Love Mercy (3 page)

She was in the kitchen pulling Ace’s leash off the hook when the phone rang.

“Love, you got to get down to the café right now,” Magnolia said.

Love touched her right temple with her fingertips, already feeling a throbbing start. What had broken this time? Where would they get the money to fix it?

“There’s this girl here,” Magnolia said, her voice as big and lush as the curly black hair that drove her crazy. “She says she needs to talk to you. Darlin’, she favors you some around the mouth. I’m thinking she might be one of your granddaughters.”

One of her granddaughters? Love’s stomach twisted into a knot. Over the phone she could hear the café’s normal background sounds, a cacophony of rattling pans and loud laughter. Music twanged from the jukebox, a frenetic, vaguely country-sounding song. Love couldn’t make out who was singing, but it didn’t matter. As talented as they were, all those narrow-hipped, pretty young girls being pushed by the record companies looked and sounded so much alike. What happened to singers who’d actually lived a little life before they sang about it? Patsy Cline would be appalled. Or have a good belly laugh.

“I offered her one of my cannoli, but she turned me down flat.” Magnolia took it real personal when someone turned down her food. “She just ordered coffee. She’s sitting there staring at the wall and drinking it.”

“Maybe she just ate,” Love said, making excuses for the girl before she even knew whether they were related.

“Maybe so.” Magnolia’s voice sounded doubtful. “Her arms are as skinny as broom handles. A little cannoli would do her a world of good. She said she hitchhiked here.”

“Hitchhiked? From where?” The last Love knew, her three granddaughters and their ditzy mother, Karla Rae, lived in Pensacola, Florida, with Karla’s second husband, Pete somebody-or-other, who owned two Ford dealerships. Love hung Ace’s leash back up. “Did she tell you her name?”

“Nope,” Magnolia said. “Believe me, I tried to squeeze it out of her, but she’s a persimmony little thing. All she said is that she has some business with Love Mercy Johnson, then she shut herself up, tight as a tick. What should I tell her? I said I’d call you but that I wasn’t about to just hand out your address to any ole person who asked. I told her that, for all I know, she was a serial killer.”

Love smiled to herself. “What did she say to that?”

“Not a blessed thing. Just nodded her head and held on to her banjo case like I was going to snatch it from her first chance I got.”

Banjo case? Love tried to picture one of her granddaughters fitting her tiny hands around the neck of a banjo. Then again, she hadn’t seen them for almost fourteen years. They wouldn’t be tiny anymore.

“How old does she look?” Love asked. She had three granddaughters: Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Faith Leann. Their names screamed out their mama’s unfulfilled aspirations. Pursuing her singing career was the reason Karla Rae and Tommy had moved to Nashville. Love quickly calculated her granddaughter’s ages; Patsy would be nineteen now, Loretta would be eighteen and Faith would be fourteen. Faith had been a baby when Tommy was killed. He’d been driving to the Piggly Wiggly to buy diapers for her when a truck broadsided his little Toyota.

Lord, don’t let it be Faith, Love automatically sent up a prayer before catching herself. She’d stubbornly been avoiding conversations with God since Cy had died. Still, she didn’t take back the prayer, despite a slight feeling of guilt, because the mental image of a fourteen-year-old girl bearing Tommy’s sweet, round face hitchhiking on a desolate highway made her blood freeze in her veins.

“Eighteen? Twenty?” Magnolia guessed.

“It must be Patsy or Loretta,” she said, only slightly relieved. “I’ll walk on over. Tell her any food she orders is on my tab. Maybe she doesn’t have any money and is too embarrassed to say so.”

“Okay, but my guess is she has one of those eating disorders so popular with movie stars and whatnot.”

“Let’s hope she’s just broke.” Love wouldn’t have a clue about how to deal with an eating disorder.

After she hung up, she thought of a question she should have asked Magnolia. Did the girl have red hair? If so, she would probably be Patsy. Loretta had brown hair, like Tommy. At least she did all those years ago. So many years, it felt like someone else’s life.

She walked over to the kitchen window that looked out onto her small, grass-covered backyard. Morro Bay and the Pacific Ocean looked like a huge sheet of gray steel. So flat you could fry bacon on it, she could imagine Cy’s voice saying in his calm, even baritone that always held a soupçon of laughter.

Soupçon. Now there’s a great word. Maybe she could work it into “Love’s View,” the column she wrote once a month for
San Celina County Life
, a local magazine delivered free to everyone in the county. Well, it wasn’t actually a column, she’d tell people, more of a columnette or a column-lite. Though she loved to read and found individual words fascinating, she didn’t actually like to write, so what she did was take a photograph of something in San Celina County and then write a short essay about it. The shorter the better. Frankly, she’d be happier if she didn’t have to write anything at all, just let the photograph speak for itself. Whenever she tried to explain what she was trying to say with a photo, it seemed to diminish the picture. It was like admitting she’d failed.

January’s photo and column were done. She’d taken a picture of an elegantly graceful spider with patterns on her back that reminded Love of a Navajo rug. She—for some reason Love thought of all spiders as female—had built an intricate web at the side of the house, and Love had been observing its progress for days. Her photograph caught it early in the morning, the sun-bright dewdrops on the filaments twinkling like diamonds. In the web, an unfortunate fly awaited its ghastly fate. Her simple caption, “Bless this food we are about to receive,” was sure to be misunderstood, causing people to write in to the magazine demanding that she explain what she meant. Some people would be certain that she was somehow being blasphemous or, even worse,
political
(though they wouldn’t actually be able to explain why). The boys at the Rowdy Pelican saloon would give her the thumbs-up when she delivered their weekly two dozen Mexican chocolate cupcakes, appreciating her warped sense of humor. It was her shortest “essay” yet. Clint Lawhead, the magazine’s owner and publisher, would just laugh, congratulate her for making people think and tease her that it would have saved him a bundle if he’d negotiated paying her by the word rather than the 150 dollars she received for each column.

Soupçon. It meant a very small amount. She imagined a photo of one of the café’s white soup bowls holding a teaspoon of bright red tomato soup, maybe a dented Campbell’s soup can next to it? No, too Andy Warhol. Besides, she didn’t really know what she was trying to say: that soup, which symbolized food, was too expensive? No, not a good thing to put out there when she was contemplating raising the prices at the café. Still, she liked the way the word sounded. And even better, it was a single word. It could be her shortest column ever. But the idea needed work.

She looked down at Ace, who’d followed her to the window, wagging his soupçon of a tail, still hoping for a walk. She bent down and ran her hand along the white, airplane-shaped marking on the black ruff of his neck, the reason Cy had named him Ace. She scratched the top of the dog’s nubby butt, making him grin like a wolf.

“If this girl is my granddaughter, she should have given me a soupçon of warning about her visit, don’t you think?” Ace cocked his head, his dark, shiny eyes giving her an intelligent look that always made her wonder if he’d one day answer her in a thoughtful Timothy Dalton voice.

When Cy was first diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, he bought Ace from a breeder in Paso Robles. Always a planner, he told her he didn’t want her to be alone after he was gone. Ace, true to the corgi breed, was a handful from the beginning, and he’d accomplished what Cy had desired, forcing Love to go outside for walks and games of ball even on days when she would have just as soon stayed in her pajamas with the curtains closed, brooding about the unfairness of life, mad at God, uncontrollable cancer cells, drunk drivers and every happy person in the world. Yes, her husband was wise in bringing this crazy little dog into her life.

Still and all, you old coyote, she scolded Cy in her head, I wasn’t any less sad when you left me. He isn’t
you
.

“Well, flyboy,” she said to the dog. “Looks like we’ll be having us some company. If she is who we think she is, anyway.”

How long would this girl want to stay? What did she want? Would she understand why Love hadn’t been in contact all these years? The sad truth was, her granddaughter had only heard her mother’s side of the story. Heaven only knew what the girl thought of her grandma Love.

Karla Rae had never liked Love or Cy much, probably because they hadn’t been very discreet about their displeasure over her and Tommy’s impulsive move to Nashville.

Tommy had met Karla Rae when she was working as a cocktail waitress at a Los Angeles hotel where he was attending a Farm Bureau convention. She’d come to California with a band, which broke up shortly after they arrived when the lead singer landed a solo gig. After knowing each other only three weeks, Tommy and Karla Rae were engaged. They married a month later under the same scarred oak tree on the Johnson ranch where Cy and Love had said their second marriage vows, shortly after his return from Vietnam. Their first legal wedding had been at the little brown church in Redwater, Kentucky, where they’d met.

In Tennessee, Tommy found work with a local cabinetmaker, and Karla Rae, with her decent if unremarkable Sunday morning soprano voice, made the rounds on Music Row and haunted open mike nights in the city’s numerous bars. They had two babies in two years and a third one four years later. Tommy called Love and Cy, thrilled each time, but with each child, Karla Rae seemed to sound perpetually more sullen. She’d not gotten any closer to her dream than singing cover songs in tourist-filled honky-tonks.

After Tommy’s funeral, there had been a small gathering at their rented house in Nashville. Her father, who lived in Ohio, had sent flowers but couldn’t take off work. Karla Rae’s mother had died years before. That made Love a little more sympathetic to her sometimes snippy daughter-in-law. What kind of parent didn’t drop everything to come support their child during a time like this? After most of the guests had left, Love went in the kitchen and started washing cups and glasses. As she worked, she wondered about asking Karla Rae if she wanted to come to Morro Bay with the girls and maybe start a new life on the Central Coast. She was picturing the girls playing in the Johnson hay barn where Tommy had played when Karla Rae burst through the swinging kitchen door. She collapsed on one of the red vinyl kitchen chairs.

“Shoot, I’m so tired I could melt into a puddle right here on the floor,” she said. “Finally got the girls to bed. Cy’s reading them a story.”

“You just sit there and relax,” Love said, glancing at her. “I’ll finish these dishes.”

“Good, I’m sick to death of doing dishes.” She leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms across her chest. “I’m a bit put out, you know.”

“Oh?” Love said, turning back to the sink.

“Tommy only had ten thousand dollars in insurance.” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “I don’t know how long he expected that to last with three growing girls.”

Love froze, shocked that Karla Rae would bring that up on the day of the funeral. She blinked her eyes quickly, trying to focus on the yellow sippy cup she was washing. “I’m sure,” she finally said, “that Tommy didn’t think he would die so young.”

“Well, he should have considered that. It’s kinda selfish, if you ask me.”

Love slowly turned around, about to snap an irritable reply to her insensitive daughter-in-law, when Cy walked into the room. By his despairing look, Love knew he’d heard Karla Rae’s words. Standing behind his daughter-in-law, he shook his head at Love, his green eyes filled with pain. It was his expression that caused Love to press her lips together and say nothing. She would not have done one thing at that moment to make her husband feel any worse than he did. Love turned back to the sink of dirty dishes and took out her frustration on a coffee-stained mug printed with a picture of Bart Simpson.

Love was certain Karla Rae never told the girls that Love had written and called every week after Tommy died, sent checks when she could to help out with expenses. Karla Rae cashed the checks but never sent one word of acknowledgment. When Love called, her granddaughters never seemed to be there; they were at tee ball or a sleepover or an overnight scout function.

About a year after Tommy’s death, Love’s letters started coming back marked, “Moved, no forwarding address.” When Love and Cy tried to call, they got a recording that stated the phone had been disconnected. Love couldn’t remember Karla Rae’s father’s name or the city in Ohio where she vaguely remembered Tommy saying he lived. After three months, they hired a private detective who, with a few phone calls and some Internet searching, discovered that Karla Rae had married a man named Pete Ryan and lived in Pensacola, Florida. Love called the number. Karla Rae’s voice didn’t sound shocked or embarrassed when she heard who it was.

“Oh, Love!” she exclaimed. “I was going to call you and let you know we’d moved, but you know how it is with kids, just one thing after another. How are you? Did you know that I got married again? He’s got a real good job. Such a wonderful father to the girls, buys them every silly little thing they want. I love my new house. The girls all have their own rooms. Isn’t that great?”

Love stuttered a moment, amazed at Karla Rae’s audacity. “Well, I suppose so.”

“We were registered at Pottery Barn, but you can just send us a gift card, if you want.”

Though Love couldn’t bring herself to send that gift card, she did start writing the girls again, still getting no response. Her letters eventually became birthday and Christmas cards, which also were never acknowledged. It was like having a relationship with imaginary people, all the emotions on one side. To be fair to the girls, Love wasn’t even sure they received any of the cards or letters. When she wrote that Cy had cancer, Karla Rae never answered, so Love wasn’t surprised when there was no response when she sent a copy of Cy’s obituary.