Only You

by Peg Sutherland

  “Floretha! Floretha, what’s wrong?”

  Floretha paused at the kitchen door and looked back at Harper over her shoulder. “When are you going to learn, child, it’s not all a game?”

  The words from the woman who had all but raised her gave Harper a chill. “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “I mean this is all just fun for you, keeping everybody stepping to your tune. Well, I want you to understand, child, that what you are doing is breaking some hearts.”

  Harper tried to put on her flippant smile, but it wouldn’t come. The urgency in Floretha’s voice touched something within her, made her question herself.

  “One of those hurting hearts is mine,” Floretha continued. “But I know that all the concern you have is for yourself, and I understand how you got that way. But you’re near grown now. It’s time you started acting it. Unless you figure out that Harper Weddington isn’t the only person in this world, the next broken heart is going to be yours.”

  “But—”

  Floretha touched Harper’s cheek, drew one leathery fingertip along the path of a tear Harper hadn’t even realized she’d shed.

  “It’s all right, love. Your old Floretha will be here for you. Your old Floretha will love you no matter what.”

  HARPER AND TRENT drove to the beach on Saturday. It was a chill, gray day, not typical for May. But it suited Harper’s mood. Even the steady, in-and-out rush of the surf didn’t soothe her. She walked in the sand in her bare feet, holding her shoes instead of Trent’s hand, cold water rippling over her toes, tickling her ankles, the wind whipping at her short hair.

  Floretha’s words hadn’t left her.

  “Am I selfish?” she asked, knowing Trent would tell her the truth.

  So would Floretha, admonished the voice in her head.

  “What makes you say that?”

  She glanced at him. “Just answer me.”

  “Of course you are. You’ve had to be.”

  Her heart gave a little twist. Floretha had said she would always love her, but that didn’t mean Trent would. Not if he saw her as selfish.

  He put a hand on her shoulder and they stopped walking. “Don’t you see, if there was no one else to take care of you, you had to do it yourself. You’d be nuts not to be selfish.”

  She recognized a certain truth in his words, but she discovered that it hurt nevertheless to think of herself as selfish. Which was foolish. She’d created that reputation for herself, the spoiled rich kid. So why complain now?

  “But what if I don’t want to be that way anymore?”

  Trent pulled her close. “Just be who you are, Harper. I love you just the way you are.”

  “But—Floretha said I was going to break everybody’s hearts.”

  He grinned. “Now, I could have told you you’re a heartbreaker. You didn’t need Floretha to tell you that.”

  She smiled a little. But the idea that she needed to change still nagged at her. What if she could become kind and loving like Trent and Floretha? Wouldn’t it be nice if someday that was the way people thought of her?

  But making the change seemed so overwhelming. She decided not to think about it today, to just enjoy the salt air and the sea breeze and the reassuring roar of the surf.

  They bought a Frisbee and threw it until Harper grew too tired to run up and down the beach. They bought hot dogs at the amusement park; Harper ate half of hers and gave the rest to Trent.

  “You hardly eat anything these days,” he said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Nothing tastes good.”

  “You’ve lost weight, too.”

  She shrugged. “I haven’t felt too good lately.”

  “Maybe you’re sick again.”

  “I’m not sick,” she said, but she had wondered that herself. Had wondered and set the worry aside.

  “Maybe you ought to go to the doctor.”

  She thought of old Doc Forstman, who gave Sam his blood pressure medicine and Leandra those little pills she sometimes used when she was feeling nervous. “I don’t need a doctor.”

  Then what little bit of the hot dog she had eaten threatened to come back up. After that, there was no dissuading Trent. She would go to the doctor.

  HARPER DID HAVE one thing her way. She didn’t go to Doc Forstman. She picked a doctor two counties away, where nobody had ever heard of the Weddingtons of Collins. At least, she hoped not. Just to be sure, she gave them a phony name, although she told herself there was nothing she needed to hide.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she told Trent as they sped across two counties in his shabby old Chevy. He had insisted on driving her himself. “I’m fine, you know.”

  He looked over at her and said, “Fine, huh? And all this time I thought you could act.”

  “I am fine,” she said, realizing she must’ve said the same thing a dozen times in the two days since they returned from Myrtle Beach. Two days in which she had continued to feel pretty lousy. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Seventeen-year-olds didn’t get sick and die, did they?

  Dr. Hurbert Allenbrandt’s waiting room was dark and dingy; the vinyl seats were cracked and uncomfortable. The only other people waiting were over sixty.

  “We ought to go,” Harper whispered to Trent, who was thumbing through an issue of Progressive Farmer magazine. “I’m not sure he’s licensed to treat people my age.”

  “Sit still,” Trent whispered back. “Read your Reader’s Digest.”

  Only through sheer willpower was she able to sit without wringing her hands until the nurse called her. Through dry lips, she explained how she’d been feeling. She took her clothes off and lay back on the examining table, heart thumping, wishing she had a mother to be here beside her and hold her hand. The exam was uncomfortable and embarrassing, and she shivered as she put her clothes back on and waited for the doctor to return.

  If she hadn’t been seventeen and way past such things, she would have felt like crying. Her breath shuddered in her chest, and she gulped to regain control of it.

  The examining room door opened, startling her. She couldn’t quite look at Doctor Allenbrandt, who was the approximate shape and color of the pumpkin Annie Kate had carved into a jack-o’-lantern last fall.

  “Well, Miss, ah, Porter. It is ‘Miss,’ I presume.”

  “Yes.” The word was the barest of whispers.

  “Well, then, let me see.” He studied the chart in his lap. “Of course, we won’t know for sure for several days, but my best guess is that you are pregnant.”

  Harper felt the way she’d felt the one time she’d fallen off a horse. She had landed on her back, driving all the air out of her lungs. All she could do was lie on the ground and wait for the world to stop whirling.

  “Pregnant?”

  He nodded. “Every indication.”

  She wanted to argue, to tell him it couldn’t be. But she realized, as she sat there in the chilly, dank examining room, that she had somehow known all along. From the very night Red Jannik had caught her in the barn…

  She had brought it on herself. She knew that. Knew from that very night that she had no one to blame but herself.

  Red Jannik was almost as old as Sam, but he was hard and tapered and good-looking, with his coppery red hair and spring green eyes. Harper had flirted with him mercilessly from the moment he set foot on Weddington Farms. He had ignored her at first, the way most of the hands did. But finally he had given up pretending she didn’t get to him.

  That, of course, was when she took to ignoring him.

  She’d been in the barn with the litter of two-day-old kittens. She was so engrossed she hadn’t realized she wasn’t alone until the stall door creaked. She looked up and saw Red.

  “Well, if it’s not the princess,” he said, closing the stall door behind him.

  The stall suddenly felt too close. Harper backed up against the wall and gave him her best daughter-of-the-boss-man look. “Well, hello, Red.”

  “Oh, is the royalty fee
ling friendly tonight?”

  He dropped to his knees beside her. She knew it was silly, but his presence felt menacing.

  “Not especially,” she said.

  “That’s too bad, princess,” he said, sliding even closer, so close his thigh pressed against her. “‘Cause I’m feeling real friendly.”

  “Cut it out, Red.”

  But he hadn’t. He’d pinned her down, explained how her cries would do nothing but bring more of the farmhands, all of whom would no doubt like to join the party. Harper knew he was right. She struggled silently, swallowing her screams. But he was too strong for her.

  Now, almost three months later, that night came rushing back to Harper, causing her heart to thump painfully. She had fought so hard to forget, but now she knew that forgetting would be impossible.

  “When…I mean…How long?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s hard to say,” Doctor Allenbrandt said. “We’ll know more in a few weeks.”

  But Harper couldn’t wait weeks to confirm her worst fears. “Three months?”

  “Three months along, you mean? Oh, quite likely. Have you been feeling poorly for a while?”

  “I had the flu a month or so back.”

  He nodded. “Yes, flulike symptoms are common. Three months is certainly possible.”

  Harper wished with all her heart that she had been struck with some fatal disease. Anything would be better than having Sam and Leandra find out she was pregnant with Red Jannik’s baby.

  The only thing worse would be explaining it to Trent.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE RIDE BACK TO Collins passed in a blur of dazed confusion and sharp-edged guilt.

  “He didn’t say anything?” Trent pressed her one more time. “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Harper snapped, realizing only too late that she had never before used that tone with Trent. He didn’t deserve it.

  You’re the one who’s getting what you deserve, she told herself.

  Trent patted her hand and spoke soothingly. “Okay, okay. But you have to tell me as soon as he calls about those tests.”

  She promised to do just that, but as she drove the few miles from the mill village to Weddington Farms, Harper felt as if a committee of judgmental, angry, self-righteous voices were holding court in her head. Some of the voices said she had played with fire too often and, just as Floretha had predicted, people were now going to get hurt. Others said she didn’t deserve this, that no one deserved what Red Jannik had dished out. A few loud voices that sounded like Sam’s raged at her for ruining her future, shattering her dreams.

  And one tiny voice suggested that there was a way out. Trent.

  The very idea of using Trent in that way made her sick enough to pull off to the side of the road until the nausea passed.

  As she dragged herself upstairs, Harper couldn’t help but think how much more bearable this whole situation would be if only the father of this baby was Trent.

  She crawled into bed and pulled the covers up, but the committees did not adjourn.

  It could be Trent’s. They hadn’t used protection every single time, had they? So what if the doctor had said she was likely three months along? He had also said he couldn’t be positive.

  But Harper knew. The black certainty that she would pay for her mistakes had burrowed into her heart from the moment Red Jannik had cornered her in the stall. The certainty had grown, filling her with fear and anguish that nothing could diminish.

  Until Trent.

  He loves you, the tiny voice said. Just as much as you love him.

  But it’s wrong.

  He’s the only answer you have.

  THEY SAT ON THE HOOD of her car beside Foxtail Lake. It was the first time she had agreed to see him since they returned from the doctor’s. She had been avoiding him.

  His heart had been leaping happily ever since she came out to the barn earlier in the day and asked to meet him after work. But now that they were here, face-to-face, he knew that whatever was wrong still troubled her. She looked drawn, and she refused to meet his gaze.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. “You’re driving me nuts, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Even her voice sounded different.

  “I’m imagining all kinds of stuff. Like you’re dying or something. Tell me you’re not dying, Harper.”

  “Maybe it would be better if I were.”

  He took her hands in his and clutched them desperately. “Nothing’s that bad.”

  She finally looked him in the eye and searched for whatever reassurance she needed. Finally, she said, “I’m…expecting. A baby.”

  Relief was quickly followed by elation. A baby! His and Harper’s. Oh, thank you, God, it could all come true. Then cold, hard reality set in. Yes, it was coming true, but it wasn’t just his sunny dreams about being together with Harper forever and always. No, what was happening was his ugly little plan. The one he’d devised to use Harper, to dupe her, to ruin her life.

  It had worked.

  And look at the expression on her face.

  Despite the guilt creeping into his heart, he pulled her into his arms. “You know it’s going to be all right, don’t you? You know we’ll make everything right.”

  She struggled against his embrace and looked at him. She didn’t look reassured. “It’s not that simple, Trent.”

  He touched her face. “Sure it is.”

  “No, no, no!” She covered her face with her hands, so distraught it pained him to watch her. “Please, Trent, you can’t fix this. It’s all wrong!”

  “Harper, please don’t feel so bad. I promise you, I’m right here with you and…and…” Her shoulders were beginning to shake. “Please, baby, please. Trust me.”

  “I do. But…” Her protest dissolved into sobs.

  “I know your old man will raise holy hell, but—”

  “No, it’s not just that. It’s—”

  “You leave Sam to me. Besides, he won’t even have to know until it’s too late to do anything about it. We can leave next week, right after graduation. Your folks’ll think you’re in Myrtle Beach with all the other kids.”

  Her sobs began to die. Still, she shook her head and her voice remained thick with tears when she spoke. “Oh, Trent, you just don’t understand.”

  He hated seeing her look so miserable. He pulled her close again, and this time she stayed. “We’ll be married before anybody knows a thing about it. Okay?”

  He held his breath, waiting for her response. He made a vow to himself that if she married him, he would do everything in his power to make it up to her for ever thinking of using her. Because it wasn’t that way now. Now he loved her. He only wanted to make her happy and safe. He wanted nothing more than to be the father of her baby.

  “You’re sure?” she said at last in a voice so soft and uncertain he barely heard it

  “I’m positive,” he said, smiling against her soft curls. “You’ll see. We’ll have the prettiest baby in the whole world. She’ll have your dimple and your black hair and my blue eyes and sweet disposition.”

  Tears trickled silently down her flushed cheeks. Trent held her. He would make it up to her. She would never have to know the truth.

  HARPER WALKED THROUGH the week leading up to graduation like a zombie. Annie Kate knew something was wrong, and nagged her about it constantly. Floretha knew, too, although she kept quiet.

  Sam and Leandra, of course, noticed nothing.

  Trent treated her like a precious porcelain doll. His attentions, which should have made her feel treasured and special, merely aggravated her guilt. The committee in her head rarely fell silent these days, nagging her with a million different opinions as graduation day grew nearer.

  But Trent’s apparent joy over the situation paralyzed her, making it impossible to tell him the truth. He talked of nothing but his plans for their elopement. He talked about buying a ring she knew he couldn’t afford. He talked about a wreath of flowers fo
r her hair and the honeymoon suite at the best hotel in Myrtle Beach.

  “Don’t, Trent,” she had said one night, her guilt gnawing at her. “Quit trying to make this sound like a real wedding.”

  “It will be a real wedding,” he declared. “Better than a real wedding.”

  He had been patient with her moods and unfailingly good-humored about everything, which made her love him all the more. And hate herself.

  The morning of graduation, Harper woke in an agony of indecision. Could she really go through with this? Could she betray Trent, the one person determined to stand by her? Should she give in to the inevitable and tell her parents? She cringed at the thought.

  At times, the thought of a living being growing inside her actually calmed her. This would be her baby. It would love her just because she was its mother. And she would love it. This baby—her baby—would never grow up thinking no one had time for it. It would never think it was just an inconvenience in other people’s lives.

  Those calm, reassuring feelings came and went quickly, but they made it possible for her to get through the day.

  They hadn’t, however, helped her figure out what to do.

  Trembling, she picked up the phone on graduation morning and dialed Annie Kate. Her best friend was always so levelheaded; maybe today some of it would rub off.

  “Oh, Harper, aren’t you excited?” Annie Kate’s voice was almost a squeal. The squeal of a child, and Harper knew she was no longer a child. What, after all, could Annie Kate do to help her? “How many swimsuits are you taking? If you aren’t going to use it, can I borrow that little dotted swiss cover-up Floretha made you last summer?”

  “Sure,” Harper said. “Whatever.”

  “Well, you sound like this is the worst day of your life instead of the best. Is this the same Harper Weddington who’s been counting the days till graduation since October?”