Clancy burned his lip on the hot coffee and swore softly. “Damn it all,” he muttered, but he was angry with more than the coffee. He was mad at himself all over again as he remembered that hot August night when he’d gone to see her to break it off. Angela had been waiting for him in her usual place, with her feet in the water, wearing the same bikini that she’d worn all summer. Her jean shorts and that orange T-shirt that was too big for her were tossed up on the creek bank. Her brown curls were pulled back into a ponytail and she looked like a little girl. But then she was only five feet three inches tall and barely weighed a hundred and ten pounds.
He remembered telling her to marry Billy Joe Summers and her telling him to go to hell. And he’d never seen her again, from that night until now.
That night he’d gone to the Dairy Queen. Melissa was there and had flirted with him. They both wound up at Oklahoma University, and started dating during the first semester. At the end of the first semester, he had casually asked a former classmate about Billy Joe and Angela and learned that both had left Tishomingo at about the same time, and that was all anyone knew.
He and Melissa had married right after their college graduation, and she’d taught school while he was in the Air Force. He’d thought they were doing fine until the year she’d come home and told Clancy she wanted out. She’d fallen in love with the principal of her school and they were planning to marry as soon as the divorce was final. That had ended what he’d thought would be a military career. Clancy had come back to Oklahoma, gotten his master’s degree, and landed his present job teaching chemistry at an Oklahoma City high school.
He turned the pages until he found Billy Joe Summers’ name. Maybe Billy Joe lived in Denison, too…and maybe he’d married Angela after all, and they had had that pack of kids and she and her band played border town dives just to pay the bills.
But when Clancy read Billy Joe’s page, he felt just plain foolish. Billy Joe was gay, and Angela sure hadn’t looked poor. Two-bit bands that played for border town dives didn’t have customized buses, or smoke machines and their own knock-down stages, and none of them played at alumni reunions either. Angela and her band had done well, although evidently they hadn’t hit the big time. But she and Billy Joe had both done well. And now her name was Angel.
He’d called her that sometimes, he realized.
So just what in the hell was she up to? None of your damn business, his conscience told him. You gave up any rights to know what she was doing with her life that August night down by the creek when you were eighteen years old.
He turned out the light and went to the living room, where he leaned back in his father’s recliner and thought about Angela Conrad. His angel—once upon a time.
* * *
Angel turned off her office lights and pulled the door shut. She carried a burgundy leather briefcase in one hand and her laptop bag in the other. She pushed the button for the elevator to take her down to the ground-floor garage where her black Jaguar was parked. It was time to go home. The two-story Conrad Oil Enterprises, Inc., building disappeared in her rearview mirror as she drove to Main Street in Denison and then east on a farm road.
She thought about the first days when she and the girls had formed the band and played the border town dives in Cartwright, Colbert, Yuba, and Willis. They didn’t even have a name then, just a few instruments and a need to make a couple of dollars on the weekends to keep them in college. That was before Conrad Oil Enterprises had been even a glimmer of an idea.
One night they’d unloaded their equipment at the Dixie Pixie club in Yuba while an old man wearing faded overalls watched. He swilled his liquor from a Mason jar and said to his wife, a big woman in red stretch pants, “Well, looky here, Momma. There’s a pretty little angel with her honky tonk band. Guess we died and went to heaven.” The old man had named their band right then and Angel wondered if he was even around anymore to know how far she and the Honky Tonk Band had come in the past years.
She crossed the river bridge and turned left into Hendrix, Oklahoma, then drove several more miles to her farm. It was only twenty acres, but it was home, and home was where her heart was this morning.
The sun was an orange ball on the horizon when she pulled into the oval driveway. When she opened the car door, she could smell the welcoming fragrance of roses. Jimmy’s gardening skills kept the rosebushes looking wonderful, even if the Oklahoma winds and hot, blistering sun tried to rob the blooms at this time of year. But as she’d told him so many times, his thumbs were greener than spring grass, and he could make silk plants reproduce if he wanted to. The house was dark, but then she hadn’t expected her housekeeper Hilda to be there yet. She didn’t usually arrive until midmorning and then she left in the middle of the afternoon, unless Angel was there and needed her longer.
Angel opened the gate in the white picket fence surrounding the two-story farmhouse, which looked like it had been there since the turn of the century. But she’d had the house custom-built just four years before. It was her dream house, and Angel loved everything about it. Angel crossed the verandah that wrapped the house on three sides and noticed that the blue
