by Kathryn Shay
If she stretched up, touched her lips to his...
She ducked her head, the wanting and the uncertainty both too much, and said, with every bit of Ado Annie brightness she possessed, “I love Christmas decorations, don’t you?”
“Uh, Christmas lights are nice.” It sounded like the vocal equivalent of someone feeling his way through fog.
“They’re wonderful,” she agreed, ever more brightly. “On the houses and shops and trees. All lit up so whole blocks glow. Just wonderful.”
“Don’t see that much in Wyoming. Lights are more spread out. Every year some neighbors put lights on this tree, using a whole lot of extension cords. I don’t think they can even see it from their place, but if you drive by, or if I’m riding that section, there it is, all the colors shining, out there all by itself.”
“That’s... that’s wonderful, Ed.” She wanted to kiss him. She wanted... him. “A wreath on the front door.”
“What?”
He sounded off-balance at her blurted words. Thank God, she wasn’t alone.
“A wreath on the front door. That’s what tells me Christmas is coming at home. Not made from snowberry though.” Her brightness was nearly too much to bear. “Now it’s your turn.”
“A bow on the truck, I guess.”
Curiosity dialed the brightness in her voice back toward reality. “You put a bow on your truck? Inside or out?”
“On the front grill mostly. Sometimes on the rearview mirror. Mom puts them on.”
“I like that.” Maybe she would have something in common with his mother. Not that they’d ever meet. “Mailing cards to friends,” she said quickly.
”Calling Merry Christmas at anybody you pass by on the road.”
“Carolers going door to door.”
“Doors too far apart. So barn dance where everybody sings together.”
“Like what happened when our bus broke down. That’s nice.”
“Yeah, it is. In the old days, it took so long to get anywhere, people came from all over and stayed a night or two. They’d dance ’til dawn on the last day, then start traveling. Now folks come for the evening. Except, one year when I was a kid, there was a storm, and everybody stayed over, and all us kids wanted to do it every year. But it’s not very practical.”
“I suppose not.”
“You’re not wishing for the old days are you?” he asked. “Because forget the nostalgia, it was a heck of a lot of work.”
“I know. And, no, I’m not wishing for the old days. Not all parts of them, only... community, I guess.”
“We’ve got that in Knighton. Suppose you have to when there aren’t a lot of people. Most folks are pretty self-reliant, but some jobs need more hands, so it’s good to have neighbors to count on. I never thought about it as anything special until college, when I realized my life had been different from some of the other kids’.”
They had tonight.
“Where is Knighton?”
“Eastern slope of the Big Horns — Big Horn Mountains,” he elaborated, apparently reading her blankness. “You know anything about Wyoming?”
She searched her memory. “Sort of square. Uh, Yellowstone Park? Cheyenne?”
“Not near either one,” he said cheerfully. “Yellowstone’s the northwest corner. If you cut the box of Wyoming into four, Cheyenne’s in the southeast quadrant. Knighton would be on the west side of the northeast quarter, ‘bout halfway down.”
“What’s it like?”
She wanted him to keep talking, while she considered something she had never before considered. Making love with a man she couldn’t have a future with. A man who would leave when this weekend was over.
Tonight... Would she dare... ?
“Not much there.”
“There must be something there. Tell me.”
“Okay. There’s a main street — called Main Street. Buildings like the library and courthouse, a couple of churches, and what’s now an elementary school are from the ’20s, built from native stone. Then there’s the cafe and other places built of wood.
“The town started with a log building at a crossroads. A sort of bar — what they called a roadhouse in the early days. Pretty rough. Cowboys and rustlers and cardsharks, all together. A few other businesses started to serve the roadhouse’s customers. Livery stable, general store, and a bawdy house run by the ancestor of one of the town’s most upright citizens.” He grinned. “Everybody acts like nobody knows, but everybody does.”
Despite the distraction of her other thoughts, he’d caught her attention.
“As more folks moved in, there was pressure to make it a proper town. One night, the roadhouse and bawdy house mysteriously burned — no injuries, and surprisingly little property loss, since the furnishings were out in the road for some odd reason.” He winked, and she grinned. “The next day, construction started on the building that’s the cafe to this day, and the woman who ran the bawdy house and her girls were respectable — just like that. Overnight.”
“Everyone accepted them?”
“Sure. There weren’t many women around. They couldn’t afford to shun any. After a while, there wasn’t a family that didn’t have a connection to one of Miss Jean’s girls.”
“Including your family?”
“Oh, no, none of Miss Jean’s girls were in my family tree. Miss Jean herself. Married my grandfather’s uncle.”
She laughed. A genuine, true laugh.
Their ships would pass. He would return to his Knighton and his ranch. She would move on to wherever next. But they had right now. Right this instant.
That had to be enough.
He put his arm around her, and she forgot everything else.
“There you two are,” Lydia said, making a production out of coming around a back curtain. She’d have made less noise with a set of cymbals. “I’d’ve knocked, but there’s no door. C’mon, the bus is about to leave.”
“We’ll walk back,” Donna said quickly.
They had tonight.
“No, we won’t. Too late.” Ed stood, holding out his hand to her as if she’d need help getting out of the chair.
“It’s not —”
“Not going to have you out on the streets this time of night with only me to look out for you.”
“Ed —”
“Donna.”
Looking up at him, she knew they were riding back in the bus, just as they’d eaten at the diner.
She thought about that on the bus ride.
Ed Currick was mostly a very easy-going person. Until he encountered something he felt was the right thing to do.
Or not the right thing to do.
So how would he react to her trying to get him into bed?
CHAPTER SIX
Saturday
“FLAT.”
Brad appeared out of nowhere and shot the single word at her as she’d trailed the others to the dressing room after the matinee.
“No way. When — ?” she started indignantly. Then she realized she didn’t recall a single note of the numbers she’d performed.
“Whole thing, beginning to end. No oomph at all.”
He’d meant her performance. She released her shoulders back into a slump. “Sorry, Brad. I’ll do better tonight.”
“Better.”
He might have simply repeated her word. More likely it was an order. Possibly a threat. He was gone before she felt any obligation to find out which. She didn’t particularly care, because —
“He wasn’t here this afternoon, was he?”
Donna’s head came up at Maudie’s voice. The older woman stepped forward from a shadow.
“Who wasn’t — ?”
Maudie stopped the charade with a shake of her head. “Ed Currick of the Slash-C Ranch in Knighton, Wyoming. Is that because you had sex with him last night or because you didn’t?”
“Maudie!”
“Are you shocked I know about sex? Or that you want it. No, no, don’t answer. Go get out of your makeup and into
your clothes, and come to my room down that corridor.”
“I’m going to get some food with the girls —”
“You need rest before tonight’s show, and reasonable discussion. Not chattering. Now, do what I say. Fifteen minutes, I will expect you.”
MAUDIE’S ROOM WAS surely as dingy and tattered as the rest of backstage, but that wasn’t what Donna saw after knocking and being invited to enter.
Warmth and comfort and ease.
A muted paisley throw formed a backdrop — pinned to a clothesline, Donna eventually realized. An oriental patterned rug warmed a rectangle of floor. A small lamp’s glow contrasted with the sharp makeup lights of the dressing room and with the dimness of the rest of backstage.
“Maudie, this is... Where did you get all this?”
“My special things travel along, tucked in corners.”
The tiny space reminded Donna both of a reading nook in her parents’ house and the cleverly outfitted milieu of a fortune-teller she and friends had visited in New Orleans.
Donna realized she’d never been to Maudie’s cubbyholes in any of the theaters they’d been in. Maudie always came to them.
“If the theater’s your home — onstage or backstage — you’d best make yourself comfortable.” Maudie sat in a chair draped by another colored throw. “Now, sit, and have some tea and something to eat. Chicken, fruit, a few carrots — not too many, mind — and tea are best between a matinee and evening performance. Never fish.”
“I know about orange juice and grapefruit juice, but I never heard about fish. Is it bad for the voice, too?”
“Bad for the rest of the people backstage — the smell.”
Donna chuckled, and sat on a sofa. Stage sofas were never this soft because it made it difficult to get out of them on cue. She looked more closely and saw an extra cushion on the sofa. “Yours?”
“Of course. Now have some chicken.”
Donna ate, suddenly hungry.
“There is a charge for this meal, Donna. Your young man did not come this afternoon, and I ask you why?”
“It had absolutely nothing to do with... sex.”
“You did not have sex with him last night?”
Sex? They’d barely kissed.
While a crowd from the company had ostentatiously held the elevator door for her, he’d kissed her goodnight almost chastely.
So much for their having the night.
“No. And —”
“But you want to have sex with him.”
“I want to —” Almost too late she saw how changing have sex to make love might cause more misunderstanding. “Yes.”
Maudie let out a little breath that sounded... satisfied? Why?
“So what was the cause of his missing this show?”
“It’s not like he’s been to every show,” Donna started defensively. Maudie simply looked at her over her tea cup. “He’s at the stock show — livestock show.”
Words tumbled out of her about Ed, his family, the Slash-C, and Wyoming. She said nothing about her feelings. Or her wonderings about his.
When she stopped, Maudie poured more tea. Only with the cup half emptied did she say, “Brad was right, you were flat this afternoon.”
Stricken as she had not been when Brad said it, Donna had no response.
“Tonight will be better. You needed the right food and you have had it. Now you need a vocal rest. So you will listen, and I will talk. What so many young people do not understand is they must love this — ” Maudie’s gesture took in their cozy space, yet called to mind the wider realm of backstage. “As much as the singing and dancing. Indeed, more.”
“More?”
“Add up your time onstage, then add up your time on all the rest. The traveling. The waiting. The checks. The wardrobe calls. The meetings. The command performances at opening night parties. The maneuvering.” Maudie shot her a look. “That’s your real life when you’re in the theater. Not singing and dancing.”
“Rehearsal is. Rehearsal’s the best —”
“Vocal rest,” the older woman ordered. Donna shut her mouth. “Being onstage — performance or rehearsal — is the tip of the iceberg. All the rest of it are layers upon layers of ice building up from the bottom to hold you high enough to be seen above the surface. That’s being onstage. Take Angela.”
“Angela?”
“Our Charity,” Maudie said, as if, instead of repeating the name because she didn’t see how she fit this conversation, Donna needed an introduction. “She revels in it. Especially the maneuvering. If there were no singing, no dancing, no acting, but still her name was in Playbill, people coming to applaud her, and, most of all, the backstage dramas to put her atop the heap, she would be perfectly satisfied. She has been that way from the start.”
Donna’s eyes widened.
Maudie nodded. “I was there on her first road company. She worked very hard. Got herself noticed, too. Two entirely different things, you know. Easy to do one without the other. But Angela knows where she wants to go. Nothing gets in her way.”
The older woman’s look gave those final words added significance. A warning to not get in Angela’s way? Or a warning that Donna needed more of that intensity?
“One of the principals in that company was an up-and-comer. A lot of talent, a lot of sparkle. Started hearing rumors she was being looked at for bigger things. She and Angela hit it off. Got so you didn’t see one without the other. Except one time, we had a couple days travel, and Angela was nowhere to be found. Nobody knew where she was, including her good friend.
“Angela comes back, looking like a cat who’s feasted on a canary. Three weeks later, Angela’s gone to take the lead in that first TV series she got so famous for, one where she was the sexy daughter of... Who was he?”
“The nation’s only crime-solving governor. He signed the laws and then enforced them,” Donna recited from the intro to one of her favorite shows growing up.
“Right. So Angela had the lead, and her great friend was mad as fire. Seems she’d been scheduled to test for the role on our next break. Angela got there first.”
“Angela stole the role?”
Maudie shook her head. “No role belongs to anyone, so no stealing. All I know is her friend said the only person she told about the audition was Angela. The friendship ended. Still, her friend did okay for herself, then retired to marry a doctor. And Angela didn’t stay up.
“The TV show got her a couple movies. Didn’t work,” Maudie was saying. “Two more series didn’t stick. Then the one about a school for clowns was on its way out. She tried for Broadway. No deal. But she fit okay for taking this on the road. So here she is...”
From Donna’s standpoint, lead in a touring company would be a dream. From Angela’s it must be less impressive.
“Now the word is she’s angling for another TV show. That’s the way of this business. It’s like climbing a mountain. Sometimes you make good progress. Sometimes you fall far enough to break your neck if you’re not lucky. You’ve got to be willing to go anywhere you can get a hold — up, down, sideways — just to stay on the mountain. It’s the ones who get a thrill from that who’re suited to this life.” She studied Donna. “You’re like her in a lot of ways.”
“Like Angela?”
“Tch. Not Angela. Theresa.”
“Who’s Theresa?”
“Who’s Theresa? Who’ve I been talking about all this time.”
“But... ” Donna swallowed the protest that Maudie had never mentioned the other woman’s name. Then voiced a different protest. “I’m not going to quit and marry a doctor.”
The wrinkles on Maudie’s face rearranged into a smile. “I’d be greatly surprised if you marry a doctor. Greatly surprised.”
THAT NIGHT AT the theater, Ed heard people during the break — interval, they called it — talking about other members of the cast. How could they see anyone else on the stage for the beaming brightness of Donna?
He wasn’t sure he grasped detai
ls of the show he’d seen four nights in a row, because he only watched her. When other actors took over, he remembered her every move, every smile, every gesture.
Course, that happened when she wasn’t on the stage, too.
He’d stumbled through meetings at the stock show, feeling as if his words came out jumbled like a puzzle in the Sunday comics. So he’d concentrated on listening, trying to hear, hoping to remember. Thinking about her all the time.
And now, seeing her, like he was seeing her for the first time.
Only it wasn’t like the first time, because he wasn’t seeing the woman he’d spotted across the lobby. He was seeing the star she would be.
She would be a star. There was no doubt. Her spirit and talent would take her as far as she wanted to go.
Broadway. That’s where she’d want to be.
Not the Slash-C in Knighton, Wyoming. About as far from Broadway as it got. Not only no stages, but no audiences.
The one place he belonged. The one place...
He drove one fist into his other palm, and hunched over in the theater seat.
How could he ever ask her to give up her dream for his?
How could he even want her to give up her dream for his?
How could he not want her dream for her?
He couldn’t. Right down the line, that was the answer. He couldn’t.
And that left him... What?
He should leave. Leave right now. She’d wonder for a while, but she’d get over it. She’d forget —
“Excuse me.”
His head jerked up at the voice of the woman trying to return to her seat. He stood to let her by.
“Thank you. Are you okay, dear?”
“Yes’m.”
She paused a moment, then took her seat.
He remained standing. He could leave right now. Cut his losses. Make a clean break. He should —
The lights flicked a final time. The orchestra struck up.
He sat.
And when the curtain rose, he watched only one person.
ED WAS THERE inside the stage door after the evening performance.
“Grover said to come in. Said to call a taxi from here so you didn’t have to walk back to the hotel. Thought we’d eat there.”
