Finding Me (13 page)

One more deep breath in and out and Kelli was a little more confident she could control herself enough to answer. “Sure. I’ll stay.”

As they walked out the door together, Beth said, “How long are you planning to be in town?”

Kelli shrugged, trying to be noncommittal. “I’m not sure, really. The end of the week for certain. After that it depends.”

“On what?”

“Beth, you’re being nosy,” her husband said.

“Am not.” Beth shoved at him and whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “If Rand had his way, we would never have a meaningful conversation about anything, because as far as he is concerned, everything is private.”

Rand.
This time she would remember. Kelli looked at him and smiled, thinking he might be a good person to have as an ally. Still, she didn’t want to offend Beth, so she gave the truthful answer she’d rehearsed just in case she ran into Alison. “I really just came for a visit to check out the place. It’s so pretty here. I did speak with a man about a job a couple of days ago. I don’t think anything will come of it, though.”

“Really? Where?”

“Beth, mind your own business.” Rand looked at Kelli. “Please forgive my wife’s overly inquisitive nature.”

Kelli laughed. “Not to worry, it’s fine.”

“See, Rand, it is fine, because all I’m doing is making casual conversation. She told me she applied for a job, so it’s obviously not a secret. Where’d you say that was?” She cast a quick look in Rand’s direction before turning innocent eyes on Kelli.

Kelli supposed there was no reason to hide the truth. If Beth and her family were still closely connected with Kenmore, they might hear about her anyway. If they weren’t, then it wouldn’t matter. “I talked to a man called Kenmore over at Moore’s More Store.”

Beth squealed with enough volume that everyone in the near area looked in their direction. She didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she raised her hand and signaled to her mother, who had stopped to talk to an elderly couple. “Mom, you better get over here. Kelli’s about to go to work for Kenmore.”

More eyes turned, and Alison Waters hurried toward them smiling. “I actually knew that already. I spoke to Kenmore yesterday, and he told me to keep a lookout for you today, because he thought you might be visiting the church.”

“He did?” Kelli barely choked out the words. Why would he have done that?

“Yes. He told me he had met a very nice young lady and that the two of you were talking a potential job.”

They continued walking toward the back lawn of the church, where a couple dozen round picnic tables were covered by a shade tent. Beth and Alison both put their purses at a place on one of the tables, so Kelli did the same. “Well, I don’t know for sure,” she told Alison. “He said he would call me so we could talk about it, but it’s all up in the air. He might find someone else, or I might go somewhere else. It’s all just theory at this point.”

“Of course he won’t find someone else. Mom, you need to call him right now and tell him that she wants the job and that he’s got to hire her.”

Alison Waters laughed. “I’m happy to call, but I don’t think I can tell Kenmore he’s
got
to do anything.”

Beth snorted. “Right. He’s always done everything you’ve
asked him to do for as long as I can remember. If you tell him to hire Kelli, then Kelli is hired, and we both know it. So you’ll call him, right?”

At that moment, Kelli realized she might have trod a little too close to danger.

16

Y
ou have a really beautiful voice. I’ve never heard anything like it.” Kelli found herself staring at Alison, so she focused her attention on the plate full of food in front of her. She didn’t think she could eat a single bite.

“Thank you.” Alison took a sip of sweet tea. “What about you? Do you enjoy music?”

“I enjoy listening, that’s about it.”

“Mom plays every musical instrument known to man. Don’t you, Mom?” Beth leaned across the table toward her mother.

Alison shook her head and smiled at Kelli. “My daughter is blessed with the gift of exaggeration, as you have already witnessed several times this afternoon.”

“She’s witnessed nothing of the sort.” Beth made a snarly face as she took a bite of corn on the cob. The teasing affection between mother and daughter was foreign to Kelli. Surely it couldn’t truly be this simple and uncomplicated and . . . loving. There was no way her father would have taken her from this to a life with Mimi. Obviously there was something darker here. They were just putting on a good front for the church people.

Kelli cleared her throat. “How many instruments do you play?”

“I’m fairly proficient in piano, guitar, and violin—I teach piano lessons two afternoons a week and on Saturday. I can pick at a mandolin and a flute. But I’m pretty sure there are a lot more instruments out there than those.”

“My mother has the gift of modesty to the point of outright lying. Fairly proficient? Really? She used to be a professional musician, in a band that traveled all around the South playing events.”

“Really?” How had Kelli missed this in her research?

Alison actually blushed. “It was nothing, really. There were four of us. We got some local jobs, things like that.”

“If by ‘local’ you mean any state in the Southeast, then yes, you played locally. Kenmore always says that if you hadn’t quit, you would have been famous by now. He said there was some guy talking to y’all about a record deal when you stopped playing.”

Alison waved her hand dismissively and took a bite of her sandwich.

The polite thing to do at this point was to let the subject drop, as Alison obviously wanted. Yet there was one question Kelli knew she simply had to get an answer for. “What made you quit?”

Alison shrugged. “A lot of things, really.” She stirred the baked beans on her paper plate.

“There was an accident.” Beth glanced toward her mother. “My father and sister were killed in a boating mishap in South Carolina, while my mother, brother, and I were at a show in Tennessee. It was the last concert she ever did.”

“Their accident made you stop doing the thing you loved, something you have such a gift for?” The words flew out of Kelli’s mouth too soon for her to stop them.

Alison shrugged. “Beth and her brother were still young, and the grief was overwhelming and confusing. I didn’t want to do
anything that would take me away from them when they needed me most.”

Beth reached over and hugged her mother. “And she was always there for us.”

“I’m so sorry.” Kelli didn’t know what else she could say.

“What she’s not telling you is that same daughter and son begged her to take up music again a couple of years later, and she wouldn’t.”

“To tell you the truth, I just didn’t have the heart to do it anymore.”

“Do you sing, Beth?”

“Nope. Not at all. My brother inherited the musical gene, somehow it skipped me altogether. What about you?”

Kelli shook her head. “My singing is so awful I don’t even sing along to the radio if there are people around. It’s one of my great regrets, because I really love music.”

Beth smiled and clapped her hands together. “You know what? You should take a singing lesson from Mom while you’re here. I guarantee she can free your inner musician.”

Alison shook her head. “Beth, you need to lay off. You’re backing Kelli into a corner, and you just met the poor thing.”

Rand added, “My wife likes to take on ‘projects.’” He made air quotes around the word. “Looks like you might be the next victim in her crosshairs. Better run for cover while you still can.”

Beth cocked her head to the side, opened her mouth to speak, then stopped. A few seconds later she turned to Kelli. “I hate to admit it, they are right. I do apologize. Usually I don’t get this worked up with someone I’ve just met. Weird though, I feel like I know you better than I do, for some reason. Please forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive. Now, tell me about your baby. Do you know if it’s a boy or girl yet?”

Beth put both hands on her stomach. “We are being very
intentional about not finding out the baby’s sex. We want to be surprised.”

Kelli nodded. “Good for you. When are you due?”

“Not until October. That gives me plenty of time to check out carousels and rocking horses”—she glanced toward Rand—“and decide what I’m going to do with Sprout’s room.”

“Sprout?”

“Like I said, we don’t want to know the sex, but it drives me crazy when people call my baby ‘it.’ So we went in for the first ultrasound, and Rand commented that the baby kind of looked like a bean with a heartbeat. After that, we bestowed the temporary name of Bean Sprout, which I’ve shortened to Sprout, and the terms
he
and
she
are always alternated. No one is going to call my baby an ‘it.’”

“But it’s okay to call her Sprout?”

“Yes, I’m sure he won’t mind a bit.” She folded her arms across her chest. “See how easy that was? You said ‘her,’ I said ‘he.’ It’s the perfect solution, don’t you think?”

“Sounds perfect to me.” Truth was, Beth’s quirkiness reminded Kelli of the part of Denice she loved best. And she completely understood Beth’s earlier comment when she’d said she felt like she’d known Kelli longer.

All of a sudden, Kelli was overcome by a deep ache. For the past twenty-four years, she had not even known these women existed, and now she sat here speaking with them and realized what an empty spot there had been inside her all these years. Why would her father have done this?

I met my mother and sister (that was an unexpected surprise) at church today. So far, they seem like really nice people. Super nice. I can’t think of one reason why my father
would have chosen Mimi over the Alison that I met
(except that she was fifteen years younger and more of
a hottie, maybe). I’m sure there’s more to
the story, though, there usually is. Beth seems pretty free
and loose with information. If I could arrange to be
around her another time or two before I leave town, it would definitely be helpful for gathering information. She’s
not going to know anything about why my father left, I suppose, but she can fill in a few blanks. I’ll see how I can finagle myself into contact
with her again this week.

It might mean staying long enough to go back to church next Sunday.

Kelli spent most of the rest of Sunday in a funk. She walked around the town square, then visited the only shop that was open on Sunday—a pharmacy that carried a little bit of everything, from toys, to porcelain figurines, to T-shirts. A young family was standing in the toy aisle, dressed liked they’d probably just come from church—father, mother, young boy, and an infant. Had her own family come to this very store when she was a baby? Had she been in this aisle before, feeling loved and secure, part of a happy family unit like this family appeared to be?

This line of thought cannot be healthy.
She went back to the hotel, planning to pack and get out. She’d done what she’d come to do—see her family, everyone but her brother at least. It had been foolish to think she could waltz in here and dredge up some deep, dark secret that would help her understand what had happened, then waltz out again without any problem. It was time to move on.