Love in a Small Town Read Online Free PDF

Colorado and out in California, where such topics were eagerly embraced.
    It had been evident right from the start that Molly and Tommy Lee came from vastly contrasting backgrounds. Stand their mothers side by side, and it was like looking at night and day.
    Molly got up and went out to the kitchen and told her mother, “I’ve left Tommy Lee.” Then she laid her head in her arms on the kitchen table and cried.
    When she finally lifted her head, her mother set a box of tissues and a cup of sweet Darjeeling tea in front of her.
    “How about a bite to eat?” her mother asked, peering into the refrigerator. “I have some corn flakes . . . and there’s always toast and jelly. Oh, here’s a couple of Hardee’s biscuits. . . . How about one of those?”
    No one in their right mind ate out of Mama’s refrigerator. Things tended to stay in there for months; in the case of jelly, years. Mama truly believed that refrigeration very nearly suspended spoilage.
    Molly was in such a fog, however, that she forgot this and just nodded, and a few minutes later a microwaved Hardee’s biscuit was set in front of her. She just looked at it. Everything, the tabletop, her mother, the room around her seemed foggy, and she couldn’t seem to feel anything.
    It wasn’t until she’d had two cups of tea that she had the presence of mind to remember Marker and Ace and hurried outside to take care of them. She put Marker in the wooden fenced corral, where he could stick his neck through and nibble from the adjacent alfalfa field but not gorge himself on it. She took Ace in his carrier back to her mother’s kitchen.
    At no time did she allow her gaze to stray to Aunt Hestie’s cottage, and she made no move to go over there, either. She kept wondering if maybe she wouldn’t get back in her truck and go back home, but deep inside she knew she wasn’t going to do that.
    Deep inside Molly had the sense of being atop a wild runaway horse, and the best she could do was hang on until the end of the ride.
    * * * *
    Rennie announced her arrival with several honks on the horn of her new candy-apple-red Mustang and came through the door in her lithe, long-legged stride. Mama was dressed and ready with her basket of cleaning supplies and no sooner had Rennie come in and hugged and kissed Molly than Mama was breezing out the door, heading for the cottage.
    “You two stay here and hash things over,” she said. “I’ll start on the cottage. I haven’t been over in a while. . . . It’ll need airing and who knows what all.”
    What she was really doing was getting away from Molly’s crying. Tears put Mama on edge.
    Rennie lit a cigarette and poured herself a cup of tea and said, “Okay, so what’s goin’ on, Sissy?”
    Molly gazed into Rennie’s golden green eyes a moment, looked out the window for another moment, then said, “I can’t talk about it. Let’s go help Mama.”
    Rennie looked somewhat startled. Molly scooped up Ace and slipped on her sunglasses and waited for Rennie to go first out the door. She kept her eyes averted from the cottage. Each time she caught it in full view, her eyes squinted and ached, even though the cottage sat in the deep shade of tall elms.
    Mama was fiddling at the electric fuse box. Rennie waltzed around, looking into the living room for an ashtray and then opening cabinet doors, checking out the contents.
    “You know, I read of a man who found a painting by Monet—or one of those famous painters—in his family’s old barn. Has anyone ever really checked this place out?”
    Molly, still wearing her sunglasses, stood in the middle of the tiny kitchen, until Mama nudged her and told her to start opening windows. She went on wearing her sunglasses until she had to select fresh sheets out of the linen trunk. She removed them in order to see well enough to make certain there were no spiders in the trunk.
    The cottage was old, an institution in the Collier family, something of a shrine to womanhood. It had