He laughed, too, and rose. “Good luck, Mary,” he said quietly, then took her by both jaws, leaned over and kissed her forehead.
“Thanks, dear.”
The kitchen was small. He turned to leave and found Tess in his way, the coffeepot clutched in her right hand, her eyes bulging with anger. “Excuse me,” he said, and moved around her as if she were a stranger on an elevator.
When the screen door closed, she was left behind, blushing.
Tess McPhail was unaccustomed to being treated like a tree stump. Where she moved, people paid attention. Fans loved her. Radio stations vied for her interviews. People in restaurants asked for her autograph. Her agent thought she was the greatest female talent he had represented in his career. Her producer said she had an ear for a hit and the talent to perform it that had elevated his status to that of star in his own right simply for having worked with her. She had the business and home telephone numbers of all the hierarchy from MCA Records, who picked up their phones the moment they learned she was on the other end of the line.
Yet if Kenny Kronek had been a dog with a natural urge, he’d have raised his leg on her ankle.
The moment he left she slammed the coffeepot on the burner, spun to the table and began throwing some dishes into stacks. “Well!” she exploded, marching to the sink and whacking them down. “Since when did he become the man of the house?”
“Now, Tess, don’t be ungrateful. There are lots of times when one of the kids can’t get over here to help me, and Kenny is more than willing. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“I could see that.”
“Why, Tess, what are you so upset about?”
“I’m not upset! But he comes right in here like he owns the place! And who’s Casey?”
“His daughter, and will you stop throwing my dishes around?”
“I suppose she walks in here without knocking, too!”
The truth hit Mary. “Why, Tess, you’re upset because he didn’t pay any attention to you!”
“Oh, Mother … really. Give me a little credit.”
“I give you all the credit in the world when you deserve it, but not when you criticize Kenny. And I said to quit throwing my dishes around. You’re going to break them.”
“If I do I’ll buy you some new ones. Just look at these old pieces of junk anyway! They’re all chipped and the gold color is worn right off the edges! Why don’t you buy some new ones with the money I send you? Come to think of it, why don’t you buy anything with the money I send you?”
“I like those old dishes. They’ve been around since your dad was alive, so please take some care.”
“Mother, you shouldn’t let a man just come walking into your house whenever he pleases!”
“Oh, Tess, just listen to yourself. He’s my neighbor. What are you getting all worked up about? I knew his mother for forty years.”
“He’s rude.”
“Not to me he’s not.”
“No, just to me!”
“Can you blame him? You just got done telling me how awful you used to treat him.”
Tess made no reply. She turned on the tap, filled the sink with soapy water and began washing the dishes, a job she abhorred. Five years ago she’d offered to build her mother a new house with a dishwasher and air-conditioning and anything she wanted! Five years! But would Mary say yes? Of course not. Instead here was Tess, washing dishes by hand and glaring out a window at Kenny Kronek’s house!
“All right! So he aggravated me, but the man is a complete boor!”
Her mother found a dish towel hanging inside a cupboard door and picked up a wet plate. “I don’t want to argue with you, Tess. You never thought much of Kenny, I don’t expect that to change now. But he has been good to me, and it makes me feel good to know he’s right across the alley anytime I need him.”
Tess took the towel and plate out of her mother’s hands. “I’ll do the dishes. You go do whatever you want to—lie down and rest, read, get your things ready for tomorrow.”
Mary glanced wistfully toward the living room. “Well … the nurse did give me some special soap that I’m supposed to take a bath with tonight, and then again in the morning.”
“Go ahead, take your bath while I clean up the kitchen. Do you need help with anything?”
“No … no, I can manage.”
When Mary was gone, Tess gripped both ends of the dish towel and snapped it into a straight line, staring again out the window. Four weeks, she thought. I’ll be crazy before two. A moment later the water could be heard running in the bathroom and Tess continued cleaning up the kitchen, trying to ignore the presence of the house across the alley and the fact that its owner had just snubbed her royally.
She could see his kitchen window through this one, and occasionally a head moving past it. The glass porch, which had been added to the back of the house in the sixties, was also lit up, though nobody was in it. Tess had dim memories of playing in it with Kenny when they were both toddlers and their mothers were having coffee together. More clearly she remembered balking at going there to play with him as she grew older.
She was nearly finished washing dishes when the front door opened and a familiar female voice called, “Tess, you here?”
Renee. Tess’s heart gladdened at the sound of her other sister’s voice, even as she quashed the instinct to run toward her with a hug. Instead, she waited for Renee to appear in the kitchen doorway. Momentarily Renee did—a dark-haired, tall and classically pretty woman with a face composed of smooth lines, like a Walt Disney drawing of a princess. The middle of the three McPhail girls, Renee was thirty-eight but looked thirty. She was dressed in a pastel blue skirt and blouse with a white sweater tied over her shoulders. Her collar-length auburn hair looked as if she’d been driving with her windows down.
“You are here!” she rejoiced, opening her arms and smiling broadly.
“Hi, you little shit.”
Renee laughed, got Tess in a hug and rocked her like a bowling pin. “What do you mean, little shit?”
“You know what I mean, ordering me to come home and take care of Momma. I’m so mad at you I could choke you.”
Renee found it amusing. “Well, if that’s what it took to get you home, I guess we did the right thing.”
“You probably got me in a heap of trouble, you know that, don’t you?”
“Oh, come on,” Renee said disparagingly.
“I’ve got a record contract and I’m supposed to be in a studio recording right now.”
“And I’m supposed to be at home putting supper on the table for my family, but I’ve been off running down twenty-five potted violets for the tables at a wedding reception, and taste-testing Florentine chicken at a caterer’s and trying to find anyone with a white horse-drawn carriage because Rachel insists they’re going to arrive at the church in a carriage, and the only ones I can find in the whole country are black and look like they hauled Robert E. Lee through the battlefront.”
“Do you know that I had to cancel seven appearances because of this?”
“What do you think we had to cancel the last time Momma had surgery?”
They were no longer hugging but leaning back taking each other’s measure.
“But it’s easier for you,” Tess reasoned. “You live here.”
“Try that argument on Judy and see how far it gets you.”
“Judy. Ha! I won’t have too much to say to Judy after the way she talked to me on the phone.”
“She’s disgusted with you, too. Has been for the last ten years because you never come home.”
“What do you mean, I never come home? I come home!”
“Sure. Once a year or so when your schedule permits. Honey-pie, families deserve more than that.”
“But you don’t understand.”
“Sure we do. You’ve got your priorities.”
“Renee-ay!”
“Te-ess,” her sister aped in the same singsong.
“I expected this
out of Judy, but not out of you.”
Renee said simply, “It’s your turn, Tess, and you know it.”
They were at a stalemate. Tess returned to the sink, pulled the plug and let the water drain. She squeezed out the dishcloth and swiped it over the faucets, then turned and gestured toward the bathroom, whispering, “She’s gonna drive me nuts!”
Renee, too, kept her voice lowered. “It’s only for four weeks, then I can help her once the wedding’s over.”
“But I don’t live like this anymore … eating pecan pie and washing dishes by hand, for heaven’s sake.”
“For the next four weeks you do.”
“She just doesn’t understand, I have to keep in shape. It’s part of my public image, and I can’t go eating Tater Tot hot dish and pecan pie with whipped cream!”
Renee held Tess in place by her rolled-up T-shirt sleeves, looking straight into her amber eyes. “She’s your mother. She loves you. It’s how she shows it.” She dropped her hands. “And how in the world would she know what you eat anymore? You’re never around.”
Apparently this was going to be a repeated refrain during Tess’s time back home; she had difficulty stifling a retort, for none of her family had the vaguest idea of the immensity of the commitments she made and how many people were affected by them. They all thought she was merely caught up in fame, and that whenever she picked up a telephone or received an overnight package she was grandstanding. Any protestations to the contrary would fall on deaf ears.
“Is she in bed already?” Renee asked.
“No, she’s taking a bath.”
“Well, I’ll go tap on her door and say hi and good-bye. I gotta get home. Just wanted to stop by and see if you got here okay.”
Renee went through the living room into a small hall alcove where she tapped on the bathroom door with her car key.
“Momma? Hi, it’s Renee, but I can’t stay. Everything go okay today at your pre-op?”
“Just fine. Can’t you wait till I get out?”
“Sorry, gotta get home and feed my family, but I’ll be there in the morning before they wheel you in, okay?”
“Okay, dear. Thanks for stopping by.”
“Anything you need?”
“Nothing I can think of. But if there is, Tess can get it for me, and Kenny offered, too.”
“Okay, then, see you in the morning.”
When Renee came back through the living room Tess was there with her hands in the pockets of her jeans and one shoulder propped against the kitchen archway.
“Kenny again,” Tess said with a look of distaste that Renee missed.
“Thank heavens for Kenny. He treats her as if she’s his own mother. We should all be plenty grateful to him. Well, listen … gotta run.” Renee pecked Tess on the cheek. “See you in the morning, bright and early. She tell you what time she’s got to be there?”
“She told me.”
“Can you manage that?”
Tess rolled her gaze to the ceiling and mumbled, “I can’t believe this.”
‘Okay, okay—just asking.”
“I meet more schedules in one month than you and Judy will meet in your lifetime.”
“Not at that time of day.”
“Will you stop treating me like the baby of the family!”
“Okay, all right … I’m going. See you tomorrow.”
Tess followed her sister and stood in the front vestibule watching her drive off in a blue van. Evening had fallen and the street was quiet. In the bathroom the tub started draining. The smell in the vestibule never seemed to change. It was one she associated with changeless places from her past—public libraries and churches and school buildings mat still had wood floors. The floor in the vestibule was oak, the bound rug old and jute-backed, and the smell was stuffy, like the clothing of old people who don’t go outside enough. The vestibule itself was a cramped cubicle with a door to outside and another to the living room, the kind that had been popular in another era before foyers had become integrated with living rooms. It had an antique mirror on the wall, and on the floor in one corner a tarnished brass container holding some old magazines. She stood there feeling disgruntled and misplaced, no longer comfortable in her mother’s house and not fully understanding why, wishing she were in the studio in Nashville where she belonged and knew her function and purpose. Here, she felt cast upon a foreign shore. Her connection to it was gone, and she was being blamed for that, yet all she was guilty of was success.
Her mother came out of the bathroom dressed in a flowered cotton nightie and duster that snapped up the front.
“Tess? Is Renee gone?”
“Yes. She had to get home.” Tess turned back into the living room where her mother was toweling her hair, releasing a strongly medicinal smell into the room. “Phew! What is that? It stinks.”
“They just called it antibacterial soap.”
“Can I comb your hair for you? I have my blow-dryer.”
“No, thanks, honey. Got my brush right here. I have to use the soap again in the morning anyway—orders from the hospital.”
The way Mary was moving Tess could tell she was in pain. “Is your hip worse, Momma?”
Mary put a hand to it and walked with a pronounced heel-slide, perching carefully on the overstuffed arm of a living-room chair whose height made it easier to use than the seat. “It’s hard getting in and out of the tub. Always makes it worse.”
This time when Tess made her point she did so in much gentler tones than earlier when she was upset with Kenny Kronek. “Then why wouldn’t you let me buy you a new house when I wanted to? You could have had a nice roomy shower instead of that cramped little tub.”
Mary waved off her remark and tried to make herself comfortable on the arm of the chair, but could not.
“Mom, what can I do for you?”
“Get me a bed pillow and I’ll stretch out on the sofa, then sit down and let’s talk.”
It took some time to get Mary reasonably comfortable on the sofa. When she was, she said, “Now tell me about the places you’ve been lately.”
Tess began giving highlights of the last couple months. After years of traveling by bus she owned her own jet, so she could now perform a concert in California one day and be in Nashville recording the next. Since it was not cost-efficient to employ a mechanic and pilot for a single jet, she had bought five and opened a plane-leasing service to defray the costs. She had been telling her mother how well the two-year-old company was doing but after only a few minutes Mary’s eyes grew heavy and got the intermittent glazed look of one who’s trying to give the impression of alertness. Realizing her conversation wasn’t getting through, Tess finally said, “Momma, you’re tired. Let me help you to bed.”
Mary stifled a yawn, and murmured, “Mmm … guess you’re right, honey. Have to be out by four-thirty anyway, so early-to-bed won’t hurt.”
Her mother’s bedroom had changed only slightly more than the rest of the house. It had a new bedspread and matching curtains, but the furniture was the same, sitting in the identical spots it always had, and the carpet hadn’t been replaced in all the years Tess could remember. On the chest of drawers her parents’ wedding picture shared the space with the same wooden key-and-change holder that had held flotsam from the pockets of the daddy she barely remembered. He had died in an accident while driving a U.S. Mail truck when she was six. The three girls’ portraits on the wall were the same ones that had been taken when they were all in elementary school and had hung on the pearlized beige-and-white wallpaper ever since.
What’s wrong with me, Tess thought, that so little of this evokes nostalgia? Instead, it raised a mild revulsion for the stifling changelessness of her mother’s life. How could Mary have lived all these years without replacing the carpet, let alone the man? She was an attractive woman, and a kind one, but she’d always said, “Nope. One man was enough for me. He was the only one I ever wanted.” As far as Tess knew, her mother had never even dated after his death.
Tess drew up the covers when Mary lay down, and bent over her with a heavy sadness in her heart for all that her mother had missed.
“Mom, how come you never married again after Daddy died?” she asked.
“I didn’t want to.”
“All these years?”
“I had you girls, then the grandchildren. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I was happy. I am happy.”
Tess tried to comprehend such unimaginative acceptance, but to her whose life was constantly filled with new faces and places, Mary’s life seemed stultifying. When Tess would have straightened, Mary reached up and took her face in both hands.
“I know you came home against your will, dear. I’m sorry that Judy and Renee made you.”
“No, Mom, I didn’t, honest.”
“Sure you did, but I don’t hold any grudge against you for it. Who wants to stop everything to take care of a lame old woman?”
“Mom, don’t be silly.”
Mary went on as if Tess hadn’t spoken. “But you know what I think? I think that the life you lead is wearing you out. That’s why I let the girls force you into coming home, ‘cause I think you needed it worse than I did.”
“Mom, they didn’t—”
Mary silenced her daughter with a touch on her lips. “No need to lie, Tess. I wasn’t born yesterday. I said it’s okay and it is. Will you make sure you get plenty of sleep yourself? We have to get going by four-thirty to be there by six, and that comes awful early. Now give me a kiss and turn out the lamp.”
She kissed her mother’s cheek and said, “Good night, Momma,” and turned out the light.
“You can leave my door open just a crack. I like the light reminding me you’re home again.”
Settling her mother for the night, carefully leaving the door ajar, Tess felt a pang of disillusionment. I’m not ready for this reversal of roles, she thought, as if I’ve become the mother and she’s become the child. The thought left her feeling trapped as she wandered restlessly around the living room, glancing at the piano, compressing one key soundlessly, wishing she could sit down and play. She leafed through some sheet music that had been left standing against the music rack, but Mary needed sleep, and the piano would keep her awake. In the kitchen only the stove light was on. Tess opened the refrigerator door, realized what she was doing, and closed it again, went to stare out the window over the sink at the lights coming from the house across the alley.