by Stacey Keith
But there hadn’t been athletes. Not really. There’d only been him.
Mason and his friends turned left on Decatur Street and disappeared from view. She turned away, toying with the idea of going into Grams’ study, firing up the ancient desktop and seeing for herself what all the fuss was about with this video. But she couldn’t. Not yet. It was all too recent, and she had a thousand feelings to sort through first.
Right now, she needed something physical to bring herself back down to earth. No thinking about dinner with Mason tonight at her parents’ house. No thinking about Mason, period. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself, this sudden renewal of attention. Look where it had gotten her last time. He could just as easily drop her now. She had to be practical about these things. She had to remember that he was Mason Hannigan of the Dallas Lone Stars and she was an unwed mother who just happened to be from his hometown. This was real life, not a movie.
With something akin to relief, she remembered that the mudroom was a filthy mess after last week’s rain. She grabbed a blue bucket from inside the kitchen cabinet, squirted floor soap on the bottom and then filled it with water. Yes, this was better. As Grams used to say, “There’s no problem that can’t be made better by cleaning.”
At the sound of footsteps outside the mudroom door, Cassidy shut off the water and wiped her hands on a dish towel. She heard her sisters’ voices.
“You know, Mags, if you don’t enter the pie judging this year, Abigail Schuler is going to win,” April was saying. “Then you’ll have to look at that blue ribbon for the next twelve months because she’s going to fly it from her car antenna.”
“Abigail’s pies are inedible,” Maggie grumbled. “They’re nothing but sugar and Play-Doh.”
“Then enter the contest,” April said, letting the door slam shut behind her.
Cassidy sighed. They had the same argument every year. Come rodeo time, you could set your watch by it.
“Those judges wouldn’t know a good pie from a pig’s ear,” Maggie said as she marched into the kitchen. “They’ll slap a blue ribbon on anything with enough sugar to put you in a diabetic coma.”
April detoured to give Cassidy a quick hug before making a beeline for the kitchen cupboards, opening and closing them in quick succession, peering inside. “You have coffee, right?” She was all dressed up in her “social worker uniform,” a skirt and sweater set, plus a pair of low heels.
Cassidy opened her mouth to say hello, then shut it when instinct told her this was no ordinary visit.
Maggie stood in the middle of the kitchen, hands on hips, and leveled a gaze at her. “Was that Mason Hannigan I saw leaving here a few minutes ago?”
“Aren’t y’all supposed to be at work?” Cassidy added a sponge and her bristle brush to the bucket before lifting it out of the sink.
“You realize that Mom called us bright and early this morning.” Maggie trotted after her into the mudroom. She and April stood in the doorway, Maggie’s riot of dark curls contrasting with April’s angelic blondness. They wore the same look of eager curiosity, but April’s face was full of concern while Maggie’s looked a little accusing.
“So Mason’s been in town for what—all of twenty seconds—and he’s got himself an invite to Mom and Dad’s?” Maggie asked.
“Mom said he was super nervous,” April added with a dreamy sigh. “She said he couldn’t stop looking at your picture on the refrigerator.”
Cassidy applied more pressure to a stubborn mud stain on the baseboard. A part of her liked the fact that Mason stared at her picture. Another part of her wanted to run into the bedroom and hide under a sheet.
“So how do you feel about that?” Maggie asked while April retreated to the kitchen. “Do you still like him?”
Cassidy sat back on her heels. “I never stopped liking him.”
Maggie tilted her head like a bright-eyed bird. “So what you’re telling me is after everything that happened, even after Mason dumped you a week before prom, you still have feelings for him.”
Cassidy worked the bristle brush into a corner. Why did Maggie always have to say stuff? Sometimes the truth just needed to lie there like the wounded animal that it was.
“It’s not like I want to,” she explained. “These things just sort of… are.”
“I’m not saying Mason isn’t one hell of a specimen,” Maggie continued. “Of course he is. I mean, who even looks like that, right? If he wasn’t America’s favorite quarterback, he could be a Calvin Klein model. But the guy dumped you. Am I the only one who seems to remember this?”
April reappeared in the doorway, towel drying the empty Mr. Coffee decanter. Her pale blue eyes looked troubled. “Yes, but we don’t know why he dumped her, Mags. Not really. It’s dangerous to assume—”
“Nobody’s assuming anything,” Maggie told her. “And don’t you dare take Mom’s side and start pulling for Mason. But you can’t deny that he broke her heart. I mean, Cassidy, tell the truth. If you hadn’t been so upset after seeing him and Kayla at the prom, would you have wound up in the back of Parker’s car?”
Cassidy scrubbed harder. For a moment, all she could hear was the scritch scritch of the brush and the sound of April filling the decanter. She didn’t want to think about this, hated thinking about this. Cleaning the mudroom was supposed to sweep all these worries right out of her head. Instead, Maggie had her cornered and was forcing her to relive it all. In Technicolor. Sisters were wonderful, but they could also be a terrible pain in the ass. No wonder when she was five she’d asked Mom if she could have puppies instead of sisters.
Yet in the end, not even her family could save her. Not from Parker. Not from herself.
Until he’d started bombarding her with attention, she’d only known Parker Nolen as the other boy all the girls had a crush on. He was captain of the basketball team and drove a flashy red car. But Cassidy wasn’t in love with him like she was with Mason.
She felt the honor done to her, a lowly freshman, by the town’s two star athletes, but that wasn’t why she was crazy about Mason. It was everything he said and the way he said it. His flashes of humor, his love of sports, family, of boy things like cars and motorcycles. She loved the mute sensitivity of his big hands, hands that could locate the seam on a football in the coldest weather, yet could also pet an old, gray-muzzled dog with wistful tenderness.
Still, a week before senior prom, Mason asked Parker’s sister, Kayla, instead of her, and Cassidy felt as though her whole world had come to an end.
“You’re too pretty to sit home crying,” Parker told her. “Let’s go to the prom together, just the two of us.”
In hindsight, she should have refused. Seeing Mason slow-dancing at the prom with a radiantly happy Kayla made Cassidy go running out of the auditorium in tears.
“I’m sorry,” she remembered telling Parker between sobs. “I never should have agreed to go. I don’t know why I did.”
Parker draped his jacket over her and ushered her to his car. At the time, she’d been too distraught to question his gentleness and his patience.
When he pulled off onto a deserted farm road to comfort her, she was inert as a doll in his arms, lonely and devastated and if not in love with Parker, at least grateful to him for his kindness. Her first time was over soon enough. If she wasn’t any happier or more contented, at least she wasn’t crying.
Two months later, on a hot, sticky morning in July, she found herself staring at a pregnancy test stick, the third one she’d used because nothing would convince her there hadn’t been some kind of mistake. She remembered staring through her bedroom window at the sun-washed garden, at the billowing white sheets her mother had hung out to dry. All she could think was that her life was over before it had started.
And that she was still in love with Mason.
“You’re about to strip the paint off that baseboard,” Maggie told h
er with her usual talent for yanking her out of her thoughts. Then her expression softened. “Are you all better now that you’ve scrubbed away your troubles?”
Cassidy sat back to assess her work. “Not really. All it makes me want to do is rake the yard.”
Maggie accepted a cup of coffee from April and then beckoned for Cassidy to follow her to the kitchen table. “You get what I’m saying here, though, right? About watching your step with this guy? Mason Hannigan is a big shot now. He has access… well, to a lot of things. Including women.”
“Yes, but people do change, you know,” April said. “Look at old Mr. Treniman. Ten years ago, everyone thought he would die from drinking. Now he owns a gas station.”
Cassidy gave the sponge a vicious squeeze before dropping it in the bucket. She went to the table where April, smiling sympathetically, poured her a cup of dark roast. The room smelled of soap and detergent and percolating coffee, comforting reminders that Cassidy wasn’t fifteen anymore. She ran a house and raised a daughter and could make her own decisions about the men she dated. Besides, there was plenty to be grateful for, including two sisters who loved her enough to show up late for work. Even if they were sometimes a pain in the ass.
But her head pulled her in one direction; her heart pulled her in another. Somewhere in between she knew she was waiting for Mason to lose interest in her again. If trust were a glass, it felt as though someone had dropped it off a ten-story building, blindfolded her, and asked her to piece it back together.
“Mom said to bring extra salad tonight,” April suddenly said, “because we’re feeding a bunch of hungry menfolk.”
Cassidy nearly spit coffee. “She said ‘menfolk’?”
Maggie sighed, shook her head and added more sugar to her cup. “You don’t want to know what she said.”
* * * *
From a podium inside the auditorium of Cuervo High, Mason gazed over a sea of faces. It seemed as though everyone in town had come out for this event. Nervously, he wiped his hands on one of the paper towels someone had provided and wished he had water. How many press conferences had he done? Yet these people he’d known since birth managed to rattle his cage more than anybody. What the hell?
On his left side, Coach stood beaming. On his right side was the new principal, Mr. Chuck. Mr. Chuck had given him a firm, no-nonsense handshake when they were introduced, and then turned his baleful, all-seeing glare on any possible student infractions. Mason could only imagine the names students made up behind his back: Upchuck, Chuckie, Nunchuks, Chuckles… Mason almost wished he were still around to share in the fun.
He made short work of the speech, touching on how much Coach meant to him and how Coach had lain down the foundation and principles he still lived by today.
“Coach had one playbook for the field and one for life,” Mason said. “It took me a few years before I realized they were the same thing: Don’t play games; play the game. Give it everything you’ve got, every time. Be clear about what you expect from people. Be clear about what you expect from yourself. If you’re ten points behind at the bottom of the fourth quarter, don’t hope for a miracle. Be the miracle. Take responsibility for the outcome, whether it’s good or bad, your fault or someone else’s. Because taking responsibility doesn’t have to crush you. It just gives you the power to change the final score. If you own the problem, then you can own the solution.”
When he finished, there was a moment of what might have been stunned silence, followed by thunderous applause. Mason found himself searching the crowd for one face in particular and was disappointed when he didn’t find it.
Coach Winston slapped him on the back. “Nice speech, son.”
“You deserve the award, sir. Actually, every award.”
Even through the din, Mason could hear Coach’s deep rumbling laugh. “A man runs out of wall space after forty years. Nowhere to hang the damn things.” He winked and then ascended the podium to yet more cheers.
Mason took a seat behind a table onstage that faced the audience. Jasper was out there giving him a slow clap. Brian offered a thumbs up, and Temple pretended to have fallen asleep. If the speech had sucked, not one of them would have bothered giving him a hard time about it. Like they did about Cassidy.
“Did you really think you could ditch us this morning?” Temple had asked in the lobby of the Cattle Rancher motel, where they were staying.
Brian slung an arm around his shoulders and herded him out to the parking lot. “C’mon now, we’re your friends. You need us. Somebody’s gotta keep you from tripping over your tongue.”
Jasper suggested it was something else Mason kept tripping over. Then they all piled in his car and ate breakfast at the only diner they could find, which was about ten miles down the Interstate toward San Antonio.
Well, they got one thing right, Mason thought as he tried to focus on Coach’s speech. He was tripping. That had to stop. If he was going to get anywhere with a smart girl like Cassidy, he needed to grab the ball and run it right down the middle. No more off-sides. No more fumbles.
There were some games you just couldn’t afford to lose.
Chapter Four
Cassidy had the strangest feeling of calm as she and Lexie walked up the brick path to her parents’ house. It didn’t make much sense, given how agitated she’d been watching the video of Mason signing autographs at Artie’s. Every ten seconds or so, he’d raised his head and gazed at her with an interest even she couldn’t mistake for something else. Whenever she skated by with a root beer float or a tray of hamburgers, he flashed her a smile that brought reckless amounts of heat to her face, even sitting in the privacy of her own home. She didn’t care that people had seen the video and were talking about it. Somehow, over the course of the afternoon, everyone else had ceased to matter.
What did matter was that a part of her was waking up. Something bigger than anything she’d ever known besides Lexie. Cassidy didn’t understand what it meant or where it would take her, but she knew it was the kind of feeling a person was lucky to experience even once in a lifetime.
And now, she would be putting herself to the test. Could she accept the risk of having her heart broken again? Or would she do what she’d done before—try to run from the pain?
“Grandma!” Lexie sang out when Priscilla opened the door. “Mom let me help make the salad.” She parked the tinfoil-covered salad bowl in her grandmother’s hands and darted inside. Cassidy’s greeting, though less boisterous, was equally heartfelt. She hugged her mom and for a second, let herself be a daughter again.
Chatting, they walked into the big homey kitchen where her sisters April and Maggie stirred pots on the stove. The air was full of delicious cooking smells: the starchiness of good Texas rice, homemade mac and cheese bubbling in the oven, peanut oil heating in the backyard. Through the window, Cassidy could see her dad lifting a thermometer out of the big aluminum fryer while Lexie talked excitedly from a safe distance. When she was little, Lexie called Grandpa’s fryer “The Spitter.”
“There she is,” Maggie said with a warm smile. She had her dark hair up now with loose cascading curls spilling out of a bun. Her T-shirt said “Sweet Dreams” on it right above a screen-print of a sketch she’d made of her bakery. “We were just talking about you.”
April set her spoon down and gave Cassidy a hug. She smelled delicious, too, a combination of citrus and cake mix. “Maggie is making me bake things. Now that you’re here, she can make you bake things instead.”
“I’m no better at it than you are.” Cassidy reached behind the pantry door for an apron. “There’s a reason Mom asks me to only bring the salad.”
“That’s not true.” Her mom took the apron away from Cassidy and hung it back on its peg.
Cassidy stared at her. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” Priscilla Roby had never been a good fibber. Her lack of eye contact gave her away every
time. “You’re always working. Can’t you just sit a spell?”
Cassidy sat, but now her suspicions were aroused. “April and Maggie work, too. Why are they cooking?”
“April and Maggie don’t have to pull double duty at home.”
“So?”
“In about two minutes, Mom’s going to tell you to put your hair down,” Maggie said. “Set your watch.”
“Of course!” Cassidy threw her hands up and fell back in her chair. “Mason’s coming over.”
“I’m being practical,” her mom said. “You have an excellent figure, Cassidy Dawn. There’s no point in covering it up with an apron.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“And would it kill you to wear your hair down once in a while? A ponytail is fine for work, but you’re not at work now.”
Cassidy groaned. Long experience had shown her that there was no use arguing with Priscilla. Her mom claimed to “know things” that her daughters didn’t. Not until they were older, anyway. These things she knew, that were beyond the scope of a daughter’s comprehension, always revolved around some aspect of April’s shyness, Maggie’s stubbornness or Cassidy’s determination to hide her head in the sand. Although when Cassidy thought about it, her particular fault was a combination of April’s shyness and Maggie’s stubbornness, so automatic bonus points there.
Priscilla had been a hairdresser before she retired. She still kept a shampoo bowl in back for a handful of her most diehard clients. So Cassidy didn’t argue when her mom slid the ponytail holder out and let her heavy blond hair cascade down her back. As a mother herself, she knew firsthand that moms did sometimes have superpowers.
Then Lexie’s voice sounded from out front along with the much deeper voices of Mason and his friends. Cassidy sat up straighter in her chair. As though on cue, April, Maggie and her mom all busied themselves in the kitchen. And that’s when Cassidy knew she’d be asked to get the door.
