His Pretend Baby Read online

  “Hell…”

  He goes over to the closet and pulls down a plastic shopping bag.

  “Sorry,” he says, tossing the clothes over to me. “That’s all they had in the women’s section.”

  I open the bag and find a pair of mom jeans, a pink thong, and a pink t-shirt with the name of what I can only assume is the local high school’s football team written across it.

  Before I can answer, Colin’s back, talking with Ginny.

  “Yeah. Yeah, you better come and get her. How soon can you be here?” His mouth quirks up. “That soon… because you were already on your way when you called the first time.” He chuckles. “And that’s why I pay you the big bucks, Ginny. Yeah, I’ll make sure she’s ready. Honk when you’re outside.”

  But the amusement falls off his face as soon as he hangs up.

  “The owner of the local general store snapped a pic of me buying the razor and the ladies clothes yesterday. Sold it to a few online blogs. Story broke this morning. That means we maybe have an hour before the Nashville paparazzi shows up here and figures out where I’m staying. Get in the shower. Ginny’s going to be here in twenty to pick you up.”

  * * *

  Actually Ginny gets there in less than twenty. After taking a quick shower and getting dressed, I come out to the living room to find her with Colin, discussing next steps.

  “They’ve already got a few paps swarming around the general store,” Ginny is saying to Colin. “I think the best thing to do is for me to drive her car out of here, then by the time they figure out you’re staying out here, she’ll be gone and they’ll only have my car to trace if they take pictures. Luckily it’s private property all the way from the road. Might keep them out of the trees.”

  “Might,” Colin says, his voice terse.

  Ginny sees me. “You ready?” she asks, like a busy divorced mother waiting to make the trade off at the end of dad’s weekend.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I answer, since I didn’t come with much more than my purse. I notice Ginny’s already got my keys in her hand. Colin must have given them to her. “Where are we going?”

  “About twenty miles or so, to the a bus station in the next town over. Then I’ll double back for my car. But there might be paparazzi at the fence, so I’m going to need you to duck down in the back seat.”

  Colin picks up the afghan off the back of the couch. “Here, put this over her. That way there’s nothing to see.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand,” I say. “All of this, because Colin bought a few things at the local general store?”

  “All of this, because Colin’s deeply private about his personal life,” Ginny answers. “The Nashville paps haven’t been able to confirm he’s had so much as one date over the past fifteen years. Colin’s managed to control his story because of it, but that means the bottom feeders get all riled up if they even think there’s a chance they might break a story about who Colin’s dating.”

  “But—” I start to say. An urgent beeping sound cuts me off.

  More cursing from Colin as he picks up his phone again, and I see a picture of a couple of men with beer bellies at the access road’s perimeter. He must have a security camera in one of the trees, I realize, one that sends an alert to his phone if anything triggers it. Which means he must have known I was coming from the moment I turned onto the access road.

  “Shit, looks like they’re at the edge of the property,” he says.

  I think of Colin, coming to the door to greet me two days ago, and register that it was just a ruse. He’d been inside, lying in wait the whole time.

  But now he pushes the afghan at Ginny and says, “Get her out of here, and make sure nobody sees her.”

  24

  Make sure nobody sees her.

  Colin’s final words ring in my head as I’m driven down his access road, hunkered down in my own back seat. I know when we get to the gate because I can hear the sound of shouts, despite the windows being rolled up. Also, Ginny starts mumbling about bottom feeders having nothing better to do.

  Someone thumps against the window.

  “You the girlfriend? You the girlfriend?” A muffled voice yells outside the car.

  “No, you idiot. I’m the lesbian assistant whose picture isn’t worth nil,” Ginny mumbles.

  The car slows as it turns onto the main road, but it never stops, and soon we’re back on paved road, driving at least fifty.

  But it’s not soon enough to keep the memories from crashing down…

  “Mama, Mama, no! Please mama, don’t. Don’t!” I pull on my mother’s arm, trying to keep her from going up the walk to the Prescott’s Tudor mansion.

  But I’m still weak from blood loss. The only thing that’s letting me pull on my mother’s arm now is the need to keep her from shaming us like I can tell she’s fixing to do. But even with that extra strength, I can’t tug hard enough to keep her from moving forward.

  I can’t still her hand before she uses it to ring the doorbell, and then pound on the door itself while the bells are still chiming our arrival.

  “Mama, please don’t do this! Please,” I beg. “Let’s just go!”

  She glares at me, like I’m the one who’s had too much to drink before coming over here and not her.

  “Why you trying to protect him? This is all his fault. We don’t have insurance. We barely got a pot to piss in. Look at your face! Unh-uh, he needs to pay for this.”

  I don’t have to look at my face. I can feel the blood still seeping through the makeshift bandage I taped on myself.

  “Yes, Mama, look at my face. I need stitches.” I actually needed them twenty-four hours ago when this first happened, but my mother had spent that time drinking, leaving me to tend to my own wounds as she drank straight from the bottle, cursing our lot. Cursing her former boss, Beauregard Prescott, the man who had put us in this position. Until she’d grabbed her keys and told me to “come on.”

  I’d thought with relief that we were finally going to the hospital, though my mother had claimed earlier she couldn’t afford it. But as we passed the outskirts of Birmingham, I suddenly knew where we going with a sinking feeling. To my mother’s last place of regular employment, to confront the man who’d fired her from that job.

  And now here we were at the door, my new scar pulsing as my face burned with the shame of what was to come.

  A small black woman with pressed hair held back in a bun answered the door. Later I would find out this was Josie’s mother, Loretta, who’d sadly died of cancer just a few years before I met Josie.

  “You the one they replaced me with,” my mother says to her, like this replacement happened fifteen minutes ago, as opposed to fifteen years.

  The replacement housekeeper looks back at her, confused.

  My mother answers her unspoken question with “Let me speak to your asshole employer, Mr. Beau.”

  “He not here,” the replacement answers. “And he don’t receive visitors at the house without notice. So if you want to call on him…” The replacement looks my mother up and down, and I know she’s judging her, dressed as she is, in last night’s painted on daisy dukes and cropped flannel blouse tied across her large breasts. It’s a performance outfit and it looks good on stage. But on Beauregard Prescott’s front step, it only makes my mother look trashy.

  “…you should make an appointment,” the replacement finishes with barely contained disgust in her voice.

  “I’m not making any appointments,” my mother answers. “If he’s not here, get that stuck up bitch he calls a wife out here.”

  “She not here either. I’ll tell Mr. Prescott you stopped by when he gets back.”

  “Don’t you tell him nothing. I can tell him myself—”

  The replacement shuts the door in her face without another word. Leaving my mama and me standing out there on the porch.

  “Bitch!” my mama cries as if she did nothing to deserve the replacement’s slamming the door in her face.

  T
his is what I’ll remember most about my mother after she’s gone to L.A. Her inability to understand cause and effect. Her constantly getting riled up, due to the world not treating her the way she expected to be treated, even when she was acting a fool.

  But it was a relief that the replacement stopped her on the front porch. Feeling like we’ve dodged a bullet, I turn my mother around to go back to the car—

  Only to see Beau Prescott Jr. coming up the front walk.

  I freeze. Beau is a big deal high school football player, and he’d been drafted early by UAB, so I’d seen his picture in the paper plenty of times. Plus, that one time I spotted him with Mike at the county fair. But that one sighting and those pictures hadn’t near done him justice.

  He is, hands down, the most beautiful boy I’ve ever laid eyes on in real life. And I love him. From the first time I see him in the flesh, I love him. More than I love my mother. More than I love myself.

  Love him so hard and so much that all I can do is stand there, mute.

  “Miss Val, what are you doing here?” He looks my mother up and down, just like the replacement did.

  “You remember me? How I used to take care of you?” my mama says with a batty-eyed smile, like she isn’t destroying any good childhood memories he might have had of her by showing up at his house drunk as a skunk in a skanky outfit that doesn’t look good anywhere but an even skankier country bar.

  “Of course I remember you,” Beau answers. Then his green eyes land on me. “Now you. You’re new.”

  I know I have got to look like some kind of idiot, standing there with my mouth hanging open, just out and out staring at him, but I don’t know what to say.

  “I’m—I’m her daughter,” I finally manage to say.

  Beau stares at me. Eyes steady, like he’s trying to figure all of this out. “Looks like you need a doctor.”

  “She do,” my mother answers. “That’s why we here.”

  Before she can explain, I do. “Your father fired her, and she’s still upset about it. She’s drunk and so she drove us here because I need to go to the hospital and we don’t have any money to pay for it.”

  It’s the truth. Not the whole truth, but enough of it. And Beau must believe me, because he pulls out his wallet. Counts six bills with Benjamin Franklin on the front of them along with a few more twenties, tens, and fives.

  “That’s all I’ve got on me, but that ought to be enough. Go get your daughter some stitches, Miss Val.”

  He stares at us hard as he says this, and I stare back at him. I can’t stop staring. The connection I feel between us is so strong in that moment, I’m sure he’s got to feel it, too.

  But then he says to me, “Don’t let her come back here.”

  His words fill me with the shame I thought I’d managed to dodge when the replacement told us Beau Sr. wasn’t home.

  “I won’t,” I mumble.

  And this time I do have the strength to drag my mother out of there. Ignoring her protests, I pull her back to the flashy, 80s-era Thunderbird we drove here in.

  But my mother refuses to get in. “You think I’m going to let it end like that? You think I’m going to let him get away with that?”

  My new scar feels like it has its own heartbeat now.

  “You need to take me to hospital,” I tell my mother.

  “What I need to do is go back there and tell off that little boy. Acting like he can get rid of me with a few bills. Who does he think he is?”

  “You need to take me to the hospital,” I say again. My voice is fierce and hard as granite.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” my mama whines in that petulant way of hers. “I’m the mama and you’re the child. I say I need to go in there and tell them who they’re messing with. Let them know exactly who I am.”

  I slap the shit out of her. Hit her so hard across her face, it might as well be a backhand.

  “Take me to the hospital!” I scream at her, hot tears of unbearable shame gushing from my eyes. “Take me the hospital, you selfish bitch!”

  She takes me to the hospital.

  And then a couple weeks later, she drops me off at my grandparents’ house in Tennessee, gets on a bus to L.A., and never comes back.

  Years later, I’m visited by the same shame as Ginny drives me away from Colin’s cabin. I hear her getting gas about five minutes later.

  “Stay down,” she whispers before she gets out. “We’re still in town, but you’re nearly on empty.”

  Then about twenty minutes after the refill, she stops, as promised, at a little bus depot. She helps me out of my own car, but barely seems able to meet my eyes as she hands back my keys.

  “Sorry about this. But here you go…”

  She digs around in her purse and produces the bottle of perfume I purposefully left behind in Colin’s Alabama hotel room.

  “Colin asked me to put this in the mail for you yesterday.”

  She hands the perfume to me like a consolation prize.

  “But for now, it’s probably best that you go home and lay low. And I probably don’t need to tell you to stay away from the cabin, right?”

  “Don’t let her come back here.” Beau’s words echo in my head like a ghost come to life.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” I mumble.

  “Okay, good,” Ginny says, pulling out her smart phone. “I’ll text Colin and let him know we got out without you being seen. He’ll call you maybe. Later. Is there anything you want me to tell him in the meanwhile?”

  “Sure,” I answer.

  I heave the bottle and watch with satisfaction as it smashes into little expensive glass pieces against the depot wall.

  “Tell him that.”

  Then I get back in my car and peel out of there before Ginny can answer.

  A few hours later I’m back in Alabama, back at Beau and Josie’s house. Everything’s exactly as I left it when I decided to leave on impulse, and it makes me feel like an even bigger fool. Because I’d given everything to Colin that weekend, and he’d sent me away without so much as breakfast. Without so much as a thank you.

  Shame washes over me in sickening waves, as images of the many ways I’d demeaned myself come flashing back through my mind. Colin was right both times. I am an idiot. For going up to meet him in Tennessee. For liking the things he did to me there. And for ever thinking it was more than it actually was.

  25

  I’d thought Ginny was just trying to smooth over an awkward situation, but she’s right. My phone lights up with a call from Colin as I’m leaving to pick up Beau and Josie at the airport the next morning.

  I don’t answer. I send the call straight to voicemail, wondering what story I’m going to make up the next time Josie asks about how it’s going with Colin.

  Beau and Josie come out of the gate, looking happy and refreshed. Setting up Sam’s second shelter went well, and they’d enjoyed the project—not because Indiana was anything to write home about, but because they’d needed the couple time. Between Josie’s training to take over as the director of Ruth’s House Alabama and Beau’s charity work, they’d barely had time to fit in a date night, and strangely enough, setting up a new shelter together had been just the kind of quality time they needed.

  I get to hear all about it as I walk with them back to the car, and its pretty much torture. Like some higher force decided to put true love on display right in front of me so I could see how much it doesn’t look like some country star’s assistant covering me up with an old blanket as she sneaks me off his property.

  “Do you mind driving again?” Josie asks me after the bags are in the back. “I’m trying to make Indiana last as long as possible.”

  I try not to gag as I climb back into the driver’s seat of Beau’s Audi SUV. The back seat is pretty roomy. But through the rearview mirror, I can see Beau sitting hugged up with Josie like it’s a tight squeeze. His hand on her knee, rubbing like he’s dying to get to the skin beneath her jeans.

  “We
’ve got to schedule a date night soon,” Josie says, laying her head on his shoulder. “But I have no idea when.”

  “Isn’t this a problem couples are supposed to have after they have kids?” Beau asks. “What are we going to do when the baby comes?”

  “Beau!” Josie glances at me through the rearview mirror.

  But Beau just grins. “Guess the cat’s out of the bag, Kyra,” he calls from the back seat. “We were waiting a couple more weeks to tell everybody, but what the hell. You’re like family now, so you get the news early. We’ve got a baby on the way!”

  The news hits me like a ton of bricks. And then panic floods my brain. How am I going to keep this ruse going? How am I going to keep from telling him? A baby changes everything—

  I cut off the rush of scared thoughts, squeezing my brain shut. I’ve got at least six months until the baby comes, I remind myself. Six months to figure out what to do.

  “Congratulations,” I say in what I hope is a passable impersonation of a woman who isn’t holding back an ocean’s worth of panic inside her brain.

  “Thanks!” Josie says, her eyes shining with excitement.

  * * *

  Colin calls again that afternoon. Then again at ten p.m., just as I’m settling down in my attic room to go to sleep.

  I don’t answer, but in a moment of weakness, I push the voicemail icon to check the messages.

  The first one is simple. “Hey, Purple. Call me back when you get this.”

  The second one is a little less casual. “Less than twenty-four hours and you’re already forgetting your training. Call me back. That’s a command, not a request.”

  I erase that message and press the play button to listen to the third one. All civility is gone from his voice now. “What the hell, Purple? Now you got me worried about you. Call me back, so I don’t have to hire somebody to hunt you down and make sure you’re all right.”

  I think long and hard about that message. Trying to figure out if it’s a real or play threat. Just in case, I text him. “Fine. Don’t need to talk. The weekend’s over. Back to real life. Please don’t hire a detective. ”