“Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home...” Joella sang as she pushed the porch swing with her toe, peeled potatoes, and admired the purple rhododendron blooms spilling over the rail. Her mother’s house was way out in the woods where no one would hear or care if she sang her heart out or cried a river.
“You ought to sing in church more often.” Marie wandered out to the rough planked porch with a glass in her hand. Once as tall as Jo, she’d shrunk some with time and ill-health, but she still stood straight and feisty, cigarette in hand despite doctor’s orders.
Her hard-living mother hadn’t touched alcohol in years, but Jo automatically eyed the glass with suspicion before deciding it looked like lemonade. Her mother’s current situation was enough to cause anyone to pick up a bottle and start drowning. She admired Marie’s strength in avoiding temptation. She should take lessons.
Jo shrugged. “They sing boring old songs here. I’m thinking of going down to Asheville and looking for a church that does contemporary music.”
“Don’t be silly.” Marie sat on the swing and picked up a potato and peeler. “You don’t belong down there. You belong here where people know you. I thought you’d learned that by now. You’re all the time trying to be bigger than you are.”
“I’m a pretty big girl, Mama. I couldn’t afford new clothes if I get much bigger.” Jo shoved aside the slight with twisted humor. It was the only way to take her mother when she went down this path, which was at least once a visit. Her mother spoke from experience, after all. “That reminds me, the kids need summer clothes, and Evan’s hoarding money again. Maybe I could buy some material with my next check and you could make it up into some little shorts and things.”
Her mother had worked as a sewing machine operator in the samples department at the mill for years, despite the crippling pain and fatigue of hepatitis. It had taken the lay-off of half the work force last year to end her decades of hard work.
Social Security had turned down her disability request, and the unemployment benefits expired next month. Jo had hoped maybe her mother could take up making clothes for others—just enough to cover her COBRA insurance until they could hire a lawyer to help with the disability application. The house was paid for, and she and Amy could provide groceries for a while.
Once COBRA ran out, however, no other insurance company would take her on. Without continued treatment, the doctor said Marie would die.
There had to be a way—Jo just hadn’t found it yet. Her mama was only fifty-five.
“Evan is being smart about their money.” Marie brushed off Jo’s implied criticism. “Things are bad out there, and he’s trying not to go into debt.”
Jo cooled her anger at her brother-in-law by envisioning dumping the pot of potato peelings on Evan’s shiny blond head. The man was a control freak who would stab his own mother-in-law in the back, but Marie had old-fashioned values and would never find fault with a man who provided for his family.
“Evan laid you off, even knowing you need insurance,” Jo protested. “He won’t pay for daycare so Amy can take a job and use her education. It’s all about him.”
“That’s you talking, not Amy. You just don’t understand men. You should have known that fast-talking Randy was just using you.”
Like Jo’s first boyfriend and so-called business manager, He-Who-Should-Rot-In-Hell. Any reference to that dangerous episode went unspoken, but the fear was there in her mother’s eyes.
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Cutting the potato into quarters and nearly taking off her finger with the viciousness of her slice, Jo decided they had enough potatoes. She picked up the pot and carried it into the house.
Her mother had good reason to question Jo’s poor choices. She was not only a bad judge of men, but it seemed she’d recently turned coward. She’d waited until the lunch rush had started before taking Josh back to the café. That wasn’t like her. She should have waited to see what that no-good, cheating, rotten…
Which was why she hadn’t hung around. She couldn’t think of Randy—RJ!—Peters without looking for a rope and a gun. RJ! For heaven’s sake alive, who did the miserable rotten cur think he was? Randolph John wasn’t good enough?
He’d been good old Randy while he was playing with the Buzzards. He’d left for Nashville and the music circuit a couple of years ago, but until she’d heard through the grapevine in January that he’d finally sold an album, she hadn’t fully comprehended she’d been dumped along with the band. Stupidly, she’d had high hopes that his visits and sweet promises meant his heart was growing fonder with his absence. She’d just been waiting for him to keep his word to take her with him.
She didn’t know who was stupider, her for believing him, or Randy for turning his back on the people who’d got him where he was today.
The phone rang at the same time that Amy’s SUV chugged up the gravel drive. Balancing the potato pot on her hip, Jo picked up the cordless on the way through the shabby living room to the even shabbier kitchen. “Jo here.”
“Has Amy arrived yet? I have some new clients in my office, and I’ve promised we’d feed them. I need to talk to her when she gets there.”
“Hello, Evan, good to hear from you, Evan. How’s life treating you these days, Evan?” Jo slammed the pot on the stove, added more water and some salt, and turned on the burner. Evan’s pomposity was another of the traits that made her skin crawl. “Have you moved all the mill jobs to Mexico yet, Evan?”
She heard the kids shouting to their grandmother and waited to hear if Amy would come in. She glanced at the old Seth Thomas wall clock. Her sister was running late. She’d probably go on down the road. Amy hated to be late for anything. That was just fine, because Jo had no intention of handing dickhead over to Amy to ruin her evening out. He was perfectly capable of feeding clients in Asheville. He did it all the time. He just hated that Amy was taking classes instead of waiting on him.
“Just let me talk to my wife, dammit, Joella. This doesn’t have to be the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Inquisition! Big word. I’ll have to go look that up. I’ll be right back.” She set the phone on the counter and went out to greet the kids.
“Who was that on the phone, dear?” Marie tickled Louisa’s belly beneath her too-small shirt. Josh had already taken off for the apple tree.
“Just an encyclopedia salesman. I left him dangling.”
So, she had a little problem with the truth. The problem with truth was that it sometimes got in the way of justice and hurt people who didn’t deserve to be hurt. Every once in a while, she’d like the good people to win.
And she figured whatever Flint had intended to say about Randy John Peters wouldn’t have much to do with good people winning. Not unless he handed her a gun and told her it was okay to use it.
***
On light feet, Joella raced down the fire escape steps of her apartment over the café on Friday morning. She didn’t think Flint had figured out yet that she was his tenant. Some surprises were better left to time.
Humidity met the night breeze in a fine mist that blended with the gray light of dawn here in the alley between the café and the hardware store. She liked the isolated feeling of having the town to herself for these few minutes before she went to work.
A new day gave her a chance to start over. She’d kicked herself all night. She hadn’t given Flint a chance to explain. Maybe he wanted to take Randy down, too. She ought to at least give him the benefit of the doubt.
She was just a little sensitive on the subject of the man she’d invested the best three years of her life in. She thought the one damned thing she did right was to know people, and Randy had shattered her illusions. She’d believed him when he’d said he was building a career on the road. She even believed him when he said he was too busy or too tired or traveling too late to call her often. She’d let him into her house and into her bed whenever his circuit had come back through here.
He’d told her he lived for the days and nights with her. Just last Christmas he’d been telling her how he loved her. He must have known then that he’d sold the album. Jeez, you’d think she was eighteen all over again. She must have beans for brains to believe Randy actually liked her rhymes as much as her bed.
Great track record, Jo. He-Who-Should-Rot-In-Hell had taught her stage fright and Randy-RJ-Ratfink had taught her not to trust a lying conniving music man. And now she had to work for one. Well, at least she knew better than to trust Flint. She just needed to think with her head instead of her hormones for a change. Easier said than done.
She stepped out of the alley into the early morning of Main Street, Northfork, North Carolina. She loved the picturesque brick storefronts with their sagging signs and wood benches strategically located under awnings. The side of a mountain didn’t leave a lot of flat land for building, so the highway between the shops was narrow and the sidewalks tight. Tourists had to park in the lots on either side of town, or on the residential streets that wound up into the hollows. Foot traffic, the big city planners had called it. Good for business.
But tourists came up only on weekends. To survive, businesses needed a thriving local population. Since the mill started laying off, the local economy had flattened. She could see evidence of it already in the FOR SALE signs on houses, the closed gift shop, and the empty pharmacy that used to always be there on the corner. Asheville was less than an hour away and people went down there on the weekends to do their shopping now, to the big box stores that could offer cheaper goods—made in China.
She couldn’t do anything about the mill, but she had lots of ideas about other ways to boost business. The big MusicFest the first week of August was one of them. And if Flynn Clinton really was an ex-member of the Barn Boys, then he might be just the man they needed on the committee.
Speak of the devil… There he stood, contemplating the flying fuchsia pig in front of George Bob’s insurance office. He had his fingers stashed in his front jeans pockets and his head tilted as if in conversation with the pig on its pedestal. Jo admired his long legs in boot-cut jeans and smiled in memory of his dancing. Her boss was one hell of a sexy man. It was a pity she wasn’t trusting men these days.
She’d have to pry his story out of him sometime. His story, and nothing more, she reminded herself. And she’d take any tale he told with a grain of salt. She planned on learning cynicism before her thirtieth birthday.
She sauntered across the street to stand beside him. “Impressive, isn’t she? That’s Dot’s creation. She sells ceramic artwork, so she’s a professional at this kind of thing. The purple pig the kids painted isn’t quite so neat, but it’s cute.”
“What the hell is it?” he asked in obvious confusion. “An ashtray?”
“It isn’t anything. It’s art. Knock knock.” She tapped his temple with her knuckles. She liked that she had to reach a bit to do so. She liked the heated look he shot her as well. She needed to be reminded she still had what it takes, even if she didn’t plan to use it. “Where have you been? Everybody’s doing them. I think Chicago started it with the cows. We can’t do anything quite so fancy, but if it makes money for the festival, who cares?”
“How do they make money?” He leaned his head back to look the fuchsia pig in its checker boarded eye. “It’s the ugliest damned thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Folk art. People like whimsical. We take bids on the pigs all summer and start the auction where the bids leave off at the festival in August. Cute, huh?”
“People are going to put these things in their houses?” He shook his head in disbelief, and started across the street to the café.
Jo stayed in stride with him. “Or their gardens. Whatever. Will you take Sally’s pig? It will look adorable by the front door.”
He shoved the key in the lock. “If everyone else is doing it and I don’t have to keep it forever, reckon I can give it a try. It won’t trip any customers, will it?”
“That’s why George Bob asked for the one on the pedestal, but you’d have to be blind to trip over one. I’ll call Sally. She’ll be delighted.”
“Has she got anyone special?” Flint asked, not looking at her as he flipped on the lights.
Jo tried not to reel in shock. This handsome cowboy who could have any woman he wanted was interested in little Sally? Boy, she really was losing her judgment about people. “No one special. She sings in the choir at First Baptist. You might go up there on Sunday if you’re out to make an impression.”
“Better class of people in church than in bars,” he agreed, apparently forgetting where he’d met Jo.
She contemplated socking him over the back of his oblivious head with a coffee mug, but he was a man and clueless. “You’ll see some of the same people in both places,” she said with what she considered great restraint.
He regarded her tight expression with suspicion. “Right. If you’ll start the coffee, I’ll go back and unlock for the delivery truck.”
They were stepping around each other as if his mention of RJ yesterday had planted a mine field. Maybe it had. Figuring she’d better wait until they both had some caffeine before approaching him about Randy, Jo tightened her apron bow and sauntered back to the counter.
She had coffee brewing and Charlie’s newly-washed Fiestaware collection stacked all over the counter by the time Flint returned. He carried boxes heavy enough for two forklifts and efficiently stacked them in the pantry without dropping one. Jo sighed in regret over all those rippling muscles she shouldn’t touch.
After storing the delivery and breaking out the Krispy-Kremes to stack in the counter case, Flint gazed over the array of plates she’d set out. “Having a party?”
“They’re Fiestaware,” she said proudly. “They’re real popular now, and I bet these are the genuine things, not the cheap ones from the discount store. I looked them up at the library when I was in Asheville, and we have some of the old colors. I had this idea—we could paint the café in tangerine and persimmon and juniper and line shelves with the plates. Sit some in the front window. Tourists would come in and want to buy them. We could serve them coffee in the cups.”
“Tangerine?” He looked as if he’d swallowed the persimmon. “I don’t think so. You think these things are worth money?”
“Maybe turquoise and cobalt then?” she asked hopefully. “The place is so gloomy and dull. Bright colors would attract kids, but I guess blues…”
He shook his head. “I like the place like it is. Just because I agreed to a purple pig doesn’t mean you can change everything. But if those plates are worth something, I could fix up a shelf in the window maybe.”
That was a start, she supposed. She traced the tip of her finger lovingly over one of the colorful coffee cups. “And serve coffee in them maybe?”
“They need saucers. Twice the washing.” He poured coffee into the plain white restaurant mug and leaned back against the counter to sip it.
Jo could feel the heat of his gaze burn straight through her clothes, but she was practicing focus this morning. Men seldom turned down her ideas, but Flint probably had lots of women throwing themselves at his feet. She apparently had to appeal to his pockets if she wanted to win this one. She kinda liked the idea that he couldn’t be swayed by sex.
Before he asked about the cost of the platter she’d broken, Jo switched the subject. “Why did you ask about Randy yesterday?”
“Randy?” He had to change mental gears for that one. “RJ? I’d forgotten we used to call him Randy when we were kids.”
She poured herself some coffee and leaned her hip against the stove, far enough away from him that she could keep her mind on the subject and not how it had felt to be held in those big brown arms. If she wanted to learn more, she had to keep this low key even if she had the urge to fling a plate every time she heard RJ Ratfink’s name. “You knew him when he was a kid?”
Flint set down his cup and headed toward the door to switch the CLOSED sign to OPEN. “He was a few years younger than me, but he lived next door until my family moved away when I was ten. We bumped into each other regularly on the circuit.”
That meant he could probably tell her all about the two-timin’ bastard’s escapades. As if he heard her thought, Flint avoided her proximity by straightening chairs. In those cowboy boots, he looked almost too tall for the room.
“How do you know him?” he asked with an edge in his voice.
“He used to play with the Buzzards,” she replied, keeping it casual. She could see George Bob opening his office across the street. She’d have to be quick.
“Yeah? I didn’t know that. When he came up to Nashville, I helped him get a few jobs.” He stacked a few misplaced chairs and held them over his head to carry them to the back where they belonged.
Jo sighed in regret again. He looked good in jeans. “I heard about his recording contract.” She moved the ugly white mugs to the closed cabinet to make room for the pretty cups in the glass display cabinet and tried to look disinterested. She didn’t know why she ought to be interested in RJ’s doings, except he seemed to make Flint real uneasy.
When she didn’t throw a tantrum or drop anything, Flint returned to top off his cup. “Yeah. That’s why I asked about him. Is he a real good friend of yours?”
“When Nashville called, he walked out on the Buzzards and left them stranded. I don’t reckon he has a lot of friends here right now.”
His hard expression eased a little. “Well, that’s the music business. His manager and the record company probably made that decision.”
She nodded knowledgeably. “The Buzzards weren’t pretty enough.”
“Right.” Flint straightened his shoulders as if to steel himself and produced a multi-folded scrap of paper from his wallet. “You wouldn’t happen to know if any of the band wrote this, do you?”
That caught her by surprise. Jo stopped stacking plates to stare at the scrap. It looked like one of the invoice envelopes she usually scribbled on. She was afraid if she took it, it might self-destruct. Or she might.
A sunbeam through the newly cleaned plate glass window struck Flint square on his bronzed cheekbone, and she had to admit he had the deepest, most honest eyes she’d ever seen on a lying, conniving music man. That high brow of his gave him an earnest, intellectual look that appealed to her, and the jut of his square chin begged for her to lean over and suck his sculpted lips.
And she knew better than to believe the image or give in to the urge.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked, without taking the scrap. Her hands were sweaty with anticipation. Despite the peculiarity of the conversation, Jo thought that had more to do with kissing than any expectation of what Flint was about to say.
“I composed the tunes for the lyrics RJ gave me, but later, I found that rhyme from one of his songs in his car. It’s not his handwriting.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “I have some reason not to trust him, so when he sold his album based on the songs we wrote together, that scrap made me nervous.”
“We wrote?” She was trying hard to follow this while watching a kaleidoscope of pain, confusion, and anger in Flint’s flashing eyes. He looked as volatile as she felt. “Randy’s been using some of the band’s material on the circuit,” she said carefully.
Which was why he was such a sneaking low-down thief, using their songs to make his career and not paying the band—or her—a dime, and then forgetting their existence when he cut a deal. Just thinking about it made her want to reach for a shotgun—and then Jo’s brain did a quick backtrack. “Wait a minute. You composed the music?”
Taking a seat on the far side of the counter, Flint visibly braced himself. “The tunes he was playing sucked, but the audience loved the lyrics. I was staying home at the time, so I put the words to better music.”
“The words? To Randy’s songs?” She really couldn’t believe where he was going with this. She’d written the only original lyrics Randy ever sang. Like Randy said, it was all crappola, but it was good for a laugh to warm up the audience, right?
She must have been playing cool real well because Flint relaxed.
“Yeah, some of them were kind of cute. ‘Let’s all join together, and summon stormy weather, and when the skies fall, we’ll bring them to their knees, and make the ratfinks crawl’. Silly, but he could change the subject from politics to business, if he liked. Audiences love thinking they can bring the fat cats to their knees and make them crawl.”
Sipping his coffee, Flint was getting into his subject. Jo was a damned good listener. He hadn’t had an opportunity to talk music in a while, and he was feeling deprived. He’d had a roaring good time creating the upbeat on those verses. It had matched his vengeful mood at the time and washed away some of the bitterness of his divorce.
“Silly?” Joella asked silkily, taking the scrap from his hand.
Still sailing on one of his favorite topics, Flint didn’t hear the torpedo coming. “Yeah, some of them. Once I added the bass to the chorus of that one, the audience really got into it, pounding their bottles on the table and singing along when we tried them out in a few bars. The lyrics have the kind of passion that sells. The album’s bound to go gold.” He might hate the man behind it, but he was damned proud of the music.
“How nice for Randy.” Glaring at the envelope as if it had turned into a spider, Joella dropped it on the counter and started polishing one of the hideous rainbow dishes she’d been raving about earlier.
Since she was being more rational than yesterday, Flint got a little bolder. Maybe he ought to talk to the Buzzards first, but he’d been a little startled to discover the potential source of the rhyme so easily. That chorus was the cornerstone on which the first release was laid. Maybe Joella really was an angel in disguise and could break it to the guys in a manner that wouldn’t get his pants sued off. He prayed they’d only written the one line on the envelope.
“Yeah, well, the thing is,” Flint said slowly, looking for a cautious way to word his problem, “RJ told me he wrote all the lyrics. He’s been singing them around the country for years, so I didn’t doubt him. I’d helped him out when he needed it, so he helped me out by letting me compose. I’d been doing it for the Barn Boys, but I quit the group when I quit traveling.” Flint heard the front door open and knew the morning rush was about to start, so he hurried. “But right after RJ and I copyrighted the songs and our manager sold them, I found that scrap and asked him about it. He swore it was just a line a friend back home had jotted down. I kinda wanted to make sure everything was on the level.”
“He said that? A friend?”
Joella sounded so perfectly calm that the purple plate flying past Flint’s ear caught him off guard. Stunned, he watched as her tanned arm reached across a stack of plates for a pink saucer. “If the line isn’t his, I’m trying to find that friend and make it right!” he yelled, ducking as the saucer blew over his head and ricocheted off a tin lamp with noisy accuracy.
“I wrote all Randy’s songs, damn the lazy lying low-down conniving— My mama needs that money.”
A yellow cup whizzed straight at him and Flint dropped just in time to save his scalp. More cups, saucers, and plates flew in accompaniment to each pejorative and with increasing strength as she built up steam. Hunkered down behind the counter, Flint caught a glimpse of George Bob fleeing out the front door, and his rage boiled up and threatened to spill over. This was his career on the line.
“All RJ’s songs?” he yelled. A growing terror built behind the dam of rage.
Jo broke into a wild, high-pitched chorus of “He’s my man, and I’m proud to know it. He’s my man, so I knew he’d blow it…”
Except RJ had changed the personal pronoun and said woman instead of man. The line came from the first song they’d done, and she was singing it to the tune RJ had used before Flint had fixed it. No wonder it had sounded rotten. The meter was all off for a man.
Flint listened in horror as Jo switched into a medley of every song on the recording, punctuating each change of verse with another plate. She was winging them like Frisbees now, keeping time to the beat with the crash of crockery. And his terror swelled his rage right to the brink and over.
“If you break any more of those damned plates, I’ll fire you!” he yelled, rising from behind the counter with his fingers gripping the Formica so hard they ought to leave dents. Pain shot through his crippled left hand, but it aided and abetted the rage.
“You can’t fire me,” she shouted back, flinging an orange teapot into the coffee machine. “I’ll own this place before I’m through with you and Randy RJ Ratfink Peters!”