Superintendent Dartmouth, a short, wrinkled man with beady black eyes, stared through my ragtag singers as though they reflected poorly on the minister he had come to see. Luke pulled at his tie again, and his eyes darted to Lottie Miller. Her handbells hadn’t arrived yet, and I’d heard she was having more trouble coming up with enough people to play them than I had had filling the choir loft. She sat on the second row, puffed up like an angry hen because she had missed her chance to show off.
“Our opening hymn is ‘Love Lifted Me,’ ” Jason Utley managed. I turned around to face the piano and almost said a silent prayer before I caught myself. My hands had a mind of their own, playing a jazzy introduction before I could rein them in. I tended to get ornamental when nervous, which, based on the holes in my back, was something I should have warned Luke about.
Then the Happy Hour Choir started to sing.
They sang as I had instructed, braving the new harmonies I’d taught them. We breezed through the first verse and were halfway through the second when the last part of the verse grabbed me: “Love so mighty and so true merits my soul’s best songs. . . .”
Half-exhilarated and half-terrified, I realized I was giving my soul’s best songs. My fingers guided the Happy Hour Choir through the rest of the song as my mind worked over words that promised love.
God’s love. Romantic love. Love for neighbors.
Love. Love. Love. “All You Need Is Love.”
I narrowly stopped myself from segueing into the Beatles just as the Happy Hour Choir took the last time through the chorus a cappella. I turned to see their profiles, this motley crew of haggard faces with angelic voices. Sure, someone missed a note every now and again—especially the Gates brothers, who were trying to navigate the middle harmony—but their rough edges lent credence to the song.
Silence swallowed the memory of the last note. I turned to see the congregation, and the creak of the piano stool brought everyone to life. Miss Lola dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, but Miss Lottie looked away rather than meet my gaze.
Luke cleared his throat to stop the buzz and hiss of whispered voices then smoothly transitioned into joys and concerns, neither of which were very popular with a stranger present. I played a jazzy version of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” as the ushers took the plate around the sanctuary. In for a penny, in for a pound, I figured. No doubt Luke was getting the urge to have one of his little chats with me. Maybe he would say the word maybe at least ten more times.
Only the knowledge that Superintendent Dartmouth was watching me kept me from groaning when Luke started reading the story of the prodigal son. He started with the older brother’s perspective. The congregation nodded with his points; they followed all of the rules, after all. Lottie Miller’s head lolled steadily over her double chin. She would never do something as stupid as taking her inheritance and blowing it on wild living. Thomas Dartmouth nodded, but his eyes fluttered. He wasn’t much younger than Ginger and probably shared her opinion on how it wouldn’t matter much to miss a sermon or two on the back end of his life.
I shifted in my little seat by the piano. I had been trying to daydream about something other than the sermon, but I couldn’t help but think of that younger son. Maybe he hadn’t meant to go live a life of dissolution. Maybe he’d planned to start his own business to make his daddy proud. Maybe he’d fallen into the party lifestyle completely by accident because his mother was entirely too strict with him and he was searching for meaning somewhere. Oh, wait, that was me.
I shivered. I knew what it was like to have disapproval weigh heavily on you. You wanted to shake it off, to be free. Sometimes in the process of breaking free, you accidentally broke something else, and more disapproval landed heavy.
“Beulah?” Jason Utley’s hissed whisper brought me back to reality where the entire church, the Happy Hour Choir, and the superintendent all looked to me to start the last hymn. I jumped to the piano so quickly I turned over the stool. A collective gasp went up from the crowd, and my embarrassment burned hot on my cheeks. Inhale and exhale, Ginger had taught me. Close your eyes and feel the music.
I righted the seat and dug deep for some belated grace before sitting. Then I nodded to the Happy Hour Choir. They turned to the page for the invitation, a page I had marked for each and every one of them ahead of time with a tiny hot-pink sticky note.
“Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling.” Tiffany’s delicate soprano wafted over the sanctuary alone for the entire first verse, then the harmony of the Happy Hour Choir bowled over even me.
No one in the sanctuary moved. Thomas Dartmouth started to clap. Everyone looked at him as if he’d lost his ever-loving mind because County Line Methodist didn’t do anything as rowdy as applaud. After a moment’s hesitation, one person joined his applause. Then another and another.
I looked at my choir, and they all blushed. Every last one of them had a hint of color in his or her cheeks, including Bill, who hadn’t done any singing. Then I looked behind me at the attendance board. Only thirty-two people had been in church for that beautiful moment, nowhere near enough to keep County Line open.
But it was ten more than the week before.
I was still humming while gathering up my contraband hymnals when Tiffany snuck up on me.
“Beulah, I really need to talk to you,” she whispered.
I turned around to see a trickle of blood coming from one corner of her lip and a pink puffiness around her left eye that was going to become quite the shiner.
“What in the blue hell happened to you?”
Tiffany started blubbering before I could get the story out of her. “Daddy was in such a good mood, and we were standing behind the church. So I told him about, you know.”
As if not calling a pregnancy a pregnancy would somehow undo it.
“And he hit me upside the head. He told me smart girls were more careful about that sort of thing and what were the neighbors going to think and—”
I wrapped my arms around her, tamping down panic. I needed to get away from her because she reminded me of my own panic the day I finally admitted I wasn’t suffering from food poisoning after all. I gently pushed her out to arm’s length. “Okay. You’re going to call the police—”
“No!”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Please, I can’t call them. I can’t. I don’t have any girlfriends. All my aunts are in Texas, and Momma is who knows where. What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to come home with us. That’s what you’re going to do.”
Both Tiffany’s head and mine snapped to where Ginger stood at the foot of the stairs that led to the choir loft.
“And I guess we’re going to need someone else to sing bass,” she muttered under her breath as she hobbled toward the front door.
I scrambled out of the loft and ran after Ginger, not caring much that I’d left Tiffany alone in the loft. “You can’t mean that.”
By this time we were outside in the empty gravel parking lot, so she shielded her eyes to answer me. “Well, I’m sure not going to let a guy who hits pregnant women, let alone his own daughter, sing in my choir.”
My breath came out in a whoosh. “No, I mean the part about Tiffany.”
“What are you trying to say, Beulah Gertrude Land?”
I gritted my teeth at the sound of the name my mother gave me. “I can’t live with Tiffany. She’s going to be, you know, and—”
Ginger held up one hand and looked out at the cemetery but closed her eyes as she did. “And where would you be if I had said I didn’t want to be reminded of my miscarriage?”
My mouth hung open, and the world spun around me. She’d never told me about wanting children or about losing children. She hadn’t mentioned being married, either, so . . .
“So, you too?” I took a seat on the last few steps and Ginger joined me. Up in the choir loft Tiffany stood frozen, waiting.
Ginger heaved a ragged sigh. “We went down to Corint
h for a quickie wedding before he shipped off to the Pacific. He didn’t come home.”
How could I have lived with her for all this time and not known this story? Because you were so busy keeping Ginger out of your business that you didn’t think to ask about hers.
“After I lost the baby I was sad, but I told myself John and I could try again.” Here she grabbed my hand. “We didn’t get that chance.”
I couldn’t find the words to tell her how sorry I was for being a hateful little brat all those weeks before our New Orleans trip and then again after I lost my little Hunter.
“It was hard for me to watch you get bigger every day then deliver your child, all pink and rosy. It was even harder to lose him when I’d already told myself we’d made it through the hard part, the part I hadn’t been able to make it through.”
Goose bumps covered every square inch of my flesh despite the hot June sun. She’d hidden all of these feelings from me. She had tamped down her panic while I carried Hunter to term. She’d squashed down her own grief to make sure I came out of mine alive.
I looked at Tiffany. She stood at the altar, wanting to come to us but no doubt worrying about what we were saying about her. And of the three of us, I was the coward. Ginger had endured her miscarriage and lost husband with grace. Tiffany followed me doggedly, doing what she felt she needed to do to keep her baby safe, even though that baby had cost her more than one dream.
The time had come to quit wallowing in self-pity and pay it forward. There was only one question left to ask:
“But are you sure you want to go through all of this again?”
Ginger shrugged. “Third time’s a charm? Besides, I’m due to kick the bucket either way.”
I cringed at her words, but I didn’t have it in me to have that discussion, not when my knees still wobbled from her earlier bombshell.
“C’mon, Tiffany, let’s get some lunch,” I called over the pews.
She stood taller with hope and trotted over to join us. Just as she reached me, Luke appeared from the back of the church. “Headed out to lunch? I thought we might celebrate our little bump in attendance.”
Tiffany froze in place, keeping the back of her head to Luke. Her eyes widened in fear that he would come over and see what had happened. Now that she was directly in front of me I could see how much more her left eye had swollen. Her lip pouted unnaturally, too.
“I’m thinking this may be a day to eat in,” I said.
“Oh. In that case, you ladies have fun.”
I winced. It’s for the best. You need to be at least five hundred feet from that man at all times.
Besides, Tiffany clearly didn’t need to be out in public at the moment.
“Come on, let’s get you some lunch,” I said as I led her outside.
When we got to the Caddy, I had the weirdest sense of déjà vu as she slid into the backseat. From the driver’s seat, Ginger took a look at her through the rearview mirror, and her eyes widened at the sight of both swollen eye and swollen lip. “Why don’t we call for a pizza today?”
“Pizza going to work for you, Tiffany?”
She nodded yes, but her complexion turned gray and her hand went to her mouth.
“Don’t worry,” I heard myself say. “We can find you something else if that turns your stomach.”
She nodded, closed her eyes, and laid her head back against the seat. I knew what she was thinking, praying, even: Please don’t let me throw up on this leather upholstery.
After all, I had been there once before.
That evening I’d finally confessed to my mother. At first I thought she was taking the news really well. Then she turned on me with the wooden spoon she’d been using to stir spaghetti sauce for supper.
“You are a disgrace! I raised you better than this!” She aimed for my butt, but I spun to get out of her reach. My efforts only meant more slashes of spaghetti sauce on my favorite low-rise jeans. Damn things were barely held closed by a rubber band through the buttonhole, so it didn’t matter anyway.
“Momma. I need to tell you what happened.”
“I know what happened. It was you and that Vandiver boy. Your Aunt Lucy told me you didn’t go to the movies. Kari saw you two drive off in the other direction.”
She lunged for me, but I backed out of the galley kitchen, into the foyer, and out the door.
“Beulah Gertrude Land, you get back in here! Have you thought for one moment what this might do to your father? He could be kicked out of the church.”
It always came back to Daddy and what other people would think of us, didn’t it ?
I turned my back on the house, not wanting to face her but knowing I’d have to eventually. Gravel crunched on the driveway, and I looked at Miss Ginger Belmont’s brand-new Cadillac. Usually I went to Ginger, but I’d missed three piano lessons in a row, so maybe she was coming to check on one of her sources of income. I looked from the car to the door as Mama busted out, her curly black hair flying from her head like an amateur Medusa.
The car seemed the better choice.
Down the driveway I ran, hoping Miss Ginger wouldn’t lock the doors on me. Blessedly the door opened, and I slid into the front seat, my stomach churning from the excitement and from the general feeling of carrying a baby.
“Could you please take me to the Greyhound station?” I asked.
Ginger looked through the windshield at how my mother stalked toward the car. As always she sat up ridiculously straight and smelled of Emeraude. Her pursed lips bled tiny lines of lipstick into the wrinkles around her mouth. For a minute I thought she would turn me over to my mother.
Instead she threw the car into reverse and squealed down the driveway as my mother yelled, “If you leave now, don’t even think about coming back!”
I closed my eyes and concentrated on not throwing up in Ginger’s car—it still had the new car smell, for crying out loud! When I dared open my eyes, I was looking at a white clapboard Victorian house, not the bus station.
“But—”
“I’m not taking you to a bus station with only the clothes on your back,” Ginger announced. “You come inside until you and your mother can patch things over.”
But I never moved home.
My mother had been true to her word. Fortunately, so had Ginger.
Chapter 9
“Beulah, show Tiffany where she can sleep,” Ginger said as she started arranging containers on the table. I took Tiffany upstairs to show her the guest room, a yellow monstrosity. I showed her the bathroom and where the washcloths were so she could clean up the tiny bit of blood at the corner of her mouth.
“What’s that room?” she asked, pointing down the hall.
“It was going to be the nursery.” I cleared my throat, surprised I’d choked the words out.
“Oh,” said Tiffany. “Oh.”
Once downstairs I passed Tiffany a bag from the freezer to hold over her eye during lunch. At first we ate in silence, but then Ginger said, “If you tell us who the father is, we might be able to get him to help you out.”
Tiffany choked on her bite of the sub sandwich we’d decided on. I whacked her on the back. Soon it became clear she wasn’t going to tell us even when she wasn’t choking. No matter how hard Ginger and I tried, we couldn’t get Tiffany to tell us who the father of her baby was.
“Tiffany, he has a right to know and a responsibility to help.” I purposely didn’t look at Ginger while I took the bag of English peas Tiffany had been holding over her eye and handed her a different bag from the freezer. Good thing for her I didn’t like English peas, and Ginger hadn’t felt like cooking them. Otherwise Tiffany wouldn’t have had anything to hold over the bruise.
“It doesn’t matter, Beulah. He wouldn’t be any help anyway.” She leaned back against the chair and closed her eyes. She was wearing my Bon Jovi tee because she had nothing else to wear but her church clothes. Sooner rather than later, we’d have to make a field trip to the Davis trailer to get her things. I sure a
s hell wasn’t looking forward to that.
“But what are you going to do about food?” Ginger asked as she took one of Tiffany’s strong hands in her skeletal ones. “You’re not going to be able to keep working as a waitress at The Fountain for much longer, you know. Breathing all that smoke and standing on your feet’s not good for you.”
“I know,” Tiffany moaned. “But I don’t know what else to do.”
She sat up straighter. “Maybe I could help out around here to earn my keep. Clean up a bit, cook?”
My eyes locked with Ginger’s. Help the cancer-ridden woman go through her last days as comfortably as possible? No, no need to tell Tiffany about Ginger until we absolutely had to.
I started pacing. “First things first, we’re not going to mention this to anyone. That way, you can apply for jobs and not tell them you’re pregnant.”
“Beulah, that’s sneaky,” Ginger objected.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world. You know that. Tiffany’s never going to get hired around here if people know she’s pregnant and unmarried—trust me on that one. No, it would be much better for her to get a job and then ‘discover’ her pregnancy.”
Tiffany sat up in the recliner. “Do you really think I’m going to be able to pull that off?” She’d thrown up three times since we got home.
“I think you should give it a try.” I stopped pacing.
“What are you going to tell Luke about Carl?”
I inhaled deeply. “I’m not telling him anything. What does it matter to him?”
The Happy Hour Choir Page 8
