Riverbend Reunion(70)

“Did y’all sleep with the football players back then?” Daisy asked.

“We did not,” Haley said. “I didn’t have sex until I was in college.”

“Me either.” Mary Nell wasn’t going to admit that the only man she’d ever slept with was Kevin.

“I’d been in the army a year and thought I was in love before I went to bed with a guy.” Jessica pounded her left fist right into her right palm.

“I guess we might as well not even try out for the cheerleader squad if that’s what it takes.” Lily sighed.

“Don’t let those rascals tell you what to do or intimidate you,” Jessica growled. “If they ever come around here again, I intend to tell them to take their sorry butts back into their pickups and find somewhere else to park.”

Mary Nell spoke up. “Don’t worry about the tryouts. You will just meet in the gym and do your best two cheers for a panel of judges. Riverbend is a small school, so there’s just a teacher who serves as a cheer sponsor. It’s not like in the big schools, where there’s a flag squad or props for the cheer tryouts. It’s just you and the judges. The football team has nothing to do with any of it.”

“That’s the way it was in Kentucky, too.” Lily stood up and carried her empty bottle to the trash. “We always wanted to try out, but Granny Martha said no. Please don’t tell Mama about tonight,” she said. “It would just worry her. She wants us to be happy.”

“I’m telling her soon as I get home,” Daisy declared. “We all three promised not to keep secrets.”

Lily shot a dirty look toward her sister and then turned toward Mary Nell. “Would you tell your mama about something like this when you were about to be a senior in high school?”

“Senior? I thought you girls were sixteen,” Mary Nell said.

“Our birthday is September the first. We’ll be seventeen then,” Daisy answered. “We’ll be young graduates.”

“I see.” Mary Nell took a long drink of her tea. “To answer your question, yes, I would have told her. Mama and I shared almost everything.”

“Jessica?” Lily asked. “How about you?”

“Probably”—Jessica nodded—“but mainly because I would have gone home so mad that she would have known something was wrong.”

Haley spoke up before they even asked her. “Nope, not in a million years. I might have done something to get even with them, but I wouldn’t have told my mother, and Risa wouldn’t have told Stella, either, would she?”

“Oh, hell no!” Daisy gasped and then clamped a hand over her mouth.

“Don’t worry about saying a bad word, Sister. We are not living with Granny Stella or Granny Martha, and hell is a destination according to both of them, anyway.” Lily patted Daisy on the shoulder. “So that makes it just a word, like Florida or Cancún, or Paris, France.”

Daisy removed her hand. “You are right, and I’m trying out for cheerleader. We’ll be the ones who change things if what they said is true. Besides, that was crude and rude of them to tell us that.”

“Totally ungentlemanly.” Mary Nell held up her beer. “To scumbags who think they can make any of us do something we don’t want to do.”

“Amen.” Haley clinked her glass against the beer bottle.

The other three raised their drinks.

“To us,” Lily said.

“To us,” the others chorused.





Chapter Sixteen


Mary Nell could hear her dad whistling out in his moonshine barn, where he was working on a new batch of elderberry wine. She was sitting on the front porch swing with a glass of sweet tea in one hand and a book that she planned to read in the other, but the sunset was just too pretty to miss that evening. So she laid the book on the swing, which she pushed into motion with her bare foot.

Her phone rang, and thinking it was probably her dad wanting her to bring out a bag of sugar to the barn or maybe to taste the newest blackberry moonshine, she didn’t even check the caller ID, answering instead with a cheery “Hello! You should come see the sunset. It’s beautiful tonight.”

“I would love to be there beside you.” Kevin’s words were slightly slurred, which meant he’d been drinking. “I miss you, darlin’, more than I can ever say in words. I was a fool to let you leave me.”

“Let me leave you?” Mary Nell’s voice went up an octave. “You threw me out, told me you didn’t need me anymore now that you were on the rise with that contract.”

“Don’t be mean to me, darlin’,” Kevin said. “I had a lapse in judgment. It’s the artist in me. You have to know I love you.”

“No, I do not know that.” Mary Nell was amazed that she felt nothing for him except anger that he thought he could sweet-talk her into another chance. “A person doesn’t treat someone they love like you’ve treated me, Kevin, and I was a fool to let it go on as long as I did.”

The phone screen went dark, and Mary Nell thought he’d hung up on her, but then it rang again, and this time he wanted her to accept a FaceTime call. She hit the right button and held it out from her face. “Kevin, it’s over. I’m in Texas. I’m not coming back to Tennessee. Find yourself another sucker to pay the bills while you chase your dream of being a famous country music star.”