Hometown Series Box Set

by Kirsten Fullmer

  Winnie settled onto her stool and gave Tara an arch look.

  “Don’t do that,” Tara grumbled, squirming.

  Winnie didn’t relent.

  Tara sighed and pushed her hair back from her face. “Fine, I’ll tell you. I’m worried about—” but the words didn’t come. It felt as if a baseball had lodged in her throat.

  Winnie’s expression softened, and she reached across the island to pat Tara’s hand.

  Unwilling to be comforted, Tara pulled her hand away.

  Winnie sighed and put a tea bag into her cup. She looked up, still waiting. “Is it Justin?” she finally asked.

  Tara glanced up but didn’t answer, pretending instead to be engrossed with selecting a tea bag from the new box.

  “I know he’s been very busy lately.” Winnie continued.

  Tara shrugged.

  Winnie didn’t give up. “I ran into Lizzie at the grocery store; she said Elliot and Justin had several projects in the works, and she’d hardly seen Elliot lately.”

  “Really?” Tara asked, with the first spark of hope she’d felt in days.

  Winnie nodded. “Yes, and Lizzie said their deadlines are much too close. She’s worried that they won’t be able to finish some of the projects on time.”

  Tara wound the tea bag string around the handle of her cup. Maybe Winnie was right and she’d been overreacting. Justin had been busy with his business for years. He and Elliot were always looking for the next project, and they worked tons of hours. She’d been so busy with the Inn until now, that maybe she’d been so exhausted she’d hardly noticed. Maybe everything was normal after all. She certainly had nothing but time on her hands the last few days. Time to wonder and worry and miss him.

  “Relationships ebb and flow, honey,” Winnie said, stirring sugar into her tea. She pushed the sugar bowl to Tara and got up to get cream from the fridge. “You can’t appreciate the good without the bad, you know, same as everything else in life.”

  “But marriages f—fail,” Tara countered, her voice cracking. No matter what Winnie said, she felt distant and weird when it came to Justin. The closeness and connection was gone. Her eyes stung and her throat burned at the thought of losing him.

  “Tut, tut,” Winnie scolded, returning with the cream. “Justin loves you. I have no doubt of that.”

  “He won’t even talk to me anymore.”

  Winnie placed the cream in front of Tara. Then, before she returned to her seat, she went to the pantry and got a little box of raisins for Bella.

  Tara still sat frowning into her cup, the cream forgotten, so Winnie tried again. “Are you two going to the homecoming game? That would be fun. Maybe if you ask him ahead of time, he’ll make time to attend with you.”

  “It will be too cold for Bella,” Tara muttered, refusing to be soothed.

  “Open, pwease!” Bella demanded, pushing the raisins back at Winnie.

  Tara got up and came around the island to open Bella’s treat. Then, as if her thoughts cleared, she regarded Winnie with one hand on her hip. “About Homecoming, are you going to the reunion?”

  Winnie acted like the comment hadn’t rattled her, but Tara could see that it had. The old woman’s hand shook as she removed her tea bag, stirred in cream, and lifted her teacup to her lips.

  Tara waited, cocking one hip against the island, her own tea forgotten. Even though Winnie had seemed better the last few days, she was obviously still upset. “What has you all shook up?” She asked. “Do you have a friend that you haven’t seen for a long time coming for the reunion? Why does that bother you?”

  For the life of her, Tara couldn’t imagine why seeing Claudia again would make Winnie so unhappy. According to Winnie they’d been so close. Plus, Winnie had a beautiful home and tons of friends. She was practically the queen of Smithville, for heaven’s sakes.

  Winnie’s cup clinked back onto the saucer, but she remained silent.

  Tara’s brows lowered in thought. Maybe Winnie would like to get a makeover. Maybe she was feeling like she wouldn’t measure up to a friend who hadn’t lived in Smithville forever. Was Winnie feeling small town? Frumpy?

  “We could go shopping for a new dress, if you’d like.” She suggested, wishing she could help Winnie the way the sweet old woman always helped her.

  “A dress isn’t going to make any difference,” Winnie puffed, irritated with the topic in general.

  “Well, a football game isn’t going to fix my marriage either,” Tara countered. “But you were right, it’s a step in the right direction.”

  Still, Winnie didn’t respond. This whole Tara comforting Winnie thing was knew to them both, and it felt strange.

  “I think you’re being hard on yourself.” Tara said stubbornly.

  Winnie looked up, taken aback at Tara’s admonishment. “I could say the same for you.”

  Tara had to give Winnie credit, she was probably right. Conceding the point, she went back to her stool and finished fixing her tea. Evidently, not only was her career and her relationship with Justin changing, but so was her rapport with Winnie. Somehow, without her even noticing, they were building an adult bond, a new level of relating to each other.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As Winnie cleaned up tea fixings and Bella’s snack smudges, she couldn’t help but think about what Tara had said. Was she being too hard on herself?

  Stretching across the top of the island counter to wipe it off, her mind wandered back to the good times she’d had back at the university. It hadn’t all been studying and social upheaval, or even falling in love with Thomas. She’d actually spent a decent amount of time having fun.

  She and the other students, and of course Claudia and Roy, had all shared an easy camaraderie. Obviously, she was closest with her friends from home. With all those years growing up together as their connection, she and Roy could share laughter and memories, even when Claudia didn’t see fit to join them. Back in the day, growing up in Smithville, they’d all run wild. Well, as wild as Roy would allow anyway. Both her mother and Claudia’s mother had felt like the girls were safe as long as they were with Roy. Oh, how he must have hated them tagging along! Those were different times for sure.

  As little kids they would walk to the corner store alone, pulling a wagon filled with empty soda bottles. They’d use the refund for the bottles to buy far more candy than was good for their teeth.

  They’d climbed half the trees in town too. Their favorite had been old man Griffith’s tree because they could watch and hear the people walking past, unseen. They’d thought themselves so sly.

  The drive-in movies in Uniontown had been a favorite hangout too. Roy could sure pile a lot of kids into his old Dodge Dart, and poor Tommy-what’s-his-name had always had to ride through the theater gates in the trunk of the car.

  Winnie chuckled to herself.

  As a teen, Roy had even been willing to drag main with Winnie and Claudia along, most likely because everyone in town knew who they all were, and it was understood that Roy was tied to his sister and Winnie, through no desire of his own.

  What wonderful friends those two had been.

  The first few weeks at the university, before Claudia and Roy had taken separate sides of nearly every issue, the three of them had gone to football games and sport rallies. And even after her best friend didn’t want to see Roy anymore, Winnie and Roy had still gone to movies with the group of kids from the dorm, or spent hours goofing off in the student lounge in Roy’s dorm.

  The lounge in the boys’ dorm hadn’t been fancy; as a matter of fact, the room in the basement had been as much a laundry room as it was a hangout. But the billiards table was free, and the well-loved sofa was comfortable.

  Winnie smiled to herself as she washed out her dish cloth. If the rumors had been true, that sofa had indeed been well-loved. She had no doubt that the old couch had played a significant role in the sexual revolution. She hadn’t participated in those activities, of course. Not on that sofa. She had been quite the poo
l shark though.

  One night in particular came to mind, a time with Roy before everything between them was ruined. The two of them were playing eight-ball there in that dorm lounge, and the winner of the best two out of three had to buy ice cream. Roy was on a roll that night, making one shot after another. Finally, he missed landing a shot, but he did manage to leave the cue ball in a difficult position for Winnie to make her shot.

  She tossed Roy a confident look and circled the table. “No problem, you wait and see,” she taunted as she lined up her shot. With a quick stroke she pulled back the cue stick and hit the ball with a good solid knock.

  The cue ball flew across the table missing every other ball, jumped the bumper, and flew three feet in the air. Roy ducked to evade the missile, and Winnie watched in dismay as the ball sailed over the laundry machines and hit the wall, then fell behind a dryer.

  She straightened, her face giving nothing away.

  Roy laughed, incredulous, and went over to peer behind the dryer. His gaze came up to hers.

  She set the end of the cue stick on the ground and grinned impishly. “Just as I planned. Let’s see you make your shot from behind the dryer!”

  “Oh no, you scratched,” he laughed, leaning further over the dryer for another look. “I’m not sure how to get it out of there though.”

  Winnie placed her cue stick on the rack. “I guess I won then.”

  “You did not!”

  She sashayed over to plop on the sofa. “Look up the rules. Who wins if a player refuses to take his turn?”

  “You beat all,” he scoffed, leaning on the end of the pool table.

  “Why, thank you,” she preened.

  “So, Claudia didn’t want to come over with you, even to play pool?” He asked, growing serious.

  Winnie shrugged. “You know how she can be.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Both considered their life-long companion.

  “She’s so funny sometimes,” Winnie said. “Yesterday, she was on another invention kick.”

  “Oh yeah?” Roy asked. “What did she come with this time?”

  “She said she wished there was a way to see who was calling before you answered the phone – that way, you’d know if you wanted to answer it or not.”

  Roy chuckled. “Oh, I’m sure she’d like that. She probably has a growing list of people she’d rather not talk to these days.”

  “A few days ago, she said she wished there was a way to heat up leftovers right on the plate.”

  Roy shook his head. “The stuff she dreams up.”

  “Too bad she’s not studying engineering,” Winnie giggled.

  “Is she studying anything these days?” Roy asked, “Other than partying I mean.”

  It didn’t feel right to Winnie, knocking her best friend, even if she agreed. “She’s always been more interested in the social aspect of things -- her major is Sociology.”

  “What a bunch of hogwash,” He scoffed, heading to the dryer to retrieve the cue ball.

  “It is not!” Winnie defended. “How do we know if we’re progressing, if we don’t know what people have done in the past? Human nature hasn’t changed much the past thousand years; if we don’t learn from our ancestors, we’re doomed to remake their mistakes.”

  The dryer scraped away from the wall as Roy gave it a good, hard tug. “Right,” he grunted. “Cave men wanted to know who was calling before they answered the phone, and they picketed caves waving stupid signs.”

  Winnie watched with a frown as Roy squeezed between the machines to retrieve the ball. “Maybe not cavemen, but once we had societies, people rebelled to create change.”

  Roy stood and held up the ball in triumph. “And how did that work out for them? Wars and fighting are still happening.”

  Winnie stood up, getting more and more frustrated with her friend. “Oh yeah, what about the reformation, or the Boston tea party?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Roy said, his expression darkening. “We’re still arguing about religion hundreds of years later, and the Boston tea party resulted in a full-blown revolution. Do you want a revolution? Are you that anti-American?”

  Winnie took a step back. “I’ve told you before, voicing a grievance isn’t being anti-American! It’s part of the structure of our whole government!”

  Now Roy was mad as well. “And I suppose causing riots so violent that the police shoot students, like what just happened in South Carolina, or spitting on wounded soldiers returning home, calling them horrible names and chanting at them, is good for our country too?”

  “Of course not!” Winnie cried. But it was becoming more and more clear that she and Roy had very little common ground left between them.

  She stood watching silently, as he returned the cue ball to the pool table and collected the other balls. He racked the balls and stored them under the table and then headed to the door, where he waited for Winnie to join him. Neither said a word, and the silence was deafening.

  “I’m not in the mood for ice cream,” he mumbled as she passed him in the doorway. “Want me to walk you home?”

  She shook her head, and they trudged silently up the stairs. It was no wonder Roy felt threatened, considering he would be leaving soon for Vietnam.

  He motioned over his shoulder to her before going up to his room. Even mad, he couldn’t help but wave goodbye. He may think differently than she did, but Roy was a good egg. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Then again, neither did Claudia. It hurt her to see her friends so angry and divided.

  The phone rang, jarring Winnie back to the present. She sighed and plopped onto a kitchen stool, still holding the damp rag. “Oh Roy…” she sighed. Maybe all her memories had been affected by unrest.

  * * *

  Justin watched Tara across his breakfast plate, with one eyebrow arched.

  “What?” she asked, lowering her fork full of eggs.

  “I was just wondering,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically jovial, “why you don’t wear that cute striped shirt anymore. You said it was your favorite.”

  Tara didn’t answer -- just shoved her food into her mouth and chewed in response. Did he know about her shirt?

  “And where did you find those shoes?” he continued. “I haven’t seen you wear them for ages.”

  Tara glared at him as she swallowed, knowing full well her favorite shirt and shoes were stuffed deep in the outside trash bin. “Oh, so you’re not around here for weeks and now you notice my shoes?”

  Blanche bustled barefooted into the kitchen. “How are your eggs?” she sang out. “Are they up to snuff? My third husband loved scrambled eggs, but I love eggs over easy, I really do!”

  “Eggs!” Bella chanted, banging her spoon on the highchair tray. “More eggs, pwease!”

  Blanche grinned down at the toddler lovingly. “If sweet Bella wants more eggs, more eggs my Bella shall have!”

  Tara stuffed her last bite of food into her mouth and stood. “It’s okay. Blanche, don’t bother.” She said around her mouthful. “She’s full. She’d just throw them on the floor. It’s a game to her.”

  All three adults glanced at the eggs on the floor. Justin caught sight of Blanche’s bare feet and his eyes widened.

  “I suppose you’re right, you are her mother.” Blanch conceded.

  Tara tossed Justin a look, as if to show she was still in charge of something, then took her plate to the sink.

  “Would you like me to take Bella up and give her a bath?” Blanche asked.

  “No, I’ve got it,” Tara assured her, not about to give up the only job Blanche hadn’t taken over.

  “Thanks for breakfast, Blanche,” Justin said as he put his plate in the sink next to Tara’s.

  The older woman grinned up at him from where she bent putting clean pans from the dishwasher into the cupboard. “Oh, anytime, handsome.” She straightened and put up one hand to cover her words from Tara. “You’re so charming -- you’d make a great eighth husband -- I really think so
!” she whispered loudly.

  Justin grimaced a smile. “Uh, thank you?” He cleared his throat and turned to his wife. “So, what are you doing today?” he asked Tara with an innocent smile.

  She didn’t meet his eye, still feeling off kilter over his question about her clothes and irritated by Blanche’s ridiculous flirting. “Oh, the girls are doing a thing over at the spa this afternoon.”

  “A thing?” he chuckled. “That sounds highly suspicious.”

  Her brows slammed down. As if he had a right to comment about being suspicious! “Yes, a thing. Where are you going?”

  He picked up on her pique, and his attitude shifted. “To work.”

  There it was again, his closed response to any question about his whereabouts. “Where?” She countered.

  Justin kissed Bella on the forehead and headed for the door. “It’s north of town, you don’t know it.” He replied offhandedly as he slipped out.

  Tara gritted her teeth and growled inside. His whole attitude was so— demeaning. Like he knew she’d have issue with where he was going, so he just wouldn’t tell her.

  Blanche pulled clean plates from the dishwasher and put them in the cupboard. “Would you like me to watch Bella while you’re at the spa, dear?”

  But Tara didn’t hear Blanche; her mind was north of town, wondering what on earth Justin was up to.

  Bella bounced in her seat. “Want down!”

  Tara had to smile in spite of her mood. It was as if something had broken through, and now Bella spoke in sentences all the time. “Okay, baby,” she said, lifting the little girl. She went to the sink, tucked Bella under one arm, and thoroughly scrubbed her face and hands with the other hand.

  Blanche laughed and stopped working to watch. “My, my, you young mothers are so much more creative than folks back in my day. I don’t think I ever saw anyone scrub a child at the sink like that, under one arm, like they were a dirty pot.”

  Tara set Bella on the counter and used a paper towel to dry her off. “Yeah? Well, Winnie doesn’t approve of my tactics either.” She set Bella on the floor and the little girl took off at a run and disappeared around the corner.