All in all, it had been a horseshit day when she picked up the phone to dial Casey’s house at nine o’clock that night.
As she’d feared, Kenny answered.
“Hello?”
Perhaps she was working too hard, perhaps it was the PMS, but for whatever reason, hearing Kenny’s friendly voice unglued her. Without the slightest warning, she began to cry. Trying to disguise the fact, she failed to reply immediately.
“Hello?” Kenny repeated, sharper. Then, growing irritated, he barked, “Hello, who is this?”
“Kenny, it’s T-Tess,” she managed.
“Tess, what’s wrong?” he said, the change from irritation to concern immediate in his voice.
“N-nothing,” she blubbered, then, “… everything. Hell, I don’t know. It’s just been an awful day, that’s all.”
“Tess,” he said, the way he might to a child, soothing. “Hey, come on, darlin’, nothing’s so bad it won’t feel better if you talk about it. I’m here, you can talk to me.”
She felt better already, so decided to baby herself a little, something she rarely did. “Hey, Kenny, would you call me darlin’ one more time? It sounds good tonight.”
“Darlin’,” he repeated matter-of-factly, “now you go ahead and talk. What was so awful today?”
So she talked. She admitted to Kenny that her empire was getting to be more than she could handle without relinquishing personal control. But there were so many stories about superstars whose dominions had crumbled under mismanagement, whose agents or accountants or business managers had cheated the stars they worked for, undermining them to the point of ruin.
“I’m not going to let that happen to me!” she vowed. “And the surest way to let it happen is to give over control to someone else. That’s why I watch everything so carefully.” Under questioning, she admitted she was keeping tabs on more than any one human being should be expected to, and she’d been doing it for eighteen years while her business concerns grew and grew.
“You’ve got to learn to delegate,” Kenny said. “That’s what you pay these people for.”
“I know. But look what happened to Willie Nelson. He’s probably still putting on concerts to pay off his debts.”
“Is there someone you employ whom you don’t trust?”
“Well …” She thought for a second. “No.”
“There,” he said reasonably, “it’s you, not them. You know, Tess, it’s possible that you think of yourself as omnipotent, and when you come right down to it, that’s a pretty egotistical attitude, isn’t it? Did you ever think that by not trusting them more, you undermine them? By placing your full, unadulterated trust in them you might get more production out of them, more cooperation, certainly a pride in their work that will boost their egos. And you know what happens to output when egos get boosted.”
She knew he was right, knew, too, that most people wouldn’t have had the temerity to say something like that to Tess McPhail because of who she was. She respected him for his honesty as well as for his sound advice. “How did you get so wise, Mr. Kronek?” she asked, feeling much better, her frustration and weariness dissipating.
He chuckled quietly. “By running a two-person office with such a grinding routine that the last time either one of us surprised the other was when Miriam came out of the bathroom with the hem of her skirt accidentally hooked 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.”
“Your room is waiting. I won’t be able to get up there for your party on Saturday though. I’m sorry, hon.”
“Aw, shoot, I knew that,” Casey said cheerfully, “but I wanted to send you an invitation anyway.”
“I should have called earlier, but I was trying to think of a way to work it out.”
“It’s okay.”
“I thought of something I can send you for a graduation gift though, but you’ll have to keep it to yourself.”
“What’s that?”
“How would you like to hear the songs from my new album before anybody else outside of Nashville gets to hear them?”
“Oh, my gosh, Mac, are you serious!! You’re sending me that?”
“I can’t wait to have you hear them, but you have to promise me you won’t let anybody else hear the tape. Jack would have a shit fit if he found out I’m letting it go out. Promise?”
“Not even Dad?” Casey sounded disappointed.
“Well … maybe your dad, but nobody else. Not Faith, not Brenda or Amy, or anybody else. Just you and your dad, okay?”
“You got my promise, Mac.”
“All right, then. I’ll see you next Monday, and you and I will celebrate your graduation when you get down here.”
“Darn right. When do we get to go into the studio?”
“On Tuesday. Jack’s got it all scheduled.”
“Jeez, I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation! It’s just too awesome to believe.”
“Well, believe it. Now let me go. It’s late and I’m still at the office and I want to go home.”
“Okay … six days, woman!”
“Six days. See you then.”
• • •
Those six days passed as swiftly as fallen leaves on a river. A blink of the eye and another day was gone. Another blink, another day. Tess Express Mailed a tape of her album-in-progress to Casey. She had Maria stock one of the guest suites with bathroom sundries, and the refrigerator with foods that a teenager would like. She tried not to think of Kenny, and for the most part, succeeded. There were major concerns that kept her mind occupied, the most important of which was the continuing throat problem of Carla Niles.
Nobody had thought much of it months ago when her voice began cracking and turning hoarse. A cold, they’d thought, or some upper-respiratory thing. But when it kept on, she’d begun voice lessons, hoping that proper technique might help. Several weeks into the lessons, when the problems continued, she’d consulted a doctor, who’d told her, “There’s nothing wrong with your voice.” So she’d gone on using it, which—in the end—turned out to be the worst thing she could have done.
Carla finally saw a throat specialist. His report came in on the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day. He told Carla she had a hypothyroid condition, that her body had quit producing thyroid hormones, affecting her vocal chords. The doctor ordered her to quit using her voice—not even to whisper!—for one month. After that, he said, even with medication it could take up to two years for Carla’s voice to return to normal.
The news threw the McPhail camp into a tizzy. With rehearsals already begun for the concert tour, Jack Greaves, Dane Tully, Ross Hardenberg and Tess brainstormed about who they could get as a replacement. The town was full of girl singers playing the small clubs who aspired to get a record contract. A stint as backup singer for Tess McPhail could jump-start any one of their careers. Ross came up with a list, and at the top was a twenty-two-year-old named Liza Lyman whom Tess had heard and liked.
“But I’m not sure her range is right,” Tess said.
“We can get her in and give her a try,” Ross suggested. “Think about it over the weekend, and we’ll talk about it again Tuesday at the session.”
It was a hot, bright afternoon when Casey was expected. Maria had the holiday weekend off, so Tess had the house to herself. Given the size of the place, it seemed a shame it had held so few overnight guests, and none who had been as eagerly awaited. Tess found herself happy and anxious as she checked the house one last time. She had chosen the light blue suite for Casey. It had furniture of natural pine. On the bed a puffy coverlet of oversized blue-and-white checks brought the Tennessee sky into the room through lots of windows whose white shutters were folded aside. Tess gave the room a quick perusal: the flowers on the dresser, the blue towels in the bathroom, the shampoo and soap in the shower, the bubble bath on the tub. She turned on the sound system and two lights in the bedroom as well, just to give it that welcoming feel.
The guest wing held three suites, and maybe Tess had been foolish, but she’d also prepared one for Kenny.
He hadn’t said a word about driving Casey down; neither had Tess asked. She regretted it now. Why hadn’t she? Afraid he’d say no, maybe, and take
away her anticipation.
She’d always referred to his suite as the dark blue one, though it was not dark at all. It was done with eggshell walls and shutters and navy blue paisley bedding, a more masculine room with mission-style furniture and terra-cotta accents. She had gone downtown Friday, to a little shop in the District, and bought talcum and soap wrapped in oat-meal brown paper that smelled woodsy—something a man would like. And she’d taken one yellow lily out of the bouquet in Casey’s room and put it in a bud vase beside the navy blue hand towels in Kenny’s bathroom.
She stood in his bedroom doorway with her hands knotted together, wondering what he would think if she invited him to stay overnight before heading back to Wintergreen.
She realized, with some surprise, that she wanted him to see her house, wanted him to observe firsthand what she’d achieved, what kind of lifestyle her success had afforded her—this cool, neutral place of spacious comfort that she’d never actually wanted much until now. Now she wanted it so that she could show him she was capable of choosing, staffing and decorating a place like this. A home.
She entered his room one last time and turned on the sound system beside the bed, leaving the volume low. At the west windows she adjusted the banks of shutters to let in the afternoon light but keep out the sun.