“And how about you? You’ve been down in Texas. Why?”
I scratch my head and put my empty plate on the coffee table. “I’m not completely sure. There’s someone there, and I, uh, sort of want to be where she is right now.”
Mel smiles, and I’m reminded that, in addition to being beautiful, she’s a kind and devoted friend. “Tell me about it.” Her eyes plead with me. “I know the guys have asked and you haven’t wanted to talk about her, but you need to tell someone. You’ve always been there for me. All those times I called you in the middle of the night in Hawaii, sobbing because I didn’t think I’d make it without Joss. I owe you. Let me be there for you too.”
I think back to her phone calls, the way I felt her heart breaking over the invisible waves that rolled across the hundreds of miles separating us. But though she might have been sad she didn’t ever really need me. Mel’s one of the most self-possessed women I’ve ever known.
“I didn’t do anything but listen to you for a few minutes. You didn’t need me. You had it handled. You were just sad.”
“And how about you? Are you sad?” Her voice conveys how concerned she is, and it occurs to me that my normally taciturn nature might be causing my friends distress.
“Not sad. Hopeful now, but not completely settled either. There’s a lot of history.”
She nods. “Tell me about it. Tell me about when you dated her in high school.”
I smile to myself, settling back on the sofa. “We were those stupid teenagers in love. The ones who can’t keep their hands off of each other and have to spend every minute together.”
She laughs softly.
“I know it’s hard to imagine since you’ve only ever seen me with one-night-stand groupies, but Marsha was everything to me.”
“She seems lovely. I only got to see her at the Bronco, but she was beautiful and welcoming.”
“She was raised very poor,” I say, watching for Mel’s reaction. “Her mom is crazy as they come, and her dad booked so early on she never even knew him. But she has more class than any woman I’ve ever known.”
The fire pops and Mel clears her throat. I take a breath and move on with the story.
“So, for six months, we were in love, and life was about as great as it could be. She was a senior and I was only a junior, but we had it all planned out—how she’d go to community college for a year and then we’d go to the same college. She was always smart, a really good student—a lot better than I was.”
“What happened—to all those great plans? What went wrong?”
My mind travels back to that night.
I pulled up to her house in my VW Bug—an original model, not one of the new ones with the stupid flower vases. Marsha came running out before I could even shut the engine off. I knew her mom didn’t like that we were dating, so I figured they’d been fighting or something.
“You okay, babe?” I asked when she jumped in the car.
Her eyes were wild and her hands were shaking. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
“You got it.”
We drove a few minutes, and she spent them staring out the window, silent and obviously upset.
“Did you have a fight with your mom?” I finally asked.
She looked at me, tears in her eyes.
“Jesus, babe, what’s wrong?” I stroked her sweet, satiny cheek.
“We need to talk,” was all she said.
My heart plummeted to somewhere south of my gut.
By the time we’d gotten to our favorite make-out spot in a park adjacent to the Arkansas river, I was terrified. Marsha didn’t cry, and she was the furthest from a drama queen that a teenage girl could be. All I could think was that she was going to dump me, and my heart was tearing in two at the mere idea.
We pulled up in the parking lot under a low, dark canopy of trees that fronted the river. I switched the car off and swallowed, my throat feeling like it was coated in sandpaper.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” I asked quietly.
She put her hands over her face and then took a deep breath before she pulled them away. When she finally looked at me her face was ravaged—not because of the few tears that had fallen, but because of the desolation that had settled in her eyes.
“I don’t know how to say this.” She stared out the front windshield.
“Like ripping off a Band-Aid, babe.” My heart squeezed. “Just do it.”
“I’m pregnant.”
Once, when I was about five, my mom took me to a carnival in Lima, Peru, where we were living that year while my dad worked with a humanitarian group on a clean-water initiative. The place never would have passed safety laws in the US. old rickety rides looked like they had been welded together in someone’s back pasture, and there were no rules for how old you had to be in order to ride. My mom wasn’t the type to keep me from trying new stuff, so she let me ride everything, but she did insist on coming with me.
The last ride of the day was a tower of doom. You strapped into a bucket on a commercial construction crane. The bucket was raised up to the top like you were going to work on a high building, but they’d modified it somehow so that it disconnected from the arm of the crane and you were left dangling from a collection of bungee cords. Then they unrolled the bungee cords and you plummeted fifty feet to the ground, snapping back up at the last possible second, flying up, up, up, almost to where you’d started, then repeating it all over again.
The feeling I got when that bucket was freefalling—my stomach and my heart all piled on top of one another, the fear that the sensation might not ever end, yet the dread that it would—is the closest description I could ever find to the way I felt when Marsha said those two words to me—“I’m pregnant.”
“Yeah,” I tell Mel. “It was every teenager’s worst nightmare, and I was there living it.”
“God, Colin, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. Did any of the guys know about this?”
“Nah. I’ve never told a soul—until now. Congratulations. You’re the first.” My voice is weak.
She leans over and puts her head on my shoulder, holding my hand as we both stare into the fire. “What happened next?”
“We talked about it, about the options. Neither one of us knew what we wanted to do, and we had some time—it was really early, she’d done the test right away.” I close my eyes and remember the scent of her sitting in my little car. Like honey and fear all rolled into one.
“We agreed that we were in it together no matter what we decided. Her mom had a really big hang-up about teen pregnancy since she’d had Marsha as a teen herself. Marsha knew that if she decided to have the baby her mother would disown her. I promised her that one way or another I’d take care of her. I felt confident my parents would help us.”
“Poor Marsha. She must have been so scared.”
“Yeah.” My voice is nearly a whisper now. “She was so scared that within a week she’d decided what to do, and she never consulted me, never gave me a chance to weigh in on the whole thing. She just decided.”
“She terminated?” Mel’s eyes brim with tears.
“Yeah, she did.”
“Oh.”
She doesn’t know what else to say.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I say quickly. “You know my views. It’s not what she decided. It’s that she decided it with no regard for my part in it, my rights. I supported her right to choose, Mel, but not her right to choose without me.”
“I get that. I’d have been upset too, but I also understand how scared she must have been. Colin, every woman over the age of twenty-five has had at least one scare. You can’t imagine how terrifying it is. Thinking that you won’t be able to leave the house by yourself for years on end. You won’t be able to decide when you sleep, when you wake. You can’t even walk to the mailbox without making sure the kid is cared for. Even for a few minutes. No more dates, no more school, no more lazy Sunday mornings.
“And before that there’s the pregnancy. Watching
Tammy through these last few months has been such an eye-opener. You really do give up your whole body. And for Marsha it meant giving up her only family too. I had a scare when I was in college. All I could think was that my parents would be so disappointed they’d never love me the same again. I knew they wouldn’t abandon me though, so I didn’t have to worry about how I’d eat or where I’d sleep. What a thing for an eighteen-year-old to face.”
I unclench my fist where it’s resting against my thigh. My jaw is tense and my head throbs uncontrollably. “I know you’re right. Now, all these years later, I get how hard it must have been for her, but it still kills me that she didn’t believe in me—in us—enough to talk about the possibilities. That’s all I wanted—to consider the possibilities. To know that I took care of her. She never let me though.”
“I’m guessing she’s not the type to let anyone take care of her.”
“You have no idea.”
“It requires a lot of trust to let someone do that for you. Maybe she never learned that kind of trust at home?”
“Does Joss know how smart you are?” I ask as I try to give her a smile.
“He’d better.” She grins and then elbows me in the ribs.
“Ow.” I pretend to be hurt, welcoming the break from the heaviness of the conversation.
“One more thing from your super-smart friend,” she says.
“I never used the word super,” I clarify.
She glares at me then sticks out her tongue. “The best way I know to help someone learn to trust is to be trustworthy. No matter how many times they shy away. Maybe Marsha needs to learn from experience that you’re someone she can trust. Maybe you need to trust that she can learn to trust.”
“Thanks, Mel.” I give her a little kiss on the cheek.
“Hey! Quit hitting on my woman,” Joss’s voice booms across the deck as he walks toward us.
Mel giggles as he scoops her off the couch.
“Excuse me, bro, but I think I need to remind this one who her fiancé is. She seems to have gotten a little confused.”
I smile at the two of them—the perfect couple. “She’s all yours, dude. Never doubt that. She’s all yours.”
Now the question that remains is whether I can make Marsha all mine.
Chapter Ten
Marsha
COLIN’S NOT around for the next several days, and it gives me time to reassess the idea of going to Hawaii with him. I’ve never felt so torn in two in my life. Well, except for that time ten years ago when I found out I was pregnant.
I remember that week like it was yesterday.
I was in PE when it first happened. That queasy feeling that wouldn’t leave. I left school early thinking I’d eaten something bad or was coming down with a virus. My mom always worked the second shift at the factory so she wasn’t home until after ten most nights. I spent that afternoon and evening nibbling on crackers and trying not to puke. Funny thing was, the next morning I felt fine. Then, after lunch, it started up again. After day four of showing up to the school health office, the nurse closed the door behind us and sat me down for a talk.
“You’ve been having this nausea every afternoon all week, right?” she asked as she faced me, a file folder on her lap.
“Yeah. It’s really weird. I’m fine when I get up in the mornings, but every day after lunch I get so sick.”
“Do you have any other symptoms? Vomiting? Diarrhea?”
I shook my head. “No. I dry heaved a couple of times, but I never actually threw up.”
The nurse took my hand in hers. “Marsha. Is there a chance you could be pregnant?”
I recoiled from her, horror washing over me like a tidal wave. “No.” I shook my head vehemently. “Absolutely not.”
She smiled indulgently. “Okay. It’s something I have to ask with symptoms like these.”
“But they call it morning sickness for a reason, right?” I asked.
“It’s often in the morning when the stomach is emptiest, but really, it can be any time of day. Some women get it all day even. There’s no hard-and-fast rule.”
“Oh.” I stared at her, fear welling up in me, my mind frantically trying to remember when I’d last gotten my period. “So I think I’m feeling better actually.” I abruptly stood. “I’m going to head back to class.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I pasted on a bright smile. “I’m a lot better. I should get to history. I think we’re prepping for a test today.”
The nurse nodded, and I knew she didn’t believe me for a minute. “Okay. I’ll write you a pass.”
Before I walked out the door she placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Take care of yourself, Marsha.”
I swallowed, unable to look at her now. “I will. Thanks.”
The moment school let out, I was out the door, telling Colin that I needed to run an errand for my mom. I had to ride a city bus to a drug store that was nowhere near school or my house. Once I had the pregnancy test I went straight home and learned the truth. I remember standing in the tiny bathroom of our trailer and discovering that my life as I knew it had just ended. My entire future exploded in a shower of little pink lines, everything I knew to be real and solid dissolved by a tiny plastic stick.
Colin and I had always used condoms. We’d thought we were safe. But of course accidents happen, people make mistakes, technology isn’t foolproof. And the human body is full of surprises. I spent the next several hours on the floor of the bathroom, alternating between rocking, sobbing, and vomiting. Thirty minutes before Colin was supposed to pick me up, I washed my face, brushed my hair, and got ready for our date. Then I told the boy I loved that our lives were ruined.
With my mother’s work schedule I managed to avoid her for several days. In the meantime, Colin and I walked on eggshells around one another, both of us too terrified to mention the elephant in the room. When he finally said that we needed to talk about it and took me to the park after school, I knew I couldn’t face it. I could barely face him. Already, the mere idea of pregnancy and everything that would come after it was making me wish I were dead.
The fears swirled in my mind all day and all night. I was in a constant state of panic. Where would I live once my mother threw me out? How would I eat? How would I pay to go to a doctor? And how in the world would I feed a baby and clothe it and care for it?
The shame was overwhelming. I could hardly look at myself in the mirror—I was so humiliated. The only thing I knew in the midst of it all was that I needed the problem to go away. They say life only gives you what you can handle, but at eighteen, six weeks from high school graduation, I knew that pregnancy was more than I could handle. I had to make it stop. So I told Colin my decision, and he said I had broken his heart.
Then he broke mine too.
I’M MIDWAY through a rowdy shift on a Thursday night when Colin literally blows in the door of the Bronco, his hair tousled from the storm brewing outside, and two days’ worth of scruff covering his very sexy jaw.
He’s been in Portland since last week, and I don’t think I realized how much I’ve missed his face until he’s standing in front of me at the bar grinning from ear to ear.
“Did you miss me?” he asks, as if he can read my mind.
I refuse to give him the satisfaction of an answer, so I roll my eyes. “When did you get back?” I keep mixing the pitcher of mint julep that we have on special for ladies’ night.
“About an hour ago. I came straight from the airport, haven’t even been to Mrs. S.’s yet.”
I try to hide my smile. He came straight to me. It gives me stupid butterflies in my stomach like when I was a teenager.
“Couldn’t wait to get back to the good times and sophisticated fare of the Bronco, huh?” I look at him over my shoulder, catching him checking out my ass.
He looks up quickly and smirks. “Something like that,” he answers.
I give him another eye roll. “Surely there were plenty of those grou
pies wandering around Portland. You didn’t need to come all this way to look at my ass in a pair of secondhand jeans.”
“I couldn’t care less about the women in Portland, and honestly, since the other three guys are married or about to be, there aren’t that many groupies around these days. I was never a big draw. I took the overflow, you know?”
No, I don’t know. I can’t imagine any woman with a lick of sense not being all over this man in a heartbeat.
“You did not just use the words ‘groupie’ and ‘overflow’ in the same sentence, did you?” I make a gagging noise, and he blushes. It’s so cute that I can almost erase the image in my mind of women rubbing themselves all over him.
“Let’s go back to the issue of your ass.”
“Colin Douglas, that is not a topic up for discussion.”
He grins at me. “That’s fine, I don’t really need to discuss it as long as I can look at it.”
Jimmy rescues me, coming out of the kitchen carrying a load of clean glasses. He starts putting them away behind the bar and gives Colin a little nod in greeting.
“Haven’t seen you around lately,” Jimmy grunts.
“I’ve been in Portland for a few days, so I’m stopping in for a quick change of suitcases before I grab your head waitress here and fly off to Hawaii.”
My heart flutters when he mentions the trip. Part of me wants to jump up and down in ecstasy while another part wants to go hide in a cave and refuse to go anywhere with him ever.
Jimmy grunts again and moves to the other end of the bar to fill some drink orders.
I’m grateful to see a table of guys across the room waving me down. “I’ve got to get back to work,” I tell Colin. “I guess we can talk about the trip tomorrow?”
He settles in on the stool he’s been leaning on. “I’ll be here. We can talk when your shift is over.”
I gulp. Okay then.
IT’S AFTER two in the morning when I finally get everything at the bar cleaned up and packed away for the night. Colin helps Jimmy the whole time, stacking chairs, carrying out empty kegs, and mopping the back room. I’ve gotten used to the guys from Lush hanging around and doing menial labor, but I don’t think Jimmy knows what to do with a rock star washing down the floor in his utility room.
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