Of the two, Melba Caldwell had been more devoted to Tom than Stanley had been to hunting. Every summer Kate's grandfather had driven her grandmother, like a pilgrim journeying to holy sites, to Las Vegas and the MGM Grand to worship with the faithful. And every year, instead of bits of paper or teaspoons of milk, Melba had carried an extra pair of panties in her handbag.
Kate had accompanied her grandmother to one of Tom's shows a number of years ago. Once had been enough. She'd been eighteen, and seeing her grandmother whip out a pair of red silkies and toss them on stage had scarred Kate for life. They'd sailed through the air like a kite and had wrapped around Tom's mic stand. Even now, after all these years, the mental picture of Tom wiping sweat from his brow with her grandmother's panties disturbed her and caused a deep groove in the center of her forehead.
Kate's grandmother had been gone for two years, but nothing of hers had been packed up and put away. Tom Jones chotchkes were everywhere. It was as if her grandfather kept the memory of her grandmother alive through sex bomb ashtrays, Delilah shot glasses and pussycat bobble heads. As if to lose those things would be to lose her completely.
He refused to hire more day help in the grocery store, even though he could certainly afford it. The Aberdeen twins and Jenny Plummer rotated the night shift. The store was closed on Sundays, and the only real difference was that now Kate worked with him at the M&S instead of Melba.
He was so old-fashioned that he still did the bookkeeping by hand in a big ledger. He kept track of his sales and inventory in different color-coordinated books just as he had since the 1960s. He absolutely refused to step into the twenty-first century and didn't own a computer. The only piece of modern office equipment he owned was a desk calculator.
If things didn't change, he was going to work himself into an early grave. Kate wondered if that was what he secretly hoped. She'd come to Gospel for a break, to get away from her life for a short while. One look into her grandfather's sad face and even sadder existence, and she'd known there was no way she could leave him until he was living again. Not just going through the motions.
She'd been in Gospel for two weeks now, but it had only taken her two days to see that Gospel really hadn't changed that much since she was a kid. There was a sameness about Gospel, a day-to-day predictability, that Kate was surprised to discover appealed to her. There was a certain peace in knowing your neighbors. And even though those neighbors were all locked and loaded, there was comfort in knowing they weren't likely to go on some wild killing spree.
At least not until spring. Like the black bears that roamed the wilderness area, the town pretty much hibernated during the winter months. Once the regular hunting season was over in the late fall, there wasn't a lot to do until the snow melted.
As far as Kate could tell, the townspeople had a love/hate relationship with tourists and were suspicious of anyone without an Idaho "famous potatoes" license plate bolted to their bumper. They had a distrust of California and felt a superiority over anyone not born and raised in Idaho.
After all these years, Gospel still had only two diners. At the Cozy Corner Cafe, the specials of the day were still fried chicken and chicken fried steak. The town had two grocery stores. The M&S was the smaller of the two, with only one checkout. On the outskirts of town, two different churches lined the same street. One nondenominational, the other Mormon. Gospel had five bars and four gun and tackle shops.
The only new business in town was a sporting goods store located in what had once been the pharmacy right across the parking lot from the M&S. The old log building had been refurbished and restored, and big gold letters spelled out SUTTER SPORTS just above the stained-glass fish in the huge front window. It had a green tin roof and awnings, and a Closed Until April sign hung on the double glass-and-brass doors.
According to Stanley, Sutter's didn't sell guns. No one knew why. This was Gospel after all, gun-nut capital of the world. A place where kids got their NRA membership cards before their driver's license. A place where all pickup trucks had gun racks and THEY CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS bumper stickers. People slept with handguns stuck in the headboards of their beds and stashed in panty drawers. And they took it as a matter of pride that no citizen of Gospel had been killed with a gun since the turn of the century, when two of the Hansen boys had shot it out over a whore named Frenchy.
Well, there had been that incident in ' 95 when the old sheriff of the town had taken his own life. But that didn't count since taking your own life really wasn't a punishable crime. And no one really liked to talk about that particular chapter of the town's history anyway.
Most everything inside the M&S Market was the same as Kate recalled from her childhood. The antlers of the twelve-point buck her grandfather had blown away in '79 were still on display above the old battered cash register. Around the commercial coffeemaker, conversation ranged from the mysterious owner of Sutter Sports, to Iona Osborn's hip replacement surgery.
"You can't weigh that much and not have hip problems," Ada Dover said as Kate punched the keys of the cash register, then hit Add with the side of her hand.
"Uh-huh," she responded as she set a can of cling peaches in a plastic grocery bag. Even the sounds inside the store were the same. From the back room, she could hear the whine of the meat slicer, and from the speakers overhead, Tom Jones sang about touching the green grass of home. Melba's presence was still everywhere in the M&S, from the horrible music to the velvet Tom painting hung in the back office. About the only thing that had really changed inside Melba Caldwell's store since her death was the stream of widows trolling for her husband, Stanley.
"Iona should have gone on Weight Watchers years ago. Have you ever tried Weight Watchers?"
Kate shook her head, and the end of her ponytail brushed the shoulders of her black shirt. Last week she'd substituted Tom Jones with Matchbox Twenty. But halfway into the second verse of "Disease," her grandfather had ejected her CD and plugged Tom back in. As Ada rambled and Tom crooned, Kate felt a slight brain bleed coming on.
"It really keeps my figure trim. And Fergie's too. Being that I'm Iona's good friend, I tried to get her to at least check out a few meetings over at the grange." Ada shook her head and her eyes narrowed. "She said she would, but she never did. If she'd listened to me, she'd have lost that weight huckity-buck and there would've been no need to have that hip replaced." What the heck was a huckity-buck? Fearing the answer, Kate pointed out instead, "It could be that Iona has a low metabolism." According to her grandfather, Ada Dover arrived every day around noon, coifed, decked, and doused in Emeraude. No doubt about it, she was looking to make Stanley Caldwell husband number three.
"She should buy one of those mountain bikes from over there at the sports store."
Now that Kate was here, her grandfather always found something to do in the back room to avoid Ada and the widow posse who had him in their sights. He also made her do the home deliveries the widows called in on a regular basis. Kate didn't appreciate it either. She didn't like getting pumped for information about her grandfather, and she had better things to do than listen to Myrtle Lake rattle on about the horrors of heel spurs. Better things—like giving herself a lobotomy. "Maybe Iona should just start out walking," Kate suggested as she rang up a box of Wheat Thins and placed it in the sack.
"Of course, even if Iona wanted to buy one of those bikes, she can't. The owner of that store is probably in the Carribean, sunning himself like a lizard. His mama is the nurse over there at the clinic. She's not from around here. Minnesota, I think. Tight-lipped as Tupperwear." Ada dug into her huge purse and pulled out her wallet. "I don't know why he opened his store in Gospel in the first place. He'd probably sell more bikes and what-nots in Sun Valley. He doesn't sell guns over there. Don't know why, but that's a Minnesotan for ya. Liberal and contrary."