” her mother scolded with a gentle glower.
“Well, he was always”—Tess’s hands stirred the air as if to turn up the right word—”looking at me. You know what I mean?” She faked a shudder.
“He was such a creep.”
“I never thought so.”
“Not you, but every girl in school, that’s for sure.”
“Oh, Tess, come on.”
“Well, it’s true. The only class we were ever in together was choir when I was a junior and he was a senior, and remember when we went to Choir Festival in St. Louis? We went on the bus, and Kenny came over and sat with me and I couldn’t get rid of him. There he sat, with his pimples and his long, gawky neck with that Adam’s apple that looked like a grapefruit in a sock, blushing so hard I thought he was going to have a nosebleed right on the spot. And his hair—mercy, Mother, remember how he used to comb his hair! So we’re on this bus trip, and he comes over and sits with me and he tries to hold my hand!”
“Well, what’s so wrong with that?”
“Mother, it was the seventies! Half the girls I knew were already sleeping with their boyfriends and Kenny Kronek—the nerd of all nerds—comes over and tries to work up the courage to hold my hand! I swear, all my friends teased me so bad I thought I’d die.”
“You kids were so mean to him.”
“Mom, there were kids you hung out with and kids you didn’t, and Kenny Kronek was definitely in the latter group.”
“Still, you could have been a little nicer to him.”
“No, I couldn’t. Not to that nerd. All he had to do was look around at everybody else to see how idiotic he looked and try to improve himself. Only he never did. If he wanted to hang with us he could have worked a little harder at it.”
Mary wasn’t one to show her displeasure overtly, but there were signs—a tightening of a facial muscle, the persnickety way she picked up her coffee cup and carried it to the sink. Quietly she suggested, “Why don’t you get your bags out of the car and park it back by the garage. It’s probably better if you don’t leave it on the street overnight, an expensive thing like that.”
Tess knew when she was being chastised and it put a knot in her chest. What was it about her mother’s displeasure that weighed heavier than that of others? Tess could handle herself out in the business and entertainment world like a pro, could make choices and decisions and lay down music that created respect—even awe—in those around her, but she hadn’t been home one hour and already she felt the strictures of trying to return to a place she’d outgrown.
She drove around the south end of the block and headed up the alley past sheds and garages where she used to play hide-and-seek and kick-the-can when she was little, past backyard tulip trees and grapevines gone rambling over things they hadn’t ought to ramble over. There were piles of blackened lumber and burning barrels that were used no more. Every place had a garden. The yards were green and old enough that their lot lines had become obscured by trees that had seeded themselves beside sheds, and by bushes that had ranged into the adjoining property. But here in Wintergreen, just above the bootheel of Missouri, where neighbors truly were neighbors and had been for twenty and thirty years, nobody cared about lines of demarcation.
Mary’s garage was as old as the others and needed painting. Surprisingly, however, it had a new door. Nosing the car up to it and getting out, Tess glanced at the place across the alley. Everything painted, no ranging grapevines and not a piece of junk anywhere. Good for Saint Kenny, she thought sarcastically, grabbing her duffel bag and heading for the house. On the way through the backyard she noticed that her mother had somehow managed to put in a garden already. Tradition, this garden, no matter how unnecessary it was, and no matter how it must have hurt Mary’s hip to get down on her hands and knees and plant it. Tess noticed that it was well established due to an unseasonably early spring, and supposed that during the next four weeks she’d end up having to care for it, which would positively ruin her nails! And her nails were one of her trademarks.
The back stoop was three steps high with a black iron handrail on one side only. Tess wondered how Mary would climb them after her surgery. Inside was a small landing with the basement door straight ahead, and the kitchen up a single step to the right. When Tess reached the house and bumped through the kitchen with her duffel bag, she called back over her shoulder, “Hey, Momma, you shouldn’t have put in that garden this year with your hip so bad.”
She was in the living room rounding the center arch when Mary called back, “Oh, I didn’t put it in. Kenny did it for me this year.”
Tess came up short and backed down the one step she’d climbed. She shot a look at the kitchen archway. All she could see was one chrome leg of the kitchen table and the window beyond it, and in her imagination, pimply Kenny Kronek planting her mother’s tomatoes.
“He’s got a rototiller,” came Mary’s voice, “and he offered, so I let him.”
Saint Kenny the Rototiller, Tess thought wryly as she clumped upstairs.
Mary yelled, “And did you see my new garage door? He installed that for me, too.”
Tess stopped in her tracks, resting the duffel bag on the step at her knee. The nerd installed the garage door, too? What was he after?
The upper story of the house was laid out shotgun style, its ceiling shaped like the roofline with a window at either end. The girls had called it “the barracks” when they were growing up, sleeping in three single beds whose headboards were pushed into the south roof angle. The stairs emerged onto the east end of the expanse with only a sturdy homemade railing to keep anyone from falling off the floor above. Straight ahead, at the top of the steps, was a window giving a bird’s-eye view of Saint Kenny’s yard. Tess whisked past it without giving it so much as a glance, executed a U-turn around the handrail and looked down the length of the room.
The beds hunkered along the left with a stack of drawers beside each one. On the far end a small dressing table stood beneath the window, and on the right, kneehole closets filled the space beneath the eaves. She dropped her duffel on the farthest bed. They had earned their distance from the stairs by birth order; closest to the stairs and the downstairs bathroom was the oldest, Judy; middle bed was Renee’s, and way over at the farthest end was Tess’s, because she was the baby. She had always hated being referred to as the baby of the family, and felt a ripple of smug satisfaction at being the one who went off and did the best.
She stood looking around, then wandered to the dressing table where she had first written in her diary that she wanted to be a singer; where she had learned to put on makeup from Renee; and had sat staring out at the street with a puckered mouth
when she’d been sent to her room as punishment. For what? It was hard to remember now, but there had been times. Times when she’d needed it, she supposed.
The top of the dressing table held an empty perfume bottle from Love’s Baby Soft, and a framed photograph of Judy with two of her high school girlfriends; a pink glass dish containing a pearl button, a small ring, a cloth-covered ponytail holder and some dust. Dented into the top of the table, painted over in the years since, was the name Elvis, pressed there in ballpoint pen by Tess in 1977, the year he died and she graduated from high school. She’d grown up listening to Elvis and he had been her idol: if he could do it, she could do it. She brushed the word with her fingertips, as if it were a headstone, then switched on the familiar little lamp with the cheap flared plastic shade. She switched it off again and opened the single dressing-table drawer. Something went rolling and she reached inside and pulled it out: a tube of Bonne Bell root-beer-flavored Lip Smackers. She removed the cap and sniffed it. Nostalgia came rumbling like a tidal wave—being thirteen again and getting her first pair of panty hose; being fourteen and wearing these adolescent perfumes; being fifteen and going out on her first official dates with boys. She rubbed the Bonne Bell on her lips. It had turned sticky with age and she swiped it off with the side of one hand and dropped the tube back where it had been.
Bracing her palms on the tabletop she put her face near the window and glanced down at the street where she had watched for cars when her dates had come to pick her up. The trees in the front yard had grown. From up here she could see even more clearly the cracks in the sidewalk, the thin spots in the grass, the weeds. The sun was hovering just above the houses across the street where she used to babysit. On the lawn the dandelions were closing up as the afternoon waned.
And down below, her mother was calling, “Tess? Should I put the hot dish in now?”
She murmured to herself, “Yes, Momma, because the world will fall off its axis if it’s not on the table at the crack of six.” She pushed off the dressing table and called, “I’ll do it, Momma! Just let me hang up some clothes first, okay?”
“Well … okay,” Mary replied with grave doubt, then added, “but it’s ten after five already and it really should bake for a full hour.”
Tess couldn’t help shaking her head. The normal schedule of a professional musician meant rising near noon, doing studio work from about two till nine, with a caterer bringing food in around six. On concert nights it meant performing between eight and eleven and eating supper around midnight; if you were playing clubs and doing a bus tour, packing up at one in the morning and eating your last meal of the day while you were rolling down the highway.
But Tess dutifully hollered down, “I’ll be right there, Mom!”
Her mother had already put the hot dish in the oven but she let Tess set the table and get the rest of the meal ready. Mary’s suggested accompaniments to the fat-filled Tater Tot hot dish were toast (with real butter and homemade raspberry jam), coffee (with cream and sugar, of course) and pecan pie with whipped cream (the real kind, not Cool Whip—add forty calories for the whipped cream, Tess thought).
A discreet inventory of the refrigerator turned up a head of cabbage but no lettuce, cheddar cheese but no cottage cheese, sour cream but no yogurt, and whole milk but no skim. Just what were these groceries Judy had dropped off anyway?
In the freezer, thank goodness, Tess found a bag of frozen broccoli. “Mom, do you mind if I cook this?” she asked.
Mary stared at her daughter as if her feelings were hurt. ‘There’s vegetables in the hot dish.”
Potatoes soaked in oil, plus rich cream of chicken soup.
“If you’re saving it for something else—”
“No, no, go ahead and cook it!”
Tess did, but when the main dish was hot and bubbling it smelled so delicious and looked so tempting she dug into it like a soldier after a foot march. She guzzled the damned whole milk, too, because it was the only milk in the house, and had a half a piece of toast slathered with butter and jam. Mary smiled in satisfaction, watching her.
When their plates were clean, Mary began slicing a piece of pie. “I’ll just cut you a small one.”
“I can’t, Momma, honest. It looks delicious, but I just can’t.’
“Oh, nonsense.” Mary pulled Tess’s plate over. “I made it just for you. What’s one little piece of pie going to hurt? If you ask me, you look like a scarecrow. You could use a little meat on your bones.”
“Please, Momma, no. I can’t.”
Mary slapped a wedge on Tess’s plate anyway. “Just don’t put any whipped cream on it, that way it won’t be so fattening.”
Tess was eating a single obligatory bite of pie when someone tapped on the back door and opened it without waiting for an answer.
“Mary?” he said and stepped inside, into the tiny back entry, no longer wearing a business suit but a red wind-breaker, no longer carrying a briefcase but hefting a forty-pound sack of pellet salt on his left shoulder.
“Oh, Kenny, it’s you,” Mary said, going joyful in an instant.
“I brought your softener salt,” he said, turning slowly beneath his burden and opening the basement door. “I’ll take it right down.”
“Oh, thanks a million, Kenny. Tess, get that light for him, would you, honey?”
“I got it!” he called as the basement light switched on. His footsteps thumped down, there was a pause while he slit open the bag, then the salt rattled into the plastic softener vat, and he came back up. Fast, as if jogging. “Got one more. Be right back.”
When the door slammed Tess whispered, “He comes right into your house without knocking?”
“Oh, Tess, this is Wintergreen, not Nashville.”
He was back in a minute with the second sack, carried it downstairs and emptied it into the water softener before returning to the main level. When he closed the basement door and climbed the single step into the kitchen, Tess stuck a second bite of pie into her mouth and fixed her eyes on her plate, as if he’d heard all the nasty things she’d said about him only minutes ago. She needn’t have worried, for he gave her not so much as a glance. He shuffled to a stop beside Mary’s chair, looking directly down on her, brushing off his hands and making his windbreaker whistle. “There. All filled. Anything else you need while I’m here?”
“I don’t think so. That’ll hold me for a while. Kenny, you remember Tess, don’t you?”
He gave Tess a negligible nod that dismissed her as if she were still back in Nashville. It was brusque enough to be rude, and accompanied by not so much as a single word of greeting. She wasn’t sure if he still had pimples or not because she couldn’t find the wherewithal to raise her eyes.
While she went on eating her pie, Mary said, “How much do I owe you, Kenny?”
He fished a receipt out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “Seven-eighty.”
Mary said to Tess, “Honey, could you get my purse? It’s hanging on the closet doorknob in my bedroom.”
Tess went gratefully. In her wake she heard Mary telling him what time Tess had arrived, and him changing the subject, asking her if everything was set for tomorrow morning. When Tess got back with the purse, he stepped out of her way and said nothing. Mary dug out the money and handed it to him while Tess resumed her chair.
“There you are. Seven dollars…” After the bills she counted out some coins into his palm. “And eighty cents.”
“Thanks,” he said, dropping the change into a tight side pocket of his blue jeans and reaching toward a rear pocket for his billfold. He had turned his shoulder on Tess again, and a quick glance gave her a view of his trim backside as the billfold slipped out of sight. “So everything’s all set for tomorrow?” he asked Mary. “Blood work turned out fine? And you’ve got that walker all polished up?”
“Yes, sir, I’m all set.”
“Scared?” he inquired with an easy casualness.
“Not much. Been through it before, so I know wh
at to expect.”
“So you don’t need anything?”
“No. Tess is taking me to the hospital in the morning at six o’clock. That is, if I can get in that little car of hers. I don’t know what it’s called but it cost more than this house. Did you see it in the alley, Kenny?”
The room grew painfully silent. What could Kenny do but answer, still avoiding a direct glance at the younger woman.
“Yeah, Mary, I sure did.”
“She drove all the way up from Nashville just to take care of me.”
When he turned to level his impersonal gaze on Tess, what could she do but acknowledge him?
“Hello, Kenny,” she said colorlessly.
“Tess,” he said, so coolly she wished he hadn’t spoken at all. The dorky hairdo was gone and so were the pimples. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, taller than she’d have guessed, brown-eyed, dark-haired, with conservative lines everywhere. But so cold to Tess. After giving her the requisite hello, he turned back to Mary and dropped to a squat beside her chair, resting his fingertips lightly on her knees. “Well, now listen, you…” While he went on encouraging Mary with warmth and deep caring, Tess escaped from the table, ostensibly to get the coffeepot, actually to hide her mortification at being ignored. Tess McPhail, who’d had her picture on the cover of Time magazine, and who’d been invited to sing at the White House, and whose appearance on a stage made fans scream and chant and sometimes get held back by police. Tess McPhail got snubbed by that nerd upperclassman, Kenny Kronek.
“I’ll be thinking of you in the morning,” he said quietly to Mary, “and I’ll be up to see you as soon as you’re feeling up to it. Casey says to tell you hi and good luck and she’ll be coming up, too, when she can. Now, you be good, and no dancing till the doctor tells you to, okay?”
Mary patted his hands and laughed. “My dancing days aren’t over yet, Kenny, so you better keep your eye on me.