Hometown Hero

[u/JLKeay]

I hoped I wouldn’t recognize the house when I arrived. When I left, I could still smell gunsmoke in the air. I could still hear the unfamiliar sound of fear in my father’s voice. I didn’t want to go back. I had to.

Overlook was throwing a homecoming parade. I was every small town’s dream: the girl next door made good. Sitting through the discomfort of my first flight, I thought back on the last year of my life. The audition, the funeral, the trial. I had always dreamed of singing, but people from Overlook didn’t dream that big. Most girls who grow up in the farm fields around the town’s single street only hope to marry before time steals their chance. I grew up watching the show, but I only auditioned when it started accepting videos. I didn’t make any money of my own at Mason County Community College, and my father could have never afforded to send me to one of the cities. He always said “I’d buy you the White House if I could pay the rent.” He was a good father.

For the first hour of the flight, I tried to keep my mind on the playlist. I had to perfect three new songs for the finale. One was an old honky tonk standard I had learned from my grandfather. One was a recent radio hit that no one in my family would have dared call country. I would have to strain to smile through it. And the third was my winner’s song—the one that would be my debut single if I won. The music was simple, and the label’s songwriter had found the lyrics in the story the show had given me. There it was again. I turned up the synthetic steel guitar to drown out the story I was trying to forget.

When I landed in Overlook’s aspirational idea of an airport, the local media was already there. Their demands unified in one suffocating shout. “Over here, Jenny! Show us that pretty face!”

I wished they would go away, but I had to smile. This is what I always wanted. “Y’all take care now!” By then, I had memorized the script.

Sliding into the car the show had arranged for me, I saw the rising star reporter who had picked up my story. I didn’t recognize it, but her blog told it beautifully: a troubled young man; a doomed father; and, a sister trying to hold her family together through all-American faith and determination. Her posts never mentioned who had actually been in our house that night. They never mentioned Tommy.

When I left, I told myself I would never step foot into that house again. I had begged to go to a hotel instead, but the producers said it would have been too accessible to the media. They made me come home.

By the time the driver opened my door, it was too late. Surrounded by the forest of trees Sunny and I had climbed as children, I recognized the house all too well. I remembered what it had been before. Walking up the gravel driveway, I couldn’t help but see my brother’s window. Dust had started to cling to the inside. Sunny had been in prison for six months. The last time I had seen him I had been shadowed by a camera crew. The producers thought a scene of me visiting him inside made a good package for my live debut. They were right.

The silence in the house was all-consuming. Before our mother left, I might have heard her singing hymns off-key while doing chores. The recession took that away in a moving truck. Before last year, I might have heard Sunny and our father arguing over a football game. Then the night that changed everything. Standing in our living room, I was in a museum that no one would care to visit.

I walked down the hall to my bedroom. I had changed it as I grew—changed the posters of my TV crushes for black and white photographs of our family. But it still had the paint from when my mother painted it before they moved in. Rose pink: my grandmother’s favorite color; time had taught me not to hate it.

This was where it happened. My father wasn’t supposed to be home that night. Just Tommy and me. Then darkness. Confusion. Silence. The silence that had never left. The silence I could feel in my bones. Being in my room felt like standing in a space that had died.

I came back to the present and placed my costume bag on the bed. I unzipped it and took out the baby blue sundress. None of the other Overlook women would ever wear something so lacy, so impractical, but it did look good on camera. The costume designer had glued more and more sequins onto me as the weeks went on. This dress shined even in the shadows of the house.

Once I had changed my sweats for the sundress, I put them in my duffle bag along with Tommy’s tee shirt. I was embarrassed to still be wearing it, but the cotton smelled like his cigarettes. Then I took out the boots. They were still shiny when I unwrapped them from the packing paper. They were the most expensive boots I had ever had, but the tassels would have gotten in the way in the barn. I was never going back there. Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw someone I had never met. She was a television executive’s idea of a good girl from the country.

Walking back down the hall, I saw where the summer sunlight fell onto the floor. It was too even. It was supposed to be hardwood, dented from me and Sunny roughhousing. They had to replace it quickly when they couldn’t scrub out the red boot prints. Tommy had laughed at my father when he asked him to take off his boots in the house. I had known he was more than rebellious, but that was what excited me. That was how he made me believe he was worth it. We had been better than Overlook.

I started to forget where I was as I stared at the fresh laminate. I would have ripped my dress to shreds and set my boots on fire if I could go back to that night—if I could tell that girl where she’d be a year later. I heard an impatient honk from the driveway. I couldn’t be late for the parade.

“You ready, Ms. Dawn?” The driver was being professional, but I flinched as he called me by the name the focus group had chosen for me.

“I sure am. Thank you kindly for your patience.” I couldn’t even rest with only his eyes watching me.

The sky was too big when the driver rolled down the top of the convertible. After the tightness of the old house, the open air above Main Street was a blue abyss. In one minute, the driver would start leading me down. In five minutes, I’d be on the stage. In ten, I’d accept the key to the city from Mayor Thomas. The advance team had scheduled out every last breath I couldn’t take.

Listening to the hushed whisper of the fountain that sat on that end of Main Street, I thought of everyone who would be there. And who wouldn’t. Sunny for one. The warden wouldn’t release him for this. Tommy might be anywhere else. After that night, his father had paid him to go away. He had plenty of money left after paying the district attorney, the judge, and the foreman. But my friends from Sunday School would be there. And my pastor of course. He had taught me where women like me went. The church’s social media said they had been praying for me. They wouldn’t have if they had heard what happened in that darkness—if they had heard me.

I didn’t know what had rattled through the grapevine while I had been away. Everyone had been too genteel to ask questions when I left. They were still eating the leftovers from the funeral. When my first performance went viral, they knew the proper thing to do was cheer on their hometown hero. Still, they had surely heard rumors. Tommy’s father was persuasive, but he couldn’t bribe the entire town to ignore their suspicions about his son and his late-blooming girlfriend. They had pretended not to see. I had to swallow bile when the car started. Driving down the middle of town, there would be no place for me to hide.

Before I could make out any faces in the crowd, we passed the old population sign. “Overlook: Mason County’s Best Kept Secret. Population: 100.” The old mayor’s wife had painted it—sometime in the 1990s based on the block letters and cloying rural landscape. Time had eaten its way around the wood years ago, but no one bothered to change it. All the departures and deaths kept the number accurate.

When the people started, the noise of the crowd was claustrophobic. There weren’t supposed to be that many people in Overlook. They manifested in every part of the town that had long been empty. From the car, I couldn’t see a single blade of the grass that Mrs. Mayo had always kept so tidy. The crowd had pressed them down.

“Well hey, y’all!” I remembered what the media trainer had taught me. A soft smile. A well-placed wave. I tried to act my part. All of these people—all too many of them—were there for me. They had shirts with my face on them. And signs that said “Jenny Is My Hero!”

But the sound was wrong. The high-pitched roar should have been encouraging or even exciting. Instead, just below the noise, their loud shouts felt angry. Each cry for attention sounded like a cry for a piece of flesh. Under the noise, I heard a deeper, harder voice. It sounded like it came from the earth itself. “Welcome home.”

I wanted to look away, to have just a moment to myself; I couldn’t. The eyes were everywhere, and they were all on me. Searching for safety, I looked for a little girl in the crowd. I wanted to be for them what my idols had been for me. I quickly found what should have been a friendly face. The girl wore the light dress and dark boots that had become my signature look over the last month. She even had her long blonde hair dyed my chestnut brown. Her grandmother had brought her, and she was cheering as loud as the women half her age. But the girl was silent. She was staring at me with dead, judgmental eyes. Her sign read, “I know.” Somehow, she had heard what I had said in the dark.

I tore my eyes away from the girl and fought to calm myself. The show’s therapist had taught me about centering. I tried to focus on the rolling of the tires. The sound of children playing caught my attention.

The car was passing the park. The one where Sunny and I had played on long summer evenings. Our father hadn’t even insisted on coming with us. The boy and girl on the swing were so innocent. Sunny hadn’t suspected that danger was sleeping on the other side of the house. I remembered his face in the courtroom. He knew that fighting old money would be hard, but he had looked to the witness stand like I could save him. When I chose the money, Sunny’s face lost the last bit of childhood hope he had left.

I watched the children run over the stones as I thanked a young man who had asked for my autograph. The children in the park sounded alive. I tried to find signs of life in the crowd. The children there had fallen quiet. Now they all looked at me like the little girl had. Their silence left the sound of the crowd even more ravenous with only the screams of adults. Rolling past the library, I saw that Mrs. Johnson, my fourth-grade teacher, had brought her son to the parade. He had freckles just like Sunny’s, but his eyes felt like a sentence. My stomach dropped when I saw that his sign bore the same judgment as the little girl’s. “I know.”

First Baptist Overlook rang its bells behind me. For the first time that day, I was happy. If we were passing the church, it was almost over.

As I listened to the old brass clang, the scent of magnolias filled my lungs. Over the heads of the crowd, I could see the top of the tree where I had met Tommy that Wednesday night. It was one of the few times he had come to church. The way he looked at me was holier than anything inside the walls. I knew the Bible better, but we converted each other. By the time the gun went off, we were true believers. That night, feeling each other’s skin between my cotton sheets, was supposed to be our baptism. My father should never have come home.

Then it was over. The driver pulled the car up behind the makeshift stage. The production assistants hadn’t planned for a town like Overlook. The platform was almost too big for the square. The town hall loomed over me as my boot heels hit the red brick. This place had raised me. I prayed I would never see it again.

An assistant led me up the stairs from the car to the stage. Before he gave me the cue, we looked over my outfit one more time. It was fresh from the needle, but the assistant still found a loose thread. I looked down to check for wrinkles like my mother had taught me. The fabric was ironed flat, but there was a stain on the skirt edge. Red. Jagged. It was only the size of a dime, but I knew it hadn’t been there when I took the dress out of the bag. When I looked back at it, it was the size of a quarter. The nerves under the stain spasmed with recognition. It was too late.

The assistant waved me onto the stage. I braced for the applause. There was no sound. All of the countless mouths were shut tight. All of the eyes looked at me. At the blood stain on my skirt. My shaking legs told me to run.

Before I could, Mayor Thomas barged onto the stage. Never breaking from her punishing positivity, she approached the podium like it was her birthright. With her well-fed frame, her purple pantsuit made her look like a plum threatening to spill its juice all over the stage.

“Hello, Overlook!” she cheered.

I stood like a doll as I watched the crowd. Mayor Thomas smiled for the applause that wasn’t there.

“I am so happy to be with you here today to celebrate our little town’s very own country star! She’s the biggest thing that’s come from our neck of the woods since I don’t know when. Maybe since I was her age.” The people usually humored Mayor Thomas’s self-deprecating humor. Only the mayor laughed then.

I looked to see where I was on the stage. I was inches away from the steps down. I thought about running for them. But it was too late. No one in the crowd was watching Mayor Thomas.

Something glinted under the sun. It was at the back of the crowd, standing apart from the town but still part of it. It was a motorcycle. Tommy’s motorcycle. Feet away, Tommy stood smoking a cigarette where it should have blown over the crowd. He had come back for me. We would make it out after all.

I looked up towards his familiar brown eyes. They were watching me like the rest of the town, but they weren’t staring. They were snarling. He was laughing at me. I was foolish enough to trust him, and now I have to live with his bullet in my chest. He was long gone. His father sent him away with the money we had stolen to run away. It was nothing to him.

“Well that’s enough from me! Ain’t none of y’all want to hear this old bird sing!” Mayor Thomas’s chins shook as she laughed to herself. The crowd insisted on its unamused silence. “Let’s have a warm Overlook welcome for…” I felt something warm on my chest. I looked down and saw that my entire chest was stained red. It was wet where my father had been shot. 

“Jenny Dawn!” I obeyed the mayor’s cheer and walked to the podium with a friendly wave. From the pictures I’ve seen since then, I looked like the princess next door. Mayor Thomas’s handshake was a force of nature. A reporter’s camera flashed like lightning even under the burning sun. Surely they could see the stain spreading over my dress.

Just as I had practiced, I leaned into the microphone and cooed, “Hey y’all!” Mayor Thomas clapped alone. In the middle of another choreographed wave, I noticed the blood had reached my hand.

“Welcome home, Jenny! Now, we’re going to give you an honor that only a few people in our town’s history have ever gotten. The last one was actually mine from Mayor Baker in 1971, but who’s counting?” Her chins shook again as she gestured for her assistant to bring the gift. It was an elegant box made of polished wood and finished in gold. I had seen the mayor’s box in city hall. “Your very own key to the city!”

The silence reached a deafening volume. This was the moment I had come back for. More cameras flashed, but the eyes didn’t blink. The only person who seemed to understand what was happening was a man standing by himself. He was closer to the stage than anyone else. Security should have stopped him.

He wore a department store suit and ragged tie. His shirt was dark and wet around his heart. I recognized him, and I wasn’t on stage anymore.

I was back in my bedroom. He was coming home. His business trip must have been cancelled. Tommy was climbing off of me. He looked afraid. And angry. I knew what was coming. I had to choose.

Tommy threw on his tee shirt and jeans and grabbed the duffel bag. We had to leave right then. I was petrified when my father came through the door. Time stopped when he saw the pistol Tommy had left on my vanity. My father had always been too protective. He thought I was too good for Tommy, but I knew he was my first and last love. The radio had taught me about our kind of love.

Tommy and my father both reached for the gun. I knew my father would never hurt Tommy, but he would never let me leave with a boy like him. Tommy grabbed the gun and pointed it at the man who would keep me from him. He wanted to be Johnny Cash, but his face showed him for the trust fund baby he always would be. Even with his cowardice, I had chosen him.

My father lunged towards me. I heard myself saying what I thought a girl in love was supposed to say. “Stop him, Tommy! Shoot him if you have to! If you lov—“ Then the sound of my father’s knees falling on the hard wood beside my bed.

And there he was again. Watching me from the crowd like he had that night. I took the wooden box from the assistant. It was engraved with my birth name and my father’s family name. The name that had been mine just a year ago. “Jenny” was the only part they had let me keep. Inside the box, set delicately in red velvet, was the pistol. Tommy’s pistol.

“Now, Jenny,” Mayor Thomas needled. “Will you do us the honor of singing us into Overlook’s first ever Jenny Dawn Day?”

I couldn’t do it anymore. The crowd was watching me. Everyone I had ever known could see the blood drowning out the blue on my dress. They had always known. I could never forget.

I walked to the microphone. It barely carried my soft, “I’m sorry.” The sound of Tommy’s gun echoed down Main Street.