by Luanne Jones
But she was not her mama. People said Rita had her mother’s blood, and so she must have her mother’s courage and spirit. She had fought against any comparison or tendency, fearing that if she ever acted like her mother in one way, she might do it in others. She might have it in her to walk away not just from the hard, ugly parts of her life, but from the good ones as well.
After all this time she felt the deep, yearning, lonely ache of wishing her mother would just come to her again. That she hadn’t forgotten to include Rita when she fashioned herself a bold new life. No, Rita could never be like a woman who would do that to a child, even a grown child. If she were a clever girl, maybe, she could find a way to draw on her mother’s strengths without succumbing to her shortcomings. But what if she failed? The people that meant the world to Rita would pay the price.
She had taken her wild ride and come out no worse for wear. That was enough. She had no intention of uprooting her comfortable existence or abandoning any relationships—save one.
“Mmeenda,” Will mumbled, rolling his head to one side.
She sat up in bed and gently worked enough of the sheet out from under him to cover herself. She looked down at the man sprawled out in the most contented sleep she’d ever had the occasion to observe in another human. She feathered her fingers through the black waves of hair tumbling against his temple.
He rolled onto his side, mumbling again, and his lips curved into just a hint of a smile.
She thought of rousing him from his sleep, but on the very real chance that would actually rouse him, she decided against it. In less than an hour the work crew would arrive, and while finding her and Wild Billy in bed together would provide more of a jolt than strong-brewed coffee, she opted not to risk it.
The sheet rustled as she eased toward the edge of the bed. From the corner of her eye she caught the flicker of a light. Seeing the stage he had set up for her so he could hear her sing gave her a warmth that stretched way down to her toes.
What a decent guy. More decent than most folks, including himself, gave him credit for being. That decency had brought out things in her she had long forgotten she possessed. And he had helped her see that she did not have to hold the world together all by herself, that she could let go a little sometimes, and life would go on.
Shutting her eyes, she memorized the smell of his hair, the weight of his body on one side of the bed, the sound of his breathing. He would go, and she’d probably rarely, if ever, see him again. Her memories were all she would have left, so she wanted to get them right down to the smallest detail. She leaned down to place the softest possible kiss on his head. “Thank you.”
“Hmmm,” he shifted toward her.
She opened her eyes, slid from the bed, kissed her fingertips, and touched them to his cheek. “Thank you, for being my tornado, Wild Billy.”
And she was gone.
Wild Billy. Even in his sleep the name struck a raw nerve. His shoulders knotted. His back teeth ground together. He turned his face toward the lump of a pillow to keep from letting the hated specter pull him from a truly wonderful dream. A dream that only built upon an already amazing reality the night before.
The thought of Rita banished all tension. He groaned, a feral, lusty sound made bigger by the bareness of the room, and reached for her. His fingers grasped only rumpled sheets.
“Rita?” He sat up, rubbing his eyes.
No answer.
“Rita, you in the kitchen?” He took a deep breath, sure he’d catch a whiff of coffee just beginning to brew. His nose twitched to fight off a sneeze from the smell of dust and dankness churned up in yesterday’s work.
He was alone. He studied the sparse string of lights sagging against the nicked brick wall. Alone in a place where he had expected at least companionship.
The bed creaked as he shifted his body slowly to face the dirty window with the first light of day breaking in. Pink-and-orange clouds streaked across the gray sky. Will exhaled and put his head in his hands.
Rita had come to him, and now she had left him. She had learned well this business of not getting too attached, of not hanging on to anything long enough to let it become important, much less cherished.
“You there?” He would have cherished one last morning waking up next to her. “Rita?”
For that reason he should be glad she’d gone. But sitting there with the cool sheets pooled in his lap and the harsh light of day creeping slowly into his consciousness, he was not glad. Was this, he wondered, how women felt after a night of no-future-in-this sex with him?
No. To feel as empty as he did right then the women he had bedded would first have to have had the fulfillment he experienced with Rita. He would have had to have created a place in their lives for his going to leave a void. He never allowed any of them close enough really to care about him. And he had never let himself care deeply enough about them to make their partings anything more than a fond good-bye. Only two women had ever left a hole in his heart—the one who had betrayed him and Rita, who had befriended him.
Friendship was at the root of this emotion. He liked and admired Rita. If letting go of that didn’t come harder to him, then he really was beyond all hope. He had passed beyond the precious redemption his sister had promised he’d find in the Pig Rib Palace. He put his feet to the icy floor. He looked around and huffed out a dismal laugh.
He had not found there what he needed most to move his life forward, but maybe somewhere along the way, Rita had. That gave him more satisfaction than anything he’d done in a very long time.
“Mom? I tried to reach you all day yesterday! When I couldn’t get you I called Daddy, and he didn’t answer, either. What’s going on? Where have you been?”
“It’s a long story, honey.” Rita tried to hold the impossibly small cell phone she’d borrowed from Jillie against her shoulder. “That’s why I called you.”
“Are you at home now?”
“No, I’m in the basement of the Baptist church.”
“Oh? That does sound like a long story.”
The cell phone slipped, and she had only her chin to grab it. She let out a curse.
“You sure you’re in the Baptist church?”
“It’s this stupid phone. I borrowed the thing to keep from tying up the church phone if I needed anything. Jillie insists everyone needs one as a matter of personal convenience.” Rita found it anything but convenient as she tried to talk and stir corn-bread batter at the same time.
“Mom? You’re scaring me. Why are you cussing on a cell in the basement of the Baptist church?”
“I’m not cussing in the basement. I’m cooking. Making up a lunch for the folks working over at the Palace.”
“Cooking? For the people working at the Palace? Has the food gotten so bad that even the staff won’t eat it?”
“One thing you could say for the people your daddy hired for his place. They were not stupid, nor did they have a death wish.” All of Pernel’s employees had been bright enough to find new jobs weeks before Rita even knew her ex was fixing to abdicate his pig rib throneship “The cook and waitresses brown-bagged it for a year or so until they shamed your daddy into putting in that new kitchen.”
“Don’t be silly, Mom. Daddy didn’t change the kitchen for the staff.”
“Well, he certainly didn’t do it for the customers.” She mashed a lump of corn-bread batter against the side of the big stainless-steel bowl on the table before her. “I don’t think a one of them noticed they no longer had to skim a layer of grease off the barbeque sauce or that their onion rings actually took on the almost perceptible taste of onions.”
“Mama, what does the world look like from where you are?”
“What, honey?”
“Is it all rose-colored and rainbows, happy bunnies hopping by and, I don’t know, marshmallow toadstools? Or do you sometimes, just every now and again, catch a glimpse of reality?” The soft-humored tenderness in her baby girl’s tone took the hard edge off the sarcasm.
“Lacey Marie…”
“Daddy redoing that kitchen was just his first step toward redoing himself.”
“Was it?” Of course it was. How stupid of her not to have seen it then—not to understand it until someone shoved it in her face.
“And it didn’t hurt that the new kitchen set you in good stead for taking over if it came to that. Didn’t you see that? Can’t you see it now?”
“Well, now, yes. Now that you spell it out for me more than two years after the fact.” Rita put her hand to the phone to hold it in place. “But then I’ve never been especially good at seeing things that I don’t want to see.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“I know. I’m such a mess.”
“You’re anything but a mess, and you know it.”
“Really? You think so?”
“I know so. That’s the problem.” She sighed.
Rita could imagine the expert level of eye-rolling going on at the other end of the conversation.
“Everything in your life has to stay just so, Mom. You don’t take chances. You never step out of line.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Rita gripped the edge of the mixing bowl. Corn-bread batter sloshed up onto her fingers. She’d have cussed if she didn’t have her child on the other end. “That is to say, I’m not as predictable as you think I am.”
“Oh, yeah? So you say you’ve got people working at the Palace? Let me guess. A cleaning crew so you can reopen the dump?”
“We happen to be remodeling.” So there, she might have added if her tone hadn’t made that point on its own.
“Remodeling? Isn’t that like trying to make a silk purse out of a pig-rib eatery?”
“Not just remodeling.”
“Oh?”
“Replacing old things that need to go, too.”
“And?”
“Refitting. Refining.”
“And?”
And rendezvousing with my lover—nyah nyah. If Jillie or Cozie had been on the line, she just might have said it. She adored her daughter more than she could possibly describe. But no other person on earth could make her feel like such a mousy old stick in the mud as that smart, gorgeous child. It was a mother/daughter thing that Rita prayed they would someday both grow out of, but for now…
“Listen to yourself, Mom. Remodeling? Refitting? How is that new and challenging?”
She stammered but that hardly qualified as an answer.
“I’ll tell you how—it’s not. It’s exactly what everyone expects you to do.”
“Not exactly what everyone expects.” Especially the taking Wild Billy as a lover part.
“And when the remodeling is finished, what then?”
Then Will would leave, and her nights would take on a haunting stillness deeper than she had ever known before. “Then this will be a whole new restaurant.”
“New how? New menu?”
“Oh…no…no, honey.” Rita tipped her head to hold the phone in place again as she lifted the bowl and began pouring the batter into the first of three cast-iron skillets. “It wouldn’t be smart to start monkeying around with the menu just now.”
“A new name then?”
“A new name…yes, eventually. Perhaps. When there’s enough money to pay for new signs and advertising and all that.”
“Then nothing will actually be new about the place but the furnishings?”
“No. No, not really.” She chewed at her lower lip, trying to come up with some silver lining to the dark cloud her daughter had unleashed. Finally, she forced out the best thing she could, “But there will be a new owner.”
“You’re selling? Oh, Mom, that’s so…”
“I’ll be the new owner!” She set the bowl aside, then lifted one of the skillets an inch off the counter and let it drop.
“That you pounding your head against a brick wall?”
“I’m getting the air bubbles out of the corn bread.”
“I wish it were that easy to get the air bubbles out of your thinking, Mom.”
“My thinking is sound as ever.”
“Of course it is. Everything about you is as sound and as near to totally unchanged as ever. And where has that gotten you?”
She dropped the second skillet with a deadweight clunk.
“You could do so much, Mom. You could go to college.”
“College? At my age?”
“Are you kidding? Something like half of all college students are nontraditional these days.”
“That let’s me out. I’m about as traditional as they get.”
Lacey giggled. “Oh, Mom, nontraditional is PC-speak for old.”
“I’m not old either.”
“You love to learn, and you know it.” She said it the way you’d talk to a kitten while dangling a catnip-filled toy in front of it. “You could move to Memphis and…”
Memphis? Where Will lived? Where nobody else knew her and she’d have to start over from nothing? The thought of it took her very breath away. “I can’t, baby. Not Memphis.”
“Why not?”
For starters because she’d look a big-ass fool, like she’d trotted off after a man whose main goal in life was to keep his distance. “I think for now I should just work on making things better here.”
“Better how? Better for you or better for everyone who relies on you to ease their way in life?”
“Better at the Palace for starters. If I can improve things there, then maybe I can build on that momentum and…”
“How can you make things better at the Palace? Start providing decaf coffee?”
“That’d cause a riot.”
“Bottled water?”
“Oh, yes, big demand for that in Hellon, I imagine.”
“Maybe put little packets of wet napkins on every table? Better how?”
“Just better.” Though she did like that wet-napkin idea and made a note to look into it. “I’ll do what I can, and you’ll see.”
“What, Mom? What amazing new innovation could you have come up with to use in the Palace?”
Amazing innovations in the Palace? She and Will had come up with so many—and not a one of them fit to describe to her daughter. Rita put the back of her hand to her cheek and sighed. She dared not let herself get carried too far away with thoughts of making love last night in the dreamy lights from the makeshift stage. “Oh.”
“Oh what?”
“I just remembered. That is, I just came up with a terrific idea for something absolutely new and challenging I can bring to the Palace.”
“How about bringing in a new owner?” Her sweet voice rang with hope, not harassment.
“How about karaoke?”
Lacey Marie groaned.
“What? What’s wrong with that?”
“Have you ever seen people doing that?”
“Only on TV and movies where they play it up all hokey and horrible.”
“They are being kind.”
“How do you know?”
“There are at least half a dozen bars around Memphis that have those machines, Mom.”
“And when were you in a bar?”
“I…uh…well, there’s one in the hotel lounge—you know the one where you stayed when you brought me down for registration.”
“Uh-huh.” The girl is intelligent, independent, and in another city, she reminded herself. Beyond expressing disapproval there wasn’t much Rita could do. “Lacey, I don’t want you going to bars.”
“It was a hotel, Mom. Anyone walking through could hear it.”
“I don’t want you going to hotels either!”
“Mom, I’m not running buck wild in the city.” The sincerity of her laugh went a long way toward convincing Rita of her daughter’s honesty. “You raised me right. I will make good choices.”
That gave her some comfort.
“Though how I learned to make good choices with parents like mine…Karaoke, Mom? It’s just too hokey.”
“Then it should be perfect fo
r Hellon. And for me.”
“Please! Hellon maybe—it must have its share of frustrated wanna be singers like every other Tennessee town. But you? Mom, you would never get up in front of a crowd and sing.”
“Would too.”
Her daughter made a sound that in polite company would have been followed by a red face and a heartfelt apology.
“Sweetie, I didn’t call you to get into another argument about your wanting me to break out of my rut.”
“At this point I’d be happy if you’d just poke your nose up over the edge of that rut and see that there is a whole wide wonderful world out there.”
Last night she had dared to peek out of that nice cozy, comfy rut of hers, and the sun and the stars and the moon and her life had not gone careening out of control. Maybe her child had a point. Maybe she could break free of all the expectations and…and what? What could Rita Stark do? How could she survive without her roots? “Too big a world, Lacey, for a small-town nobody like me.”
“A world that’s yours for the taking, Mom. You could do or be anything, you know that, don’t you?”
No. She did not know that. “Right now I’m going to do the corn bread, or I will be late. Bye-bye, honey.”
“You know if I thought you would really get up in front of a crowd and sing, even if it was just some silly karaoke, that would be something. A start.”
“You just wait and see then.” She felt no confidence at all, even in such a purposefully vague promise. She bent to open the oven door, then reached for the first skillet. “Okay, now, I have to hang up. It takes both hands for me to climb back down into my rut.”
“Not funny, Mom.”
“Talk to you later. I love you high as my heart,” Rita whispered, her hand to her chest.
“I love you high as my nose,” Lacey Marie came back without a hesitation.
Rita could picture her little girl as a bright-eyed toddler putting a tiny hand to the tip of her nose to go through the motions of the silly poem they’d made up so long ago.
“I love you higher than heaven.” Rita lifted her open hands.
“And right down to my toes,” Lacey chimed in to say the last words with her mother.
