His Pretend Baby Page 40

  “Goody? Goody’s your mom!?”

  I can tell from his tone that he’s finding it hard to believe the flamboyant back-up singer, who recounted her struggle to find recognition with such humor and flair, is actually my mother. It probably doesn’t help that as much time as the filmmakers gave to her story, she doesn’t mention having a daughter. Not even once. Just “real disapproving parents from West Tennessee.”

  “Technically yes,” I answer Colin. “But we don’t have a lot in common.”

  “So that story she told about trying to make it as a country music singer before she moved to Los Angeles…”

  “Yeah, that’s true. She just forgot to mention I was her backup singer and guitar player.”

  I think about how she only provided the filmmakers pictures of her solo in her cowgirl outfit. It had been enough to make me wonder if I had actually been in Alabama with her. Made me touch my scar, the only real proof I have of the time we performed together, just to make sure it was still there.

  I’ve never told anyone else that story. Your mom not mentioning you in the documentary someone did about her and other backup singers lives isn’t something you go around bragging about. And my family, the only other people I’d tell it to, already know. They also know my mother isn’t a subject I like to talk about.

  But Colin, with his twisted sense of humor, has the perfect response. “That’s going to be a hell of a song when you finally write it,” he says, like I’ve won the songwriter’s jackpot.

  Over the next few weeks I have a real hard time keeping all my secrets to myself. Colin’s got a way of making me want to tell him everything, even though I know it will be the end of whatever this weird thing is that’s building between us if I do.

  The grandma-confusing gifts that keep arriving in the mail don’t help either. A package of hokey guitar picks with koalas, kangaroos, dingoes, and other Australian animals printed across their fronts. A state-of-the-art recording microphone he said he “just found” in one of Tokyo’s electronic districts. And an original pressed vinyl single of “(Love’s) Ring of Fire.” The one recorded by June Carter Cash’s sister, Anita, that he’d found while rummaging through an old record shop in London.

  “Thank you,” I tell him when he calls me from Scotland, “I don’t have a record player, but I’m going to figure out how to listen to it.”

  Two days later, my grandma calls to tell me an Amazon package with a portable Crosley record player just arrived. She’s not even trying not to open my mail these days, and I’m afraid Colin’s re-created a monster.

  “When are you bringing this boy around to see me?” she asks for the umpteenth time. “He’s obviously trying to court you with these strange gifts he be sending.”

  “He’s not…” I stop myself there, because I can’t really explain what Colin is doing to myself, much less my grandma.

  “Thank you for the record player,” I say the next time Colin calls. “But you’ve got to stop sending me things. My grandma keeps saying I need to bring you around to meet her because she thinks you’re courting me or something. Not to mention, I’m going to have to retrain her not to open my mail after all this is done.”

  “Is this the same grandma you claim makes better chicken than Josie?” he asks.

  The very next day a stack of Gospel records from an Edinburgh record shop arrives in the mail addressed to “Purple’s Grandma.” And every single one of them has a version of “Go Tell It On the Mountain.”

  “I like this boy,” my grandmother tells me when she calls with one of the records playing in the background on the new Crosley. “If you don’t bring him for Sunday Dinner soon, you go’on to hear about it from me.”

  Colin gets me in trouble with my grandma. He pisses me off. He makes me laugh. Sometimes I wish I’d never agreed to do this friendship thing with him for Josie. I look forward to his calls every day.

  Meanwhile, the last week in September gets closer and closer and Colin continues not to bring it up. Not even on the Monday before the Tuesday he’s set to fly back from the European leg of his tour. He calls to tell me he’ll be leaving Norway before I wake up and won’t be landing in Nashville until after midnight on Tuesday. Then he has a bunch of interviews on Wednesday, so he might not be able to call me until Thursday.

  He tells me this and I say, “Okay, talk to you Thursday, then,” doing my best impression of a person who is not going crazy at the thought of us skipping just one phone call after a 100-plus day streak.

  “Hope so,” he says. Like whether we talk or not is up to me, not him, even though he’s the one who’s supposed to be calling next. “Bye,” he says.

  “Bye,” I answer softly, hoping he doesn’t hear what feels like something cracking apart inside of me.

  He doesn’t call on Wednesday, and I resolve not to think about it. I tell myself I’m looking forward to a lazy weekend. Beau and Josie are flying with Josie’s best friend, Sam McKinley, to set up a second Ruth’s House location in Indiana. And I don’t have to drive up to Tennessee this weekend, because my cousin, Darnell, is driving my grandma and Auntie Beulah Mae up to St. Louis to visit family and maybe gamble some at the casinos.

  For once, I don’t have anything planned over the weekend, which means I can spend it however I want, doing whatever I want. Maybe I’ll call Bernice and we can have the long conversation we’ve been promising to have with each other, ever since I moved down to Alabama.

  In any case, I should just go on ahead and erase that text Colin sent me with the address. Because that was a weird conversation. With his crazy sense of humor, who knows if he was even serious? And even if he was, I’m definitely not going up there.

  But I don’t erase the text.

  Eventually Thursday comes. I drive Beau and Josie to the airport. Hug them good-bye, because at some point in the last few months we’ve become the kind of employee/employers who hug each other good-bye. Then I go home, and instead of erasing that text, I start working on a few songs that have been rattling around inside my head.

  One of them I even get flushed out into a full version. I’m about to start working on a second song, but my stomach starts cramping. Not an early period, which I don’t really have anymore anyway since my “lady doctor” put me on birth control to regulate them. No, it’s hunger, I realize when I look up from my journal and see it’s almost dark outside my attic window. I haven’t eaten since the early breakfast I made for Josie and Beau before I drove them to the airport.

  I should eat, I think. But the first thing I do is check my phone. There’s no missed call message on the front screen. Not even a text.

  Colin still hasn’t called.

  I set the phone down. Tell myself I’m stupid for this. Stupid for the sharp pain inside my chest. Stupid for caring. I remind myself why I called Colin in the first place. I remind myself it’s not supposed to be like that between him and me. He’s a kiss I had no business having at the age of fifteen. He’s a job I’ve taken on at Josie’s request. A client—he just doesn’t know it.

  I remind myself that I’m hungry and not thinking straight, and that I should eat. Really, that’s all I should be thinking about now. Eating…

  Then I grab my keys.

  * * *

  A little over three hours later, I’m fairly sure my car’s old navigation system has gotten me in trouble again. I figured when the city name of Marrington came up after I put in the address and zip code, I’d end up in another tony Nashville suburb. But my 90s era nav system is now taking me down the main road of what looks like one of those white-only, small Tennessee towns that my Paw Paw used to warn me to never stop in, even if I needed gas.

  Which I do. I only have about a quarter tank left and no idea how far away it is to the next decent-sized, race-tolerant city.

  “Turn right at the next road,” the nav system tells me in a posh British accent.

  I do what it says, but know it must truly be taking me some place I don’t want to go when I find myself o
n a long, unlit access road, blanketed by ominous dark woods on either side. Unfortunately, the road is too narrow to turn around on, so I keep going, hoping I’ll eventually find a space wide enough to make a U-turn.

  “You have reached your destination,” the nav system informs me when I pull into a circular clearing with a log cabin that’s even smaller than the one I share with my grandma in West Tennessee.

  “You must have lost your damn mind,” I say to the nav system, because there’s no way this cabin is where Colin asked me to meet him. The surrounding woods would probably provide plenty of game if you had a mind to hunt, which Colin told me once he likes to do in his off time. But the cabin itself looks like it’s one surprise county inspection away from being condemned, with a rusty tin roof and rotting wood planks lining both the porch and the house itself. It’s too ugly and tiny to be Colin’s house, even if he is only using it as a vacation home for hunting trips, like I’ve heard a lot of country stars do.

  I sit there, staring at the house, feeling like an idiot. I’d been in such a rush to get out of Beau and Josie’s house before I changed my mind, that I’d left my phone charger behind, which means I either have to take my chances that whoever lives here is willing to point me toward a gas station at—I glance at the car’s clock radio—at almost nine o’clock at night, or I have to find a gas station on my own, which might leave me stranded without a phone.

  Two choices. Neither of them very good.

  And then the sky cracks open and starts pouring down rain.

  I cuss and kill the engine, figuring that knocking on this cabin door and finding some backwoods hillbilly inside is a better option than stranding myself on the side of some unknown road without a phone in pouring rain. Maybe. Possibly.

  I get out of the car, wishing I’d taken Josie up on that offer to take a self-defense class at Ruth’s House.

  “Please don’t be a racist backwoods killer. Please don’t be a racist backwoods killer,” I whisper-chant as I run through the cold September rain toward the cabin’s front door.

  To my surprise, the door opens before my feet even touch the stairs leading up to the front porch. A tall figure fills up its frame.

  I stop, eyes popping wide when I see who it is.

  “Hell, Purple, I was beginning to think you weren’t ever going to come.” Colin says. It’s only been a few months since I saw him in person, but he seems even taller than I remembered. More rugged, too, with a few days worth of beard growth. He holds out a large hand to me.

  “Come on in here now, and get out that rain.”

  17

  Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting in front of a roaring fire watching Colin make me a dinner of steak and eggs in a kitchen that’s not so much another room in the small cabin, but an old gas stove and a few cabinets in one area of it.

  The cabin is not much better on the inside than it is on the out, and from what I can tell, it only has one other room. A bathroom, so dated, I’d been relieved to find out the toilet actually flushed when I used it a few minutes ago.

  There’s a full-sized bed on the other side of the main room, with a brass rail frame and what looks like a well-made quilt lying on top of it. The quilt’s the only pretty thing I’ve seen so far in the entire cabin.

  And, the only other positive thing I can find to say about this place is it’s very clean, with no obvious dust on any of the surfaces and a fresh woodsy smell about it, like maybe it was aired out for a good long while before I got here. Somebody also must have bothered to clean the windows, because I can clearly see the rain pounding against them on the other side.

  The sizzling sound of the steak Colin’s making for me interrupts the rain’s steady patter, and I look up from the couch to watch him move around the kitchen area. His long body stretches underneath the varsity Charlie Daniel’s t-shirt he’s wearing, and I see a flash of his hard abs as he reaches to get a plate out of the cabinet. He’s not as cute as Beau, I think. Not so outrageously handsome.

  But he’s got an air about him that Beau doesn’t. A confidence Beau could never have, because he knows how to do for himself in a way Beau just doesn’t. I say this, not because Beau is blind now, but because of the way I know he grew up. He went straight from a genteel Southern household to a career as a starting quarterback. I don’t think Beau’s ever even made himself a bowl of ramen. And I know, blind or not, he’d never be able to cook anything for Josie that smelled even near as wonderful as the plate of steak and eggs Colin sets down on a small wooden table in the kitchen area.

  “You want to get changed out of those wet clothes before you eat?” he asks me.

  “I’m fine,” I answer, getting off the couch and coming over to the table.

  I haven’t quite figured out how to tell him I didn’t bring an overnight bag with me, because even as I was driving here, I still wasn’t 100 percent sure I was going to stay.

  It’s cold away from the fire, and the wet thin sweater I’m wearing makes me feel like I’m covered in damp green moss. But instead of following the urge to strip it off, I focus on my manners.

  “Thank you,” I say, and dig right in.

  Colin’s a good cook. At least he’s got meat and eggs down. Despite my general level of discomfort, I eat every single bite.

  “You were hungry,” he says, after I’m finished cleaning my plate.

  “I got caught up, working on music,” I answer. “Forgot to eat.”

  “Yeah,” he says, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “I’ve been there. Not for a while now. But back before my mom had her first stroke.”

  Before I can offer any sympathy for what he went through with his mom, he turns his blue gaze on me, lazy but somehow sharp as the knife he gave me to cut my steak.

  “Is that why you’re so late? Because you were working on music?”

  I put my fork down, unable to think of a good answer for that. Talking to him on the phone was definitely much easier. Now that my hunger’s not there to distract me, actually sitting face to face across from him has a whole box of Mexican jumping beans going off in my stomach.

  And it doesn’t help that he won’t stop staring at me lazily across the table. Like a long and lean coyote, taking his sweet time, deciding just when to pounce.

  “So…” I say, looking around. “This isn’t exactly what I expected.”

  “No, I guess it wouldn’t be,” he answers, lazy coyote stare still in full effect. “It’s my dad’s old place, and his dad’s before that. The state passed it on to me after he died. At least they did after I paid all the back property taxes on it.”

  The cabin is very simple. One room. One bathroom. That’s it. But being here with Colin doesn’t feel simple. Colin looks out of place here. And I feel out of place here.

  So out of place that I just have to ask, “So is this where you bring all your subs?”

  I expect at least a chuckle, but instead Colin’s eyes come off their lazy coyote setting and he sits up, suddenly all business. “So we’re having this conversation now?”

  I look from side to side and then shrug. “Yes, I’m here. So I guess we’re having this conversation.”

  He nods, like we’ve just agreed on something important, and picks up my plate. I watch him set it down in the kitchen area, and then pick up a document, which I hadn’t noticed lying at the far end of the counter. He comes back to the table with it and sets it in front of me.

  I recognize the legal language immediately.

  “You want me to sign a confidentiality agreement? But I already signed one.”

  “That was for Alabama,” he answers, dropping back into the seat across from me. “This is for here and now.”

  “Okay…” I sign the agreement. Mostly because I still don’t understand fully what “here and now” means, and I know signing this document is the only way I’ll find out.

  I slide it back to him, but he merely glances at it before asking, “Anyone know where you’re at, Purple?”

  I try to
keep my face neutral as I answer, “Yes, I texted Bernice before I came up here. Told her the address and exactly who I was meeting. Why? Is that in violation of the confidentiality agreement?”

  I remember what Ginny told me about him being fiercely private.

  “No, that’s fine,” Colin says.

  I wait for him to say something else about it, and when he doesn’t, I say, “Okay, well, I guess it’s time to have that conversation you mentioned…”

  “Yeah, it is,” he agrees, tapping a finger against our confidentiality agreement. “All we need now is a safe word.”

  “A safe word,” I repeat. “We need a safe word just to have a conversation about what we might or might not be doing?”

  “Yep,” he answers, like we’re talking about some mundane detail: the amount of rain Tennessee’s likely to get in September or something along those lines. “I suggest you pick a word that doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re about to talk about. So nobody gets confused.”

  “How about ‘property taxes’?” I answer dryly.

  “Alright, that’s two words, but I can work with that. The safe word is ‘property taxes.’”

  It’s such a silly agreement. Really a silly conversation. But a chill runs up my back. Like Colin’s just taken off his black cowboy hat again and shown me his horns.

  He folds his hands in front of him. “So you said this wasn’t what you were expecting. Wanna tell me what you were expecting?”

  “I’m—I’m not sure,” I answer. “I’m still not sure why I came here… or if I should be here at all. Like I said, I’m not any kind of sub material. Like the whole keeping my mouth closed thing and happily doing whatever you say—I’m pretty sure I don’t have that in me.”

  I can sense a smile lurking behind his lips, but it never arrives. “I know you don’t, Purple. Now what was that safe word you picked again?”

  His question confuses me.

  “What? Why do you need the safe word again?”