His One and Only (6 page)

He opened the box and pulled out a brass spyglass. It was obviously an antique, and it gleamed in the moonlight. “My dad only uses it when he goes out boating, but it should work out here, too. Here, try it.”

Their hands touched when she took it from him, and Josie could only hope to God he couldn’t hear how fast her heart started beating when that happened.

Lately Beau had gone from being just a boy she thought about like a pseudo big brother, to the guy who set her heart to racing at break-neck speeds whenever he came to occupy the same space as her. And what had started out as a little flutter of liking at the beginning of summer had developed into a full-blown crush by the end.

She’d done her best to hide her feelings. Beau was the town’s football star, he was dating a pretty cheerleader, and from what she’d seen the few times she and Loretta had gone to see him play, there were plenty of girls lined up to take Mindy’s place when he was done with her.

Josie, on the other hand, was poor, nerdy, and black. There was no way a guy like Beau would be interested in a girl like her.

She busied herself pulling the spyglass out to its full length and using it to scan the night sky until she found a bright circle with two dots on either side. Jupiter and its four moons. “Hey, I found Jupiter, and… wow! It’s so beautiful.”

She turned to thank him for bringing up the antique telescope, but her smile faded to confusion when she found him staring at her instead of the stars.

She cleared her throat, which had suddenly gone very dry, and said, “Here, you take a look.”

She carefully handed him the spyglass, and this time she made sure their fingers didn’t touch.

He peered carefully through the lens and then gasped softly. “Yeah, I see it! Ain’t that something! This nerd stuff of yours isn’t half bad, Josie.”

“Yeah, it’s something all right.” She kept her eyes firmly on Jupiter, which could also be seen with the naked eye, just not as clearly as with the help of a more powerful lens. “So why are you up here instead of out with your girlfriend?”

“Got grounded,” Beau answered. “Old man’s pissed because he found out I was back in two-a-days this week.”

Two-a-days were the morning and afternoon practices Forest Brook football players were expected to attend almost two full months before school began. “But Mr. Prescott’s been telling everybody you weren’t going to play this year, since your already won the state championship last year.”

“I know that’s what he’s been telling people, but I never agreed to that.”

“You just let him believe it,” Josie said.

Beau lowered the spyglass. “I just let him believe what he wanted to believe and got Mom to sign the permission slip after she came back from tennis at the club.”

Josie cracked a small smile. Mrs. Prescott ostensibly went to the Forest Brook Country Club every week to play tennis with the other trophy wives, but almost always came home without a bead of sweat on her body, slightly unsteady on her feet, and smelling of the expensive bourbon the club used in their mint juleps.

“So now he can’t threaten to yank you out of football because Mrs. Prescott already signed the permission slip.”

“And, more importantly, him yanking me out of football would make us look bad.” He lowered his voice to his father’s grave registers. “We Prescotts must never show dissention in our ranks.”

Josie laughed.

“So now he says I’m grounded until the beginning of the school year unless I either quit football or apologize for going behind his back.”

These options, Josie knew, were actually a trick. Prescott men didn’t apologize, and on the few occasions Beau had done so as a child, he’d gotten leveled with an even worse punishment for daring to break one of the family’s most steadfast rules. So really, Mr. Prescott was telling his son to either quit football or spend the rest of the summer in the house.

She took the spyglass back from him. “I think you can see Saturn tonight, too.” She scanned the sky. “There it is, and you can sort of make out the rings.”

She handed the telescope back to him and pointed to a star shining less brightly than Jupiter. “Take a look for yourself.”

“Oh, yeah, I see it,” he said. But then after a few beats went by, he said, “I know Dad wants me to grow up to be like him and all those other Prescott men, but the truth is, I’m scared to death of becoming like him.” He lowered the spyglass. “I’d rather die than turn into my dad.”

She peeked sideways at him. “If you don’t want to be like him then you should keep on playing football. Don’t let him take it away from you.”

Beau turned to look at her then, his silver eyes gleamed almost as brightly as the stars in the moonlight. “You think it’s that simple?” he asked, his voice laced with skepticism.

“If you wanna do the things you love and not the stuff your daddy says you should, then yeah, it is,” she said. “So I guess the question is, do you love football like that?”

He regarded her with the strangest expression on his face, and then he said, “Yeah, yeah I do.”

She grinned. “Then you don’t have to worry. You won’t turn out like your daddy.”

She would have thought he might have left after that. Gone to watch TV or talk on the phone with Mindy. But he had stayed up there with her on the roof, helping her look up constellation after constellation and then find it with the telescope. And even though it was a Friday night, he’d acted like there was no other place he’d rather be.

In fact, it had been she who’d ended the constellation search shortly after realizing it was midnight and that she had totally blown her curfew.

“Oh crap! I’ve gotta go or my mama’s going to be real mad,” she told him.

For a few seconds he just stared at her, his eyes thoughtful, like he was trying to make a decision. But in the end he said, “Sure, run on. I’m probably going to call Mindy anyway.”

She had to school her face to keep from showing how much the thought of him talking with another girl hurt her feelings. And as she walked back to the house, she reminded herself that despite how big her feelings for Beau were becoming, there was no way on earth he’d ever feel the same way back.

But now here was Loretta, looking at her hard, like she could see through the skin on her chest into her heart of hearts where she nursed her hopeless crush on Beau.

“No, not with Colin,” she answered. “I was with Beau. He brought an old telescope up to the shed roof to help me look up constellations.”

She expected her mother to drop the subject then since she’d never had any problem with Josie and Beau hanging out alone before, but that night it was as if Loretta could smell the teenage pheromones coming off her daughter.

“You like that boy?” she demanded.

“Colin?”

Her mother glared at her. “You know who I’m talking about. The one you done spent all night with. You got feelings for Beau?”

“Beau?!” she said, hoping her extreme questioning tone would throw her mother off the scent. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Because when I was just a little older than you I made the mistake you about to make.”

Then Loretta told her a terrible story: about a naïve little girl, working her first job as a maid for an Italian-American family in Birmingham. There’d been a son living there, too, three years older and home from college for the summer.

“He was just like Beau. Confident—a big deal around those parts. He used to bring me little presents, roping me in until my heart was all in my eyes. I didn’t think nothing about raising up my skirt for him. I thought he was in love with me, too. I wrote him every day after he went back to college up North.” Loretta’s face contorted at that part of the story. “But then my monthlies didn’t come and I went to the doctor, who told me it for sure. I was with child. I used just about my whole weekly paycheck to call him at that college of his. At first he sounded happy to hear from me, but when I told him what was in my belly, he acted like I was a stranger. He must’ve called his parents because his mama came in the maid’s quarters and dragged me out of my bed, called me a whore, and made me pack up my little suitcase. I had to go back home to live with my mama in our family trailer. She was so disappointed in me and nobody in Birmingham would hire me—at first because that boy’s family turned my name to mud by telling anybody who would listen that I’d been stealing from them, and then because I was showing.”

Josie listened to this story in rapt horror. When Josie’s grandmother had been alive, she’d told Josie her father had been a Navy guy passing through Alabama and that her mother had gotten in trouble because she couldn’t keep her legs closed. Loretta, however, had never told her anything about her father, and had refused to answer any of the questions Josie had asked about him. But she never would have guessed this was her origin story, or that her father was white.

According to Loretta, her father had been dark and swarthy, and Josie had come out dark enough that she’d had no problem passing off the story Josie had heard about the Navy guy “just passing through.” In Alabama, Loretta explained, it was better to be so loose you’d have a one-night-stand with a black Navy fellow than to be so stupid as to get knocked up by a white man. In any case, Loretta and Josie stayed with Josie’s grandma, picking up housework here and there, until the theft rumors blew over and Kitty Prescott hired her on to take care of Beau.

By that time, Kitty had already gone through eight housekeepers and Beau had only just turned four. But Loretta had been too long without a job to let this one slip away.

“I put away my pride and let Mrs. Prescott talk to me any way she wanted. I put up with her and I tried my best to raise Beau and you right.” Loretta looked at her daughter forlornly, and for the first time Josie realized what all these years of docile servitude had cost her mother in pride and self-esteem. “I don’t want this for you, Josie. Promise me you won’t let some white boy with a bunch of smooth talk take away your future like I did.”

“I won’t. Beau and me are just friends. I promise you, Mama, nothing will ever happen between us.”

It had been an easy promise to make in the heat of the moment. And then Beau had shown his true colors on her very first day of school, embarrassing her in front of his cretin friends and letting her know he didn’t think of her romantically at all.

Or at least that’s what she had thought…

After days of squinting in order to see anything, when he’d brought those glasses out to the shed and said all those nice things to her, she temporarily lost her mind. For a moment, she’d thought Beau Prescott actually liked her as much as he claimed, as much as she secretly liked him.

Afterwards, she even felt bad about rejecting him the many times he’d tried to talk about what had happened over the course of the following weekend. He hadn’t seen how hysterical Loretta had been, how she kept saying she’d lost Josie in-between sobs. Her mother, who she’d never seen shed so much as a tear, actually sobbed over what she had caught her daughter and Beau doing in the shed.

Josie couldn’t have been more embarrassed or remorseful. And she spent the weekend in the somewhat strange position of assuring mother that really, it was just sex and that she and Beau had only been messing around, mostly out of adolescent curiosity. They’d used a condom, she told her mother, and Josie was not in love with him the way her mother had been in love with Josie’s father.

She’d tried to convince herself this wasn’t a lie, but in the end, she felt like she was betraying what had happened between her and Beau when she told her mother it meant nothing. And when Beau cornered her in the hallway right after Loretta had refused to let Josie accompany her to church that Sunday morning, she’d lashed out at him in frustration only to immediately regret it when she saw what looked like real hurt in his eyes.

Despite her conflicted feelings, Josie decided to seek Beau out the next day at school and explain what was going on with Loretta, how she wouldn’t talk to Josie, but at the same time watched her like a hawk all weekend. Fool that she was, she’d thought maybe Beau could help her, or at least figure out how to get her mother to start talking to her again. Even after everything that had happened, she still considered Beau a friend.

But then on Monday, Beau had shown her everything Loretta had said about him had been right on the money. And strangely enough, his awful behavior was what fixed things with her mother.

When Josie came home in an obviously foul mood, Loretta spoke her first calm words to Josie in over three days: “What’s wrong with you?”

And when Josie told her what happened at school, Loretta had sighed and put a comforting arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “I told you about messing with them rich white boys.”

“I know you did.” Josie had to work real hard to keep from crying. Apparently, that was all she’d been to Beau, a pawn, and a means for getting back at Colin.

For the rest of her time at Forest Brook, she’d concentrated on her studies. She’d even shut down Colin when he’d finally gotten bold enough to suggest they try to be more than friends their senior year.

“Colin,” she’d answered with a beleaguered sigh, “friends is as far as it goes with me and you… and any other white boy.”

It had been a little awkward for them after that, but they remained best friends until they left for college: Josie to the UAB in Birmingham and Colin to Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Music in Pittsburgh. But he’d kept in touch over email, even after he’d gotten his first record contract his first year of college, dropped out, and made himself over into a country singer who was known for his songwriting skills and ability to play a mean fiddle.

They’d probably still be in touch if Wayne hadn’t started checking her email behind her back in college and flew off the handle when he found out how often Colin had been emailing her.

She could still remember their first real argument like it was yesterday. Wayne had instantly morphed from a perhaps overly attentive, but otherwise perfectly sweet boyfriend into a green-eyed monster, so mad he’d flipped her dorm desk over and sent all her books and papers flying across the room. She’d actually been afraid to defend her long-time friendship with Colin, he’d been so physically angry. It had almost been a relief when he’d stormed out of her room, even though she was fairly sure his exit signaled the end of her very first relationship.