Love in a Small Town Read Online Free PDF Page B

belonged to Mama’s aunt Hestie Collier, built for Hestie by her father on the occasion of her separation from her husband because her father had not wanted Hestie, or any of her three sisters, to return home once they’d left. Aunt Hestie had gone through with her divorce and never remarried but had lived in the cottage until her death, sharing it whenever need be with one or the other of her sisters or their daughters. Thus it had remained all the years since, specifically stipulated in Aunt Hestie’s will as the place of refuge for Collier women made destitute by separation, divorce, or widowhood.
    So far in all those years Mama had been the only widow in need of the cottage, and there was debate on whether her brief episode could truly be counted as widowhood, because Mama had been separated from Al Moss at the time he got run over by his own car.
    There was no air-conditioning, but in the shade of the tall elms and with the blinds and drapes pulled, the temperature wasn’t too bad at the end of May. Molly didn’t know how anyone stood it later in the summer, when it was common in southwestern Oklahoma for the temperature to soar beyond one hundred. She and her sisters had lived with Mama in this house in the summer, but she couldn’t recall how they had stood the heat.
    “We went up to town a lot, to Blaine’s soda fountain,” Mama said. “And then I broke down and went back with Stirling that last time. It got to be July, and we were dyin’ here. Stirling had a brand-new air-conditioned travel trailer. He was a roughneck in the oil patch then.”
    Molly remembered that, remembered them all staying in the tiny trailer. Sometimes Mama and Stirling would spend the night in Mama’s Impala station wagon. Mama lined the back windows of the Impala with aluminum foil for privacy. Molly thought it said an awful lot about her mother that the last man she had married had been ten years her junior and named Stirling Stirling.
    Mama held the record for use of Aunt Hestie’s cottage. She had been married four times to three different men, having married and divorced Molly and Rennie’s daddy twice. With these three men, Mama had had five daughters: Kaye, the eldest, and then Molly and Rennie, Lillybeth and Season. Each of these daughters, even the first, had been conceived during the reconciliation after a fierce argument. If Al Moss hadn’t been killed before he and Mama had had a chance to make up that time, no doubt there would have been at least six daughters.
    At the moment, Mama sat on the floor of the cottage living room trying to get the little television, a fan, a radio, and two lamps to work off one electrical outlet. Rennie was in the kitchen, wiping dishes.
    Molly, holding a rag and the cleaner she’d been using to wipe the bathroom, stood in the doorway of the small hall and gazed at her mother. Suddenly she wanted to run away. She had the strong urge to go out to her El Camino and get in it and drive west and just keep on going. Away from everything that she was.
    She said, “Mama, I don’t need to use all those things at once. I’ll just plug and unplug as I want to use things."
    Mama was pushing the electric plugs into a plastic multiple outlet. Built in 1922, the old cottage had only a single outlet in each room, and even those had been added long after the cottage had been built.
    "It’ll be fine,” Mama said. “I’ve done this before. It’s just that you have to get these plugs pushed in just right.”
    She would push a plug into the adapter on one side, and the plug on the other side would slide out. Ace sat beside her, watching, blinking his slit eyes, as if pained by the procedure.
    “Well, that adapter’s cracked,” Molly pointed out. Then she added, “It could let off sparks and right there’s the rug. It could start a fire, Mama.”
    “The rug’s real wool. Wool is naturally fire retardant.”
    Molly gazed at her mama, who sat on the floor as easily as a teenager, one leg drawn