Small Town Rumors

by Carolyn Brown

  “And this all is your business why?” Rick asked.

  “Because I don’t like her. And because someday I’m going to be somebody that looks down on her like she did me in high school.”

  Rick laughed again. “Let the rich do their own thing and mind your own business, Cricket. Be happy where you are.”

  She sighed and put her hand out the open window, letting the hot air rush through her fingers. “Don’t you ever want to be something else other than a farmer?”

  Rick wiggled in the seat to get his bad leg into a more comfortable position. The IED that almost killed him had left scars that still itched and pulled at his skin. “Sure, I want to be able to take that bookmobile to more people. I want to cultivate readers. I want every house in Bloom to have a little lending library out by the road in front of their house where folks can take a book and leave one,” Rick answered. “Other than that, I want to grow good crops and be able to sell them at the farmers’ market in Sweetwater every Friday and Saturday.”

  “You’ve always been such a Goody Two-shoes.” When the truck stopped, Cricket slung open the door and stomped toward the house.

  Rick stepped out, bent to rub the pain from his knee, and limped across the yard that had gone brown in the Texas summer heat. Water had to be saved for the crops, and besides, a pretty green lawn had to be mowed more often. In stark contrast, his five acres of gardens stood lush and beautiful. Tomatoes as big as saucers were ripe and ready to be harvested, corn ready to be plucked, and green bean vines loaded. Throw in watermelon, cantaloupes, peppers, radishes, and carrots, and he always had a full truckload of food for the market. The rest of the week, he had regular customers in Bloom.

  Cricket had turned on the window air-conditioning unit. It hadn’t cooled the small house down much, but it wouldn’t take long. Living room, kitchen, three bedrooms, and a bathroom—plenty big enough for him and his sister. Home now, but he couldn’t wait to get away from it when he’d graduated from high school and joined the Army Rangers. He’d been on a secret mission when he stepped on the IED that sent him flying into the air. When he woke up, he was in a hospital. Several months later they gave him a medical discharge. Strange how a person’s life could make a 180-degree turn in the matter of a split second.

  “So what’s for supper?” he asked.

  “I don’t care. I’d be happy with a bowl of junk cereal,” Cricket answered as she went to the bookcase in the corner of the living room and pulled out an old yearbook.

  “I was thinkin’ about fried sweet potatoes and maybe a hamburger patty thrown in a cast-iron skillet so that we don’t have to fire up the oven,” he said. “You need more than junk cereal.”

  “Whatever,” she huffed. “I’ll slice tomatoes and cucumbers soon as I thumb through this. I want to see exactly how many times she got her picture in the yearbook. I’m only in it one time for choir other than our senior pictures.”

  “Those cheerleader pictures would be in there,” he said. “I remember that from when I played football.”

  Cricket flipped through the pages, laid it aside, and sighed. “That’s all she was. Just a cheerleader. She wasn’t a big shot with student council or in anything else. I wonder why. I remember her on Fridays in that cute little short-tailed skirt and a ribbon around her ponytail. I thought she had her nose in everything that went on at the school.”

  “I remember her as a sweet girl who didn’t quite fit in with the crowd she’d been thrown into,” he said. “And, sis, I’m really sorry that you are stuck on this farm when you want to do bigger things, but it takes two of us working on top of what you make at the café and what I get from veterans’ disability to keep it going.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “We’d better get supper cooked and over with so we can go pick beans and corn until dark. I bet Jennie Sue’s getting her nails done.”

  “Probably, but I wish you weren’t obsessed with her. Be your own person.”

  Cricket kicked off her shoes and headed into the kitchen. “I’m not obsessed with her. She never even has time to give a common person a simple hello, so don’t accuse me of that.”

  “If she’s all that terrible, I’m glad you aren’t like her, but I always got the feelin’ that she was just a little bit shy.” He kicked off his boots and joined his sister in the kitchen.

  Rick never wiped the steam from the mirror on the back of the bathroom door after a shower. He didn’t want to see the scars on his body or that long, ugly one that ran from his hip down to his ankle. That the doctors had been able to save the leg at all was a miracle, and he was grateful, but he didn’t want to look at it.

  He’d gone right into the service after high school with the intention of making a career of it. He’d been on dozens of missions in the nine years before he’d gotten hurt and discharged two years before.

  It hadn’t been easy to come home to Bloom a broken and scarred man. He’d been the star quarterback on the football team his senior year even though he wasn’t one of the jocks. The son of a farmer who didn’t fit with the in crowd, he’d always thought he’d return with a chestful of medals. Maybe his sister’s drive wasn’t too different.

  He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded barefoot to his bedroom, where he shut the door firmly. No mirrors in that room—only a bed, a nightstand with a lamp, a chest of drawers, an overflowing bookcase, and an old wooden rocking chair that his grandmother had bequeathed to his mother.

  He quickly dressed in pajama pants and a loose-fitting T-shirt and chose a book from the collection. He read six pages before he laid the book to the side with a sigh, got up, and found his senior yearbook on the top shelf of his well-organized closet.

  He turned to the page with the sophomores. There was Jennie Sue. The underclassmen’s pictures were in black and white, but her eyes looked sad. Why had she come to Bloom on a bus? It wasn’t a bit of his business, but he couldn’t help wondering. The whole town would be talking about it.

  You had a little crush on her when you were in high school, that niggling voice in his head said.

  “So what?” he said aloud. “No one ever knew about it. She was way above my league. As if she would have gotten into a pickup truck with me.”

  He stretched out on the bed and laced his fingers behind his head. So she was in town for Dill’s birthday party, was she? That meant a few weeks from now, because he remembered from the social pages in the paper last year, it was right near his own birthday.

  The likelihood of their paths crossing was slim to none, but he might catch a glimpse of her in town or having coffee in the café—if he was lucky.

  Chapter Two

  Jennie Sue awoke on Tuesday morning with a start. She sat straight up in bed and blinked several times before she realized that she was in her old bedroom in the house in Bloom, Texas, and not in her New York City apartment. It seemed like a fitting way to begin a new life, but nothing looked or felt right. And yet nothing had changed in the house or in her bedroom.

  Last Christmas her mom and dad had spent the holiday with her in New York. She’d had some free time between her online college classes, so they’d gone to a couple of shows, and she and her mother had done a lot of shopping. It had been a surreal visit ending in the birth of Jennie Sue’s stillborn daughter, the baby arriving a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.

  A lump formed in her throat and tears dammed up behind her eyelids when she thought of that day. With her head in her hands, she bent forward and let the tears have their way at the memory of holding that precious little body in her arms for an hour before they took her. She’d thought that day that she’d never come back to Bloom and never go to the unmarked grave in the Baker plot at the Bloom cemetery, because she wouldn’t be able to stand the pain again. She’d been in such shock after the birth that she’d never quite figured out why her mother was so adamant about keeping her stillborn grandchild a secret.

  Out of nowhere a memory of her dad winking at a young woman at a party when she was fif
teen came to her mind, and then she remembered seeing the same gesture from Percy when they went to a dinner thrown by a diamond buyer in Paris. She wiped the tears from her eyes and sat up straight, anger replacing pain. If all men were like her father and her ex-husband, she’d stay single the rest of her life.

  Sitting there with a million thoughts swirling around her, she wondered if she’d done the right thing by using part of her slim cash stash to come back to Bloom. But it was either that or live in a box on the streets. She had to get out of the apartment, and even if she’d gotten to keep her car, she couldn’t afford the parking-garage bill to keep it if she stayed in the big city. Sure, her dad would have stepped in and given her an allowance until she could find a job, but she couldn’t afford to live in New York. Truth was, even though she didn’t plan to stay in Bloom, something kept pulling her back there. Maybe if she went to her baby’s grave site, she’d get closure and she could move on.

  She went to the bathroom and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Red eyes from crying, no makeup, and were her cheeks fuller than they’d been a few months ago?

  “Maybe Daddy doesn’t want to hire me because I have ten extra pounds hanging on my body,” she muttered sarcastically. “Mama will have a hissy if he does give me a job. I’m supposed to be just like her and work on being pretty so I can hang on some man’s arm at parties. Tried that, Mama. I didn’t like it.” She talked to herself as she stretched and rolled her head from side to side to get the kinks out of her neck, and then she washed her face with cold water and went to the bedroom to get dressed.

  She’d have breakfast and treat herself to doing nothing for the rest of that day, but tomorrow when her dad got home, vacation was over. If he wouldn’t hire her, then she’d find a job somewhere else.

  “Good mornin’.” Charlotte met her in the hallway and put a glass of something green in her hands. “Drink it up and meet me in the fitness room. We’ve got an hour with the trainer. You simply must get those extra pounds off before Dill’s party. People will talk.”

  Jennie Sue sipped the green goo and frowned. “I can’t stand this stuff. You know I hate the taste of kale.”

  “You’ll acquire a taste for it after a few weeks,” Charlotte informed her as she hurried off to the trainer.

  Jennie Sue carried the glass into the bathroom and poured it down the drain. Green tea was one thing, but that stuff wasn’t fit for toad frogs or cockroaches. Her mother was already on a treadmill when she peeked inside the room. She took one look at the machinery and walked out, thankful that neither Charlotte nor the trainer had seen her.

  She sniffed the air on the way down the wide staircase, but nothing, not even a whiff of coffee, floated up to her. Definitely not a hint of bacon or hot biscuits in the oven—she could understand the absence of food since her dad wasn’t home, but surely her mother hadn’t given up her morning cup of coffee.

  “Hey, Mabel, am I too late for breakfast?” she asked when she reached the kitchen.

  “Honey, I can whip up something for you, but since your daddy’s gone, we don’t do breakfast. Your mama drinks one of those god-awful things that she makes in the blender, and she’s stopped drinkin’ even decaf. Says that she read in an article that it made a woman’s face wrinkle up faster,” Mabel answered. “I ain’t one to meddle, but even the garbage disposal would spit that green crap out. Me and Frank got us a coffeepot out in the garage, and we have a cup before we start our day.”

  “Well, I’m having coffee,” Jennie Sue declared.

  “Didn’t she bring you a glass full of that liquid grass?” Mabel asked.

  “I just cleaned out the drain in the bathroom sink with it. Looked to me like it would work as good as that declogging stuff. How does Daddy get his morning three cups?”

  Mabel drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Frank keeps the coffee going in the garage all day long. Man couldn’t live without it, and Dill goes out there and gets it in the mornin’, too. I reckon you could do the same.”

  Jennie Sue picked up an empty mug and headed to the garage, returning a minute later sipping at the steaming-hot coffee. “What’s makin’ Mama sick is that green shit.”

  “Most likely, but you’re going to suffer her wrath if she smells coffee driftin’ up the stairs. Poor old Dill sure does,” Mabel said. “But now that we’re alone, tell me, what’re you really doin’ here, child?”

  “Tryin’ to talk Daddy into givin’ me a job. Percy left me and moved in with his girlfriend months ago. I thought he owned the apartment we had, and I got it in the divorce, but it was leased. Once the alimony checks started bouncing, I had to deplete my savings to finish my business degree online,” she answered, finishing with the tale of her ex’s diamond-filled escape from the feds.

  “I’m so sorry, honey, but I got to admit, I thought that man was shifty from the beginnin’. He had a big name and acted all proper, but there was something about him that didn’t add up.” Mabel patted her on the back. “I had a feelin’ you were home for something more than your daddy’s party. You want some bacon, eggs, and hash browns to go with that coffee?”

  Jennie Sue nodded. “Yes, ma’am, but you don’t have to wait on me. I’ve been takin’ care of myself ever since he left. You go on about whatever you were doing.”

  “Okay, then.” Mabel’s head and all three of her chins bobbed up and down. “Just put your dirty dishes in the sink.”

  “No need. Percy had to be in control of everything. Believe me, I know how to keep things spotless. First month we were married, he fired four housekeepers and told me that I’d learn to take care of the place the way he wanted it done, or I could go on back to my Podunk Texas town.” Jennie Sue opened the refrigerator.

  “Why did you stay with a man like that?” Mabel’s eyes narrowed into slits.

  “Why do you think? I was groomed to be a trophy wife from birth. Keeping a spotless apartment at least gave me something to do.” She lowered her voice. “Truth is, I was glad when he ran off with a bag of diamonds and another woman. I’d had about all I could stand of his cheating, and after . . .” She stopped before she said too much.

  “You deserve better than that kind of treatment,” Mabel growled. “I’m sorry about the way things turned out, honey. You go on and make yourself a good breakfast. I’ve got to go make sure those two girls your mama hired to clean are doing things right.”

  “This place couldn’t run without you, Mabel.” Jennie Sue laid six strips of bacon out in a cast-iron skillet.

  “Oh, honey, there ain’t a one of us that couldn’t be replaced,” Mabel replied as she left the room.

  Jennie Sue had lived on fast food on the bus trip for more than two days, so she was really looking forward to a good, hearty breakfast. When she finished cooking, she carried her plate of crispy bacon, four fried eggs, two pieces of toast, and a nice big hash brown that she’d made from a real potato to the table. She’d just sat down to eat when her mother entered the kitchen.

  “What the hell?” Charlotte stopped dead.

  Jennie Sue got ready for a lecture about calories and fat grams. “Good mornin’, Mama. Care to join me for a healthy breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day, you know.”

  Charlotte picked up the plate, slid everything on it into the garbage disposal, and flipped the switch. “This is tough love, darlin’. You are going to get back into shape so we can shop for decent clothing for you. You can’t go out in public in those ratty cheap jeans and worn-out running shoes. And I’m not buying one single thing for you until you are back in the size you wore when you got married.”

  Jennie Sue clenched her hands under the table. “And what if I don’t lose the pounds, and what if I like my ratty jeans?”

  “Don’t get pissy with me. This is for your own good. We’ve got to get you in shape so you can find another husband,” Charlotte said. “If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t fuss at you.”

  “I don’t want another husband, and I sure don’t want a
nother rich one. I’m not you, Mama. I want to eat what I want and live my own life,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Charlotte grabbed a towel and wiped sweat from her face. “Settle down, darlin’. Of course you want a rich husband. You’re just mad at me for takin’ care of you. We’ll slowly let out the word that Percy lost all his money and you divorced him. By the end of all our Christmas parties, I bet you’ll have another good man on the hook. I’ll call Mabel to make you an egg-white omelet with tomatoes and fresh spinach if you think you have to eat something. But no more orange juice.” She wiggled her finger so fast it was a blur. “Too many carbs, and no toast or biscuits besides.”

  “No, thank you,” Jennie Sue said. “I’ll remake my own breakfast.”

  “Not under my roof.” Charlotte raised her voice.

  “That can be remedied real easy, Mama.” Jennie Sue pushed back her chair and stood.

  “You wouldn’t dare leave.” Charlotte’s voice jacked up several octaves. “I’d be the laughingstock of the whole state if you go out in public looking like you do. Gossip has already stirred up over the fact that you came into town on a bus.”

  “I don’t give a damn about rumors. If they’re gossiping about me, they’re letting someone else rest. I’ll be glad to whip up an egg-white omelet for you if you want one.” She had learned long ago to stay calm when her mother’s voice went all shrill and squeaky.

  Charlotte glared at Jennie Sue, who had no doubt that things could start flying through the air at any time if her mother didn’t get her way.

  “I don’t want a damned egg-white omelet. I want you to be reasonable and do what I say. I’m your mother. I know what’s best for you,” Charlotte yelled, loud enough that it could have been heard all the way up in the attic.

  “Oh, really? Seems to me that you liked Percy and thought he was the right man for me. Look how that turned out.” Jennie Sue wasn’t backing down.