The Talk of the Town (2 page)

That thought brought her up short. Roxie blinked and raised her head. The muted glow of lamplight cast shadowed crescents throughout the room, highlighting some of the women’s features and shading others. Every face she saw was as familiar to her as her own reflection in the mirror each morning. She’d known all of them all her life. And in a small town like this, that meant she knew their likes and dislikes. She knew without asking that Mabel took sugar in her tea but not in her coffee, that Marlene took sugar in, and on, everything she put in her mouth, and that Julia never took sugar at all. She knew that they all did their washing on Mondays, their ironing on Tuesdays and the bulk of their shopping on Saturdays.

And she knew that each of them knew almost as much about her. It wasn’t nosiness so much as it was life in a small town where everybody knew everybody else and their business. But it was that very lack of privacy coupled with the desire to go places, to see and do things she couldn’t see or do here that had prompted her to strike out on her own when she graduated from Blue Ridge High School.

As the youngest and only girl in a family of four children, she had often craved the luxury of being left alone to read or think or dream. That was more of a rarity than reality, though. Before Wall Street went bust in 1929 and took most of the nation’s financial institutions with it, her banker father and busy housewife mother had maintained an open door policy when it came to family, neighbors and friends. Add in frequent overnight visits from her grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and her childhood home had been filled to the rafters with noise and laughter and, at times, utter confusion.

And then there were her parents’ expectations. It went without saying that Roxie’s brothers would go to college. After all, a man needed a profession in order to properly support his family. But Roxie . . . well, it was pretty much a given that she would marry a fine, upstanding townsman and produce a passel of grandchildren for her parents to pamper and spoil.

But their hopes for her were dashed when, early in her senior year of high school, Roxie announced that her business teacher had praised her aptitude for the subject and had encouraged her to further her studies at Stephens Women’s College in Columbia, Missouri. Her mother had pooh-poohed the idea, not wanting her only daughter to go so far away, and her father had refused to even consider it, claiming that a woman didn’t need a college education to raise a family.

Their opposition not only hadn’t deterred her, but it had had the opposite effect. Rather than pout or cry or throw a tantrum, she had pondered the problem for several days before she finally decided how best to solve it. Once she had figured out what to say, she made an appointment to meet her father in his office at the bank. There, she had made a very deliberate case for continuing her education. First, she had reminded him that she had inherited his head for numbers and that it would be a terrible shame to let that gift go to waste. Then she had urged him to consider how she would support herself in the unlikely instance she never married. Finally she took the practical approach, pretty much catching him off-guard when she asked him for a bank loan to meet her college expenses and promised to pay it back with interest.

Her arguments had won her the day. Over her mother’s ongoing objections, he put up the money out of his own pocket to enroll her at Stephens. His only condition was that she finished what she started.

She did, graduating with a degree in business and highest honors. Then she’d taken another step toward declaring her independence. She’d settled in St. Louis, where she’d rented a room in a nice, clean boardinghouse and had gone to work as a bookkeeper for a dress manufacturing company.

At first she loved it. She loved the noise and the culture and the constant traffic. She loved shouldering her way through a crowd of strangers, none of them knowing who she was, where she was going or why. She loved eating new and, to her, exotic foods like Italian sausage and German sauerkraut. She loved watching the boats and barges ply the Mississippi River, attending lectures at the Botanical Garden or taking leisurely strolls around Forest Park after church on Sundays. Most of all, she loved not having to share her every waking moment with someone else.

But in the end, Roxie had come back to Blue Ridge a sadder yet wiser woman. And now Luke Bauer had come back, too. With even less reason to—she, after all, had returned to the loving comfort of family and friends—he’d come back to Blue Ridge.

It seemed to Roxie that she was on the verge of making some significant correlation about all this when Mabel interrupted her thoughts by announcing that the meeting was adjourned. Only then did she realize that everyone else was standing, smoothing out their skirts and making one last comment or suggestion about which books to buy with the proceeds from the library fundraiser. She smiled contritely as she put her notebook and pen in her clutch purse and stood.

“I’m sorry,” she said to no one in particular as she followed the others to the entry hall to retrieve her coat and hat.

“Woolgathering, Roxie?” Julia asked.

Preoccupied with tilting her tweed beret at a jaunty angle and belting the brown wool jersey jacket that had served her so well for four years running, Roxie let the question pass without an answer.

“She must have been thinking about some man,” Candise teased as she tucked her husband’s newly darned socks into her handbag. “Only a man can make a woman that dreamy in the middle of one of
our
meetings.”

The women’s laughter followed them out of the overheated house and into the chilly afternoon, where everyone continued visiting before saying their final goodbyes and going their separate ways.

That rebelliousness of Roxie’s rose up again. As a gust of wind blew across the white-painted front porch, she smiled at Candise and said, “As a matter of fact, I was.”

Candise looked at her in confusion. “Was what?”

“Thinking about a man.” Roxie let her words hang in the snappy air for a few seconds before clarifying. “I was thinking about Luke Bauer.”

The women’s laughing and talking stopped abruptly. An engine backfire that sounded like a rifle shot filled the sudden silence as the coal man’s old B-model pickup rumbled down the street. The afternoon school bell, which could be heard ringing from one end of town to the other, signaled to mothers that their children would soon be home and hungry for cookies and milk.

Despite the chill wind, Mabel held the door open and poked her head out so as not to miss anything being said by the other women.

“Now, Roxie—” Julia began.

“What do you mean, you were thinking about Luke Bauer?” Marlene’s lips pursed up as tight as her corset laces as she peered fixedly at her sister-in-law from beneath the brim of her plate-shaped hat.

“I was just wondering how he’ll adjust is all,” Roxie answered with a nonchalant shrug.

A chorus of harrumphs said the other women didn’t share her concern.

“What’s going on here, Roxie?” Marlene demanded.

She knew what Marlene meant but wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of saying so. “Nothing.”

“Was there”—now Marlene hesitated briefly—”something between you two all those years ago?”

The sheer inanity of the question startled Roxie out of her bedeviling mood. She gaped at Marlene in amazement for a full minute, keenly aware that everyone’s eyes were upon her, before she finally spoke. “Who? Me?”

Marlene continued to regard her sternly. “Yes, Roxie, you. You and Luke Bauer.”

“Of course not!” Roxie cried. “How could you think such a thing? We didn’t even know each other.”

“He was in the same class as your brother John,” Marlene reminded her.

“But I was more interested in books than in boys.” Roxie wished she didn’t sound quite so defensive but knew she had no one to blame but herself for her present predicament. “Honestly, Marlene, Luke Bauer probably wouldn’t know me from—from the tobacco store Indian.”

Intent lines puckered around her sister-in-law’s eyes. “Then why are you so concerned about him?”

“I’m not. I was just . . .” At a loss, Roxie let her voice trail off. She couldn’t really deny that she felt concern, because she did. But not because she had any feelings for Luke Bauer—at least not the kind that Marlene was implying at any rate. In hopes of clearing the air, she blurted out, “I was just trying to say that I’d like to see people give him the benefit of the doubt, and I obviously didn’t express it well. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The other women remained silent, but Roxie could see that Marlene wasn’t buying her explanation.

“I admire your sense of justice,” Marlene said, though the annoyed set of her mouth declared the exact opposite. “But you don’t want to get mixed up with him. A nice woman like you doesn’t want to waste her time or risk her reputation with a convict.”

“
Ex
-convict,” Roxie corrected before she could stop herself.

Worry flashed over Marlene’s round face. She glanced at the circle of women who were avidly listening to this exchange before returning her uneasy gaze to Roxie. “Maybe I should discuss this with Father and Mother Mitchell.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Marlene.” It was bad enough that her brother Bill would be hearing all the juicy details from his wife. The last thing Roxie wanted was to cause her parents any more worry than she already had. “I’m not mixed up with Luke Bauer. Nor am I about to get mixed up with him. Believe me, if I did, you’d know about it.
Everybody
would know about it.”

Marlene wavered. “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Roxie huffed out. “Around here, you can’t sneeze without everyone saying ‘God bless you.’”

Scandalized gasps punctuated her pronouncement.

Roxie offered a placating smile to one and all, noticing as she did that the wind was playing havoc with Mabel’s recently-dressed hair. “I’m sorry. But I can’t help making fun of such a ludicrous situation. I don’t even know Luke Bauer, except for what’s said about him, and I don’t think I’ll ever get to know him. So there’s absolutely nothing for you or for anyone else to worry about. Okay?”

The other women, seeming to sense that things had been set right, began dispersing in various directions. A couple left in cars. Most, like Marlene, lived close enough to walk.

Now Marlene stepped off the porch but hovered uncertainly on the neatly swept front sidewalk. She looked down the street, toward her house, as if trying to calculate how much time she had before her two oldest boys got home from school. Her harried expression said that she thought she was cutting it close.

“Okay,” she reluctantly agreed before shaking a chastising finger at Roxie. “But don’t waste any more of your time or your sympathy on him. A man like that makes his own trouble, and there’s no sense feeling sorry for him. Understood?”

“Understood,” Roxie concurred, and breathed a sigh of relief when Marlene turned away.

She made a point of waving goodbye to a wind-tousled Mabel, who finally closed her front door. Then she hurried down the porch steps and watched her sister-in-law turn for home. She had no doubt that she would be the main topic of conversation between Marlene and Bill tonight. Or that her entire family would soon be hearing about what happened at the meeting today.

So be it, Roxie thought as she tucked her purse under her arm, turned in the opposite direction from Marlene and started back toward Hubbard’s Garage. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Besides, she was a grown woman. She didn’t have to answer to anyone—her sister-in-law included.

Still, she walked at a faster clip than usual, trying to outpace the sudden restlessness that had settled under her skin. Though it was cold and cloudy, she blamed her agitation on spring fever: on the new grass sprouting in patches of bright green, the daffodils tossing their lemony heads in the breeze, and the red-breasted robins busily building their nests in the branches of the budding trees.

But as she neared the corner, Roxie couldn’t help feeling that it was fate rather than the wind at her back that was propelling her forward.

Chapter 2

Roxie saw that he didn’t recognize her and wondered at the tiny stab of—what? Disappointment? She knew that was absurd. As she’d insisted so stoutly a little over two weeks ago, she’d hardly even known him. She couldn’t seriously expect him to remember her. Would she have remembered him if he’d been just another one of her brother John’s schoolmates instead of “that wild Bauer boy” no one could forget?

They certainly hadn’t forgotten. Town talk had been ample proof of that. Each disparaging remark had stirred her ever-ready sympathy for the underdog and was, she supposed now, why she’d felt compelled to see him. Of course, this interview would be nothing more than an empty gesture. But when Lana had left her switchboard post and ducked into Roxie’s office to announce in a dramatic stage whisper that he was out front wanting work, she simply hadn’t been able to turn him away.

Roxie had risen from behind her desk to greet him. She had found that it went far to help ease the surprise or shyness that could sometimes strike men who weren’t expecting to talk to a woman. But the man who stood in her doorway now gave no indication of discomfort. In fact, he gave no indication of anything at all.

Swallowing a sigh, she motioned him toward the straight-backed chair beside her desk. He crossed to it, leaving the door open behind him. Running her hand over the creases in her blue cotton skirt, she took her own seat as he slid soundlessly into the chair. Even seated he seemed to dominate the cramped office, his broad-shouldered shadow almost totally enveloping her as it blocked the dim overhead light. The silence stretched out as she fussed needlessly with a small stack of orders that needed to be filled and billed, wishing she’d not put herself in this unpleasant position. Straightening her spine, she set the papers next to her typewriter, folded her hands on the desktop and looked him full in the face.

She’d thought he would appear humbled by his recent imprisonment. She’d thought wrong.