Country Nights

by Winter Renshaw

  God, was she beautiful. Mabry was the most splendid thing I’d ever laid eyes on in my entire life. I’d seen her in pictures, watching her grow up from day one. I had hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures of her and countless letters all sent via email by Rebecca. I’d insisted early on that she didn’t have to do that so often, but she told me I’d appreciate it someday. She’d assured me there would come a day when I would feel better about my decision, and I’d be forever grateful to have known she was placed in good hands and grew up happy and loved.

  I struggled to breathe in Mabry’s presence and fought tooth and nail against the overwhelming sensation that flooded every ounce of me. She turned her face upward, flashing a grin at Rebecca, and while it was sweet, it also packed with it a realization that she would never, ever look at me like that.

  “Mabry, this is Dakota,” Rebecca said, flashing a knowing look at Sam.

  Mabry walked up to me and gave me a hug sweet like strawberry candy. “You smell nice. And you’re really pretty.”

  We all laughed, as if the compliments of a little girl could dissolve the tension in the room just like that.

  “You wanna see my room?” Mabry asked, her eyes sparkling against the late afternoon sun.

  “Yes, baby, go show her your room,” Rebecca said. “We just finished painting it last weekend.”

  Mabry took my hand and pulled me toward the stairs, squeezing it tight as she led me up to her room. A white canopy bed centered the room, surrounded by walls the color of pale sunshine. Millions of stuffed animals and baby dolls rested against a vintage quilt on her bed, and a dollhouse taller than her leaned against a wall in the corner. Watercolor paintings of rainbows and smiling, three-person families hung on the walls with pieces of Scotch tape and a chalkboard with an inspirational quote dashed across it hanging above a small white desk.

  My entire childhood, I’d dreamed of having a room like hers.

  Mabry pulled me from thing to thing, going into great detail about all sorts of random objects that seemed to mean a great deal to her.

  This was her life, and it made me both happy and sad. All I ever wanted was for her to be loved and safe and to thrive. My biggest regret in life was that I couldn’t be the one to give her those things.

  “So that’s my room,” she said a short while later, swinging her hips from side to side as she pulled on a strand of her dark hair.

  “I love it, Mabry,” I smiled, taking a seat on her bed. I’d never said her name out loud like that before. It made her feel real, as if she only ever existed in my heart up until that moment. “You’re a very lucky little girl.”

  She shrugged a shoulder and pursed her lips, the same way I always did when my mind flitted from one thing to another. “How do you know my parents?”

  I wasn’t prepared for that question. “Your mom is my cousin.”

  It seemed like the most neutral, honest answer I could come up with on the spot. I had no idea what Sam and Rebecca told her or if she even knew. As far as I was concerned, they were her parents and it was their choice one hundred percent to tell her about her past.

  “It’s my birthday next month!” she said, suddenly growing excited. “You should come to my party!”

  She clasped her hands together and hopped excitedly as she lunged at me, pulling me up from my spot on her bed.

  “We’re going to have cake and ice cream and games and a bunch of kids from my school will be there,” she said. “Do you like cake?”

  “Do tigers live in the jungle?” I teased. “Absolutely. Cake is my favorite food in the whole world.”

  “So you’ll come?”

  “I would love to be there,” I said, scanning my mental calendar for May 17th. The date was forever ingrained in my memory. We were fast approaching the ten-year anniversary of my last summer with Beau and the ten-year anniversary of the day I placed a living, breathing piece of my heart into the arms of Rebecca and Sam Valentine.

  I couldn’t break a promise to her.

  My daughter.

  “We should go back downstairs,” I said, reaching out to take her soft little hand. It felt good to finally hold it.

  “What’d you think?” Rebecca asked as she peeled potatoes over a garbage can, an embroidered apron cinched around her waist. “Mabry picked out the color.”

  “Oh! The yellow. Yes. It’s lovely,” I said, realizing Mabry hadn’t let go of my hand for a single second since we left her room. “It’s very cheery.”

  “Mabry, did you finish your homework?” Sam asked.

  She twisted her toe into the ground before a devilish smirk captured her face. “Not yet, Dad…”

  One look from Sam was all it took to send her skipping down the hall to finish her homework, and cool air kissed my palm the second our hands released. I missed her already – if that was even possible.

  “Would you like any help?” I offered, eyeing the potato peelings as they fell on top of the trash.

  “No, no,” Rebecca said. “Thank you though.”

  I leaned in, preparing to lower my voice. “Mabry asked how we knew each other.”

  I expected her to set the potato peeler down. I expected drama and tension and stopped hearts. I expected the moment to build into something the three of us had wondered about our entire lives.

  But it didn’t.

  Rebecca continued peeling the potatoes as her face softened. “She knows she’s adopted.”

  “We made a promise to you, Dakota,” Sam said from the kitchen table as he set his newspaper down. “She’s going to know you. We want her to know you. And you should know her too – when the time is right for everyone. Rebecca’s her mother, but so are you.”

  My heart ached with heaviness, as if my love for her was swelling to the surface after all those years. Deep and unbending, it’d been there all along; I just chose to ignore its power because acknowledging it made the hurt that much worse.

  I never wanted to give her up.

  “Anyway, look at Sam and me,” Rebecca laughed. “We couldn’t pass as her biological parents no matter how hard we tried.”

  Sam batted his gossamer-thin eyelashes and Rebecca tucked her honey hair behind her ear, displaying how Mabry’s dark hair and blue eyes were a stark contrast against their fair features.

  “She really seems to like you,” Rebecca said. “I’ve never seen her warm up to someone like that before. It was like you two had an instant connection.”

  “Really?” I asked, unable to stop smiling. I blinked away tears at the realization that I’d missed out on the first ten years of her life all because I was afraid of facing one of the darkest moments of my own. “She invited me to her birthday party.”

  “Did she?” Sam laughed. “You should come. We’d love that.”

  “I heard Beau’s back in town.” Rebecca ran a colander full of peeled, chopped potatoes under the faucet before dropping them into a pot of boiling water on the stove. Her words held more weight than she realized, though I knew exactly what she was hinting at.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m in town interviewing him for work. He’s retiring from music.”

  “Sam, you want to go fire up the grill?” Rebecca asked cheerfully, sending Sam outside with a plate of marinated chicken she pulled from the refrigerator. The second he left, she turned back to me, her face wearing solemnity in a way I hadn’t seen on her before. “Does he know?”

  “Who?”

  “Beau. Does he know about Mabry?”

  I bit my lip, leaning up against the marble island and holding my head in my hands. “No.”

  “You have to tell him.” Her hazel eyes pleaded with me, like a desperate mother afraid of her whole world crashing down.

  “You have nothing to worry about. I promise,” I assured her. “I’m going to tell him when the time is right.”

  “How do you know?” Rebecca whispered, bringing her fingers to her lips and tracing her lips. “What if he…?”

  “He won’t. I know him. He’s not li
ke that.” I lied. I didn’t know him anymore. I didn’t know what he’d say or do or think or feel once I dropped the bomb on him. All I knew was how he’d reacted years ago, and that was with cold, hard silence.

  Chapter Eleven

  10.5 years ago

  Sitting straight up in the most uncomfortable wooden chair in the world, I listened to my Communications professor drone on and on about American dialects in popular media culture. As my mind wandered on that breezy October day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a period since August. Immersed in homework and classes and social obligations, I’d completely spaced it off.

  The next day I sat in the exam room of a local pregnancy center as a nurse asked me a few questions, had me pee in a cup, and then walked me to a dark room. I waited alone until a sonographer rolled in a machine and started whispering casually with me about how maybe there was still time to do something about my “little problem”.

  With numb fingers and stunted anxiety, I called Beau’s phone over and over beginning the second I left the clinic. He didn’t answer once. And later that night, I’d received a call from someone in his camp saying he couldn’t take my call. In a desperate state of not thinking clearly, I blurted out my message, “Tell him I’m pregnant!”

  The man on the other end met my message with silence before exhaling. “Yeah, okay. I’ll tell him the big news.”

  The man hung up, like an asshole, and I waited by my phone for Beau to call me back. Twenty-four hours passed, then forty-eight. Then a week. And then two. I tried calling him again a month later, but the line had been disconnected.

  In a last ditch attempt to reach him, I called his parents’ house on the off chance he’d come home for Thanksgiving, but much to my dismay, his mother answered.

  “How’s school going, Dakota?” Cybil asked, her voice as natural as a three-dollar bill.

  “Fine,” I said, trying my hardest to hide the bitterness toward Beau that seemed to creep up in my tone when I wasn’t careful. “Do you know how I can reach Beau?”

  Cybil paused. “He’s still on tour. I think he’s down in Oklahoma this week, making his way down into the deeper parts of Texas. We haven’t been able to reach him for weeks. Boy doesn’t answer his cell phone anymore.”

  Her words mixed with the unknown, and my raging pregnancy hormones gave the sensation of someone clenching my head with a vice grip. “It’s really important. Is there any way I can reach him?”

  “If I hear from him again, I’ll have him call you,” she said, though not in a way that convinced me in the slightest.

  I waited for months for a call that never came.

  The following February, I sat in the living room of Sam and Rebecca’s apartment in Lexington. Sam was attending med school at UK, and Rebecca had become my rock shortly after getting the news.

  “Grammys are on tonight,” Rebecca said, handing me a big bowl of microwaved popcorn. I placed it on my belly, which had become a convenient shelf in the recent months. She flipped to the award show and took a seat next to me, covering my bare feet with a fuzzy blanket.

  Two aging country singers stood at the microphone, reading off a teleprompter before the crowd went wild.

  “Wait, what did they say?” I asked. “Turn it up.”

  “They just introduced Beau Mason.” Rebecca seemed slightly less shocked than me. As far as I knew, he was nothing but a big deal in smaller circuits. Beau going prime time hit me like a ton of bricks all at once.

  A black curtain raised, revealing the father of my child with his guitar slung around his shoulders and a shiny, six-piece band; a bunch of strangers who got to spend day in and day out with him.

  “Good evenin’,” he drawled, his voice lower and his accent a bit thicker than before. His lips spread wide and carefree as he strummed his guitar, sending the crowd into an uproar. He wore the spotlight like a well-tailored suit, and damn, it looked good on him.

  Electric currents of invigorating excitement and boiling rage prickled up and down my arms, and my heart sank down to my blanket-covered feet as a lump settled in my throat.

  “Have I been living under a rock?!” I picked up the popcorn bowl and placed it on the table. “When did this happen?”

  Rebecca shot me a concerned look. “You really don’t keep up on him?”

  “I mean, I’ve looked at his website to see where his tours are headed. If he ever came to town, I’d go see him,” I said, running a hand over the underside of my belly. I’d imagined running backstage and showing him my condition. Maybe he needed to see it in person in order to dislodge the giant stick from his fame-whoring ass. “But I didn’t know he was this big.”

  “I heard he secured some endorsement, and he’s going to be a mentor on some country singer reality show,” she said, throwing me an incredulous look from the corner of her eye. “He was on The Tonight Show a couple weeks ago. You honestly didn’t know about any of this?”

  “I’m trying to focus on other things right now,” I said, neglecting to add that I thought about him every single second of every single day. Crossing my arms over the top of my belly and sinking back into the sofa, I watched as Beau and his band performed some upbeat, feel-good number before he shook his ass in his tight jeans and finished with his signature dimpled smile.

  One performance on national T.V. was all it took for me to realize the man I’d loved more than anything in the world was suddenly a complete stranger. He’d moved on and left me in the dust, despite the promises we’d made to each other just six months back.

  I couldn’t blame him. You give a twenty-year old kid from the middle of nowhere a fat stack of cash, millions of fans, and throw his name up in lights, and his priorities were going to change. I hated myself for believing him, and I hated myself even more for believing our love was special enough to transcend our destinies.

  I watched as the stranger on the T.V. gave a final wave and a wink before disappearing off stage.

  “You okay?” Rebecca asked, her hazel eyes kind. Though we were cousins, she was always more of a big sister figure to me. She’d been married to Sam since they were fresh out of high school, and they’d been trying to start a family for years before finding out Sam’s interior plumbing didn’t work right and it never would.

  “I’m fine.” I swallowed my pride and gulped in a lungful of summoned strength. Being weak wasn’t a choice I’d ever had in my life. “I should probably get back to the dorms. I have an eight o’clock class tomorrow.”

  I slipped on my shoes by the door and pulled my jacket over my shoulders, concentrating on the way the soft fleece felt beneath my palms in hopes that it might distract me from the burning tears that threatened my vision. Blinking them away, I pulled the doorknob and gave Rebecca a quick wave, dashing out before she had a chance to see my face.

  Abandonment felt like a swift kick to the gut and a surprise left hook to the jaw all at once. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.

  He didn’t love me, and maybe he never had.

  Mama always told me boys would say just about anything to get what they wanted.

  Stupid, stupid girl.

  Hot tears burned down my face in thick streaks, and the more I fought them the harder they came. I gave myself all of a ten-minute walk to get it out of my system, thankful for the blanket of night that shrouded campus that evening, and by the time I got back to the dorms, I threw myself into bed and welcomed the sleepless night and the millions of thoughts that raced through my head faster than I could comprehend them.

  Screw Beaumont Mason. Screw his sweet lips and screw his empty promises.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Look who’s back, Ruby.” I stood up from the front porch as Dakota pulled into the drive later that Sunday evening. She trailed up the gravel, and the closer she got, the more I saw something different on her face that could only be interpreted as relief mixed with apprehension.

  She climbed up the porch. “Sorry. That took longer than I planned.”

  �
�That’s quite all right.” I stood up, pulling the screen door open for her and walking in behind. She grabbed her things from the kitchen table and met me in the family room, taking the seat across from me and clearing her throat as she flipped to a clean page in her notebook. “You enjoy your time with your mama?”

  “I did,” she said, crossing her legs. She clicked her recorder on and placing it gently on the coffee table. “All right, so…”

  Her words trailed off, like she was deep in thought. I waited, folding my hands across the back of my head.

  “Sorry,” she said, her usual confidence wavering. “Got lost in thought there for a moment. Take me to when it all began. After you were picked up by one of the Big Three. When did you first know your career was taking off?”

  “The night I played at the Grammys. Without a doubt, that’s when I knew. They had a band back out last minute, and we happened to be in town, so they asked us to fill in. It was right about the time things were taking off, but that just propelled us to a whole new level.”

  “I remember that performance,” she muttered softly.

  “You watched it? I always hoped you were watching that night. That wink I threw to camera one at the very end, that was for you.”

  Her eyes popped open wide, locking into mine for a half second. “I figured you were just winking at the crowd.”

  “Nope.” I shook my head. “That one was yours. They were always yours. All of ‘em.”

  “All of them?”

  “My manager made it my thing after that. Said all acts need a signature at the end. Kind of like signing your autograph and scribbling an insignia underneath.”

  “What was touring like for you?” she asked, her pen tracing circles in the margins of her notepad. Something told me her mind was elsewhere.

  “Like I said, mostly lonely. Most nights we’d hit up a local bar after a show. The guys would go cruising-”