Talk of the Town

by Mary Kay McComas

  "Like you're in love with me. Like you can't keep your hands off me—like we've even touched in the first place. Those people out there will have us sleeping together before the night is over."

  "Great"

  "What?"

  "I'll take all the help I can get."

  "This isn't funny," she hissed. "I've already had to live down more than one scandal in this town, and I don't want to have to deal with another. I have Harley to think about, too. It's bad enough for him already. Stop this."

  "If those people want to think that I'm in love with you and want to touch you, let 'em. There's nothing wrong with that. People do it all the time."

  "I don't. And besides, it isn't true."

  "What if it is true? What if I fell in love with you the first time I saw you? What if I want to touch you so bad, I ache?" he asked, reaching out to content himself with a light touch to her arm.

  "Oh, stop." She flailed her arms, waving away his hand, and took a step back. "You don't even know me. Yon don't know anything about me."

  "I know me. And I know enough about you to feel the power of the possibilities between us."

  "The what? Power of the possibilities? What is that? What does it mean? That you've got hot pants and I look available?"

  "Not entirely," he said, undaunted. After all, where was the sense in wasting the time to deny the truth. He did want her. And in a very big way. "Possibilities come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Bigger than sex, smaller than fear; as ordinary as common gossip, more peculiar than love. Possibilities are limitless, Rosemary. Really bad and really good, but you never know which until you try one."

  "Chances," she said, redefining his possibilities. She glanced out the window again to be sure they weren't being overheard. "I have too much at risk to take chances. I won't do that to Harley."

  "Or to yourself."

  Okay. He had her pegged. He'd thumbed her like a magazine and found her out. She was scared. So what?

  "That's right. Or to myself," she said, wanting to smash all his possibilities to smithereens; wishing he'd go away and leave her alone; hoping she could seal up the crack in the dam before it split apart and let loose all her emotions. "I took most of my chances a long time ago, and I lost. I have two left and I'm not going to screw them up." She hesitated for the briefest moment. "I've changed my mind about tonight. I appreciate the offer for dinner, but I don't think it's a good idea."

  "Okay. Fine. That's it," he said, stomping out of the kitchen.

  Her heart was racing and her chest was tight. She didn't like to fight and she hated hurting people . . . and she really had liked Gary. In a way. Mildly. He was a nice man. Personable. Funny, in his way. Her life wasn't his fault. He was a little overenergized, a little too intense, too full of life—sort of pushy and vigorously laboring under the false impression that she had something left in her heart to offer a man—but he wasn't a bad person.

  She listened for the door of the diner to slam closed behind him as he left, but what she heard was Gary— talking to the customers.

  "I'm going to take Rosemary Wickum out to dinner tonight, but before I do, I think everyone should know that despite what I want, she has no intentions of sleeping with me. Ever. And while I think that's a big mistake, it is her choice. Now, I know that you don't know who I am or where I come from, but just for the record, I would never force myself on a woman." He bowed his head humbly. "I'm a good looking, sensitive type of guy, and to tell you the truth, I don't have any trouble getting women into the sack, if that's all I want." He glanced over his shoulder, knowing that Rose was listening. Her goggle-eyed expression was priceless.

  "The thing is," he said, turning back to the stunned luncheoneers, "getting Rosemary into bed isn't all I want. Now, I do want to make love with her, I'm not denying that," he said, holding up one hand.

  "Will you stop?"

  "But I've always found sex a much more enjoyable experience if both parties are cooperating. Haven't you found this to be true?" he asked the four ladies, who ranged in age from thirty to fifty-six. They nodded, then glanced at one another self-consciously before agreeing with him again. "So, if Rosemary has no plans to cooperate with me, and if I'm too much of a gentleman to force myself on her, wouldn't you think she'd feel safe in going out with me tonight?"

  "He seems okay to me, Rosie," Danny O'Brian said. He did, after all, own the hardware store, where these types of small-town judgments were decided.

  "Thank you," Gary said, very man-to-man. He turned to her. "What do you say, Rosie? Won't you give me a chance to show you that I'm not such a bad guy?"

  A bad guy? She was far more concerned with the fact that the man clearly didn't have both oars in the water.

  However, that's not how he appeared to her neighbors. To those five apostles, who would go forth among the limited masses of Redgrove' and preach the gospel truth according to Gary Albright, he looked refreshingly forthright, lovable, and sincere.

  It did cross her mind to stand fast and heed her better judgment, but Lu chose that moment to return from the bank. Lu—who took to anything in pants like jelly to peanut butter, like ketchup to french fries, like syrup to waffles, like . . . well, you get the picture – was the straw that would break her back. Rose might have been able to disregard five favorable opinions, but with Lu to make the sixth, it was a lost cause.

  "All right," she said finally, noting her employer's keen interest in Gary. "Dinner. Six-thirty."

  "And dancing," he said, smiling. To her infuriated gasp, he shrugged and said, "You give me happy feet."

  She disappeared from the window for a split second, coming out of the kitchen to meet him face-to-face behind the counter. She opened her mouth to give him fifty lashes with her sharp tongue, but nothing happened. He grinned at her.

  He was the most exasperating man, yet his eyes were wondrous and full of awe when he murmured, "God, you're pretty."

  What could she say?

  "Oh, for pity's sake. Fine. Dinner and dancing. Now, will you please go?" she asked, pushing lightly on his chest. Under her breath she muttered, "I can't believe you just did that—and don't ever do it again."

  "What?"

  "Embarrass me like this."

  "Then don't provoke me," he said simply.

  "Provoke you?"

  "I want to go out with you. I was desperate."

  She sighed heavily, despairingly. "Will you please leave?"

  "Aren't you forgetting something?"

  "What?" she asked, her hands out as if imploring him.

  He leaned forward and her heart stopped cold. Judas priest! He was going to kiss her! Right there in front of everybody! She braced herself—resisting would only make the scene worse. Her eyes grew wide and dark—in dread, of course.

  Gary couldn't believe what he was seeing. He moved his face closer to hers and her lips parted in anticipation, her breath coming warm, sweet, and rapid against his. Deliberately he tilted his head to one side, looking into stormy seas of emerald green, murky with longing and need. His heart was beating hard and wild in his chest. He could . . . He would calm the stormy seas, feed the need, and grant her every wish. Later. In private. Fully. And most thoroughly.

  "Rose," he murmured, their lips barely brushing. "You forgot my lunch."

  FOUR

  Redgrove was one of several small, New England-flavored lumber and fishing villages scattered along the rugged Pacific coastline between San Francisco and the Oregon border. Eureka being the most populated because of a choice natural harbor, and because it was the site of the world's largest redwood mills.

  Redgrove was a blink and a half long. Population: six hundred and two, in the early sixties before the Redwood National Park was established. No one had bothered to change the number on the sign since then. It was one of those tiresome and irritating little bus stops that motorists had to slow down from sixty-five to thirty-five miles per hour for fifteen minutes before they hit the main drag —along which most of the town's
residents lived.

  Once upon a time, Rose had done some traveling. She called it traveling, though her intent at the time had been to run away, to escape her past, present, and future in Redgrove. But when the skyscrapers of Chicago made her lonely for the mountains and the tall redwoods, when the Arizona desert didn't smell like the ocean and the waving fields of grain on the plains of Kansas and Montana were conspicuously lacking the sound of the breakers smashing against high bluffs, she came back to Redgrove declaring "travel" to be the only valid method of learning to appreciate what you have at home.

  Everyone but Earl had admired her freedom and independence, and her wisdom in "globe-trotting" while she was still young and unfettered enough to enjoy it. She'd scoffed at their definition of globe-trotting, knowing she'd seen only a small fraction of the world before she'd come crawling home. But Earl knew. Earl had answered the phone the night she'd called home crying, miserably homesick and pleading for the money to pay for a six-state bus ticket home.

  To this day she couldn't regret either decision. She couldn't see the ocean from her bedroom window, but she could smell it and feel it in the moist rolling fog, and if she was very quiet—didn't even breathe—she could hear the waves pounding the rocks on the beach less than a mile away. She could stand there and feel the notion she had of being safe among the ancient redwoods, protected from behind by the snow-capped mountains, secure in the regularity of the tides. They were just the little things, of course, things she took for granted—unless she was feeling uneasy or isolated inside.

  She stood there feeling exactly that, waiting for Gary. Uneasy and isolated. The sun was preparing to kiss the horizon, turning the sky mauve and magenta, as romantic as it was miraculous, as it was mysterious. She found no comfort in it.

  She hadn't been out to dinner with anyone but Earl and Harley in years. She'd "done" lunch with Justin several times—in broad daylight, without dancing, without the frightened squirrels in her stomach, and without the hope that she wasn't making another huge mistake.

  "Mom?" Harley's voice had been cracking like cheap china all day. It made her smile.

  "What?"

  "Are you ready? It's almost six-thirty."

  She rolled her eyes heavenward. What a nag! Harley had been pestering her about this "big date" since she'd come home from work at four-thirty. "Aren't you going to take a bath? Use a little extra of that stinky rose stuff. It smells nice." "You're not wearing jeans, are you? He's gonna think there's something wrong with your legs. Don't you have anything with a skirt on it?" "Would it kill you to use some lipstick or something?"

  "Yes, Harley, I'm ready to go."

  "Get out of the window," he said, appearing in the doorway—for a final inspection no doubt. "He'll think you're watching for him."

  “I am.”

  "Well, don't. And I'll get the door when he gets here." He stepped into the room, eyeing her attire. "Nothing shorter, huh?"

  "Harley," she said, half shocked, looking down at the hem of her short denim skirt. She could already feel a cool breeze on the backs of her thighs. How much shorter did he want it? "Women my age begin to have sagging body parts, you know. If this were any shorter, my bottom would hang out."

  "You still have nice legs. Can’t hurt to show’em off a little."

  “You think so?" she asked, checking for herself, inordinately flattered by her son's praise. Her son's praise, it occurred to her. "You know, I don't think other sons would be encouraging their mothers to wear shorter skirts for some man they hardly know. What is it with you and this dinner? You aren't invited, you know."

  "I know," he said, looking young and shy for a second. "I've just never seen you go out with anyone before." He shrugged. "I mean, I was thinking about it . . . and, well, I asked Grampa. He said you hadn't been out with a man since ... my dad. How come?"

  She looked away to consider her answer, moving slowly toward the bed to sit down. "No interest, I guess. It was hard to trust men after your dad, and then later, when you were little and I was working at the plant, I was too busy and too tired to have much of an interest in men."

  "Was it because of me? Because I didn't have a dad? Because men don't want women with kids?"

  "No," she said without hesitation.

  "I remember men coming to the house, asking you out. But you never went with them."

  "I didn't want to. It had nothing to do with you." A brief pause. "As I recall, most of them would follow you home from somewhere or another, telling me what a great kid you were. That little league coach you had made me really nervous. I kept thinking that if you ever came up missing, he'd have kidnapped you. Your third grade teacher was the same way."

  "So, how come you didn't date 'em?"

  "I told you. I didn't want to."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know," she said, frowning, feeling annoyed for no good reason in particular. "It was easier that way." She laughed. "Men think women are weird, but it's really the other way around. You're just a young man, but you're getting weirder every day."

  "Don't you get lonely?" he asked. His green eyes that were so like her own were solemn and grave. Even as a small child he'd had these profoundly thoughtful moments when he seemed like a very wise, very troubled old man trapped in a kid's innocence.

  "I have you. And Grampa," she said, a standard mother's answer that clearly didn't satisfy him. She knew what he was asking, and he knew it. "I do get lonely. Sometimes. It passes. And then I'm glad it's just you and me and Earl."

  "It won't be forever, you know," he said, reminding her that both he and Earl were getting older. They both listened to a car coming to a slow stop out front.

  "I'll deal with that then," she said, rising to her feet. "In the meantime I'm happy with things the way they are, so you can stop trying to pawn me off on some unsuspecting man. Okay?"

  He grinned, looking too savvy by far. "I don't think this guy is unsuspecting, Mom."

  The squirrels were awake and clawing at her insides again.

  "He is a little obvious, isn't he?"

  "Lu said he could have lit up a neon sign this afternoon in the diner."

  "He could have lit up Las Vegas," she muttered when he left the room to answer the knock at the door downstairs. She felt a fresh wash of mortification recollecting the moment she'd realized he wasn't going to kiss her right there behind the lunch counter. The unexpected disappointment had been staggering, and he'd grinned when it showed on her face. "The jerk."

  He didn't deserve all the trouble she'd gone to, shaving her legs and putting on makeup. She pulled the carefully tucked cotton blouse from the waistband and knotted the tails in front so he wouldn't think she cared how she looked. Then she frowned down on the little black smudge across the toe of the white sneakers she'd put on, hoping she'd feel lighter on her feet when the time came.

  This was exactly why she didn't date. A lot of trouble and fuss for nothing. She'd mention this to Harley tomorrow, she decided, walking into the living room.

  "Look, Mom. Flowers," Harley said, grinning, indicating the clay pot in Gary's hands. One leaf and a thin green stub of a stem protruded from the center of it. "Eventually."

  "It's a-refugee," Gary told her, his expression announcing his delight in seeing her again. "A little love and kindness, and it'll be a red begonia someday."

  How appropriate.

  Rose tucked her tongue into her cheek and graciously accepted the near dead vegetation without comment—however, both Harley and Gary saw the amusement in her eyes and knew it was a favorable omen.

  He hadn't been sure of the reception he'd get. Earlier she had thrust his plate of meatloaf into his hands and promptly disappeared into the kitchen while he ate. His new friend Danny O'Brian had passed him some meaningful glances in relation to the amount of noise she'd made with the pots and pans, but she hadn't even said good-bye when he left.

  Rose set the grocery store reject in the kitchen window where it could catch the morning sun—and where she might remem
ber to water it once in a while. She took a moment to collect herself.

  She didn't want to enjoy Gary Albright or his silly sense of humor. She didn't want to like him or the pleasurable feelings he stirred in her. She was determined not to have a good time in his company. Let's face it, what woman in her right mind, who wasn't looking for a relationship in the first place, would choose to go out with a garbageman?

  Hmmm. On the other hand, who else would she go out with? Who would be safer? Now, that was a consoling thought. If she started to feel the slightest bit attracted to him, all she had to do was remind herself that he was a garbageman.

  Not that there was anything wrong with garbagemen as a whole, mind you. And she was sure there was an auxiliary association of garbagemen's wives somewhere, too. She simply wasn't interested in joining.

  “You have plenty of gas?" she heard Harley asking.

  "Yes, sir," Gary answered, playing along good-naturedly.

  "I want her home in time to fix my lunch for school tomorrow. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, sir."

  She watched Harley slip an arm around her date's shoulder and turn him away, speaking in hushed tones. Her face burned hot as a torch when Gary nodded another "yes, sir" and patted the wallet in his rear pants pocket with his hand.

  "Harley, honey," she said, taking his hand to lead him away, refusing to hear Gary's chuckle, avidly avoiding the expression on his face. She led her only son back to the kitchen, muttering, "You will not live to see morning." Adding in a louder voice, "Don't forget that you need to cook supper for you and Grampa. I left the directions there on the counter. Follow them."

  An inch or two taller than she, he bent his head to her and whispered, "Do you have a quarter in your sock ... just in case?"

  She stuck a finger in his face and wordlessly told him that he'd crossed the line. By several miles.

  He grinned. "Try to have fun," he whispered with an impulsive peck to her cheek

  "You are the worst son I've ever had, but I love you anyway," she told him.