Small Town Girl

up on the waistband of her panty hose.' Tess burst out laughing while Kenny went on. 'She turned her back to me to sit down in her desk chair and I looked through my office door and raised a finger as if to say, 'Hey, Miriam, guess what?' but, hell's afire, you ever tried to tell your secretary that you just got a wide-angle shot of her hind end? Wouldn't have been so bad if it was a shapely one, but you've seen Miriam, haven't you?'

'No, I haven't.' Tess was still laughing.

'You haven't! Well, Miriam's the kind of woman that if you ran into her at a bar you'd say, 'Hey, Miriam, pull up a couple o' stools and let me buy you a drink!' '

Tess's laughter billowed once more, igniting his own, and they spent some enjoyable time letting it pour forth across a couple hundred miles of telephone wire. When their mirth wound down, Tess wound right down with it. She released a huge breath, stretched out in her chair and ran a hand up the back of her hair. 'Gosh, I feel so much better.'

'Well, of course you do,' he said smugly. 'I'm good for you.'

'You really are, Kenny. Too good.'

They enjoyed the thought for a few beats before he inquired, 'So tell me-where are you right now?'

'Still in my office on Music Row.'

'Time for you to call it a day, isn't it?'

'Yes. Actually, I'm really tired tonight, and kind of cranky. At least I was until I talked to you.' They were both affected by the significance of what she'd said and sat awhile absorbing it.

'So,' she asked, more quietly, 'is Faith there tonight?'

It took him a moment to answer. His voice had grown subdued. 'No, just Casey and me.'

'I really called to talk to Casey. I got her graduation announcement and the invitation to the party on Saturday. Wish I could be there, but… I'm afraid I can't.' Her disappointment was unmistakable.

'I wish you could be here, too.'

Tess knew she should end the conversation and ask him to put Casey on the line, but she simply could not let him go yet. Outside, in the distance, a siren crescendoed and faded, and down the hall a fax beeped and started printing while she imagined the sound of crickets in the backyards in Wintergreen, and him on the kitchen phone, and Casey in her room playing her guitar, and the soft summer evening settling blue upon the gardens. She pictured the houses with their backs to each other, and the aged, narrow sidewalks that had carried them toward one another during their many encounters in the alley. She wanted with incredible intensity to be there, to step out onto her mother's stoop and see him walking toward her through the warm May night. She wanted to glide into his embrace and feel and smell and taste him once again. Instead, she could only imagine him and wonder if he'd detected the slight tremor in her voice, if he understood how valiantly she was trying not to be jealous, to be realistic about what could and could not happen between them.

'I suppose Faith is doing the party for Casey.'

'Yes. She's been making grocery lists, and ordering party trays, and the two of them have been digging through old photo albums and putting together a bulletin board of old pictures.'

Tess had never longed to be a mother, but at that moment she would cheerfully have traded places with Faith Oxbury. On Tess's desk were pictures of her nieces and nephews, the only 'children' she would probably ever have. Her eyes lingered on them, then she drove another thorn into her own flesh with a question that had been hovering in her mind for some time.

'Kenny, may I ask you something?'

'Sure.' Funny how a single syllable with sandpaper edges could give away how a man feels.

'When Casey moves away, will Faith be moving in with you?'

He took some time answering, time while Tess discov-ered she was holding her breath and cataloguing each beat of her heart.

'I don't think so, Tess. This is a small town. Living arrangements like that are frowned upon.'

She released the breath slowly and closed her eyes while they clung to their phones and listened to the clanging silence of things unsaid. It was torment and bliss reading between the lines, learning that each of them had missed and been missed, wondering how far to go in this conversation, which was getting dangerously intimate. Finally, when the ache in Tess's throat became too great to disregard, she clamped a hand across her forehead and uttered, 'Jesus, I miss you, Kenny.'

Like the rests in music, the silences in the conversation had become as vital as the spoken words. This one held them both by the throats. When he spoke at last, his voice held a note of frustration.

'I've already told you, I miss you, too, but what do you want from me, Tess? I can't stop my life for you!'

'I know. I know! I don't expect you to. But what if… what if…'

Silence.

A great, groaning, silence reaching across the distance.

'What if what?' he finally said.

'I don't know,' she admitted haltingly. 'I want… I want… to… to be with you… sometime… that's all. Just to be with you, do you understand?'

'To do what? Have an affair?'

'No!' Then more honestly, 'I don't know, but a piece of my heart stayed in Wintergreen when I left, and I feel as if I left it there with you for safekeeping. Nothing's the same since I came back to Nashville, but I'd die without this, Kenny. I'd just die. This is my life! Yet I'm dying without you, too. I'm just so mixed up.'

They thought for a while, groping for a solution, finding none.

Finally he spoke. 'Maybe you love me, Tess. You ever think of that?'

'Yes, I have.'

'But you wouldn't allow yourself to say it to me before you left, and you wouldn't let me say it to you.'

'It's too scary. It would bring too many complications.'

'For who? You or me?'

'Both of us.'

'And you won't say it now.'

'Because I'm not sure!'

'But you want me to end it with Faith-why?'

'I didn't say that!'

'No, but you hinted at it. You don't seem to understand that while Nashville and your career are your life, I've got one, too, and Faith is a big part of it.'

'All right, all right! I don't want to argue, and anyway, it's silly, because we're arguing about something that's not even logical. I mean, I'm here, you're there, you have your business, I have my career and I'm gone a hundred and twenty days a year! Anybody with half a brain can see that what we've got here is a logistical stalemate, so I don't even know why we're on the subject!'

'Because we miss each other, that's why. And because maybe-just maybe we really are falling in love, so the question is, do we run away from it or face it?'

'Kenny, I called to RSVP an invitation to a graduation party. How did this conversation get so complicated?'

'What I'm trying to get you to understand is that it's complicated not only for you, but for me as well. And you know what? We are starting to argue, so what do you say we wish each other good night and I'll put Casey on? We can talk about this another time.'

'Fine,' Tess retorted with a note of stubbornness.

'Fine,' he repeated. Then nothing happened.

'So put Casey on!' Tess ordered.

'Okay,' he barked, equally frustrated. 'But let's get one thing straight. It was more than a roll in the grass and we both know it!' The phone clunked and she heard him holler, 'Hey, Casey, it's Tess!'

Casey came on quickly, exuberant, a big smile in her voice. 'Hey, woman! Less than a week and I'll be there!'

'I know. Can't wait.'

'I'll be there Sunday afternoon-no, wait! Monday. Memorial Day.'