“Sure, you do.” Bonnie chuckled. “You’ll forget Clancy when you’re stone-cold dead and planted six feet down. Women don’t forget first loves, and they never forget a first love who did them dirty.”
Chapter 2
Angel flipped the light switch just inside the massive doors of her office and slipped off her shoes. She padded across the thick ivory carpet and plopped down in an oversize blue velvet chair behind an antique French provincial desk. She tossed the alumni newsletter on the desk, laced her hands behind her head, and tried to calm down.
She’d gone to the reunion to give her former classmates a dose of comeuppance. She had planned to leave with a smile on her face and never think about any of them again. Several former acquaintances made a point of stopping by the stage between songs and saying hello to her, but Clancy left just after the last song without a word. But then, what could he say? He’d made his choice ten years ago, and there was no room for a change of heart.
Angel got up and went to the window. Patty was the last one leaving the parking lot. The other women had already departed into the early-morning darkness. Next Friday they would be playing at a honky tonk just south of Davis, Oklahoma, and then a new band called The Gamblers would pick up the bus and have it repainted with their logo. It was high time for the Honky Tonk Band to go out with a flourish and retire. The girls enjoyed performing, but they needed their weekends these days.
Allie was married and her husband Tyler complained that he never saw her on weekends. Susan lived with her boyfriend Richie, and they wanted more quality time together. Bonnie was engaged and planning an October wedding, and Mindy was in the middle of a divorce. Besides, none of them were getting any younger. Angel sighed, looking around at her elegant office—and she had this oil business to run as well.
She thought about Tishomingo again. Main Street had changed a little in the past ten years. The courthouse was new, and the café where she and her grandmother indulged in an occasional burger had a different name these days. There was a new chiropractor’s office on the corner of Main and Broadway. Blake Shelton’s businesses were where a clothing store and a drug store used to stand. She’d looked upstream at Pennington Creek when they’d crossed the bridge over it into town, and noticed that it hadn’t changed at all. The same trees still shaded the sandbar below the dam. The memories of what had happened night after night on a blanket in the privacy of those trees were so real, she could almost smell Clancy’s aftershave.
Angel picked up the newsletter and began to read. Each page had a classmate’s name and a summary of their accomplishments in the past ten years. Apparently almost everyone had sent in the questionnaire whether they could attend the alumni banquet and the dance or not. She found her own entry and reread it.
Because of previous engagements, I’m not able to attend the banquet. However, my band and I—Angel and the Honky Tonk Band—will play for the dance free of charge if you would like. Let me know at the following address. Angela Conrad. She’d added a box number in Denison, Texas. But no one knew that she had rented the box for one month just for the return answer to her letter.
She scanned down the letter to what Clancy had written. Since leaving high school, he’d graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in geology and chemistry and a minor in education. He’d enlisted in the Air Force and had been stationed in Virginia for most of his four-year career and had gone to graduate school for a master’s degree in education. Just recently he’d come back to Oklahoma and started teaching in an Oklahoma City high school. Under Marital Status, he had marked an X beside Divorced.
So, he probably had married Melissa after all. But what had happened? By small town society’s rules, Mr. and Mrs. Clancy Morgan were supposed to be living happily ever after. Suddenly Angel wished she had subscribed to the Tishomingo weekly newspaper. Then at least she would have known who’d married whom, who had children, and so forth.
When her granny had driven their old green pickup truck out of Tishomingo that long-ago fall day, Angel hadn’t even looked back in the rearview mirror for one last glimpse of the place where she’d lived since she was three years old. She hadn’t left anything behind but heartaches, and she didn’t need to look back at the fading lights of town to recapture them. They would be with her forever.
She looked through the newsletter to see what Billy Joe Summers was doing these days. She hadn’t seen him at the dance even though she’d scanned the ballroom several times to see if there was a six-foot, five-inch gangly man standing shyly on the sidelines. Billy Joe had always been nice to her and that awful night on the sandbar when she’d sat with her feet in the warm water, it had been Billy Joe’s name that Clancy had mentioned so scornfully.
“Hello again, Mr. Henry.” Angel picked up a worn teddy bear sitting on top of her filing cabinet and held him, just for old times’ sake. Mr. Henry had listened sympathetically to all her tales of woe in the years since she’d been given him for her fifth birthday…and here she was, still feeling sorry for herself.
She wondered how her memories of Tishomingo could still be so vivid. After all, she hadn’t ever wanted to go back, even though she and her granny had lived there for fifteen years, since the day she’d turned three years old. Angel had spent her babyhood in nearby Kemp, and although they visited her great-grandpa at the farm there a couple
