His For Keeps: (50 Loving States, Tennessee)
HIS FOR KEEPS
Theodora Taylor
Ⓒ 2015
Theodora Taylor
ISBN: # 978-1-942167-01-3
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THAT NIGHT
“C
ool. Let’s meet up at my house around eight. Parents will be gone.”
That was the text that started it all. It was from Mike Lancer. My boyfriend. Well, sort of, but not really. We’d been hooking up all summer, and he only ever invited me over when his parents were out. But his parents were out a lot, so we’d settled into a routine: I was the girl he called when his parents weren’t around. And if I wasn’t due to perform with my mother that night, I was the girl who went over to his place.
He’d called me his “secret girlfriend” a few times while we were making out, before he stuck it in me. So I guess that made us… something.
This was his first text message though, because I’d just gotten a new phone the day before. My first cell phone, an early birthday present from my mom, bought because she was feeling optimistic.
She’d finally landed a gig for the following weekend at The Rusty Roof, one of Birmingham, Alabama’s oldest and most legendary country music venues, and she’d just gotten a call from the club’s manager that Lee Street, from Big Hill Records, was coming all the way down from Nashville to see her perform. Really, he was coming to see the band of twenty-year-olds slated to go on right before her—the club manager told her that straight up. But Valerie Goode had always been on the crazy side of confident about her career prospects.
She didn’t care who Lee Straight was really coming to see. He’d be in the room. And for a magical thinker like Valerie, that had been enough to make her buy the daughter she called her “right-hand guitar,” her first cell phone. Of course she did it with money she didn’t have, because she was banking on Lee Straight making her a big star after he saw her perform on stage—and/or in bed if need be. In Valerie’s mind, she was always just a performance and one really good fuck away from becoming the world’s first black female country music star.
As far as she was concerned, the only reason she hadn’t made it to fame and fortune before the age of thirty-five was because she’d gotten pregnant with me in her prime contract-signing years. According to her, my birth ruined everything: her relationship with my father, her ability to get the gigs she needed in order to be seen by the right people. Everything Valerie deserved but had never gotten was because of me.
We got along just fine for the most part, but whenever Valerie drank too much—which was often—she let me know just how far I’d set her back. I and I alone was responsible for where she was now: thirty-five and pinning every last hope she had on one gig at the The Rusty Roof.
In reality, this would end up being the gig that finally convinced Valerie she would never, ever make it in country music. The gig that would finally convince her to toss out her “right-hand guitar” and go to L.A. by herself to try to make it there.
But she didn’t know that the weekend before what happened happened, so she bought me a phone. And the first thing I did after I got my new cell phone was text the only other person I knew my age who also had a cell phone. Mike Lancer, the rich boy I’d met at the state fair. On purpose. I’d cornered him at the cotton candy booth after I’d seen him walking around with Beau Prescott, the quarterback of the Forest Brook Vikings. Beau was the boy I’d been secretly watching from afar for years now. The boy I’d never been able to bring myself to talk to.
So I’d gone after his friend, a beefy blond who was more than happy to hook up with me as long as I was okay with going straight to the servants entrance when I came over, because, “No offense, my parents would freak if they knew I was hanging out with a black girl.”
Which was why I was surprised to receive a text message right back from him, just a few seconds after I sent mine.
“Who’s that?” my mom asked, hearing the ding of my phone. “Somebody about a gig?”
She was on the couch, one shapely leg bent beneath her as she painted her toenails. Valerie might have been thirty-five, but she looked at least ten years younger thanks to an insane eating regimen, a wardrobe made up of Southern party girl staples, and her insistence on wearing toenail polish the color of candy. Today she was painting them neon pink.
Pretending to be her manager, so she looked like she’d already had one, was one of the duties my mother had given me, along with playing guitar for her sets and singing back-up when needed. Thanks to an extra serving of T&A that had come in over the past school year, I looked a lot older than fifteen years, especially when I wore stage make-up. Like Valerie, in reverse.
“No, it’s that boy I met at the fair back in June,” I answered her. “He wants me to come over, and we’re not performing tonight…”
My mom actually looked up, her heavily mascaraed eyes flicking over my outfit. Denim Bermuda cut-offs and an old Dick Tracy movie t-shirt I’d cut to hang off one shoulder.
“That’s what you’re wearing?” she asked me.
“Yeah, I don’t like to look like I’m trying too hard.” Especially with Mike Lancer, who was always more concerned with getting me out of my clothes than noticing what I was wearing.
But my mom, the queen of trying too hard, just sucked on her teeth.
“You been taking your pill? You know I’m not—”
“Taking care of no grandbabies. Yeah, I know,” I finished for her. “I’ve been taking it.”
Another disapproving up and down, and my mom went back to her candy toenails.
“Well, see you later, I guess.”
I knew I ought to be grateful to have a mom who didn’t care what I did or where I went at night, as long as it didn’t interfere with my ability to play guitar for her the next weekend. But I remember it grating on me as I left our apartment to wait for the first of the two buses it would take to get me all the way to Forest Brook, Mike Lancer’s neighborhood. Sometimes, I remembered thinking, it would be nice to have a mom who actually gave a shit. For that matter, it would be nice to have anybody who gave a shit.
An hour later, as I walked through Forest Brook, one of Alabama’s richest suburbs, I recalled my grandparents in Tennessee who I used to stay with during the summers. That was before I learned how to play the guitar and Valerie decided she needed me down here in Alabama more. My grandparents gave a shit, and I felt a tug of guilt knowing how much they would disapprove of what I’d been doing with Mike Lancer all summer.
And as I walked past the Tudor mansion Beau Prescott lived in with his parents, I remember wondering to myself why I was doing this. Taking two buses to hook up with a boy I’d met at the fair, just because he was friends with Beau.
But I kept walking. Keeping my head down, so it would be easy for folks to assume I was either one of the many black live-in servants who worked in Forest Brook or one of their daughters. It wasn’t that hard of a role to pull off. My mom used to be one of those servants. So really, I was just acting like what I would have been if she hadn’t decided to pursue her country music career full time after having me.
Still, I remember feeling a little stupid as I slipped around the side of Mike’s large colonial house and scuttled to the servants entrance in back, like a cockroach who did booty calls.
However, this time when I got to the back stairs, I didn’t find them empty like I usually did. There was a boy there, sitting at the bottom of the steps. Like he was guarding the staircase.
This boy, from what I could tell, looked to be around my age, but he was very long. It took five steps to accommodate his bent legs. I’d sat on these steps before to wait for Mike and knew it only took two or three drops before my feet found a place to rest.
I stopped short, not quite knowing how to handle this. I’d never run into anybody back here before. Hell, sometimes Mike wasn’t even there to greet me, which is why I knew how many steps my legs took up. From waiting, since I wasn’t allowed to knock or do anything else that might draw attention to me.
This boy on the steps was blond, too. But he didn’t look like Mike. While Mike’s hair was combed back in lacquered waves, this boy’s hair fell past his ears in stringy locks that made my hands itch for a bottle of shampoo to throw at him. The rest of him wasn’t too much better. He was sporting what looked like a huge black eye behind a pair of thick, square glasses. And his clothes were worn. Not in a cool way, but like they’d originally been bought at a deep discount store, given away to the Salvation Army, then bought out of the dollar box by him. High-water corduroys and a dingy t-shirt.
The boy was also “skinnier than a pile of sticks” as my grandmother might say, with long knobby arms hanging out of his t-shirt. Even before I spotted the violin case, sitting at his feet, the word “nerd” ran through my mind. Maybe he was Mike’s younger brother. A sibling who’d inherited even more height, but not any of Mike’s wide receiver beefiness.
But somehow I didn’t think so.
This kid had a different energy than Mike. A kind of feral presence I recognized well after nearly a lifetime spent in honkytonk bars. Even with the glasses and the violin and the fact that he was here, he looked like what he probably was: poor white trash. Especially with that black eye.
To me, he looked hungry in ways that had nothing to do with food, and I didn’t know who he was or why he was here but I recognized him for what he was from the minute I laid eyes on him: a coyote in human clothing.
“Hi,” I said tentatively. Just like I would have if I had run into an actual coyote in the woods behind my grandparents’ house.
He gave me a lazy coyote up and down look, before asking, “You one of Mike’s girls?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer his question, seeing as how I wasn’t supposed to be claiming Mike out in public. Also, I didn’t love hearing myself called “one of Mike’s girls.” So I didn’t say anything.
Which was answer enough for him. He leaned back, resting his knobby elbows on the steps behind him.
“Figures. He likes them from the wrong side of tracks—as long as mommy and daddy don’t find out.”
His voice was deeper than I would have expected it to be, coming from such a skinny body, and it rang with authority. Like he didn’t need me to confirm nothing, because he already knew everything he needed to know about me.
This time when he looked me up and down, I could see judgment in his eyes as they tracked over my dusty brown hair, my cut up clothes, and most of all, my light brown skin.
“So which wrong side of the tracks are you from?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Where did you get that black eye?”
The corners of his lips tugged up. “Alright, so you don’t want to tell me where you’re from. What do you think we should talk about while you’re pretending not to be waiting for Mike to get here then?”
“We don’t have to talk,” I pointed out.
“No, we don’t,” he agreed.
That got me a whole minute of silence. But eventually it became so uncomfortable, I had ask, “Is there a reason you’re sitting out here as opposed to going inside?”
He shrugged, his thin shoulders going up and down like two knobs underneath his thin t-shirt. “Putting together some thoughts, I guess.”
“Trying to figure out how you’re going to explain that black eye?” I asked him.
