by Lexi Wilson
“This,” I said, taking a step back and opening my bag with the logo of the Rangers on it.
And, I took out my uniform, balling it up in one hand--and threw it in her face. The top, the belt, and the skirt hit Glenda right in her sneering, bitchy face and spilled onto the floor at her feet. A chorus of gasps welled up in the room. Glenda, rooted to the spot, stared disbelieving at me.
Next, I pulled out from the bag my pair of short, white leather boots that completed the Rangers Cheerleaders uniform. I stepped up to the confused and disbelieving Glenda – and I slapped them right across the side of her face with a loud whack!
To my credit, I hit her with the tops of the boots, not the soles and the heels. But the impact was enough to knock her back on her angry, jealous, vicious but. As she sprawled there on the practice room floor, I took my boots and tossed them at her. They hit her in the boobs and clattered onto the floor.
She was ready to pick herself up and charge me, but the look in my eyes and the fist that I made with one hand while pointing at her in a warning with the other changed her mind.
“Don’t try it, bitch. I’ve got something to say.” And I looked up and across the room to announce, “Now hear this. Whoever wants the position of head cheerleader can have it. Fight it out amongst yourselves. Scratch each other’s eyes out. I don’t care. As of this moment...I quit!”
Silence fell over the room like the curtain at the end of a play. Even Kira didn’t say anything. I turned around, carrying my Rangers bag and zipping it up, and started out of the room. But on my way, I spun around to address my teammates one last time.
“And for your information,” I called out, “I’m pregnant.”
I didn’t hear a sound in the room behind me as I walked out.
Chapter 26
Barrett
I didn’t know what made me go there, of all places. After the meeting Cole and I had with our first potential investor, I meant to drive home. I almost didn’t seem to be aware of what I was doing until I realized the streets around me weren’t the streets on the way to my house.
Memories of growing up flooded my head as I looked around. The big, stately homes on either side of me weren’t the McMansions of the neighborhood where I’d moved once the bucks from my NFL contract rolled in. They were the old-money mansions that I knew from childhood. I was back in Russwood Acres. I was on my way not to my house, but to my home. My parents’ home.
When I realized what I’d done, every instinct told me to turn around, to turn back, to get out of there and go to the home I’d made for myself, not the home where I lived as a kid. But for some reason, I didn’t. For some reason, I kept going, past all those big, old-money places I remembered to the one I knew best.
My old house. The home where I’d lived with my parents, with Momma and Daddy. I pulled up there in front of the big, black, wrought-iron gate, set into the brick wall surrounding the property. Past that gate, on the other end of a manicured lawn as wide as a football field, was the huge old house where I’d lived ‘til I went to college. That house on that property seemed like another country now. What the hell was I doing there?
This was a mistake. I knew that. Whatever made me come here, it was wrong. This was someplace I didn’t want to be. It was someplace I’d promised myself I’d never come to again. I tore my eyes from what loomed up on the other side of the yard past the gate, looked straight ahead, took the car out of neutral, and had my foot reaching to step on the gas, when I heard something.
“Barrett! BARRETT!”
I froze in the driver’s seat and looked to the house again. A figure ran across the lawn in my direction. The sound of his shouting voice and the bag of golf clubs that he’d left lying in the grass gave me no mistake of who it was.
He charged across the lawn like a linebacker bearing down on me. “BARRETT!”
Daddy. The man I least wanted to see in the world. My father. Why didn’t I step on the gas and peel out of there? Why did I sit there and let him come charging across the field? What was wrong with me?
Next thing I knew, he’d hit the inside gate button and was through the gate and running up to my car, puffing as he went. My father, as a younger man, was a lot like the way I was now. He was a big, strong man. But the passing years had made him grayer and slower than he used to be. I could imagine myself looking like him when I was his age.
He slapped his palms on my passenger side door and called through the window to me. “Barrett! Wait! Don’t go!”
In spite of myself, I hit the button to roll down the passenger side window. Daddy leaned through the window and puffed at me, “Barrett, son, please. Don’t go away. Please, son, stay. Stay and let’s talk.”
There was a sound in his voice that I’d never heard before. Daddy was a man as proud as he was big and strong. The way I remembered him from growing up, shame or modesty didn’t come easily to him. But, there was something different about him now. I could almost swear he was a different person somehow.
For the first time in my life, I heard my father sound tired. I heard him sound sad. In the hot Texas sun, the sound of his voice chilled me a little. “Barrett, please don’t drive off. Son, I... I need to talk to you. After we talk today, if you never want to see me again, you can just go and I’ll understand. But please, Barrett...stay.”
I think it was only the tone of his voice that I never heard from him before, and the humble look that I saw on his face, that turned him into such a stranger now, that made me honor his request. And it wasn’t a demand; it was a request. That was what made me stay.
_______________
Daddy had the servants just about empty the refrigerator and the pantry for us. On the big long table in the Porter family dining room was enough food for a family feast, even thought it was just my father and me. I didn’t feel much like eating, being back in this house where I’d promised myself I’d never enter again. But, Daddy had the servants pour us a big pitcher of sangria, to which I helped myself.
At first, I didn’t talk much. I just listened.
My father began reminiscing. He talked about things I remembered myself, things I only half-recalled, and things I’d frankly forgotten. There were some memories from when I was a kid that might have made me laugh if they’d been brought up by anyone else, but in the presence of my father, I didn’t feel like smiling, let alone laughing. I just let him talk.
And as he went on with his memories of times we’d had in this house, and things that had happened here, and games that I’d played long ago that he’d come to watch and cheer, my head was full of snapshots of old times when I was just a kid in school. At one point, he actually had me remembering afternoons we’d spent out on the lawn, passing the football and running around.
I remembered that it was with my father I’d first shared my dream as a boy of one day playing pro football, maybe even being quarterback for the Rangers. And, I actually recalled that it was my father who first told me that if that was what I really wanted out of life, I should go for it and never let anything stop me.
That was the moment in my life when I actually most felt my father loved me, and the moment when I most felt I loved him. It was so long ago. And, so much had happened since then.
What is it that happens between fathers and sons, when you find out that the man who raised you, the man you looked up to, isn’t really exactly the man that you thought he was, and then you have to decide if you can live with who he really is and not just the picture you had of him in your mind and the feeling you had about him in your heart? What is that?
I came back to the moment when I heard him say, “Your Momma used to think about you getting tackled, and it made her so upset to think about all those other boys piling on you. And, I’d tell her…”
Something snapped inside me and I said to him, coldly, “Can you not talk about Momma? Can you not mention her anymore?”
Daddy gave me a wounded kind of look and said, “I have to talk about your mother, son. She was my wi
fe, your mother. We were a family.”
None of the love that I’d felt for him as a boy was present when I said to him, “Funny how ‘family’ and her being your wife and my mother mean so much to you now.”
“That always meant something to me, son,” he said.
I just stared at him, the thing that had snapped inside me feeling like a hot, crackling wire. It always meant something to him? Really? Seriously?
My mother was a gentle Christian woman. She read her Bible. She believed in what it said. She believed it was a wife’s duty to “cleave unto her husband.” I’ve always known in my heart that my mother, who never brought it up to me, knew what my father did outside of their marriage, in other beds besides their own.
Deep down, I’ve always known that Momma suffered in silence and forgave him. While she was “cleaving unto” my father, my father was “cleaving” every hot young woman in the county whose head could be turned by a rich older man. And, there were a lot of them. There were so many nights Momma slept alone while he was with one of them, and so many evenings he came home late to their bed after being in some other bed, being the rich, powerful man who could get whatever he wanted from whomever he liked.
When I went away to college, it was just the two of them and the servants in this big house. And much of the time, it was just Momma and the servants while Daddy was off getting his sugar elsewhere.
One night, it was the servant’s night off, and it was just Momma all alone. Often she was alone, she would run herself a bath and light some candles and have a long soak in the tub while reading her Bible. That’s what she was doing one particular night, either waiting for him to come home or knowing he wouldn’t, damn him. And that master bathroom was the last room that my mother ever saw in this world.
It was fitting somehow that Daddy was the one to find her, lying in the bath where the water and bubbles had all drained out and there was a trace of her blood near her head and on the edge of the tub where she was lying.
From what the police and the coroner were able to piece together, she had opened up the drain and tried to get up, but she’d slipped, maybe on the soap. She went down into the tub and hit her head, going down into the draining water. It was the crack in her skull and being unconscious under the water that did it.
The police ruled it a death from a household accident, the kind you hear about all the time. And my father, the cheating son of a bitch who’d been with some slut in a hotel suite in town when it happened, had the nerve to be shocked, agonized, and grief-stricken. Damn him. Damn his unfaithful, philandering, cheating, slut-chasing hide.
The news reached me at school. The maid called me to come home; he didn’t even bother calling me himself. The maid told me he was too sick with grief and shock to talk.
Even then, I knew exactly how and why my mother died. Even then, I knew she died because he wasn’t there to help her because he was off doing what he did with everything female in Texas but her. I’d been angry at my father, I’d resented my father, for years, knowing how he was. But when I came home from school, to a house where I’d never see my mother smiling at me and never hear her laugh again, that was when I hated him.
And now, it all came rushing back to me. It was like I was a kid in college again, coming to a home where my mother had died in some damned accident where my cheating father wasn’t there to help her. It was like the walls and the ceiling were closing in on me. I almost couldn’t breathe. I thought the anger would burn my clothes off. I had no business here, in this house, with him.
I slammed my wine glass down on the table and broke it, and it’s a wonder I didn’t cut my hand doing it. My father reared back, shocked at this blast of my anger.
I got up from my seat and glared down at him with all the anger and wrath I’d felt years ago.
“It meant something to you? What did it mean, old man? Did it mean it was good having a home and a wife to come home to while you were out chasing your skirts? Did it mean you were good and satisfied with yourself, knowing there was one person who loved you, whou would always forgive you and take you back, no matter what you did and who you did it with? Momma had all the Christian forgiveness in the world, and she used it all up on you, you cheating, bed-jumping bastard!
“Don’t you ever look me in the face and tell me what anything means to you? All anything ever meant to you was what you thought you could get, and how much, and who you thought you could get it from!”
I had to get out of there, or I was honestly scared I’d break his jaw. I stomped back from the table and was set to stomp out of that house forever, when I heard this man that I hated so much push away from his own chair and stand up, and his voice rang out into the dining room, “Barrett! Stop!”
It was a tone of voice that I hadn’t heard from him since I was little and I was bad, breaking something in the house. It actually made me stop and look at him. What I saw was something I’d never, ever seen before. It was a sight to make me freeze in place.
There were tears in my father’s eyes.
“I’m sorry, son,” he said, his voice trembling in a way I didn’t even know was possible for him. He was forcing himself not to break into sobs, and I think forcing himself not to break down weeping on the dining room table. I was stunned with disbelief.
“I know what I did to your mother. I know what I did every time, all those times, all those nights...with all those women. All of them. I know – I knew – she’d always be here, at home, waiting for me, hurt by what I did, probably ashamed of herself for staying with me. But, she stayed. She never left. She’d listen to my lies and she’d forgive me just the same. Every time, son. She forgave me every time.”
He bowed his head and shook, and now I could hear the sobs. “And, I know in my heart... I know, Barrett, your mother died forgiving me.”
My own face was wet with tears now. I’d never cried in front of him before. I swore to myself that I would never let him see how much he’d hurt me by hurting my mother, that I would only show him the anger. But, I couldn’t stop the tears. And for the first time in my life I asked my father a question.
“Why, Daddy? Why did you do it? Why?”
He looked up at me again and seemed to have aged half a lifetime in a few seconds. The man looking at me in tears now looked so much older than the big, proud man who’d come running across the lawn at me. And he said, “I did it, son...because…” His voice caught for a second.
“Because I’m a man. And because...I loved it. I loved it more than anything. I loved the thrill of being with a woman and feeling how she wanted me. I loved being wanted by someone young and soft and beautiful, and knowing she worshipped my body and would do anything I told her, whatever I asked. I loved knowing she’d let me do whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted. It was the greatest pleasure in the world, and I could never, ever get enough.
“I did it because of how I knew I looked, and being wealthy and connected, I knew I could get it and get away with it.” He sounded tired now, more tired than I’d ever heard him. “I did it, son, because it was sex – and because I loved it so damn much.”
It was the most unreal moment of my life. I didn’t know what world I was in, listening to those words coming from my father, hearing him pour out his heart to me in tears that way. And what made it the most unreal, the most unbelievable, was the fact that I wasn’t only hearing my father speak to me. It wasn’t only my father’s words that I heard.
I was hearing myself.
Chapter 27
Bama
I was done crying. I was done being afraid. And I was done being sad and desperate. Looking at a future of single motherhood when I wasn’t even twenty-five years old, I couldn’t afford any of that. Now was a time when I’d have to go looking inside myself for strength and courage I’d never had.
As it turned out, I could shake everything but the sadness.
I wasn’t sad about giving up the position of head cheerleader and my place as a member of the squad. Jumping
up and down in a costume on a football field seemed like such a trivial thing now.
And, I wasn’t really sad about possibly losing the PowerShot campaign. I was pretty sure that what I’d blurted out in the practice room wasn’t going to stay there, so it wasn’t a matter of if they would cut me, but when. I was at square one, but with a baby on the way. And as much as I told myself it was no time to give in to sadness, my heart was as heavy as my belly would soon start to be.
What actually made me sad was Barrett. What made me sad was that if I’d only been stronger at the very beginning, I might have told him I was pregnant when I first found out. And, he might not hate me now, and we might be in a much better place, able to plan for our child together. But instead, I had choked and stalled – and brought this all on myself.
I sat in the hospital waiting room before an appointment, depressed and worried about what my depression might be doing to the baby even now. And that was why I only dimly noticed at first the couple who came in and sat next to me.
They were a mixed-race couple. She was Mexican-American, he was white. She was further along than I was, at least in her second trimester. This woman, who I took to be in her thirties, was a preview of what I could look forward to. There was one other thing that I most noticed about them. He was holding her hand and they were smiling. They were happy to be together and happy to be expecting a child.
I had never envied anyone else so much in my life as I envied these two at this moment. What would I have given to have Barrett sitting with me then, holding my hand, glad to be with me, sharing the feeling of looking forward to being parents.
A deep pit of aching opened up in my heart. Seeing these two made me really know for the first time that it had become something else with Barrett besides just the sex, fantastic as it was. Somewhere, somehow, when I didn’t even notice, it had turned to love.