Riverbend Reunion(49)

“Want to talk about it?” Haley asked.

“No . . . yes . . . ,” Mary Nell stammered. “I don’t know. It’s been almost a month, and I kind of put the whole experience in a box and taped it shut. But here lately it seems like the tape is letting go, and I get so angry. One of the ladies I worked with called me a couple of days ago. She said that Kevin was flying high about getting a record contract, running up credit card debts and doing lots of partying, but something fell through with it, and he’s back playing whatever gigs he can get.”

“Karma is a bitch,” Jessica said. “He’ll probably show up on your doorstep, begging you to come back to Nashville with him, so you can be his meal ticket again.”

“They won’t ever find his body if Daddy gets ahold of him, so he’d do good to stay out of Texas,” Mary Nell said with a long sigh. “He would probably be real smart not to even try to get in touch with me.”

“Would you go back if he offered?” Jessica’s chest tightened. They all four needed each other for mental support.

“No, that ship has sailed,” Mary Nell said with a weak smile. “I loved him at one time, though, and I believed that someday he would get a break. He promised me that we would start a family as soon as that happened.”

Haley’s mouth went dry at the mention of starting a family. This was the perfect time to jump right in and tell them she was pregnant, but her throat had tightened.

The haunting sound of a fiddle floated in from somewhere close by, and then a banjo joined.

“Is that ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’?” Jessica asked. “It seems like a strange song for the girls to be practicing their cheerleader moves to.”

“Times have changed, but not that much.” Haley smiled.

“They aren’t practicing for cheerleading,” Risa said and then laid a hand on Mary Nell’s. “I loved Paul when I married him, but after we’d been in Kentucky a few months, I hardly recognized him as the same guy I’d eloped with. You’re not too old to have a family if you want one.”

Haley opened her mouth to say that she was pregnant, but Jessica got ahead of her.

“Would you have another baby if you remarried?” Jessica asked Risa.

“No, I would not.” Risa shook her head. “I’ve got my girls, and right now I don’t think I’ll ever want to get married again. Someday in the far distant future, I might date, but I’m never living with a man again.”

“Not even if he’s not a mama’s boy?” Jessica asked.

“I wouldn’t trust myself to take that kind of chance,” Risa answered.

“Who says I’ve got to be married and have a husband to have a family?” Mary Nell said. “I’m thirty-eight, for God’s sake. If I want a baby, I can talk someone into helping me the natural way or I can go to a sperm bank.”

“Thank God that we live in these days and not back fifty years ago,” Jessica said.

“Amen to that,” Haley said. All the doubts that her friends would think she was stupid for letting herself get pregnant by an engaged man disappeared. “We are independent women who can make our own decisions.”

The music out in the yard changed to a snappy Irish song.

“I recognize that tune coming from the backyard,” Jessica said. “I heard it, or something like it, when I was on R & R in Ireland a few years ago. A young lady with long black hair was playing that song in an Irish pub when I went with my team several nights in a row.”

The fiddling and banjo playing changed to an old hymn, “I’ll Fly Away.”

“What are the girls practicing out there?” Jessica asked.

“Their fiddle and banjo,” Risa said, “not their moves for the tryouts. When they do that, I watch them and give them pointers. Martha insisted that all the granddaughters take music lessons on the instrument of their grandmother’s choice so they could play in church. Lily plays the fiddle. Daisy is on the banjo. One of their cousins played the piano.”

“No boys?” Jessica asked.

“Sure, but they only played if they wanted to,” Risa answered. “Girls played when they were told to get their instruments out. Like I’ve said before, boys and girls have different sets of rules in Martha’s culture. The drummer was one of the male cousins, and another one played steel guitar. On Sunday afternoons, we all had dinner and the kids played for us. I imagine the girls miss those times.”

“Men!” Haley huffed, but at the same time, she vowed that no matter what gender her baby was, the rules would be the same.

“Yep,” Jessica agreed.

“Hey, you don’t have man problems like us,” Haley argued.

“But I have down through the years,” Jessica argued back.

“Such as?” Risa asked.

“Such as she’s got feelings for Wade, but she thinks she can’t do anything about them because they are partners in business,” Haley said, needing for them to talk about that to give her a while longer before she admitted that she was pregnant.

Jessica gasped. “Why would you say that?”

“Because it’s the truth,” Risa answered. “We can all see it, but you have to decide what you’re going to do about it. We can’t make that decision for you.”