He decided to call Sam, but he didn’t know the number, so he had to find the address book. He found it buried on his desk and took it into the living room, where he sat in his BarcaLounger. He had some difficulty finding Sam’s number and then in dialing. He mistakenly got a man who was highly annoyed. Tommy Lee apologized profusely, but the man hung up on him with a loud reverberating click.
Carefully, he dialed again. As the ringing sounded across the line, he wondered if he had dialed incorrectly again and held the phone an inch from his ear, just in case. He tried to figure out what time it would be in Santa Fe. He had scooted up on the edge of the chair, and just as Sam answered, his elbow slid off his knee, and he almost dropped the phone.
“You sound soused,” Sam said.
“I think I am,” Tommy Lee said. “But not too bad.”
“What’s happened?”
“How do you know somethin’ happened? Maybe I’m just callin’ to shoot the shit.”
“Not you. You’re afraid of phones.”
“I am not afraid of phones,” Tommy Lee insisted. "I don’t like them a lot. I find them annoying. But that doesn’t mean I’m afraid of them. Who in the hell would be afraid of a phone?”
“I wasn’t insultin’ you, buddy. Everyone has fears. I’m afraid of garbage disposals myself—they make my skin crawl, ever since I saw a movie where the bad guys stuck the good guy’s hand in one and turned it on. I can’t remember the movie or the actors, but I sure never forgot that scene with that guy gettin’ his hand chewed up. Geez, it makes my skin crawl just to talk about it. Darlene got real aggravated at me when I wouldn’t let her put a garbage disposal in our kitchen. That was one of the things she cited at the divorce."
“I saw that movie. Maybe it was a Rockford Files show. Darlene used that in the divorce?”
“She used it as one of my strange idiosyncrasies, showin’ why I was such a bad husband,” Sam said. “So—why are you soused?”
Tommy Lee sighed deeply. “I guess because the tequila is here . . . and Molly isn’t.”
“What? Has somethin’ happened to Molly?” Sam’s voice came loud across the line.
“She left me.” He was sort of embarrassed to say it, but Sam was his best friend. Sam would understand.
“Geez,” Sam said after a few long seconds, “I can’t hardly believe that.”
“Well, it’s true. I wouldn’t lie about it.”
“I know that,” Sam said. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. Why would you think I did something?”
“Because I don’t think Molly would just leave you.”
“Well, she did. She broke our wedding dishes and said she was goin’ to Hestie’s cottage and walked out.”
“That sure doesn’t sound like Molly.”
“Well, she’s changed,” Tommy Lee told him emphatically. He was the wounded party in this, and he wanted Sam to know it.
“The cottage isn’t so far,” Sam said. “When did this happen?”
“Saturday. We had sort of an argument. . . . Well, we’ve been havin’ a sort of argument for a while.” Tommy Lee sat back in the chair and rubbed a hand over his face.
“What have you been arguin’ about?”
“God, I don’t know.” He reached for the tequila bottle and held it by the neck. “You know—life.”
Sam said he was awfully sorry. “I imagine she’ll come back when she calms down.”
“Maybe,” Tommy Lee said.
“I know this is tough for you, buddy,” Sam said. “I’ve been in that place before, and it’s tough.”
“I always thought you were glad when you split with each one of your wives.” Tommy Lee halfway resented Sam saying he had been in the same place. Sam had never been married longer than two years at a time, which was nowhere near Tommy Lee’s place.
“Well, I was sort of relieved, I guess,” Sam said. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t tough. And Darlene got a whole hunk of my income. That was tough.” He paused, then added, “Molly isn’t like that, though. You won’t have that problem."
Tommy Lee felt sick at the thought of divorce legalities. How would they possibly split things up? The attic alone would take five years to go through.
Then Sam said in a low voice, “She didn’t find out, did she . . . about that time when you were in Charleston?”
Tommy Lee swallowed. “That was a long time ago and forgotten.”
“I’m sorry, T.L. . . . really sorry. Sometimes I say things before I think. God, things just seem to be goin’ too fast for me these days. It’s just hard to imagine . . . you and Molly not together.”
Tommy Lee laid his head back and squeezed his eyes closed. Tears slipped out and ran down his cheeks. He was sure glad Sam couldn’t see him. He couldn’t talk because he didn’t want Sam to know he was crying.
He choked back the lump in his throat and looked at the tequila bottle he balanced on his leg. Then he told Sam about the macho feeling that came over him when he held a tequila bottle by the neck. Tommy Lee could tell Sam things like that. Sam said he knew that feeling and that it was one of the reasons he liked to drink long-neck beers. Tommy Lee felt a little less lonely. He’d been hesitant to call Sam, afraid he might feel stupid, even with his best friend, but now he was really glad he had called.
He was feeling so close to Sam that he said, “It’s sure lonely in this big house."
“I hear that,” Sam said. “My place isn’t too big, but sometimes it echoes.”
“I always sort of thought you preferred being single. At least you don’t have to be tryin’ to please someone all the time. You can do what you want.”
“That gets a little old,” Sam said, and something in his voice touched Tommy Lee.
“Maybe I’ll come out to see you for a few days,” he said, grasping at the idea. “We can cut up. Have it like old times.
“You come on, buddy. You’re always welcome here. You know that.”
“Well, I might.” But the idea was already losing its shine. He was thinking about the two engines he had waiting in the shop; and he really didn’t want to go anywhere. It kind of frightened him to think of leaving home. If he left, he may never get back with Molly.
He and Sam talked a little longer—mostly Sam did the talking, about old times and the young woman who had her own plane and Tanya Tucker, who had come into his shop and bought a pair of earrings.
Tommy Lee didn’t want to let Sam off the phone, but he couldn’t think of a lot to say, and then Sam was gone. Tommy Lee sat totally alone in the BarcaLounger, holding the tequila bottle, while the memory he didn’t want came pushing and shoving itself forward, as if floating up through the layers of the years.
“So you slipped up,” Sam had told him back all those years ago. “It didn’t mean anything, and the worse thing you can do is tell Molly. You’ll be doin’ it to ease your conscience, and in the process you’ll make Molly have to pay for your mistake with a broken heart. Don’t do that to her. You just live with it, and forget it, if you can.”
Sam had been pretty put out with him, which had made Tommy Lee feel even worse, if that was possible. He had not expected Sam to condemn him, although Sam was Molly’s friend, too, and sometimes pretty protective of her. Tommy Lee had felt so badly, he’d asked Sam to punch him, but Sam had looked shocked and told him not to be crazy.
Tommy Lee had tried to forget, and mostly he had succeeded. Sam had been right. The mistake was his to live with, and there would be no good in making Molly have to live with it, too. But sometimes he suspected she knew.
He’d been out on the circuit for two months with the racing team. Been staying for three days at the Holiday Inn in Charleston, and of all nights for her to call, Molly had called that fateful night he had gone crazy and slept with Josey Hightower. At least that’s what he thought her name was; he had so completely blocked the shameful incident from his mind that he was no longer exactly certain of what the woman’s name was.
�
�Tommy Lee?” Molly had said his name in a questioning way, but she hadn’t asked the name of the woman who had answered the phone.
Tommy Lee had told her, though. “That was just Josey . . . you know, the woman I told you who manages the payroll and everything.” He held the receiver with his shoulder while he slipped into his jeans. “A few of the guys are here . . . you know, havin’ a few beers. It’s rainin’ like crazy outside. Nothin’ to do. You know.”
As he said that, he went over to turn up the television. On the bed, Josey was propped up on the pillows. She had the sheet tucked up beneath her arms, flattening her little breasts, and was lighting a cigarette. Suddenly Tommy Lee wondered who she was and how she came to be in his bed. She was about fifteen years older than him, and suddenly she really looked it, and hard, too, where only minutes before he’d thought she was really pretty.
After he’d hung up with Molly, he put on his shirt and boots and told Josey that he was going out. He didn’t remember now what she had said, if she said anything. He remembered her blowing smoke into the air. He stayed out the rest of the night, sat in a booth at the 76 truck stop across the street, smoking Camels and drinking about a gallon of coffee and wishing some crazed trucker would come in and shoot him. There had recently been an incident like that at a truck stop near Houston, where a trucker had gone crazy on amphetamines and blasted out windows with a shotgun, killing several people in the process. Tommy Lee kept looking out the window for any mean-looking trucker carrying a gun, or even a club, but all he saw were tired faces.
When he finally got up the nerve to go back to his motel room—at dawn, and he figured Josey would be gone—he picked a fight with a trucker coming in the door as he was going out, hoping to get the shit kicked out of himself, but the guy was an easygoing bear of a man and simply laughed and held the door and waved Tommy Lee through. Tommy Lee had thought that incident showed the hand of God intent on making him feel even more guilty.
For the remaining week, until he could cut out for home, he had avoided Josey, had never talked to her again, and had wished with all his might that he hadn’t been so stupid. The only reasons he could come up with for his poor behavior had been that he’d been awfully lonely and that he’d slept with only one woman in his life, Molly, and he guessed the curiosity of what another woman would be like had gotten the best of him. Lots of married guys talked of sleeping with other women regularly and apparently with no guilt. Also, it was true that Josey had been pressing him. Not that that was an excuse, but it was a reason.
He supposed the biggest, truest reason was that he had been twenty-one and stupid, and he’d prayed to God that if his lapse could just be covered over and forgotten, he would never be so stupid again. He simply wasn’t the kind to sleep around, and that’s all there was to it.
The years of deliberately pushing the incident from his mind had made the memory of his foolishness with Josey Hightower no more than a blur, something that seemed to have happened to someone else. The moments on the telephone with Molly were scant at best. His main memory from those moments was of his heart about to beat out of his chest and of being afraid he would have a heart attack and be discovered dead with a naked woman in his motel bed. What he remembered about sitting in the 76 truck stop was that it seemed as if he had sat there for days.
The memory of his arrival home was clear, perhaps because it was exactly like so many before and the few after, when he’d gone away. He remembered Molly coming out the front door, standing there an instant, as if holding her breath, her face bright with expectancy. She wore a flowered dress, and then her long pale hair flew out behind her as she came running, barefoot, across the yard to throw herself into his arms.
Whenever he would come home, he would always find her face all full of eagerness and love so intense that it almost overwhelmed him. He would be so glad to see her love and so pressured at the same time.
Molly’s love was a high thing to live up to. Tommy Lee always knew that if he did one thing to let her down, she would be crushed. Her love, at times, was a heavy burden to bear.
But that day when she came running at him, he had grabbed her up and whirled her around in his arms, so glad to have her and promising himself and God that he would never, ever risk losing her love again. He would cherish her because she was his treasure. He promised never to forget that.
That night Molly told him she was pregnant with Boone and cried that she didn’t want him to leave again. He told her he would give up the racing circuit. He told her eagerly, and he supposed he jumped at the decision because it was a way to bury what he had done. He sure didn’t want to have to see Josey Hightower again. And he had felt so guilty and so grateful that he would have given Molly the moon if he could have.
As the memory of his indiscretion faded, though, he had begun to miss the circuit something awful. But every time he spoke to Molly about the possibility of going back, she got this pinched look on her face. By then there were two children and house payments and doctor bills and he was in too deep to be throwing everything to the winds and following a pipe dream.
Just as the memory of his indiscretion faded, so, too, did his fervent vow to never forget how precious Molly was to him. He loved her, and sometimes he was made sharply aware of how important she was in his life, but more times the burden of her love as well as the struggles of everyday life would overcome him. How was a person supposed to keep in focus the important things when trying to support a wife, raise three kids, get a business going, and keep the wolf from the door?
Somehow romance and love got lost. Sometimes he was doing good to simply hold on to his sanity, much less his treasure.
Too many memories had been forced upon him in one day, he thought and let sleep claim him.
Chapter 10
I Know Better Now
Rennie found the back door of the cottage open and the screen door unlatched. She stepped inside.
“Molly?”
Things were messy, even for Molly. A few cups were scattered across the table, a crumpled loaf of bread and half a peanut butter sandwich. Cups and glasses were stacked in the sink. Several cups on the drain board were half filled with stale coffee. On the little stove sat the jar of generic brand instant coffee, which Molly hated. The kitchen had such a forgotten, used look to it.
Then Rennie saw the black telephone cord snaking across the floor. Her eye followed it to the door of the refrigerator. She opened the door and saw the old black phone sitting inside on the wire shelf. All by itself. The knot in her stomach tightened—a knot she just then realized was there. She closed the refrigerator door.
As she went on through the rooms, hurrying now, feeling urgent and calling to Molly, the scent of the cottage, made stronger by the humid heat of the day, surrounded her. Hardly a breath of air stirred through the opened windows.
She found Molly, wearing only her bra and panties, partially propped on pillows in the rumpled bed—the chenille spread was on the floor and the sheets in a knot, and the whole bed was littered with books, mostly hardbacks, a few paperbacks. And there was Molly, looking like an unclothed rag doll lying in the middle of those books, with a gray tabby cat lying on her bare belly.
When people are depressed they can’t get dressed. Mrs. Hinch got like that after her eighth child. After she came out of her house half naked, Mama went down to dress her every morning for weeks. Mrs. Hinch hanged herself with clothesline on her back porch.
The sight of Molly like that shook Rennie. Molly had always been the sane one of all of them. The one Rennie could always run to. It seemed strange to think that Rennie herself had to attempt to boost Molly. Molly was always the one to boost Rennie.
“Why didn’t you answer me?” Rennie asked.
“The cottage isn’t very big,” Molly said. “I knew you’d find me.” Her eyes were dull as dishwater.
Rennie breathed deeply. “You are a sight. Don’t you think you should keep that back door hooked if you’re gonna lie around half naked? I cou
ld have been an ax murderer.”
“I don’t think an ax murderer would care if I wore clothes or not.” Molly spoke lazily, her gaze back on the cat, which she continued to pet.
Rennie was a bit reassured that Molly had answered, and so logically, if strangely. But the way she continued to just look at the cat and stroke it made Rennie’s skin crawl. The black fan whirred softly from over on the trunk, stirring the curtains and wisps of Molly’s hair. There were deep shadows beneath her eyes, and her face was almost as pale as the sheet.
Glancing around for an ashtray, Rennie said, “You still should hook the door. Little boys could get in for a peek.”
Molly said, “Little boys wouldn’t have to come in the house. They could look through the window.”
Rennie went searching for an ashtray and found it beside the sink, with only two butts in it. That was a good sign; it didn’t appear that Molly was smoking a lot. Unless she was emptying the ashtray regularly. Rennie looked into the trash can. She didn’t see any butts there. She thought maybe she was grasping at good signs. Then she wished Molly were smoking; it would be better than Molly just stroking that cat.
She carried her ashtray and cigarette back into the bedroom. She had to move a pair of jeans and a shirt off the vanity bench in order to sit on it. She gazed into the mirror and raked a hand through her curls, limp from the humid air. Her gaze shifted to Molly in the mirror, and her stomach clenched. She didn’t know what to do about handling Molly. She had her own problems right now, too, and this with Molly was simply too much.
Then she looked around, sniffing. “Lordy, it smells in here.” She looked down at the jeans and then over at Molly. “Not that usual smell . . . it smells like horse,” she said, sniffing in Molly’s direction.
Molly gestured, and Rennie looked over to see a saddle sitting on the floor behind the opened closet door. The saddle pad was slung over it.
“What’s it doin’ there?”
“I put it there,” Molly answered.
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