Love in a Small Town

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  “Hello, Tommy Lee,” Odessa said.

  She came around the front of the car, holding her wide-brimmed hat against the wind. Odessa had always favored big hats that dared the wind. She wore dresses, too, that caught in the breeze and lifted and showed still-beautiful legs. Tommy Lee had always thought Odessa a little bold, especially for a woman who was the mother of five daughters. He thought women who had children should look and behave like mothers. To his mind Odessa never had.

  Sometimes Molly didn’t appear exactly as he thought a mother should, either. He had tried to tell her what she should do, but she would get annoyed, or hurt, and in any case it never had come out as he’d wished. Molly had been and still was a great mother, however, whereas Odessa never had been too good at the job, in his opinion. He supposed she had tried.

  “Hello, Odessa,” he said. He tossed the shop towel aside, and they gazed at each other for several seconds.

  Odessa’s coming to see him was quite a surprise. In all the years he had been acquainted with the woman, the two of them had rarely been called upon to hold a direct conversation. They were inevitably surrounded by Collier women, and they each took care not to be alone together in the same room.

  A grin played at Odessa’s lips. “There’s no need to look at me like I might slap you any minute, Tommy Lee.”

  Bold, like she always was. She made him feel a little silly, and this irritated him. He wouldn’t let her make him look away.

  “You’re as talkative as ever, I see,” she said, moving past him into the shop and out of the wind. Not bothering to be invited, either.

  Tommy Lee walked over to the small refrigerator, saying, “I’ve never felt that you required a great deal of conversation on my part, Odessa.”

  He pulled a can of Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator and held it up in a silent offering. Odessa shook her head. She stood there, hand on her hip and legs splayed slightly, a decidedly sexual stance that was natural to her . . . and for one sharp instant Tommy Lee saw Molly. The resemblance took him by surprise, and something like pain flashed through him. He popped the tab on the Coke and took a deep drink.

  Odessa said, “I suppose you could call our relationship over the years one of mutual evasion. Would you agree?”

  Swallowing, Tommy Lee nodded. “If you could say we have a relationship.”

  “We share disapproval,” she said in a teasing tone. “I think that could be called a relationship.”

  Tommy Lee didn’t think there was anything for him to say to that. He noticed Odessa appeared a little nervous. She put her hand to the back of her cheek and then laid it on the tall tool chest, but then she snatched it away and checked for grease. Seeing Odessa nervous made Tommy Lee nervous.

  “How’s Molly doin’?” he asked before he realized he was going to. He could have kicked himself.

  “I think it could be said that Molly is doing along the same way you are—confused, aggravated, hurt. I’ll tell her you asked, and maybe that will make her feel better. It might make you feel better to know that we were speakin’ of you just this mornin’. She said a lot of good things about you. You are very much in her heart and on her mind.”

  Tommy Lee breathed deeply. He did feel a little better, hearing Molly was thinking about him. It was funny how a little thing like that could make him feel better.

  Odessa said, “I want you to know that I have never spoken of my feelings about you to Molly, and I appreciate that you have never spoken yours about me. I know you haven’t, or Molly would have let it slip somewhere. She can’t hide her feelings. No matter how she tries, they will come out eventually. I’ve always thought that her charm . . . and her irritation.”

  “Molly’s honest,” Tommy Lee said. “A person always knows where he stands with her.”

  He didn’t think Odessa was quite honest. Maybe few people were as honest as Molly. Tommy Lee didn’t want to agree with Odessa, but Molly’s honesty at times did get on his nerves. Still, if Molly said she loved you, she meant it, and if she said she was mad, she meant that, too. A person didn’t have to wonder if she was saying one thing but thinking another. Of course, sometimes he wasn’t certain why Molly was mad, and she generally wouldn’t tell.

  “I’ve always admired that you haven’t said anything to cause trouble between me and Molly,” Odessa said. “Only a strong man would control his tongue.”

  “Well, only a fool would criticize you to Molly’s face.”

  He thought maybe he should add that he admired Odessa for her control, too, but he was uncomfortable with talking about this—whatever this was.

  “Odessa, I imagine you have a point to this conversation, but—no offense meant—to my mind some things are better left alone.” He straightened. “What’s goin’ on between Molly and me right now is our business.”

  “Of course it is,” Odessa said quickly, and in a way he knew she was going to worm it around to make it hers, which she did in the next breath. “Although I am Molly’s mother, and I feel I have a certain right to interfere when her happiness is at stake. What I have to say concerns all three of us. There are some things I have to say, Tommy Lee, and that I feel you must hear, even though you don’t want to, and it may not help you at all.”

  He read what she was talking about in her eyes, and dread shimmied through him. He shook his head.

  “It happened almost thirty years ago. It’s dead and buried, Odessa,” he said, walking to the door.

  But even as he spoke, the memory of his father dancing with the woman who stood behind him now came across his mind. The memory had faded with the years, but some things made an indelible impression on a fifteen-year-old boy. After all this time, he could recall his father’s strong bare arms sticking out from his white undershirt and how his pot belly pushed his belt buckle against Odessa, whom he held tightly in his arms, his big hand splayed over her rounded bottom, beefy and dark against the shiny satin of her dress.

  Tommy Lee asked himself a thousand times afterward why it was that he and Sam had decided the place to hide the quart of vodka was in a cabinet in Molly’s cottage. Why hadn’t they asked Sam’s older brother, who’d bought it, to hold on to it? Sam’s mother went through all his things because she was a snoop, and Tommy Lee’s mother did the same because she was a neat freak, so their own places were out. It was well known that Odessa didn’t hardly go near the kitchen, and Molly agreed to slip it in a bottom cabinet. Later on he wondered why they hadn’t simply slipped it under a bush somewhere.

  There was no accounting for how young teens think, especially when prodded onward by older teens. The vodka was for the school Christmas dance, to spike the punch, on a dare from Red Stocker, a senior and the toughest guy in school. Tommy Lee took Molly to the dance, of course. She was living at the cottage, only for a couple of months, as he recalled. His dad drove him to pick her up because Odessa wouldn’t let Molly go in a car yet with him and Sam Ketchum, who had turned sixteen and gotten his license.

  “Well, hello, Mr. Hayes,” Odessa had said—Mrs. Stirling she’d been then, although she and Stirling were separated at the time. Her voice was warm as a summer night, like always. “How are you this lovely evenin’?”

  “Fine, I guess,” his dad answered, his voice clipped, as always.

  Tommy Lee had wondered later, despite not wanting to think about it at all, how those two had gotten so far past that inane greeting.

  The plan was to let his dad drop him and Molly at the gymnasium, and after the dance had gotten under way good, he and Sam would slip back to Molly’s cottage for the vodka. Sam’s mother was busy with her Saturday night card game, so they “borrowed” her car. Sam dropped Tommy Lee off up at the driveway to the cottage and drove on to turn around and pick Tommy Lee up on the way back.

  Molly’s mother was supposedly going out that night, but when Tommy Lee got down to the cottage, he found her Impala station wagon sitting there in the dark. The cottage was dark, except for a light shining from back in the bedroom. He could hear
music and faint laughter, too, and he knew Odessa was in there with someone, but he figured he could slip in the kitchen door, get the bottle and get out, and she’d never know. She wouldn’t have known, either, if he hadn’t been drawn into spying on her. It had been the sound of the male voice; something in the tone had made him go look.

  Even as he tiptoed through the living room, he knew what he was going to see and told himself not to go look. Then he was standing there and staring into the bedroom, and there was his dad, waltzing Odessa around the room. Another thing he remembered was how Odessa’s dress was partway unzipped in the back. He couldn’t believe what he saw, but then his dad’s head came around, and he was looking straight at Tommy Lee, who stood there with the bottle of vodka in his hand.

  Tommy Lee wouldn’t ever forget the look on his dad’s face, either.

  “Oh, my God,” he heard Odessa say, but he was already running from the cottage. He didn’t hear his dad say anything.

  It had been hard to look his dad in the face for a couple of weeks, but other than that things went on at home as always. He and his dad never discussed the matter. Tommy Lee had never expected his parents to act lovingly toward each other, and they still didn’t. Maybe his father was a little more silent.

  Tommy Lee couldn’t imagine why, after all these years, Odessa felt the need to dredge up the whole thing, but here she was saying, “Your daddy was a lonely man, Tommy Lee. Surely you had to know that. Once—only once—it got too much for him, and he sought some comfort. Was that so horrible a thing?”

  “I never said it was.” He half turned to look at her. He could have said he understood more than she knew, but he wasn’t about to say that. What he knew was his knowledge and didn’t belong to this woman.

  She said, “I don’t know what he said to you, or how . . .”

  “He never said anything.”

  She regarded him. “No, I suppose he wouldn’t know what to say. I was surprised when he took me up on my invitation that night. He was such a closed man.”

  Tommy Lee was amused. He couldn’t resist saying, “Once with you—how do you know there weren’t others?” As soon as the words were out, he felt like a heel for dishonoring his father . . . and for throwing dirt at this woman he didn’t particularly care for but for whom he did hold a measure of respect.

  “I knew your daddy enough to know. We grew up here. Oh, he was older than I by a number of years, but Valentine was very small in those days. I also know a bit about men, and he wasn’t the type. He was just so sad that night that I prevailed upon him. I did once have a way with men,” she said, not at all boasting but as a matter of fact. “That night we were both painfully lonely, both desperately needing comfort. We were both human, Tommy Lee.”

  “Like I said, that was years ago, Odessa, and none of it matters now. Dad’s gone, and anyway, it had nothin’ to do with me.”

  Odessa shook her head. “Oh, it had a lot to do with you. Your mother and daddy stayed together because they both loved you and neither would give you up.”

  “How do you know so much about what my parents felt?” Tommy Lee cut in.

  “Your daddy told me some that night, and I knew both of them enough—and knew enough of human nature—to piece together the rest. Somewhere a rift developed between your parents, and it got wider and colder, until neither of them could come together again. Yet, neither would break the marriage. Not only did they have you to think of, but a divorce would have meant scandal. It was one thing for me to get divorced as I did—people expected me to act outrageous. But people expected your mother and father to be staunch and upright. Their families would have disowned them, and your father stood to loose half his land, and he wasn’t going to do that for anything. So the two of them lived their lives together while loneliness ate at their hearts until there wasn’t anything left.”

  Tommy Lee didn’t like Odessa talking about private details of his parents’ lives—of his own life—and making it out that they were pitiful, while she had the answers.

  “And what about the way you lived, Odessa? Was that so much better for you and your daughters? Don’t you think Molly was hurt by your continual marriages and affairs? Why do you think every time I happen to say a cross word to her, she’s got to run off and hide?”

  He had meant to lash out, but he immediately regretted it when he saw her flinch and draw up straight, as if from a slap.

  She said, “I came today because I felt the need to tell you that I was sorry for what happened back then. Oh, I know it is awfully late to make apologies, but . . . well, I felt the need. I’ve felt so badly about it for so long, and if you don’t need the apology, I certainly need to make it. I’m not apologizin’ for what I did with your father,” she clarified. “I’m only sorry that you saw what should have remained a private matter for Thomas. That was a cruel thing to have happened, for both of you. And I don’t want you to think less of him. Thomas was a fine man, a fine father.”

  He felt badly about hurting her feelings, but as she went on telling him what a fine man his father was, he began to get annoyed again, so he said quickly, “I know my father was a fine man. I always knew that.”

  He reflected that he’d had a few doubts after seeing his father with Odessa, but the years of making his own stupid mistakes had erased those doubts.

  “Oh, well, good,” Odessa said. “I’m glad to know that.”

  She was looking shaken, and Odessa shook up made him feel very uneasy. They stood there for several awkward moments, and then Odessa came toward him. Her steps and manner were once more firm, and he felt relieved, except that she had something more to say, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, short of stuff a rag in her mouth, which wasn’t likely to work for very long.

  “Another thing I wanted to tell you today was that I don’t disapprove of you. I never did disapprove of you. It only came out that way. I was annoyed with you for so long because you took my Molly from me. I was jealous because instinctively I knew that you could give Molly what I never could. It was selfish of me, and I knew it at the time, but there you have it. I was much more selfish in those days.”

  “Odessa . . . I didn’t mean to . . .”

  But she waved him silent. “You have been good for Molly, and I can admit that now, for what it’s worth. I would like to see you and Molly work this out.” She searched his eyes, questioning.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know how I feel right now.”

  She sighed. “Well, I’ve been there once or twice myself.”

  Then she put a hand on his arm; it was soft and cool and in that instant he thought he understood what his father must have felt when she touched him. Odessa Collier could still have a way with men.

  She said, “I’m going to give you advice, so brace yourself. Feelin’ free to give advice is one of the few things I like about being sixty-four.”

  “I thought you were only fifty-seven.”

  She smiled at that, and he felt eased. “You are a good soul, and you know, I believe I’m only sixty-three. I’ve lied about my age for so long, I get confused.”

  She sighed again and then lifted her chin. “When you get my age, you will see that life is so very short and we should never waste time being cold and lonely. That’s what Molly is running from, and well she should. For all my failures, I never raised my daughter to settle for less than all the passion life has to offer. Don’t settle for less, either, Tommy Lee. You won’t do Molly or yourself any favor if you patch this thing up simply because it is the easiest thing to do. If you can love her, truly love her, then do that and nothing less . . . but if you can’t, then have the balls to let her go."

  She gave his arm a little pat and stepped out from the shop, immediately putting her hand up to hold her hat on. Odessa always had been abrupt, as if she planned entrances and exits with drumbeats.

  He watched her drive away and thought about how she had said “have the balls.” A term like that coming out of her genteel m
outh was startling. But she had always done that; shock value, he thought. Odessa always had enjoyed livening things up.

  Molly was a lot like her. Molly looked pure and virtuous and refined, but underneath that exterior beat a heart that burned blue flame. He remembered the first time he’d gotten Molly’s blouse off—in the backseat of Sam’s old Chevy—and discovered that her bra was bright red. The combination of purity and sensuality could be a little confusing . . . and it was a powerful turn-on. Cool, she seemed, and then he would touch her, and she would come at him like a fierce hot wind.

  Standing there, staring at the dust Odessa’s car had raised, he realized that all Odessa would have had to do was touch his dad’s arm, and it certainly would have been enough. He felt very sad for his father, and foolishly grateful to Odessa for that one night she had given him.

  He turned back to his work, intent on losing himself in it, but after five minutes or so, he realized he was just standing there staring at the engine. He set his socket wrench aside and found the pack of cigarettes he had bought the other night. After about four puffs on one, though, he put it out because he felt a little sick. He got another Coke from the refrigerator and went out the back door of the shop and sat down on the step to drink it. He reflected that he had become as dependent on soft drink as he used to be on cigarettes. Maybe the change was good, though. He’d do soft drinks for another ten or fifteen years and then switch to something else; he might stay healthy by never spending his entire lifetime on one bad habit.

  Thinking of his lifetime he suddenly felt very empty. So empty that he thought he might cry. He was alone; there wasn’t anyone to see. But he couldn’t cry. The only time he could recall crying since he was a small boy was at his father’s funeral. The main reason he had cried then was because his mother hadn’t, and that had upset him considerably. His mother’s stony face had seemed to make all of life seem futile.

  His mother lived down in Florida now, in a retirement community. She had left as soon as all the legalities had been taken care of after his father’s death. Everything had been settled in only about two weeks, because his father had had his affairs in the same perfect order as he’d always kept the barn. Tommy Lee thought his mother seemed happy now, at least content. He called her once a month. He hadn’t called to tell her about him and Molly, though. His mother didn’t care to be told of problems, and he didn’t see the need, anyway. Anything he and Molly did wasn’t going to affect his mother, whose life, like her apartment, was as neat as ever.