His Pretend Baby

by Theodora Taylor

“And I really don’t understand why we need all this stuff to keep a baby alive. I mean we set up a Diaper Genie and a changing table at Ruth’s House, scattered a few toys on the floor, and we were good to go!”

  I laugh as I pick up a baby floor gym and register it with one of the scan guns a clerk from the baby registry department gave us.

  “You need to just be happy Beau’s mama agreed to scale down the wedding enough so you’d still fit in a wedding gown by the time you walk down the aisle.”

  Scaled down wasn’t really a good word, though. Now instead of the four-hundred person summer wedding Mrs. Prescott had been envisioning, Josie and Beau will be having a two-hundred person Christmas weekend wedding, complete with fake snow, a full orchestra, and a gown that looks like it was straight out of a production of The Snow Queen.

  There had even been some talk about dressing the security guards as nutcrackers, but Beau had squashed that, explaining to his mother that no security team worth its salt would agree to do their job while dressed in fake white beards, red short coats, and beefeater hats.

  Still, I could tell all the wedding preparations, along with taking over Ruth’s House, were wearing on Josie. So I’d stayed in Alabama for most of the weekend. Going around with Josie to different shops and vendors and helping her take care of the mountain of little things you had to take care of before a wedding and the arrival of a baby.

  However, I can only be so much help, and I don’t love the dark circles under Josie’s eyes. Especially since I know one of the things she’s worrying about is finding a nanny.

  “Why don’t you go test out the gliders,” I say, nodding my head toward the nearby section of rocking chairs. “I can take care of this.”

  Josie hesitates. “But you have to get on the road soon to drive to Tennessee for your grandmother’s Sunday Dinner. I don’t want to…”

  “I’ve got about two more hours until I’m in the danger zone,” I tell her. “Besides, I don’t know where you come from, but I’m black. You know Sunday Dinner isn’t going to start exactly on time.”

  Josie laughs. “You’re so good to me,” she says, squeezing my shoulder. “I must have been a saint in a past life, because that’s the only way to explain how I got lucky enough to deserve you.”

  A wave of guilt passes over me as I think about all the things I’m keeping from her. And that she really has no idea who exactly she invited into her life.

  The ringtone version of “9 to 5” saves me from having to answer, and I pull out my phone like a drowning man reaching for a buoy.

  I’m so surprised when I see the name flashing across the scene that I let it show on my face.

  “Who is it?” Josie asks beside me. “Is everything okay?”

  I school my face to something just about neutral.

  “Um, it’s Colin,” I tell her.

  And Josie smiles.

  “Ooh, he hasn’t called in a while. I was afraid to ask how the friendship project was going. But don’t let it go to voicemail. Answer it! The CMAs are coming up. He might need to talk.”

  I do as she says, wondering if there will ever be a guilt plateau to all the stuff I’m keeping from Josie.

  “Hi,” I say, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible.

  St. Josie gives me a thumbs up and goes over to the glider section as Colin says, “I was wondering if you’d make me borrow Keith’s phone again.”

  “Why are you calling me?” I ask him. “I thought I made myself clear the last time we talked.”

  “Tell me something, Purple. When’s the last time you Googled yourself?”

  I blink, thrown off by the question. “I’ve never Googled myself,” I answer.

  “Why is that?”

  “I dunno. I guess because I haven’t done anything that would really get me an electronic footprint.”

  “Hmm.” The sound is little more than a grunt coming out of Colin’s mouth. “Well, I guess I can wait.”

  I look to both sides. “Wait for what?”

  “For you to Google yourself. Go’on ahead. I’ll still be here when you’re done.”

  With a mixture of dread and curiosity, I lower my smartphone, open up its browser, and type in my own name, first and last. This is silly, I think to myself as I do it. It’s not like my name is all that uncommon. Most likely I’ll have to scroll through a few pages before I even get any real hits…

  The results immediately begin to flood the screen preceded by headlines like: “Colin Fairgood Reveals New Relationship” and “Country Singer Colin Fairgood Finally Admits to Being In a Relationship.”

  The preview copy in a few of the links reads, “Colin Fairgood, who has always been notoriously secretive about his love life, was surprisingly candid about his new girlfriend in an interview with Canadian talk show host, Oliver Morgan…”

  My eyes go wide as I scroll through the results. There’s even a video clip. I click on it, somehow thinking this is a joke, that it all must be a joke, even as Colin appears on my screen, seated on a couch next to the desk of a pudgy man with a thick Canadian accent.

  “So you’ve been on the program a few times and I always tell my producers not to bother asking aboot your personal life in the pre-interview. But this time, my producer comes running into my office and says, ‘Colin Fairgood’s got a girl and he’s giving us the exclusive!’ Of course my first response is, Why the hell would he do that?”

  Both the audience and Colin fall out laughing on my phone’s small screen as Oliver Morgan insists, “We’re a small show. We’re nothing, for Chrissake’s! On late at night with an audience share so small, we’ve started counting the moose hanging aboot outside as part of our viewership. I’m serious man, our audience is so small, we’ve been reduced to having American country music stars as guests.”

  Colin responds with a good-natured chuckle. “Well, maybe this will help your ratings.”

  “In America maybe, yes.” Oliver Morgan agrees. He then calls over his shoulder to his unseen crew. “Are we even on in America?”

  A few helpful crew members call back, “In Puerto Rico!”

  “Puerto Rico doesn’t count. Nobody cares about Puerto Rico,” Oliver answers.

  “On the internet!” another voice calls out.

  Oliver Morgan’s eyes widen comically. “Ooh, he’s right! This might get us more YouTube hits. So for the love of ad dollars, tell us, Colin. Tell us who you’re dating.”

  Colin laughs but the look on his face becomes thoughtful when he answers, “Her name is Kyra. Kyra Goode—that last name is spelled G-O-O-D-E. And I’m not sure she’d take too kindly to me saying much more than that about her. But she’s a cool girl and a great little songwriter, and I’m really into her.”

  The audience gives a collective “aw!” but Oliver Morgan lets a reflective beat pass before saying, “Is that all? I mean she sounds nice and all that but we’d certainly get more hits if she were say, a stripper. Does she have any pole dancing in her background? Because the show could really use the hits…”

  The clip ends on Colin laughing and shaking his head.

  After a few moments, I put the phone back to my ear, but my heart is beating so hard in my throat, I can’t speak.

  “You still there, Purple?” His voice is quiet, somber. A far cry from the Colin I just watched on my phone.

  I nod, even though I know he can’t see me.

  Colin chuckles quietly. “Guess I finally found a way to shut that smart mouth of yours.”

  “I… I...” I reset and say, “I’m not sure why you did that.”

  “I’ll show you exactly why tonight.”

  A voice says something in the background, and Colin lowers the phone to say, “Yep, I’ll tell her. Thanks.” When he comes back to the phone, he says, “Ginny wants to make sure you know to take a day off over the next two weeks to come shopping with her. She says you two have got to figure out a dress for the CMAs. Also, she’s got to schedule hair and makeup.”

  My head is spinn
ing, trying to process all of this. “Colin, I don’t understand…”

  “You’ll understand tonight,” he says, cutting me off with a savage fervor that doesn’t match the casual tone he’s been using up until now.

  “But…”

  “I’ve got to go,” he says, cutting me off once again. “But I’ll see you at dinner.”

  No, he definitely won’t be seeing me at dinner. I’m about to tell him I’m supposed to be helping out with my grandmother’s Sunday Dinner, when he says, “Tell your grandma to make sure she has enough chicken, because if it’s as good as you say it is, I’m not sure how much I’ll be leaving for the rest of your family. Eight hours from Vancouver to Nashville has got me about ready to kill a plate of good chicken.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I say. “You are not coming to my grandmother’s house!”

  “See you there, Purple.”

  “Colin, no. Colin, wait—”

  And that’s when he hangs up on me.

  28

  “So let me get this straight, you’re bringing a white boy round here to meet Grandma?” my cousin, LaTrelle, asks after I finish telling the group of cousins gathered on Grandma’s front porch about our unexpected guest.

  “He’s not just any ol’ white boy,” my cousin, Bernice, explains to the group. “He’s that one white boy who sang that song with Roxxy RoxX that one time.”

  “Ooh, I liked that song,” LaTrelle says, her eyes lighting up. “And he cute! You go’on head with your bad self, KiKi!”

  “I’d let him get it,” another of my cousins calls out.

  “You’d let anybody get it, Rhonda,” Bernice answers with the no-holds-barred harshness only family can get away with.

  “Yeah,” LaTrelle agrees, backing up Bernice. “But you bet keep your fast ass away from him. That white boy belong to KiKi, and you just jealous because she the only one Grandma let help with Sunday Dinner.”

  “Why would anybody be jealous of that?” Rhonda asks, like she honestly wants to know who in their right mind would covet spending hours of their time in a hot kitchen with Grandma.

  I raise my hands to stop the argument. “Um, can we all agree to not refer to him as ‘the white boy’ while he’s here?” I ask them.

  LaTrelle’s brother, Tyrone, immediately raises his own hands up and says in an overly exaggerated imitation of my voice, “Um… can we all agree to not refer to the first white boy anybody’s ever brought around to meet our grandma as a white boy? Can we call him “Kumbaya” or “One Race” or whatever it is sensitive white folks want to be called these days?”

  Everybody but me and Bernice falls out laughing.

  So I guess that’s a no.

  * * *

  “The white boy’s here!” I hear one of my little cousin’s yell outside Grandma’s kitchen window.

  My grandma, who’s at the kitchen counter piling the last batch of chicken into one of the large graniteware stockpots we use to serve it, gives me a teasing sidelong glance.

  “Better go out to meet him before your cousins do, Best Grandbaby.”

  I take off my apron and come out the front door just in time to see Rhonda, her cleavage leading the way, already sauntering toward the old-school, black Chevy Silverado that’s come to a stop at the side of the road outside my grandma’s cabin. The body of the truck looks like it must have been made sometime back in the eighties, but the paint and detailing sparkles clean in the light of the setting sun, as if it just rolled off the assembly line.

  “Excuse me,” I say to Rhonda, rushing pass her.

  However, I stop jogging when Colin actually climbs out of his vintage truck.

  He looks even better than his truck. A throwback to the country singers of yesteryear, in his black-on-black Johnny Cash western suit, his Roy Orbinson sunglasses, and his Kris Kristofferson hair, wavy underneath his black Stetson. And even though he now has a bouquet of flowers in one hand, he somehow seems more intimidating than the last time I saw him.

  “C’mon, you made it this far,” he calls out to me, not budging from where he’s standing. “Come the rest of the way to me.”

  I do, closing the space between us with a few more shaky steps.

  He looks at me for a few beats behind his black sunglasses. “Guess, I’m going to have to start calling you Blue.”

  I laugh, despite myself. Despite this situation. “I guess so.”

  He takes off his sunglasses and his eyes travel over my shoulder, probably taking in all the picnic tables and my many family members who are most likely staring right back at him. It’s not like we’ve ever had a white man just drop in on the Sunday Dinner. And he’s a country star, to boot. Not that they listen to a lot of country, but they’ve had time to Google him on their phones since I made the announcement about him coming.

  “You weren’t lying about having a big family,” he says.

  Yeah, that was one of the few things I hadn’t lied to him about, I think to myself.

  “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” I tell him. “We also got kin up in St. Louis, Mississippi. Even a couple of cousins out in Las Vegas.” I think of one of Bernice’s aunts, who’d died in a tragic car accident along with her husband a few years ago, leaving behind my cousin, Prudence, and her much younger brother, Jake. “Us Goodes are scattered all over the place. I think my mom might have chose Alabama to live because it was one of the few states where she didn’t have relatives.”

  “It’s always just been me and my mom,” Colin says, his eyes continuing to scan behind me. “I can’t hardly imagine having a family this big.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool in some ways, and it’s not in others,” I answer with a roll of my eyes. Now it’s my turn to be ominous. “You’ll see when you meet them.”

  His blue gaze switches back to me. “Your grandma watching?” he asks me.

  “No, she’s still in the kitchen, getting everything in serving dishes,” I answer, wondering why he wants to know.

  He answers my unspoken question by pulling me into him tight and kissing the hell out of me.

  My family proves everything I’ve said about their drawbacks by promptly erupting into a chorus of “ooooooohhhhs!” behind us.

  “C’mon,” he says, chuckling against my lips. “Introduce me to your family.”

  And somewhere in the distance, I hear one of the records Colin sent my grandma start playing “Go Tell it on the Mountain.”

  * * *

  Colin is nothing less than utterly charming with my family. Polite and quick with the “sirs” and “ma’ams” when it comes to addressing my older uncles, aunts, and cousins. Good-natured about any and all ribbing he receives. He happily answers my family’s general questions and handles the more personal ones with more cleverness than I would have managed under the same circumstances.

  “So you like black women, huh?” my cousin, Rhonda, asks him point blank, batting her eyes at him across our picnic table. She just about pushed poor Bernice out of her usual spot in order to make room for herself right across from Colin and me.

  “Sure do,” Colin answered. “Latina, Asian, and white women, too. I don’t really dislike any kind of woman that I know of.”

  “But how many black woman have you dated?” Rhonda presses, leaning in so he can get a better view of her pushed up cleavage.

  Colin shrugs as if he’s never considered that question before. “I don’t know. How many black women have you dated?”

  Rhonda stares at him, obviously not knowing whether she should be insulted by the insinuation that she’s dated women or if Colin’s just confused.

  “Ooh, that white boy of yours is a quick one!” Grandma, who’s sitting beside me, cackles and slaps me on the arm.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Colin says right on cue. “May I have another piece of chicken?”

  “You sure can,” Grandma answers. “C’mon ya’ll, pass down that chicken,” she yells to some cousins at the far end of the long table.

  “You were right, this
is the best chicken I’ve ever had,” Colin admits after transforming three more drumsticks into naked bones. He’s technically whispering, but his voice is loud enough for everyone on our side of the table, including my grandma, to hear him. “Think she’d be open to becoming my Nashville chicken supplier?”

  The answer to that question turns out to be yes, especially when Grandma finds out the current rep is another “grandma.” A television personality who owns a nationwide chain of southern food restaurants.

  “Oh, my chicken stomps hers into the ground,” my Grandmas states bluntly, with the confidence of a woman who’s been throwing her whole foot into her signature dish since the age of ten.

  I try to laugh right along with everybody else. But it doesn’t sound near as light-hearted. I can’t relax on account of Colin’s hand on my thigh. It’s been there since the start of the meal, stroking, just close enough to my core for it to feel more intentional than unconscious. A deliberate promise of things to come.

  I keep waiting for something to go wrong, for Colin to stop acting like the perfect dinner date and show everybody his horns.

  But he doesn’t, and when I try to clear the table, my grandma stops me.

  “Don’t mind that, Best Grandbaby. While you were in the bathroom, Colin said you two needed to be getting on the road soon.” She lowers her voice to say, “I’m assuming he wants to get an early start on your nighttime activities, and I don’t want you falling asleep on the road.”

  I can’t believe Colin talked to my grandmother behind my back. And I really can’t believe my Southern Baptist grandmother is okay with me spending the night somewhere else, with someone else.

  “Oh, don’t look at me that way, Best Grandbaby. And don’t think I wasn’t young once myself,” she says with a suck of her teeth. “That boy’s been eyeing you harder than my chicken all through dinner! They get like that when they been on the road too long, you know. I could tell you some stories about when your Paw Paw returned from the Korean War. We wasn’t married yet, but believe me, we wasn’t good Southern Baptists for a whole week after he got home.”