The Happy Hour Choir Read online

  Great. New Guy was tall, dark, and handsome. Now, if only he had a mute button. “What are you? Some kind of preacher?”

  “Fully ordained.”

  Of course you are. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell since you were drinking a beer.”

  He studied me carefully. “I vowed self-control, not abstinence. Besides, it’d be more impolite for me to sit around and not buy something.”

  Damned, if that didn’t make sense. Still, he had to want something. “Are you here to ‘save’ me?”

  “Not tonight.”

  I snorted. Quick-witted sonuvabitch. “I don’t need to be saved, so you can stuff it.”

  I could tell it was on the tip of his tongue to say something trite about how everyone needs to be saved. Instead, he exercised his vaunted self-control to stare me down. I had to admit some grudging admiration. No one stared me down except Ginger, and they all knew better than to try in The Fountain. New Guy didn’t know he was supposed to get mad, lose his temper, and call me names. Instead, he faced my anger with reason. “All right. I’m familiar with these vendettas. You play whatever you want to play, but stop and think about the other people in that bar. Do you really want to drag them down into sacrilege with you?”

  “Sacrilege?” Something snapped behind my eyes. “You want to waltz into my workplace and talk to me about sacrilege. It’s a free damned country. If you don’t like the songs I sing, then you can leave.”

  “Free country or fascist state, I wasn’t going to leave without telling you that singing hymns like a sexpot isn’t appropriate.” He still hadn’t looked away. “No matter who you are.”

  “Appropriate? Who gives two shits about being appropriate?” I stood up straighter and crossed my arms, which had the unintended but fortunate effect of pushing my breasts up and out. Good. Let him take a look at what he isn’t going to touch. Ever. “I’ll do what I need to do to put food on the table. If I’m going to be saddled with this ridiculous name, then I might as well make the most of it.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Are you making the most of what you’ve been given?”

  More preacher-speak. As if I hadn’t heard all of this mess about gifts and talents from my father a long time before. It was my business if I wanted to stay put in tiny Yessum County instead of driving up to Nashville to see if I could get a better job.

  I turned to go. “You know what? Screw you. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

  He grabbed my arm. “You have real talent. You shouldn’t be wasting it here.”

  We both looked down to where his warm hand lightly circled my arm. He quickly released me, almost as though he couldn’t believe he’d reached out to touch me.

  “I’ll do as I damned well please.” And I could’ve done you, but that ain’t happening now that I know you’re a sanctimonious asshole. “These people took care of me when I needed help, so my talents aren’t ‘wasted’ here. You can mind your own business, Preacher Man.”

  He winced at my nickname for him, but he didn’t stop me when I made for the door. Instead, he shoved his hands in his pockets as though making sure he wouldn’t reach for me a second time. “Maybe you don’t know that much about me, either.”

  “I know you’re a holier-than-thou jerk.” The screen door slammed between us for emphasis.

  I bellied up to the bar and motioned for a beer. Bill handed me one as Tiffany stopped to load her tray. “Who was that guy?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  “I care,” she said with an appreciative growl before carrying her wares across the room.

  Bill looked from me to the half-full beer on the ledge. “C’mon, Beulah. Please tell me you’re not running off new customers.”

  “Trust me when I tell you he’s not our type.” I chugged the rest of my beer. Time to get back to work.

  I sat down at the piano a full seven minutes early, and perversely launched into another hymn. I wondered if my friend Preacher Man was still in the parking lot. Could he even hear me being more sacrilegious than usual? Probably not. I didn’t need to waste another thought on him, but the warm circle around my upper arm reminded me it’d been a long time since I’d been touched like that.

  I hoped he was still out there fuming. When I hit a verse about the many dangers, toils, and snares, my heart squeezed. Is this actually guilt? No way was I going to feel guilty for offending some Holy Roller who should’ve known better than to come into a bar in the first place.

  Of course, if I’d known what was going to happen next, I might’ve thought twice about playing hymns to piss off the Preacher Man.

  Chapter 2

  At the first whiff of French toast, I knew my day was headed straight to hell in a handbasket. I stumbled into a pair of shorts and made the executive decision to ignore my smoky, matted hair. Playing piano until three in the morning didn’t exactly inspire good hygiene. Besides, Ginger had seen worse.

  I stopped in the hallway, my toes squishing into shag carpet far older than my twenty-five years. There at the end of the hall sat the one room in the house I refused to enter, the nursery. On a morning not quite ten years ago, Ginger had served French toast. That was the worst morning of my life, so I didn’t have high hopes for this one. “Beulah Lou! Get down here and eat before it gets cold!”

  I jumped out of my skin and headed for the stairs. At the bottom, I almost tripped, grabbing the newel ball from the post to steady myself. Instead it popped off into my hands and I bumbled into the wall. If Ginger was worried about my well-being after the thud, she didn’t say anything. I put the newel ball back gently. House maintenance wasn’t my specialty, and what Ginger didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  “Took you long enough.” She turned and smiled as I padded across the well-worn linoleum. She stood with her hands on her hips, holding the spatula in her right hand so it poked from her body at a weird angle. It shook with the palsy that had robbed her of the ability to play piano anywhere but church. These days, even while playing hymns she’d played a hundred times before, she still missed notes, but I doubted anyone at County Line Methodist would ever say anything. That sorry bunch had their own assorted problems.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” she said. “Get you a plate.”

  I took the spatula from her and opened the cupboard. “I’ll get breakfast for us. It’s the least I can do since you cooked.”

  “Ah, but you’ll be doing dishes.” She winked as she eased into a metal chair with a vinyl seat. When she sat over the slash of duct tape that held the vinyl together, you could almost believe the chair was brand-new. Almost.

  I slid a plate of French toast in front of her and turned to the coffeepot. Taking two mugs, I doctored the coffee: cream and three sugars for me, black with one sugar for her. My stomach flopped as I sat in my own scarred vinyl chair.

  “Eat! Eat! You have to eat it while it’s hot!” She cut a generous hunk of toast and dipped it into the pool of syrup on her plate.

  “How’re you feeling this morning, Ginger?” I already knew the answer because she was still wearing her pink terry-cloth robe with the threadbare elbows.

  “Oh, I’m plodding along.” She smiled, but she wasn’t wearing lipstick. Ginger always wore lipstick. Without that telltale slash of red, she looked washed-out and faded, just like the gingham curtains behind her. Even her hair was a dull grayish blond from where she hadn’t been to the beauty shop to get it dyed. At least she had her eyebrows penciled in. And they were fairly straight considering she always shaved them off before attempting to re-create them with pencil in shaking hand.

  I put my fork down, the first bite of my toast still dangling from the tines. “Go ahead and tell me how yesterday’s trip to the doctor went. I’m too old to be softened up by French toast.”

  She studied her plate. “I’m not doing chemo this time.”

  “It’s back? But—”

  “No buts! Dr. Bowman told me he could only promise me two years with chemo, six months to a yea
r without. I’ll keep my hair and take the six months, thank you very much.”

  Tears stung my eyes. “Ginger, please—”

  Her hand snaked across the table, her skin almost transparent except for the brown spots that did nothing to hide sinew and blue veins underneath. I would’ve thought it a skeleton’s hand if it hadn’t still been strong and warm.

  “Beulah, we talked about this the first time. I can’t stay here forever. I’m pretty sure I’ve already outstayed my welcome.”

  Tears blurred my vision, and I willed them back. Ginger patted my hand. “Don’t you worry about me. When I meet the good Lord, we’re going to stick our tongues out at you, and I’m going to convince Him to send thunderstorms when you misbehave just because you fuss about getting your hair wet. You think about that every time it rains!”

  I laughed a nervous hiccup-laugh. My throat burned.

  Her bleary brown eyes searched past their cataracts to find me. “All you have to do is remember what I told you about my funeral. If you let Anderson’s Funeral Home have an open-casket visitation so everybody and their momma can gawk at me and talk about how my shriveled-up corpse looks just like me, so help me God, I will haunt you every day for the rest of your life.”

  I couldn’t help laughing again, but my throat cramped, choking the laugh into a grunt.

  She looked absently out the breakfast room window at a fat cardinal perched on the birdhouse. “Now, I do have one last favor to ask of you.”

  You took me in when I had nowhere else to go. “Anything.”

  She chuckled, and her bleary eyes returned to lock with mine. “You might want to hear what the favor is before you answer so quickly.”

  “Anything, Ginger. You’ve done so much for me. Without you . . .”

  “I want you to take my place.”

  “Take your place?” What did that mean? How could I ever begin to take Ginger Belmont’s place? I didn’t really have the disposition for teaching piano lessons to the neighborhood kids. Was I supposed to troll the town looking for unwed teen mothers? Could it be as simple as ladling out soup at the Jefferson Homeless Shelter every Tuesday? Or would it be defending the need to shelve Harry Potter books at the local Friends of the Library committee meeting?

  “I want you to take my place at County Line.”

  I felt the color drain from my face. Anything, anything but that. I owed my life to Ginger Belmont. But I didn’t owe one damned thing to God, and I wasn’t about to play piano for Him.

  “Ginger.” I fought back nausea.

  “It’s my dying wish. Would you deny me my dying wish?”

  “That’s not fair, and you know it,” I croaked.

  She squeezed my hand. Hard. “Life’s not fair, sweetie, and, oh, how we both know it.”

  “But I can’t stop playing at The Fountain. Bill needs me,” I said.

  “I didn’t say you had to stop playing at The Fountain.”

  “Well, I can’t play at The Fountain and at church!”

  “Why not?”

  Ginger knew very well why not. Last night’s stranger wasn’t the only one who didn’t approve of my song selections.

  Her eyes shifted to the floor. “Well, you could always find a new song to sing.”

  I crossed my arms and settled in for a fight. “Bill renamed the place because of that song. I’m not changing it now.”

  “Beulah, you can’t stay ticked off at God forever.”

  I slammed my fists down on the table and stood. The metal legs of the table shrieked, but my voice came out low: “Watch me.”

  Ginger’s penciled-in eyebrow arched to unnatural heights, telling me I needed to take it down a notch and have a seat. “Beulah Lou, you keep punishing yourself. You—”

  “How am I punishing myself with your cancer? Can you tell me that?”

  “Rejoice when a person dies and . . .” Ginger paused, but forced herself to forge ahead. “. . . mourn when a child is born.”

  Her words stabbed me at my most vulnerable spot. “I don’t know how you can quote that religious bullshit to me,” I whispered.

  “Because it’s the truth,” she said grimly. “I know you don’t see it that way, but it’s the truth. Now sit down and eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Sit down. And eat.”

  I couldn’t argue with her or her penciled-in eyebrow, so I picked up my fork. My stomach pitched at the thought of food. For a moment, I felt sixteen again, and I tried to brush it aside. That was a year I hated to remember, much less relive.

  Even with only a kiss of syrup, the sweet, sweet toast gagged me. The bacon didn’t look burnt, but it tasted like ashes.

  I consoled myself with the idea that the preacher would probably fire me the minute he realized I was the woman from The Fountain. Then, Ginger wouldn’t be able to blame me for not fulfilling her dying wish.

  Ginger’s hand shook as she tried to meet her mouth with a piece of French toast. My smile faded. No amount of thumbing my nose at the new preacher would keep Ginger with me.

  And no amount of her well-intentioned roadblocks would save me from the path I’d started down years before.

  Chapter 3

  Ginger wasted no time calling in her favor. The next morning she knocked on my door at eight, once again too early for someone who played piano in a honky-tonk to all hours. “Beulah Lou, get on up and take a shower. We’ve got a nine o’clock appointment with Reverend Daniels to talk about how you’re taking my place.”

  “This couldn’t wait?”

  “Doc says I could drop dead at any minute, so no. Time is of the essence.”

  At least I knew she was feeling chipper since she’d used “Lou,” her made-up middle name for me. As if being named Beulah Land wasn’t bad enough, I also bore my maternal grandmother’s name: Gertrude. When she took me in, Ginger quickly decided Beulah Gertrude didn’t roll off the tongue.

  I went through my morning routine in record time, even putting on makeup minus the eyeliner. I hopped down the steps in a sundress and sandals with barely enough time left to get out the door and to our appointment on time.

  Ginger did something she hadn’t done since I was a teenager. She assessed my ensemble with a long head-to-toe look and pointed upstairs. “Try again.”

  “What?” I looked down at my sundress. So, yes, it was cut a little low, but it wasn’t that bad.

  “Go, or I’ll wrap one of my shawls around you.” She crossed her arms over her chest and tried to raise her eyebrow. That’s when I noticed she hadn’t penciled in her eyebrows, which she only neglected to do when her fingers shook their worst. I took a deep breath and swallowed any more arguments before I raced upstairs.

  I pawed through my closet until I found a more modest sundress and exchanged outfits with a minimal amount of cursing. I stopped at the foot of the stairs to give a twirl and a mock curtsy.

  “Much better.” Her frown didn’t match her words, but, before I could question her, she added, “You’re driving.”

  She placed the keys in my hand, and my mouth fell open. I had never been allowed to drive the Caddy. Even when Ginger had gone through chemo, she had ridden in my antique Toyota hatchback rather than let me drive her Cadillac.

  “C’mon,” she said from where she stood at the front door. “And close your mouth before you swallow a fly.”

  Walking out into the hazy heat was like walking into an invisible wall of humidity. Ginger shuffled around the Caddy, and I had no choice but to move forward.

  After helping her inside, I rounded the car and slid over the slick worn-leather interior of the Caddy. I couldn’t help but marvel at the reversal of fortune. At sixteen, I had been newly homeless and pregnant when I crawled in the passenger seat of the Caddy, concentrating on keeping my lunch down. Back then Ginger had been in the driver’s seat. She had worn her hair high, never letting the gray show.

  “For Pete’s sake, start this car and get the AC going!” Ginger jarred me back to the present, and I lo
oked at where she sat in the passenger seat, slumped and with her hair cut short. She had attempted lipstick, but the burgundy color had escaped the natural boundaries of her lips, further betraying her shaky hands.

  “Get your head out of the clouds,” she harrumphed. “Most people have the good sense not to leave a dog closed up in a car on a day like this, much less a person.”

  I turned the key, and the engine rolled over with a solid, satisfying rumble. Was driving the Caddy some sort of consolation prize for agreeing to take her place at the County Line piano, or was this the first in a long line of things and traditions that would come to me and only me?

  We eased through town and out into the country, the Caddy’s V-8 purring. After the anemic engine in my Toyota, I felt I could conquer the world with Ginger’s classic Cadillac.

  “For heaven’s sake, Beulah, air her out.”

  I grinned and pressed the accelerator almost to the floor.

  “Oh, but watch out for that Barney Fife sheriff of ours. He likes to sit there by the pond at the beginning of the swamp. Thinks he’s running a regular sting operation.”

  I practically stomped on the brakes. We crawled past the pond and into the long, flat stretch of bridges that crossed Harlowe Bottom.

  “We’re not in a school zone,” she muttered. I sped up again. The Caddy went from a purr to a roar, and I watched the speedometer hit sixty, seventy, eighty. The crooked cypress trees on either side of the car waved in a blurry, macabre dance.

  “But look out for deer. And the big curve where people like to take their half down the middle.”

  I hit the brakes harder than I meant to, and we both jerked against our seat belts. “Ginger, would you like for me to pull over so you can drive?”

  “Don’t sass me, Beulah Lou. You are not too big to spank.”

  At a quarter of a century old, I was pretty sure I was, but I wasn’t about to argue. She would probably hurt herself trying to prove me wrong. I stifled a grin at the thought of Ginger trying to catch me long enough to spank me. Something really was up with her. She wasn’t normally this crabby.