All Your Pretty Dreams by Lise McClendon Page A

mess, even though it leaked every spring for
the last twenty.
    Margaret stared over the
rose bushes, eyes like slits. She had recovered her sanity, even
braved the gossips at Eva’s Beauty Barn to get her hair done. She
made a noise like a raspberry. “She wants him to sell,” she
grumbled. “And leave town.”
    “ Now, Margaret,” the
priest said, touching her arm. “Maybe he just wants to prove his
worthiness— to you and the family.”
    “ After 35
years?”
    Jonny watched his father
dig away at the old shingles, sending rotting layers flying. Jagged
pieces of asphalt shingle and tarpaper landed on the students’
cars. Others fell on rose bushes and the picket fence. Jonny felt
the pressure to help, to at least clean up. His father was acting
like a crazy person. Ozzie would be at it for awhile, maybe days.
Maybe get Jonny involved, make him take sides.
    The priest said, “People
change, Margaret.”
    She snorted.
“Germans?”
    Ozzie crawled over to the
other side of the roof, bent to his task. They shouldn’t watch.
Jonny asked Father Teddy if he’d like more coffee. Before he could
answer, a knock on the door was followed by a yoo-hoo . Carol floated in on a cloud
of gardenia.
    “ Look who I’ve
brought!”
    Carol wore her yellow pedal
pushers with a Hawaiian shirt featuring hula girls. She stepped
aside to let two young women pass. The first Jonny recognized as
Carol’s daughter, last seen at a Christmas gathering. She was bony
everywhere Carol was ample, her mother’s exact opposite, right down
to soul-killing shyness.
    Margaret clapped her hands
in a rehearsed manner, her strange, estranged husband forgotten.
“Darling Frances! Just look at you. You’re a sight for sore
eyes.”
    The exchange between the
old friends told the story: Margaret and Carol had concocted a plot
to boost Frances’s self-esteem. There was no other explanation for
their enthusiastic comments about her haircut, her complexion, her
shoes, her height. Jonny felt a pang of sympathy. The girl hung her
head, mud-colored eyes darting up unwillingly from under hair the
color of soggy toast. The other girl smiled at everyone as the
mothers ignored her. She radiated good feeling, with blue eyes and
long brown hair that was sleek and wavy.
    The Frances Boosters
returned to earth. Carol’s voice resumed its normal pitch and she
introduced the dark-haired woman as Kiki Calhoun. Kiki worked the
room, shaking everyone’s hand. When she got to Jonny her hand was
warm. “Great meeting you, Jon,” she said, startling him with her
sunny smile.
    Coffee was ordered up, and
cheese with crackers since baking hadn’t been on the schedule for
some time. Father Teddy took up a post next to shrinking Frances
and tried to get her to talk. No such methods were required for
Kiki Calhoun. She asked Jonny about Red Vine, and soon was talking
about herself. She went to college with Frances at a small college
in Ohio and was visiting campuses with her, looking at graduate
programs. They had already toured Minnesota, Iowa State, Chicago,
and Missouri.
    “ And are you finding good
programs?” he asked. “I’m sorry, what did you say you’re
studying?”
    “ Physics. I mean, for
Frances,” Kiki said, throwing back her head as she laughed. “Don’t
ask me about it! It’s over my head. I mean, I thought I was smart.”
    He smiled, glad the pretty
one wasn’t studying physics. That would have been the end of that.
The visit ended soon— although none too soon for Frances— and they
were invited to dinner that night. No mention was made of the
absent father or roofing. They had stuck with light subjects,
summer weather, college life, baseball. He hadn’t consciously
avoided the topic of his musical instrument, or the reason for his
extended visit. He wondered if Kiki despised accordions like other
college girls he could mention.
    He found out minutes after
they arrived at the Chichester’s that evening. His grandmother
Nora, an old friend of