by M. J. Pullen
“That’s it,” she said.
“That’s what?” Suzanne asked.
“I might need your help, girls. There’s something I have to do.”
They looked at one another doubtfully, but stood to follow Rebecca’s lead anyway. For Marci, this took an extra moment of sliding her belly out of the wooden booth. There was a little more stumble in Rebecca’s step than she expected as she headed for the stage, but she recovered her balance by grasping Marci’s hand.
“Easy,” Marci muttered. “I’m six months pregnant, not exactly a pillar of stability.”
No spotlight shone on the stage that night, unlike the first time she had wandered into this place. Then, it had been nearly empty, and Rebecca could scarcely have thought of anything more horrifying than the prospect of taking the stage. Tonight it was full to capacity, which did little to decrease her terror. When she located the microphone and tried to talk into it, nothing happened. Suzanne flagged down the waitress with the long curly hair, who responded to a twenty-dollar tip with a slight smile and at least minimal helpfulness getting the microphone plugged in.
By the time it was working properly and Rebecca was standing on the plywood stage, looking out into the crowd, Suzanne and Marci had climbed up behind her. She hadn’t even had to ask. She scanned the crowd and saw Jake at their table, smiling and shaking his head.
“Hello,” she said into the microphone. “Hello? Can you hear me?” A few heads turned in her direction, but most ignored her. She found herself tempted to begin her airline safety speech and tell everyone where the emergency exits were located. There was only one person she really needed to hear her, however, and he was not looking up yet. She tried to think what to say.
“Sing!” yelled a man at a table near the front.
“Oh, no,” she said, finding her voice. “I just have something I wanted to say to someone. Alex? Alex Chen?”
The deputy looked up at the mention of his name and shook his head. Tanya gave her a scornful look and put a possessive hand on Alex’s chest.
“Sing!” the man down front repeated. “Sing or get off the stage! It’s the rule.”
“Trust me, sir, no one wants that. I really can’t sing,” Rebecca said. “I’m sorry. Alex, I just wanted to apologize and—”
“Sing! Sing! Sing!” the chant rose from several patrons near the man in the front, and this drew even more attention to her. She looked back at Suzanne and Marci for help, but they were chanting too, all smiles.
Alex was now covering his face with a bar menu. Dear God. There was nothing for it. She reached for the only song she could remember in that moment.
She started barely above a whisper, feeling ridiculous. “Baby put your hair up, or wear it down, or…”
Suzanne whispered, “Shave your head!”
“Shave your head.” Her voice trembled.
Alex had lowered the menu and she could see the guys around him ribbing him. “Hey, Alex! When you gonna let your hair down, sweetie?”
There was no going back now. She sang, “We can go out … fishing, to a ball game, or just…” Rebecca blushed, but finished the line anyway. “Rock the bed.”
A glance behind her told her Suzanne and Marci were dancing, swaying from side to side, which was particularly funny with Marci’s awkward belly.
Alex was watching her now, smiling a little but still shaking his head. “You can’t sing,” he mouthed. She laughed and kept on.
She made herself hold eye contact with him. She could feel her unsteady voice wavering even more. “Honey I don’t care, what you do, or what you wear.”
He lifted his hands, cupping them around his ears. “Louder!” he mouthed.
Her voice was painful even to her own ears but she got louder anyway. The crowd cheered. “You don’t have to be perfect … but you’re perfect for me.”
To her astonishment, applause broke out, with some added cheering by the guys at the table down front. Just roll with it, she thought. It can’t get worse.
“Thank you, thank you very much. That song goes out to my good friend, Alex Chen. Do y’all know Alex?”
Another cheer and whooping noises from around the bar. Alex lifted his beer bottle to her and took a long drink. She felt exposed on the stage, and worried that maybe that was all she would get from him. “Keep singing, sweetheart!” one of the men down front called out.
Rebecca spoke the next words in a tuneless sort of melody. “I’m here tonight because I screwed up, to see if I can get a second chance. Well, it’s more like a fifth chance.”
“Fifth chance!” Suzanne and Marci sang behind her, backup-singer style. She grinned at them and went on.
“But even if he won’t give me that chance, I couldn’t leave tonight without telling Alex I love him.”
“Love him, oooooooh.”
“I love you, Alex, even if you can’t love me back anymore.” She was no longer singing, just talking to him across the room, across the crowd, as though he were the only other person in the bar. His face was still, lips pressed together. He didn’t move, but he didn’t drop her gaze.
Rebecca turned back to the crowd in front of her. “That’s the first time I’ve said that to anybody, especially into a microphone in a crowded bar, so y’all be gentle with me. And maybe he will, too.”
One by one, the faces turned toward Alex, who replaced his beer on the bar, and was disentangling himself from an annoyed Tanya Boozer. The same men who had been chanting for Rebecca to sing were now calling his name. “Alex, Alex, Alex…”
He crossed slowly to her, making his way gently through the crowd, leaving her twisting uncomfortably at the microphone. He patted shoulders as he went. He even nudged aside a woman who had just come back from the bathroom and was blocking his path while trying to figure out what the fuss was about. It may not have taken more than a minute for him to make his way over from the bar, but it seemed to take hours.
When he was a couple of feet from the stage, she held out her hand. “You always assume,” he said softly, taking the microphone from her other hand and turning it off with his thumb, “that I’m going to take your hand.”
“You don’t have to, you know,” she said, trying and failing to sound as though her whole life did not ride on his response.
“In this case, I think I do.” He took her hand and pulled her to him, kissing her deeply and hoisting her off the stage. She slid down his body, slowly, surrounded by a bar that had erupted in cheers.
“Sorry if I embarrassed you with my bad singing,” she said.
“Well, it’s not an airport gate,” he said. “But it will do.”
He gave her another long kiss to the whooping approval of the crowd. One of the guys in green jerseys Rebecca didn’t recognize walked past them, clapping Alex on the shoulder as he went. Alex nodded to the guy, but kept his arms around her. Someone turned the karaoke system off and put on music, and they swayed a little as others began slow dancing around them.
“I applied for a job with Southern Air,” she said, a little sheepish.
“In Birmingham?”
“Yep. I need a change.”
“Just need a change, huh?” He was smiling. He knows the truth. He wants to hear me say it.
“Actually, I must have hit my head on something, because I realized that I needed you.”
He laughed. “When it comes to women, head injuries always work in my favor. I should warn you, though, the old house I just bought in Birmingham might be haunted, too.”
“I think I can handle that,” she said. “Just promise me we can get someone else to clean it.”
“Promise.” He put his forehead against hers.
To one side, Rebecca saw Jake and Marci dancing nearby, and wondered if Marci would write about all this in her next blog. She would have to start reading more consistently to keep up with everyone, now that she was moving back to Alabama.
“So, this is my happy ending,” she said, almost to herself.
“Nope,”
Alex said, pulling her closer. “This is the beginning.”
Epilogue
* * *
GUEST POST BY JAKE STILLWELL (AKA SUBHUB HIMSELF)
* * *
BLOG: THE CARE AND FEEDING OF A SUBURBAN HUSBAND
{ Entry #199: (Untitled) }
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
This week in Oreville, Alabama, they are changing signs all over the town. If you drive in on any of the highways that run through this pretty little town, you’ll see them adding a name and number to some of the signs, while others are being replaced entirely. That’s because Friday night, a long-held state high school record for passing yards in a single season was broken, when Holden Murray threw a simple forty-seven-yard pass for a season total of 4,140 (and counting). I know this because I was there and saw it happen.
Wait, you’re saying, this isn’t a sports blog. Hang with me.
The reason this matters, to me at least, is that the record for passing yards by a high school football player in Alabama was previously held by Cory Williamson, also from Oreville High. He was the older brother, mentor, and hero of one of our best friends, Rebecca. I would never have known about Oreville, Alabama, if it weren’t for her. If my family hadn’t been visiting her this past weekend, we would have missed a tiny moment of sports history. When we saw Holden Murray throw that pass, we all sucked in a breath, and yes, I’ll admit it, said a little prayer.
Shortly after he broke that passing record nineteen years ago, Cory Williamson was killed in a car accident. He was coming home from a party in a nearby town, at which he’d had a couple of beers, and lost control of his car, running off the road into a farm fence. He was alone, and no one else was injured. Cory left behind a younger sister who adored him, and two loving parents who would never be the same. He also left countless friends and admirers, all over the county, who washed this little part of the world in their grief when they lost him. Cory Williamson had a scholarship to Auburn University when he died, and some say he was NFL material. Had he lived, he might be enjoying life as a retired player today, working as a sports announcer or owning a successful car dealership, or he might have chosen a different path entirely. We will never know.
What we do know is that Cory threw for 4,126 yards in the fall of 1996, and that his football portrait from senior year shows a smile of carefree, youthful energy and warmth. Even today, his family and friends cannot grasp the depth of his loss, and so we talk about it in terms we can understand. Of an all-American kid who worked hard and was loyal to his teammates, and the lost potential of the years he never got to know. Now that his record has been broken, and now that his high school has graduated a class that was not yet born when Cory died, his memory may begin to fade, at least in some parts of the town and the state. But never in the hearts of those who loved him.
Documenting athletes and their stories is central to my life and career. Still, it’s always interesting to me that when someone dies, people seem to cling to that part of their identity. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to sports so much—it’s a way of being in the world, the same way my wife puts her words into the world on this blog, the way together we are raising our expanding family and hoping that they will be a force for good in the world. Sports are something to do.
My wife often asks me why I love sports so much, since they are in large part lost on her. (Which, I’ll say, is lucky for you, because she spends that time writing instead.) For me, however, it’s more than just the score at the end of a game. More than the yards on the field, the strategies, the stats, and even the celebrations.
What I love about sports is the spirit that each individual player brings with him (or her), the histories they carry in their hearts, the people who love them watching from the stands. They play because they have something to prove—to their teammates and coaches, to their families, to themselves. Leaving everything you have on the field in the form of blood, sweat, and tears is just one way of saying “I was here. I did something. I matter.”
More than any sport, though, what gives our life meaning are the people we have something to prove to. Our friends, our family, and even ourselves. Friendships are made strong through shared hardship, shared triumphs. Marriage, too. Sometimes you have to know what it feels like to let someone down, so you also know the victory of regaining their trust. Sometimes you have to know the tears of loss to appreciate the joy of winning. Sometimes the people who need love the most are the ones who seem to push it away. And in my case, sometimes your whole life hinges on something scrawled on a napkin.
Life isn’t perfect. Love isn’t perfect. People are taken from us too soon, lives unravel, families crumble. Even when we stay together, we take each other for granted, and the love that should lift us up to be better people sometimes leaves us room to become selfish, righteous, or controlling instead.
So how does love survive? How do any of us make meaning of it all? There are thousands of answers—none of them right, none of them wrong.
For me, it’s about choosing teammates—friends, family, and most importantly my wife—who will not only forgive my imperfections but make me a better person in the process. I pledge them my loyalty, flawed as it is.
And then, win or lose, you just get back out there. Leave it all on the field—in love, in life, in work. Pick something that matters to you and commit your whole heart to it. Because none of us know how long we are given to play the game.
* * *
Acknowledgments
Writing this series has been one of the most fun and challenging experiences of my life. So please let me say thank you to some incredible people.… Nicole Sohl and the rest of St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan Entertainment, and Beth Phelan and Jenny Bent of The Bent Agency. I’d also like to thank those who’ve supported me in the writing of this book by giving me feedback, validation, and sometimes wine: Carla Birnbaum, Sarah Cutler, Jenna Denisar, Kristal Goelz, Marla Kaplan, Nan Merrow, Anna Needle, Stephanie Needle, Ross Newberry, Betsy Rainwater, Brenda Turetsky, Ryan Van Meter, and Rob Wade, as well as George Weinstein and the rest of the Atlanta Writers Club Roswell critique group. As always I’m indebted to Faith Williams at Atwater Group for being my punctuation safety net.
There has to be a separate paragraph for my family, especially my husband Sam Turetsky and our children, for all the sacrifices they have endured so that I could spend time writing. Living with a writer is a special kind of domestic torture. I am so grateful to you for putting up with me.
I am also incredibly grateful to those of you who have taken time from your busy lives to read this book, and particularly those of you who chose to follow Marci, Suzanne, and Rebecca on their adventures from start to finish. Many of you have made an effort to review my books—including bloggers and readers—and I value your honesty and encouragement. Many readers have even taken the time to get in touch and tell me personally that you’ve enjoyed the books—I can’t tell you how much that means to me. Cheers to all of you!
Also by M. J. Pullen
The Marriage Pact
Regrets Only
About the Author
MANDA (M. J.) PULLEN is the author of complex, funny contemporary romances, including The Marriage Pact and Regrets Only. She was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta by a physicist and a flower child, who taught her that life is tragic and funny and real love is anything but simple. After traveling around Europe and living in cities like Austin and Portland, she returned to Atlanta, where she lives with her husband and two sons.
www.mjpullen.com
www.facebook.com/MJPullenBooks
Twitter: @MJPullen. Or sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
St. Martin’s Press ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates
on the author, click here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by M. J. Pullen
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
BAGGAGE CHECK. Copyright © 2016 by Amanda Pullen Turetsky. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: