Free Love in a Small Town by Curtiss Ann Matlock

been that they had had a very poor beginning, Molly thought. In all truth she had gotten exactly what she wanted, because she had never wanted anything but to marry Tommy Lee Hayes and have his children. She had needed his responsibility and dependability, and more than anything in this world she had wanted Tommy Lee to love her best of anything in his.
    But Tommy Lee had wanted other things, besides Molly.
    Tommy Lee had wanted to design and build and run race cars for top drivers on the stock car circuit. He had been on his way to doing just that, too. Right after high school graduation, he had gotten a job as a mechanic on the team of a small-time racer and was looking ahead to moving on up to the big leagues.
    He would have done it, too. Molly knew this without a doubt. If it hadn’t been that he’d had to leave it all and marry her and take on a child, he would have made himself a major name in racing.
    Maybe he could have gone back to it, and once he did try, but again he had been caught by Molly and another child coming along. Molly honestly hadn’t planned that to happen, had been as surprised as Tommy Lee about it. Each of their children had been a surprise, although much loved ones.
    Through all the years, Molly had held inside of her the suspicion that Tommy Lee was married to her because he was caught by his sense of responsibility. And of late she had come to think that twenty-five years was long enough for either herself or Tommy Lee to live on false pretenses. She thought that she could not live another day feeling beholden to him, or guilty for holding him where he didn’t want to be.
     

Chapter 5
     

Hold Me
     
    At dawn Molly went into the kitchen and made a cup of instant coffee. The coffee was a cheap generic brand that came from her mother’s refrigerator and had an expiration date of the year before, but it was coffee and obviously not lethal because Molly drank six cups and kept breathing.
    The sun rose higher and filtered through the trees, but Molly continued to sit at the tiny maple table in the kitchen with a cup of instant coffee and the warming summer breeze wafting through the back door screen. She had put on her sunglasses again, which made the room dim and seeing the numbers on the telephone dial a little difficult. The telephone was an old black rotary model, connected to the wall plug by a fifty-foot line, so it could go anywhere in the cottage and even out the back door. A number of times Molly reached out and took hold of the receiver, but she never lifted it.
    She had told Tommy Lee that she would call their children. What was she going to say to them? How could she tell them that she had left their daddy? She couldn’t even stand to think the words: “left Tommy Lee.”
    The sound of a car startled her, and she jumped to look out the window, thinking immediately of Tommy Lee. What would she say to him?
    But then she saw it was Kaye’s Buick. Molly was so disappointed that it wasn’t Tommy Lee—angry, even. She didn’t want to speak to him, and it wouldn’t help either of them, but she really would have liked for him to try to initiate contact again.
    She was sick that it was Kaye. Why did it have to be Kaye? The fact that it was Sunday cut through her hazy brain. Every Sunday morning Kaye stopped by Mama’s on her way to church, to have a cup of coffee and to try to talk Mama into going to church with her. Mama had given up church after Season had moved out; she said she didn’t need to go to a special building to have church. She preferred to have church in her own house.
    “The Lord wants me as I am,” she always said. “I can be myself in my robe in my own home. When I start thinking of church, I start thinking of what will I wear and that’s not thinking of the Lord.”
    “The Bible tells us to go to church,” Kaye argued. “Where two or three are gathered—that’s where the Lord is. That’s what it says in the Bible.”
    “It also says when you pray to go