Tumbleweeds (25 page)

“Doesn’t it ever get football weather around here?” Trey asked one of his teammates, wiping his face with a towel on the sidelines during a game.

The boy was from Miami. “What are you—a freaking comic?” he asked.

Trey had spent most of his savings from his job at Affiliated Foods to pay for his stint at summer conditioning camp and now, for the first time in his life, found himself worrying where he’d get the money for his next tank of gas or a pizza to eat at midnight. He would have gotten a part-time job, but an NCAA rule forbade athletes on scholarships from working during the fall and spring, and while his scholarship paid for everything, it did not include spending money. He was not embarrassed by his lack of funds. The attraction of his looks and talent and brains, his potential to be a football great, made money unnecessary to be accepted into any circle he chose. He minded only because he hated to continue taking money from his aunt. He was aware that her income had taken a dive, and more often than not he returned her checks—out of guilt, shame, sorrow, feeling undeserving of her generosity, he refused to determine—and went without the extras the money would have provided.

But there was an upside to his financial situation. It gave him an excuse to decline invitations from his new pals—recruits like
himself—to hit the local hangouts on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, the big party night when everybody let loose before tightening up for the game on Saturday. He couldn’t afford the evenings of throwing back beers and raising hell, and they would have done nothing to lift his mood.

Though he didn’t understand it (he’d expected to be immersed in the glories of becoming another Jim Kelly by now and to hell with John and Cathy), Trey chalked up his atypical desire to be alone, to study by himself, to walk without company to class, to pretend ignorance of the signals he received from girls, as a tunnel he was going through until he came out the other end into sunlight and blue skies.

To add to his low-grade depression, the middle of October Cathy’s letters stopped coming. Until then, he’d drawn a weekly blue envelope—her favorite color—from his mailbox. The letters gave him a small diabolical pleasure. He had never read a single one, but as long as she continued to write, she still cared for him, and he wanted her to care—to suffer—as just punishment for her betrayal. Still, it left him with a caved-in feeling when day after day the rest of October he found no blue envelope in his cubicle. He experienced an especially hollow moment when one day he saw a blue envelope among his mail and discovered it to be an advertisement. He’d thrown it vehemently into a trash container and vowed never to subscribe to
Today’s Young Athlete
.

He’d kept her letters in chronological order, unable to throw them away. He’d pull the rubber-banded stack out of his drawer occasionally and run his fingers over their blue surfaces, but within minutes his heart would freeze, his jaw harden. She was history. The campus was running over with tall, voluptuous beauties only waiting for him to crook a finger. The problem was he was not yet ready to beckon, but he would be. “Time is a great healer” was a favorite expression of his aunt, and—like he kept telling himself—he had plenty of it ahead
of him and the most exciting years of his life to get over Catherine Ann Benson.

He’d been shocked when Aunt Mabel had written that Cathy had lost her full scholarship from the First Baptist Church and would not be coming to Miami. He’d gone into a deep funk, not knowing whether he was relieved she wouldn’t be on campus or deeply distressed she’d had to forfeit her dream. He’d run so many laps that day that Coach Medford had come out on the track and ordered him to stop.

At first, his aunt’s letters had filled him in about Cathy, along with pleas to come home and “do your duty”—that phrase again. When he did not respond, his aunt had changed her strategy and framed her letters to stir his conscience.

Trey had crushed the letter in his fist and his whole upper body had felt ready to explode, but again he had not replied and eventually his aunt had come to realize that if she expected him to correspond with her, she’d better lay off the guilt-and-sympathy trip. They spoke by phone seldom and then awkwardly, Aunt Mabel’s conversations carefully modulated to navigate the mines that would put an end to the call and the rare opportunity to hear her only relative’s voice. Afterwards, Trey felt bad that he could not be more the loving nephew she deserved, but her silent, irrevocable disappointment in him erected a barrier he could not surmount.

Thanksgiving loomed next month. Aunt Mabel assumed he’d come home—“it will be just the two of us, a quiet holiday this year”—but Trey wouldn’t have even considered returning to Kersey, despite his desire to see his aunt and his sadness at hurting her. To avoid prolonging her expectation, he wrote early to say he’d accepted an invitation from a buddy to spend Turkey Day with his family in Mobile, Alabama. Trey composed the note with an ache in his throat, knowing it would be the first of many that would disappoint his aunt. His former life was a thing of the past, and most likely he would never spend a holiday in his old home again.

A
re you hoping for a girl or a boy?” the ultrasound technician asked, spreading gel over the mound of Cathy’s abdomen. She lay on an examination table in her obstetrician’s office in Amarillo, her pants slipped to the top of her thighs in preparation for a three-dimensional sonogram that would determine the gender of her child as well as detect birth defects and other abnormalities. After her first prenatal examination by Dr. Thomas, she’d preferred to consult an obstetrician out of the county. It was the middle of November, and she was in her twentieth week of pregnancy.

Cathy winced. The gel was cold. “It doesn’t matter, but from all indications, the baby is a girl,” she said.

“Indications?”

Cathy grinned despite her nervousness and the discomfort of a full bladder, advised by her obstetrician in order to get a clearer computerized picture of the fetus. “Old wives’ tales,” she said. “I was really nauseous during my first trimester. That’s a sign I’m having a girl, so I’m told, and my face is full and rosy, another sign.” She would not divulge to this member of the medical profession the experiment that Aunt Mabel had insisted on conducting. She’d suspended a ring on a string over Cathy’s abdomen and declared that if it swung back and
forth, she was having a boy; in a circular motion, a girl. The ring had twirled like a top.

The technician looked amused. “I hope you didn’t fall for the one that says if you carry high, you’re having a girl. If you carry low, get ready for a boy. Nobody can ever remember which applies to which, but I will say this: Your baby is going to be a mighty big little girl if those wives’ tales are correct—and a mighty pretty one if she looks like her mama.” She turned on the wand or transducer in her hand, an instrument that would feed the image of the fetus into the computer behind her. “Ready?” she asked.

“Ready,” Cathy answered, her head turned toward the computer screen to fix her eyes on the first pictures of her unborn child.

The technician began the slow glide of the wand over Cathy’s stomach and eventually there emerged a fuzzy picture on the screen. The technician pointed to details in the body image, the heart chambers, blood in circulation, and individual organs. “Oh, my…,” Cathy whispered in shocked wonder.

“Yep. Looks like the signs were wrong,” the technologist said. “Congratulations. You’re going to have a boy.”

Cathy dressed while she stared dazedly at the set of sonogram pictures she’d been given of the infinitesimal human being carried within her. She’d been expecting—hoping—for a girl who might manage to grow up her first years in Kersey without the instant recognition that she was Trey Don Hall’s daughter. After that, it wouldn’t matter. She and her child would be moving to any city in Texas with a university that offered premed courses. But a boy… Was that TD’s nose on the tiny profile… his brow?
Oh, God.
What if her son was born in the unmistakable image of his father?

She was now convinced that Trey was not coming for her. Their baby—a son—would be no lure. In November, looking over the baby-care magazines in Affiliated Foods, her eye had caught the title of an inside feature on the cover of
Today’s Psychology
: “Why Certain
Men Reject Their Children.” She had gone immediately to the page listed and found an article written by a psychiatrist that explained Trey’s puzzling rejection of her. A study had led to the discovery that certain males orphaned as children cannot tolerate sharing the love of a mate with their offspring. The introduction of a child into a household where such a man must have the undivided attention and loyalty of his partner will most likely result in rejection of the one who has, in his mind, violated and betrayed the trust of the union.

The article went on to state that men diagnosed with this rare emotional disorder who were deserted by parents in their formative years and who had found mates who loved them in the way they needed and desired to be loved were particularly exigent to sever the relationship. “Their feeling of irrevocable abandonment by someone to whom they felt enduringly secure and safe and exclusive is not unlike the emotion experienced at the time they became conscious that their parents had forsaken them.”

Cathy recalled that the only time she’d seen Trey in the presence of an infant had occurred one day when she’d stopped by Affiliated Foods while he was working. A young mother with a baby in her arms had wheeled her cart up to the checkout stand where Trey was sacking groceries, and Cathy had offered to hold the child while she placed her items on the belt. Cathy had cradled the baby—a tiny newborn girl swaddled in pink—in her arm as naturally as if she had been born to her, and she’d given Trey a smile. “Nice,” she’d said.

He’d ignored her smile and meaning, and she’d noted a clenching of his jaw muscles and an increased concentration on his business. She’d felt slightly rebuffed but figured he thought her attention to the baby was holding up the grocery line. It was November, and the store was crowded with Thanksgiving shoppers. Now she realized those tightened jaws had been her first clue to how he’d feel about having a child in their lives.

She had bought the magazine and gone at once to show the article
to Mabel. “Was Trey aware that he’d been abandoned when he came to live with you and your husband?” she’d asked.

“Oh, my dear, yes,” Mabel said. “He was only four but old enough to know he had no father and that his mother was not coming back for him. He came to us skinny as a newborn lamb with hardly enough clothes to keep him covered, not even a winter jacket, and nothing whatsoever to play with. His uncle and I fattened him up, bought him a smashing wardrobe and more toys than he could say grace over. He’d been neglected and probably abused, but he stood at the living room window day after day waiting for his mama to come home, and I’ve tried not to think of the nights I heard him crying for her in his sleep. Every year he expected her to return at Christmas and to remember his birthday, but she never did. Thank goodness, he had John for a friend. It was that period more than any other that forged their bond.”

Deeper research had borne out the article’s study, categorizing Trey’s irrational aversion as a form of narcissism. It had even helped her to understand his complete rejection of John. They’d lived as give-and-take brothers. Despite the differences in their nature and temperament, they had made an equal and complementing pair, but this latest behavior of Trey’s had tipped the scales—at least in Trey’s eyes. He could not continue a friendship in which he’d proved himself to be less a person—a man—than John.

Cathy had been staggered by an overwhelming sadness, but her findings had supplied the answers she’d been searching for. She imagined Trey alone and lost on the campus of Miami, looking for another pair of arms to hold him exclusively as she had, going from girl to girl, searching for that light in the darkness that would shine only for him and him alone. She was no longer that light. She was now free to do what she must do.

In the waiting room of the obstetrician’s office, Emma’s eyes popped when she saw the copies of the sonogram images. “Would you
look at that!” she said of the child’s genitals, the joy in her tone giving away the private wish—which Cathy had long perceived—that her great-grandchild would be a boy. Cathy’s silence caused her to look up from the pictures. “Sweetheart, you’re not… disappointed, are you?”