All for a Song

by Allison Pittman

  “All right, then,” Kaleena says. “I know we’re not supposed to ask, but what’d you do to get your community service? You didn’t hurt no one, did you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You didn’t steal nothin’?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then what?”

  “I got in trouble once, for singing in a park.”

  Lynnie twitches her head, wanting to turn around.

  “And they gave you community service for that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Then Charlotte does the thing that most irritates her about people. She lowers her voice to a whisper, as if the inability to speak has also taken away her ability to hear. If anything, it’s a pain because it causes her to stretch her neck in an uncomfortable fashion, just to catch everything.

  “You see,” she says, so close to inaudible that Lynnie wonders if she’s hearing her correctly after all, “I’m not exactly a CSV. I’m something more like family.”

  Dorothy Lynn did not return to the theater that night, nor did she intend to the next day. Darlene kept her in a perpetual swaddling of fabric—measuring, draping, pinning. Liberated from their mother’s attention, RJ and Darren raced through the house at will, playing bank robbers and cowboys and soldiers—whatever gave license to chase and shoot and die horrible, gargling deaths on the kitchen floor.

  “This one better be a girl,” Darlene said, standing back to study Dorothy Lynn’s hemline with a critical eye. “I’d like to know what life is like with a princess.”

  “The more time I spend with your children,” Dorothy Lynn said, thankful to be standing on a chair, outside of collision range, “the less I want my own.”

  “Oh, that’ll all change once you and your husband start loving on each other.”

  The whole idea was frightening. Not the loving, but the boisterous results.

  “Were we ever that loud?”

  “Sister, we were in God’s country. Ma just sent us out into the forest. We might have gotten eaten by bears, and she wouldn’t have known until one of us didn’t show up for supper.”

  “That’s true.”

  She supposed that’s where Donny got his wandering spirit, and where she would have too, had she ever been given the opportunity to follow it. Yesterday had been adventure enough. She’d played a few chords on the guitar, hoping to impress Darlene’s family with the improved sound, but between the boys’ restlessness, Darlene’s indifference, and Roy’s distraction, she realized her best audience had been the two men in the music store. Given that Darlene’s sense of adventure didn’t extend beyond the new wainscoting in the dining room, she opted not to tell her about lunch with Roland Lundi. Some things, she figured, deserved to be guarded in a heart.

  “You’re thinking about him now, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Why would it be silly for you to be thinking about your fiancé while being fitted for the dress you’re going to marry himin?”

  “If you must know, I was thinking about what it would be like if I didn’t get married at all. If I could be like Donny and just go where the wind took me.”

  “‘The wind whirleth about continually,’” Darlene said in a rare spate of biblical quotation, “and it never took anyone anyplace good.”

  “How do you know? You could say that the wind brought you here.”

  “Finest Automobiles brought me here, on the arm of my husband. Honestly, Dot, you’re beginning to worry me with all of this talk.”

  “It’s just talk.”

  The sound of the ringing telephone came as a welcome interruption. Throughout the house the boys were screaming, “Telephone! Telephone!” Darlene took the straight pins from between her lips and jabbed them into the little pillow-like cushion tied to her wrist.

  “Like I can’t hear it,” she mumbled before leaving Dorothy Lynn alone with her adulterous thoughts. Not of Mr. Lundi—handsome though he was—but of what he represented. Seeing the world, proclaiming Jesus. Dorothy Lynn never had the desire to follow in her father’s footsteps. Such a thing would never have been offered as an option. But to see a woman on stage, speaking the Word of God more powerfully than she’d ever known a man to do, stirred something within her. And then, to have somebody actually ask to hear a song? Brent, of course, had listened to several of her poetic, melodic musings, but he had to. He loved her. Mr. Lundi didn’t.

  And so she coveted, more than she ever thought possible.

  Sometimes I yearn for more.

  Of all her verses, that was one she’d never shared with anyone. And here she’d come so close to spilling to Darlene.

  Lord, guard my heart and my tongue.

  And her temper, as RJ came running into the kitchen, nearly barreling into her.

  “Aunt Dot! Telephone for you. Mama says it’s your fancy.”

  “My fiancé,” she corrected as she climbed carefully down from the chair, mindful of the pins that stuck her in every possible place.

  Darlene was sitting at the telephone table in the alcove under the stairs, leaning on her elbows, shouting into the candlestick phone.

  “We’re having a fabulous time! The dress is coming along nicely, but we’re a bit behind! She disappeared for half the day yesterday!”

  Pins or not, Dorothy Lynn strode across the hall and closed her fist around the phone, attempting to yank it away, but Darlene’s grip was stronger.

  “Not a clue. Said she had to get her guitar fixed or something, but I was beginning to worry she’d run off with one of our city boys!” She punctuated her words with a broad wink and strengthened her grip.

  “Give it!” Dorothy Lynn hissed.

  Darlene turned toward the wall, hunching her body around the phone. “She’s chopped off all her hair, and we can’t get her to stop smoking cigarettes. And if you’d seen her dancing—”

  Disregarding both her sister’s delicate condition and her own precarious one, Dorothy Lynn draped herself across Darlene’s wide, soft body, reached around, and finally wrenched the phone away.

  “Don’t believe a word of it!” She was breathless, laughing and talking all at once while trying to untangle the two of them from the phone’s cord. RJ and Darren had clomped in to witness the fun and were jumping up and down, cheering their mother on.

  Breathing heavily, Darlene ushered the boys toward the kitchen with the promise of a snack; Dorothy Lynn tucked herself into the alcove, saying, “Hello, darling,” once she knew she was alone.

  “Tell me you’ve been behaving yourself.” She could hear the trust and smile in his voice, even though he was so far away.

  “Of course I have. Darlene is such a brat.”

  “I knew it would be trouble letting you go up there alone.”

  He was joking, of course, and she should have laughed, but a sharp pain that had nothing to do with the pins in the garment jabbed at the base of her spine. A flirtatious girl might giggle and tell him not to be silly, but she had never been a flirt, and he had never been silly. The prolonged silence went on long enough that she finally heard a faint “Hello?” on the other end, as if they were starting a brand-new conversation.

  “I’m still here,” she said softly, then again when he hadn’t heard.

  “So tell me about your adventures in the big city.” There was no hint of accusation or even suspicion in his voice, and she had only a mere second to decide whether he deserved to have either. She closed her eyes, seeing nothing but Roland Lundi across the table, and knew, if nothing else, she couldn’t start there. So she told him about the movie and the lights and the streetcars and the eccentric Mrs. Lorick in the fabric shop.

  “She said I loved you enough to need a veil, but I said I couldn’t afford to love you that much.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you wear. I’d marry you if you came down the aisle in a feed sack.”

  “I wish you’d tell Darlene that. She’s going to make me crazy.”

  “Put her back on; then put
yourself on the first bus home.” Though he was clearly joking, she could not ignore the timbre of desire in his voice, and it sparked clear through her skin.

  “Tempting,” she said, and meant it, “but it is going to be a beautiful dress once it’s finished.”

  Darlene hollered from the kitchen, “Don’t say any more! It’s bad luck.”

  Dorothy Lynn relayed that bit of information and continued. “Then I got new strings on my guitar. You should hear it. Sounds like a whole new instrument.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Really?”

  “If I can hear your guitar, then you can’t be far away.”

  She brought the mouthpiece closer, wishing she could kiss him right then and there. Instead, she whispered, “And I wrote a new song.”

  “I didn’t know you could write away from the woods.”

  “I didn’t know I could either.” Her head had been filled with it all of last night and today, the chorus coming full circle, lyrics knitting themselves as tight as thoughts. She wanted to tell Brent all about it, maybe even sing a few lines over the phone, but her mind brought her back to the Strawn Brothers Music Store, and a newly formed loyalty kept her tongue quite still.

  “Anything else?” Brent asked, and the line crackled in anticipation of an answer.

  “Just one thing.” A woman evangelist on the stage, dressed in white, with blonde, bobbed hair and an audience of a thousand on their feet. “I went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch and had chow mein.”

  “You went by yourself?”

  A man who looks like Rudolph Valentino; a man who listened to my song; a man who wants to see me again, and he just might because he’s haunting my thoughts. She swallowed. “Yep. I walked in all by myself.”

  The lie tasted bitter on her tongue, and she wondered if he could taste it too.

  “And how did you like it?”

  “Too salty.” Even now she felt like choking.

  Brent chuckled. “Look, Jessup’s giving me the eye—got another person waiting for the phone. Any word for me to take to your mother?”

  She thought about the postcard from Donny in California. Ma voiced his name in prayer every night, even though she sometimes had a hard time saying it without tears during the day. No such card had come to her, or Dorothy Lynn would have seen it. They would have wrapped themselves around it in the lamplight after supper.

  “Just tell her I love her, and that her girls are having a real good time.”

  “I will.”

  There was a pause in which she silently poured out all she’d left unspoken. No, not just unspoken words, but lies. Three of them—Sister Aimee, Roland, Donny. She brought her hand to her heart as if to hold them there, harmless.

  “I love you, Brent Logan.”

  “I love you, Dorothy Lynn Dunbar.”

  Then another silence, another chance, and the line went dead.

  Dorothy Lynn placed the earpiece back in its cradle and stared into the empty black void of the phone.

  “Chow mein?” Darlene had returned, hands braced at the small of her back, foot tapping. “You didn’t mention that.”

  “Didn’t I?” Dorothy Lynn stood, doing her best to smooth the rumpled fabric.

  “Where did you go? How would you even know what to eat?”

  “I might not live in the big city, but I didn’t just crawl out from under a rock. We’re from the same hometown, remember? I guess I can shake the dirt off me same as you.” Shocked at her own tirade, Dorothy Lynn brushed past her sister on her way to the kitchen, but she couldn’t stay more than a step ahead.

  “I thought you were awful quiet when you came home yesterday.”

  “I’m a quiet girl.”

  “Lucky you were talking to your fiancé on the telephone, so he couldn’t see what I see.”

  They were back at the table, where Darlene shooed RJ and Darren away with their cookies. Dorothy Lynn picked one from the plate and attempted a nonchalant nibble. “And just what do you see?”

  Darlene leaned close. “You’re hiding something.”

  “Not tellin’ isn’t the same as hidin’.”

  “So? Spill.”

  “Can I take this off first?” She couldn’t stand another second of holding still beneath the pinned fabric.

  Darlene frowned but agreed.

  The confession started the moment they began to tug the dress off—while her face was hidden in the white crepe de chine tunnel. By the time Dorothy Lynn was once again dressed in her own comfortable clothes, every detail had been shared, from the meeting in the restaurant to the parting in the music store. Whether from shame or defiance, her cheeks burned from the telling, and her voice trembled with the conclusion. “And then I came home.”

  “So you went on a date?” Darlene said, lowering herself into a chair. “And he’s asked you for another.”

  “It was not a date,” Dorothy Lynn said, not entirely sure how to define what her sister implied. “And he wants to hear my song.”

  Darlene snickered. “You’re a pretty young girl. Trust me, he’s not interested in your music.”

  “Well, then, he wouldn’t be the first.” She pouted, knowing full well she looked and sounded like a child, but it drew no pity from her sister.

  “Never mind that,” Darlene said. “I can understand falling into a dish of noodles with a handsome man. Not that I condone it, mind you, but I understand. It’s that Sister Aimee business. She’s an abomination, Dot. Roy says so, and Pa would too, if he were alive. And it’s worth a bet that your fellow wouldn’t think too highly of her either. But then, you wouldn’t know, because you failed to tell him about that little moment of our evening too, didn’t you?”

  “How can you say that? Mr. Lundi told me they’ve seen thousands and thousands of people come to know Jesus. All over the country. Pa didn’t preach to a thousand people over his entire lifetime. Nor will Brent, I daresay. And you said yourself that Roy doesn’t go to church but twice a month, maybe. Who is he to say she’s an abomination?”

  “She’s a she. That’s enough. It’s not a place for a woman, up like that.”

  “You’ve never even heard what she has to say.”

  “Neither have you.”

  They were nearly shouting, and a burst of unfamiliar anger brought Dorothy Lynn to her feet. “You’re the one always callin’ me old-fashioned. You and your electric sweeper and smart parties—all that makeup on your face.”

  “There’s no sin in any of that.”

  She softened. “Of course not. But you have to admit, there’s sin all around in this modern world. That movie we saw—the fortune teller, everybody on screen drinkin’ and carryin’ on. And all around us women with their cigarettes, and some of them kissin’ and pettin’ right there in the lobby. Why isn’t that the abomination?”

  Darlene sighed. “I think it’ll be a good thing when you get back home.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t think you’re quite ready for life in the modern world.”

  She didn’t know how to respond. In a way, her sister was right. Much of what she’d seen and experienced the past few days was new—how could she have been prepared? Looking back, though, she couldn’t remember a spot of trepidation. Discomfort, yes, and caution, and maybe even a hint of regret in retrospect. But not fear, and certainly not failure.

  Here she was almost nineteen years old, and everybody she knew seemed to think she had nothing to offer. Resentment took its first churning bite as Dorothy Lynn saw herself through her sister’s eyes. A backward bumpkin. Ma only wanted her to be safe and married and close to home. Brent—sweet, wonderful Brent—only wanted her close to him. That, she knew, should be enough. And it was . . . or had been. Until yesterday, when an utter stranger made her feel something new: strong.

  “Now, don’t be sad,” Darlene said, hoisting herself to her feet. “You’ve got a lovely life ahead of you in Heron’s Nest. Like you’re following in our mother’s
footsteps.”

  “More like I’m livin’ her life.”

  “And it’s not such a bad life, is it?”

  “No, I suppose not.” She sounded more convinced than she felt, as if she were outside watching herself in a moment of revelation. She’d shared every moment of her life with Ma, living within those boundary lines that God had so clearly fashioned. Darlene had her family and Donny had the world, but what could Dorothy Lynn claim as truly, uniquely her own? Certainly not Brent. As a minister’s wife, she would forever be sharing her husband with any church member who had the slightest need. How often had she heard Pa slip out of the house in the middle of the night to sit at the bedside of a dying man?

  When she looked back on her childhood, she looked into her future. This very moment stood in marked isolation. A hinge. A turning point. Her own little portion. And the appetite to taste it grew within.

  Darlene patted Dorothy Lynn’s arm and focused on carefully folding the unfinished dress. “Think I’ll wait to start sewing tomorrow. I’d just have time to get started, and it’d be time to fix dinner. That all right with you, Dot?”

  But the last of her words were lost as Dorothy Lynn walked up the kitchen stairs to the boys’ room, where her newly strung guitar stood in the corner, surrounded by a toy mile of train tracks. She picked it up, along with her purse, and quietly walked down the carpeted front steps and out the front door.

  Her cup awaited.

  She had no idea where to go but to the theater, and her first step into the gaping, silent lobby made her feel like the embodiment of the fool Darlene thought her to be. The only light came through the open door, and the only sound from the buzzing of an electric sweeper in the hand of a tall, tired man who seemed unwilling to lift his eyes from its repetitive path.

  She tried repeating “Excuse me?” at varying volumes, but if he did hear her above the machine’s din, he gave no indication. Waving her arm to catch his eye proved equally fruitless, and it wasn’t until she moved directly into the sweeper’s path that he even looked up, and then not until the machine had tapped the toe of her sturdy brown shoe.

  “Whaddya want?” Not only did he not turn off the machine; he continued to maneuver it in a narrow arc around her feet.