Kat
There was nowhere in the world that made my heart sing like Montana. The way the grassy knolls rolled into snowcapped sharp mountains that seemed to lord over and protect the docile valleys, the way it felt like you could reach out and touch the deep blue sky, the way the air reminded you of dipping your bare feet in ice-cold river beds, it was and always would be the only place that felt like home to me. And still, I hadn’t planned on ever coming home again.
The day was unfolding easier than I had expected. Somehow, I’d traipsed a Rolling Stone reporter through my hometown of Conway, Montana without running into anyone worth a damn—and by that, I mean without accidentally bumping into anyone who made me think of Billy Morgan. As reporters go, Casey Stevens was perfectly lovely but still nosey. I mean, that’s her job after all, but I didn’t want to talk about Billy Morgan. We’d been to Sadie’s, the town bar and the first place I got paid to sing. We’d met Mr. Lewis who taught me to play the guitar and Mrs. Turner who made me go to summer school for Biology, and now we were in the car with my entourage on our way to the Conway Cafe to chat up Hazel, who was the riskiest visit. Hazel owned the cafe. I worked there all four years of high school. She knew me better than the rest, so Billy might come up.
Casey had been quiet on the drive so far. I looked out the car window, hoping I appeared nostalgic. But really, I just didn’t want to talk. Not about Billy or the many other topics I wanted to avoid. For example, my father, who didn’t love me enough to stick around; my dating life for the last decade, which was as brutal as a four-car pile-up on the highway; my writer’s block, I hadn’t written anything in months or my crappy last record. This visit to Conway was not by choice. After my third album was panned, Marcus, my manager, and my PR team decided that before I took a stab at the next album, my fans needed to remember I was a small-town girl. So, here I was back in the town I hoped to forget, surrounded by everything that reminded me of the worst heartbreak I’d ever known.
“Where did you live?” Casey suddenly asked. “Are we going to see your old house?”
Marcus answered from the front seat without ever looking up from his phone, “When the first album went platinum, Kat moved her mom to New York so they could be close and sold the house she grew up in to the neighbors.”
What Marcus didn’t say was that the neighbors were the Morgans—Billy’s family.
“Great. When are we going there?” Casey asked.
I kept my answer vague. “They’re busy folks. Run a ranch. They bought it for the grazing land. I’d be surprised if it's even still there.”
“We could drive by…” Casey suggested.
“Yeah, maybe.” I threw her a bone to put her off the scent. “If Hazel doesn’t talk your ear off first. We need to make sure we get back to my plane at a decent hour. It’s starting to look like it might storm.”
Casey looked down at her pad of notes. Then she said, “Tell me about the first album.”
I didn’t want to talk about the first album at all. It was the album that I wrote before I left. It was the album of a lovesick fool. “Sure, what do you want to know?”
“Um…” She flipped through her yellow notepad, landed on the page she was looking for, and said, “Who is Blue Eyed Beau about? Was that based on someone you knew here in Conway?”
For years, I’d been PR trained for moments like this. “I mean, yeah. It was about a local boy, but honestly, no one to speak of. Just a high school crush.” I pointed ahead through the front window, “The Conway Cafe is just up here to the left.”
The street was pretty empty in the late afternoon, so the driver parked the black SUV right in front. Marcus, Casey, my assistant, June, and I piled out onto the curb, and for a second, I felt like an asshole. I mean, in New York, being famous, being a rockstar was normal. It was normal to have all of these people with me all of the time. It was normal to have some guy in a suit driving me around. In Conway, it felt like I thought I was important.
My hometown might as well have been called Small Town, USA. Conway had a lot of land. They call Montana big sky country for a reason. There was a lot of sky over big fields. It was ranch country through and through. I mean, we had a Wal-Mart, but basically, we were still a homespun kind of place. Everyone knew everyone. Our main street was tree-lined. Our town Santa Claus was Mr. Parker, and one day, it would be Mr. Parker’s son if it wasn’t already. There was one beauty shop, one pizza place, and an ice cream stand that was only open April through September. For most Conway residents, cappuccinos were still “fandangled coffees” for urban people, or at least they were when I left.
Immobilized by my encounter with my past, I stood on the curb looking left and right. A young woman I didn’t know crossed the street. She didn’t look like the Conway I remembered at all. She was pretty, but she wasn’t homespun. She looked almost punky, like I could have seen her on a corner in Brooklyn. Her hair was bright blue. She had huge doe eyes and a curvy figure. She smiled as she passed us and then did that thing that people do when they pass a celebrity. She slowly looked back with narrowed eyes, clearly wondering to herself, is that Kat Bennett?
I put on my sunglasses and headed for the cafe door. Hazel had me in her arms before I even stepped through the door. “Sweet baby Jane, well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
I was caught off guard by the tightness in my chest and the tears in my eyes. I hadn’t realized I missed her.
Hazel leaned back, holding me at arm’s length, and inspected my face. “Pie, you need pie. You look tired and underfed. Do they feed you out east?”
She turned and started moving toward the counter, calling out behind her, “Kat always loved a warm slice of my strawberry rhubarb. I’m fetching the rest of y’all apple unless you speak up.”
Never one to miss the opportunity to assert his opinion, Marcus said, “I actually prefer crumb cake.”
I could feel June shaking her head behind me, as she said, “Thank you, ma’am.”
I took a seat on one of the red stools. The Conway Cafe was exactly as you’d imagine it. A soda shop counter in a large room filled with rickety wood round tables and a mix and match collection of chairs. There was no particular color scheme, but the place was homey. And it smelled like heaven. That is, if your version of heaven is forty some odd years of pie.
Hazel looked older. She was letting her hair go gray. She had to be nearing her sixties by now. She was round, but she was always round. I mean, the woman makes pies for a living.
After slicing pie and crumb cake and making sure everyone had a fork, Hazel looked at me and said, “Well, I was pretty sure I was never going to see you again, so what brings you back?”
Selling a PR tour to Hazel felt insincere. “Casey here,” I pointed to her, “is a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine.”
“Oh, so it’s a show and tell?” There was sarcasm in her tone, but she was smiling.
Casey didn’t miss a beat. She leaned in and asked, “What did you bring to show and tell, Hazel?”
“I got stories, kid. But, we’re old school around here. If it ain’t mine to tell, I’m not telling.”
“Well, what can you tell me, Hazel?” Casey smiled, leaning back on her stool.
Hazel took a deep breath, “She was a good kid, talented. We all knew that she was something special right from the start. I was standing right here with her mom the first time we heard her song on the radio. Kat’s momma worked here too. The restaurant was full. It was lunchtime and everyone put their forks down. Everyone in town is a Kat Bennett fan and has been since she was a girl, so hearing her voice come through the radio just about knocked our socks off. When the song was through, the whole place broke into applause and people started hugging and kissing Kat’s momma. Her name’s Miriam, by the way, Kat’s momma.”
I blushed, I’d heard that story before but it made me feel happy. I turned to Casey,
“My mom and Hazel are friends.”
“And now your mom lives in New York, with you?” We’d covered this ground earlier, but it was a conversation I didn’t mind having so we could hang out here all day. “Yes. As soon as I could, I brought her to me. We’re close, and I like having her nearby. Every now and then, she comes back here to visit. With touring and recording, it was just too hard to...”
I was interrupted by the jingling bell on the cafe door. A hulk of a man walked in, hollering, “Heeeeeyzeeeel!” He was almost singing the word. “We need pie. What do you have in store for us today, you sweet ray of sunshine?”
When he caught sight of me, the hunky cowboy dead stopped with a stunned look on his face. It took me a second. When I left Conway, this hulk of a man was a pimply-faced fourteen-year-old kid. This was Wyatt Morgan. One of Billy’s little brothers.
Behind Wyatt, another man came in, he must have been looking down at his phone. All I could see was the tipping brim of his hat. He said, “She’s asking for cherry,” right before he ran smack dab into Wyatt’s back. “What the heck, Wyatt?”
He couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see him. But I knew his voice better than my own: Billy Morgan.