Tall Tales

By Marcia Davey

Tall Tales is a collection of short stories.
Hey Good Lookin is a story about a young woman who discovers that she doesn’t have a favorite song. What’s wrong with her? Does everybody else have a favorite song? Is this more evidence of her social awkwardness? She will try to fix it.
Rescued is about memorials to those we’ve lost. For some, remembering causes us to retreat into an uncomfortable place; to relive the trauma.
The Plowman is a profile of life in a small village and the dynamics of loyalty and alienation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664171978

Marcia Davey

Marcia Davey graduated from Acadia University and Providence College. Her first book, Three Stories, was published in 2004. Camille’s Fond Embrace was published in 2004, Gallivanting in 2008, Priest in 2010, Chevy Blues in 2013, and now in 2016, Isabella.

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Copyright © 2021 by Marcia Davey.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/27/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

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Contents

Hey Good Lookin

Settled

Maura Payne

Place in Active File

Nanna

The Fires Next Door

Home Confinement

The Plowman

Rescued

Icing the Puck

Corrected

Shadowland

Hey Good Lookin

Sadie Timmel was unrelaxed in social settings. To compensate for this, she cooked popular casserole dishes and baked apple pies which fostered animated conversations at pot-luck dinners. She entertained her husband’s business associates with sit-down events in her ornate dining room. Painted portraits of her grandparents, framed separately in oval frames, overlooked the table, heavy with inherited silver settings. She served Prosecco in crystal flutes. At these times, her husband did most of the talking and she focused on the food; here she was relaxed.

But at one local event, a charity spaghetti & meatballs dinner for the football team – the boys needed new uniforms after an especially rough season – she ran out of talk with Coach and finished the Chianti. A magician was scheduled to perform and she hates magicians: rabbits in a hat and all that, stupid card tricks and all that.

One of his tricks was hypnotism. The magician asked the audience for volunteers to come up on stage and be hypnotized. He had four male volunteers and scanned the group for a gal volunteer. Sadie was so annoyed at being called a gal, she stood up. The group applauded. Her husband Jack grabbed her wrist and tried to sit her down but she got free and climbed the steps to the stage. The men arranged her chair in the center. She crossed her ankles and folded her hands on her lap. She considered that nothing could be as awful as trying to keep up that aimless chatter with Coach. Jack ordered another scotch.

They were hypnotized as a group. They waved their right arms, waved their left arms, stood on tip toes and then did pirouettes. She doesn’t remember any of this. Jack told her later.

Then the magician asked each volunteer to sing a favorite song. One man had a trained tenor voice and sang I Did It My Way. Another sang Ave Maria. When it was her turn, she stood mute. Despite the magician’s gentle persuasion, she could not sing; she doesn’t have a favorite song. The magician didn’t suggest whistling which she does well.

She does not remember standing there on the stage trying to sing. Jack said she was rubbing her eyes with her head down. The group returned to their seats and the magician unhypnotized them with his secret suggestion.

We didn’t think you were really under, Coach’s wife said, I mean, everybody has a favorite song, don’t they?

Jack returned from the bar with a fresh drink. I didn’t know that you don’t have a favorite song, he said, I know you like YoYo Ma, but I don’t believe he sings, does he?

This innocent comment from her husband added to her social insecurity. Why does she find these gatherings so uncomfortable? Why does she look for any escape like resorting to hypnosis? Why doesn’t she have a favorite song like normal people do? Why can’t she chat up the coach of the football team? Is she waltzing through life in a trance?

She went for a walk and tried to remember a song, any song, searching for some ditty filed away in her addled mind. Here’s what she found:

Hey good lookin,

What’s ya got cookin,

How’s about cookin somethin

Up with me.

Where did that come from? She didn’t know. Was that her favorite song? She has a favorite novel – Olive Kitteridge; a favorite bird – the nuthatch; a favorite flower – the rose; why doesn’t she have a favorite song like normal people? Cinema Paradiso is her favorite movie. She could talk about that, but who would be interested?

Hey sweet baby

Don’t you think maybe,

We could find a brand

New recipe?

Now she can’t get the damn thing out of her head.

The problem seems to be conversations with men. They talk sports:

Hey man, did you see Bett’s homer in the ninth? Hey, why the hell are they trading him? Hey, The Sox can go the distance this year.

Well, she can do the hey part, it seems.

She was determined to talk sports too. She bought a book by Hugh Townsend, a famous sports reporter known for his fine writing, and read it from cover to cover just because the writing was so pure.

And now it was time for her annual New Year’s Eve dinner party. She ordered a fresh green centerpiece from LLBean, and too many battery-operated (remote included) candles from the Home Shopping Network because the earnest demonstrators said that they had sold twenty thousand and there were only a few hundred left. She put some in the front windows and a New Year’s Eve snowfall enhanced the effect.

Jack served festive Campari cocktails and then poured the red wine for each guest. He sat at one end and Sadie sat next to Coach at the other end.

Somebody said BRUINS and Sadie took her cue. She said to Coach:

Sidney Crosby was only eighteen when he went to the NHL Pittsburgh Penguins. He comes from Cole Harbour in Nova Scotia…he’s the best. The kids love him. He built a big sports complex there, and when the Penguins won the Stanley Cup in 2016, he brought the cup back to the Tim Horton’s doughnut shop and invited everybody to take pictures. Now he’s in a commercial on TV where he drives through the Tim Horton’s pick-up on a Zamboni and orders coffee. It’s so funny.

She went on:

I had my picture taken with Jean Beliveau in Montreal in 1965 when he got an award of some kind. They weren’t called selfies then. She paused. My father took me.

I don’t follow much hockey, Coach said.

But Sadie was determined. A fellow alumnus of mine from Acadia University, Brian Heaney, was drafted by the NBA, the Baltimore Bullets in 1969. Then he coached the Canadian women’s team in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

Is that so? Coach seemed curious.

Jack started clearing the dinner plates and Sadie helped with loading the dishwasher. You and Coach are having an animated conversation, he said and smiled because he knew she had been trying to improve her talking points.

Yes, I’m afraid I over-talked on the sports stuff… he didn’t seem too interested though.

Sadie, you know he’s not a sports coach, right?…he’s a Lifestyle coach.

He’s a what?

He’s a Lifestyle coach…a counselor, sort of a cheerleader in a wellness program. He works out of the gym.

No, I didn’t know that, she said. She set the dishwasher on its first run, and began to sing her favorite song.

I got a hot-rod Ford and a two dollar bill,

And I know a place just over the hill,

There’s