by Ava Miles
She was more than a breath of fresh air. She was a hurricane coming in off the Gulf.
Finally!
He’d been suffering the worst writer’s block of his life. After a recent songwriting retreat with fellow country singers, Rye Crenshaw and Jake Lassiter, he’d come home with nothing but the theme for his new album—roots—and a heap of balled-up paper. He had a contract for a new album and no songs, and he was behind for the first time in his career.
Meeting Caitlyn had shaken things up for him. He felt more like himself than he had in a good long while.
He sat back in the chair, humming, and allowed himself to think of her. When she’d walked in, the sight of her in that blue dress and the tan legs beneath it had nearly rendered him speechless.
More guitar, louder now, filtered into his mind.
The cloth of that sexy blue dress moved with her as if storm winds stirred around her. She was young and beautiful, and she spoke with the full force of her heart. Caitlyn had shaken him out of his writer’s block, and he wasn’t so foolish as to ignore a sign like that. He already knew he could fall in love with this woman if he let himself, although he hadn’t seen it coming until he’d sunk to the ground before her.
This time a harmonica wailed in his mind. When she came out of her shoe and I bent down to help, her arch seemed like a long road I’d traveled, one I’d been on too long alone.
The words were the refrain for a lifetime, and he knew it.
He’d gone steady early in high school, and then stardom had come knocking, and women had started to throw themselves at him willy-nilly. At sixteen, he’d had women press their panties into his hand at a fan meet and greet…and offer him sexual congress more apt to that Christian Grey guy than a guy like him, who really only wanted to go steady and do some serious loving out in the woods. Some were his age, some thirty years older. The more they’d pursued him, the more he’d withdrawn. He’d even asked for his mama’s help in protecting him from the predators, and for a time, he’d been so busy, he hadn’t dated at all. Setups from friends later on hadn’t gone much better. Every woman he met wanted Beau Masters the country star. Not plain ol’ Beau. His mama had started to vet them even, wanting to make sure they weren’t pursuing him for his money or fame. He’d bided his time, knowing the right woman would show up when the stars aligned. Someone he would both admire and want.
It felt like there’d been an outright meteor shower with Caitlyn. And what had he done? He’d stopped himself from asking her out. If he was honest with himself, his mama’s advice had caught him up short. True love doesn’t happen overnight, Beau, his mama would say. Songs are one thing, life is another. Time always reveals a person’s character, and with your success, Beau, best wait and not put yourself in a bad situation. I rushed into marrying your daddy, and look what happened. Besides which, he’d been raised to do things the Southern gentleman’s way. A gentleman took his time—he showed a woman he respected her before he asked for a kiss or even a date.
Although his mama was sometimes a mite bit too pushy, he mostly agreed. In fact, given how powerful his feelings were, he didn’t want to screw anything up. The slow approach was the way to go, but he certainly wasn’t about to let this opportunity slip through his hands. He pulled out his phone and texted her.
Hey Caitlyn! Thanks again for coming today. I’m really glad to have met you. You’re a breath of fresh air and lovely to boot.
He read what he’d sent and cringed. This was the best Beau Masters, award-winning songwriter, could come up with? He sucked at serenading women.
His phone beeped, and he read her reply with sweaty palms.
Hey back! Great to meet you too, Beau. Made my day. I’m so excited about the perfume. Talk soon. Your kindred spirit. Hope that’s not too weird.
He smiled slowly. He needed to look at his schedule and see when he could make that trip to the farm. He wrote: No, I like it. Your KS.
Golly molly, he might as well be in grade school again, scribbling hearts on her notebook. But then she sent him a smiley face, and his heart lit up. Okay, maybe he hadn’t made a fool of himself. Besides, she liked his nice guy side. Not that he’d ever let anyone see a glimpse of darkness in him.
His father had been a bad enough man for both of them. A drunk. A philanderer. A brute. But while Beau took pride in being nothing like his daddy, it was easier to defeat the devil you knew. After choosing the theme for his album, he’d decided it was time to face his own roots. Where had his daddy’s people come from back in the day? He knew next to nothing about Walt Masters and his Masters ancestors. His mama never talked about them, and to hear her tell it, they were all dead.
Which was why he’d sent his daddy’s baby tooth to a private genetic testing company. Dr. Clarridge had called earlier, while Caitlyn was still visiting. Shifting in his chair, his stomach doing flip-flops, he called the doctor back.
“Dr. Clarridge,” her crisp voice answered.
“It’s Beau Masters, returning your call.”
“Oh, hello, Beau,” she said. “Thanks for getting back to me so fast. I’m sure you have a million things going on. Listen, I know you had some trouble locating a sample of DNA from your father.”
“I got lucky with the boxes I found in the attic. Until then, I hadn’t thought my grandmother was a sentimental woman. It surprised me to see she’d kept his baby book.” A lock of soft, brown hair and Walt’s first lost tooth tucked into a small envelope with a tooth fairy on it—the evidence of the sweet boy he’d been had shocked Beau, so different than the man he remembered.
“That’s just it, Beau,” she said. “While the baby tooth contained enough DNA for testing, the sample you gave me isn’t from your father, I’m afraid.”
He wandered into his private office, not believing what he was hearing. “It has to be, Dr. Clarridge,” Beau said.
“It’s not,” she said, her voice gently certain. “We ran the tests twice to be sure. Maybe it’s someone else’s.”
“The whole book is devoted to my father. There were no other children.”
A fist clenched his gut, and he picked up the baby book still on his desk and opened it. The photos from his daddy’s childhood and young adulthood had come from the same box. Beau didn’t see much of himself in the man they showed. The resemblance was so absent, he’d purchased a magnifying glass to better study the old photos and compare them to childhood photos of himself. He looked so much more like his mama. Their eyes were the same stormy blue. Their noses had the same slope, leveling out into full lips. She was all over his face.
The lack of resemblance was even starker because he’d had to reacquaint himself with his daddy’s face after embarking on this search for roots. Growing up, his mother had removed all traces of Walt Masters from their home, saying he was a man best laid to rest forever. She’d raised Beau to be his opposite, hammering into him an ever-growing list of never and always: never swear, always be grateful; never shout, always listen; never drink, always keep a cool head; never lie, always tell the truth. And on it went. No wonder he had a reputation for being the squeakiest clean music star in the country.
“Beau, I’m sorry, but the DNA in your sample doesn’t match. Maybe you should look through his things again.”
“There were no more boxes.”
“Well, if you find something else that would make a good sample, send it along,” Dr. Clarridge said. “With him being gone so long, we don’t have a lot of options, you know. We can give you a comprehensive report about you, of course. Perhaps your mother can fill in some of the information about your father in the absence of a sample.”
He could ask Mama. Except she never spoke of his daddy. Hadn’t since the day of his funeral. After the funeral luncheon, she’d taken down all of his pictures and boxed up his clothes and keepsakes for Goodwill. That’s why Beau had sung at funerals, he’d realized recently. Mama hadn’t wanted a fuss, so there had been no music to accompany Walt’s passing. Somehow Beau had wanted other peo
ple to have a better send-off.
“Thank you, Dr. Clarridge,” he said, his heartbeat a crescendo in his chest. “Write up what you can from mine.”
“I’ll be in touch when I’m finished. Goodbye, Beau.”
He sank into his office chair, studying that single photo in Walt Masters’ baby book, the page he’d thought would unlock the story of his Masters genetics and ancestry. He picked up a photo of his daddy as a young boy from the mess of photos on his desk. If the tooth wasn’t his daddy’s, how had it gotten into the book?
Something was wrong here. His eyes lowered to the mess of photos on the desk, finding a photo of himself at around the same age his daddy had been in the picture. Everything went silent in his mind.
A burn started in his stomach.
Conventional wisdom said babies favored their fathers when they were born out of some evolutionary compulsion, almost as if a man needed to see for his own two eyes that a child was his before all the modern tests came on the scene.
Beau looked nothing like his daddy. Never had. Not in all the years he’d been alive.
Was Walt Masters really his daddy?
But how could it be otherwise? His mama was a churchgoing woman. She wouldn’t have…
He threaded his hands into his hair as agony throbbed there, pressing at his skull. His elbows banged onto the desk, but he ignored the pain.
It can’t be. It can’t be. It can’t be.
He lowered his hands and took in all the photos of him and his daddy scattered over his desk. The truth couldn’t be hidden any longer. The tooth sample said that Walt Masters wasn’t his daddy—and these photos told the same story.
His mother was the only person who could put his questions to rest.
He raced to her house in Belle Meade, just south of his office downtown. His mama loved the neighborhood, from the endless lawns to the tasteful mansions, which she considered an appropriate fit for her newfound money and status, both of which she’d gained from working hard managing his career. Not to his taste, and even less so today as he stepped out of his Ford pickup truck and walked to her front door.
He’d blasted the air conditioner, but his T-shirt was still damp from nerves and sweat. Mind spinning, he rang the bell. She would be home from the hairdresser.
“Beau!” Her blond highlights were woven into long, straight caramel hair. People commented they looked like mama and son all the time. It struck him that no one had ever said so about him and his father. Not even after he’d died. As a child, Beau had thought it a politesse because his daddy had been such a notorious bounder.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, stepping inside the house.
“Bertha just made sweet tea,” his mama said. “How about we have some in the sunroom? Bertha! Bring some of that tea in for my boy here. Now, tell me about your meeting with the Merriam heiress. If you hadn’t pushed, I never would have let you take it alone.”
Leave it to his mother to call someone an heiress. He’d never have used that word to describe Caitlyn Merriam. “It was great. I told her I wanted to do it, assuming they put together a wonderful scent like I expect they will.”
He was growing nauseated as they stood in the foyer. How was he supposed to ask her this? She was his mama, the woman who’d raised him single-handedly after Daddy had died, working two jobs to keep them afloat, and then helped him launch his career.
He owed her everything.
“You should have discussed that with me first, honey,” she told him, pushing him toward the sunroom like she was wont to do even for a little woman. “That’s my job. You didn’t sign a contract yet, did you?”
“No, Mama, I know you’re better at business than me, but I’m not that dumb.”
Bertha appeared with the pitcher of tea and two glasses the moment they sat down. His mama waved her off, but not before Beau gave her a smile and a “thank you.”
“I still don’t like this idea, Beau. People complain all the time about women wearing perfume in church and just about every product line out there is pushing unscented. So many people have allergies, you know. Besides, it’s a French perfume, and your people are more made-in-the-U.S.A. types even though so few products are anymore.”
She was pouring him tea like she had a million times, and he just couldn’t take it anymore.
“Stop.” His voice sounded like it did when he was at the end of a tour, worn out. Done.
She put her hand to his forehead. “What’s wrong with you? Are you coming down with something, honey? You look downright pale. I’ll have Bertha fix you up a juice. Straighten you out right away.”
He took her hands. Looked her straight in the eye. When he did that with someone, he could always tell if they were being truthful. “Mama. I have to ask you something.”
“Well, spit it out, boy. You look like you’re a tick about to pop.”
“Was Walt Masters my daddy?”
He felt her hands jerk in his grip. Saw the shadows enter her eyes, chased by a fear he hadn’t seen in his mama since the day their landlord had upped the rent on them, hoping to steal the hardware store out from under them after Walt died. The fool man had insisted a woman couldn’t run a business alone, but Beau’s mama had proved otherwise.
“What?” She yanked her hands out of his. “Are you crazy? Stop talking like this, Beau. This new album has sent you straight off the deep end. I told you nothing good would come of looking into the past. If I’d known I still had those boxes in the attic, I would have tossed them in the trash.”
He had his answer, and he had to fight the gorge rising in his throat. He watched her hands shake as she drained the tea she’d poured for him. “Mom, there was a baby tooth in Daddy’s baby book. I sent it in for genetic testing. It came back—”
“You did what?” She launched herself at him, shoving him hard in the chest. “Why would you do a fool thing like that? How dare you imply—”
“Because I wanted to know my roots! You never talk about him. All my life it’s felt like he’s this horrible shadow I can’t shake. I don’t know nothing about him except that you raised me to be nothing like him.” His voice broke.
“Of course I never talk about him. Why would I talk about a drunk, a liar, and a cheat? Beau, I tried to protect you from all that. The stories would make you ill. They… Listen, sugar, of course he’s your daddy. The lab must have gotten—”
“Then why don’t I look anything like him?” He clenched his fists at his sides as his volume rose. “Please, Mama. Tell me the truth. For once, tell me about him. I want to understand how the lab could have gotten this so wrong when they do everything so scientific. Please.” I want to believe you.
“I will not talk about him beyond what I said, Beauregard.”
The sound of his full name rocked him back, and she grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “You’re more a man than Walt Masters ever was. I made sure of that, raising you right. That’s all you need to know.”
She was breathing harshly, like Cousin Alice with emphysema. “Mama, if you were unhappy with Daddy and found someone else to—”
Her open palm crashed against his jaw. “How dare you!”
His chest turned to stone. “He’s not my daddy, Mama. Tell me who is.”
Those eyes—so similar to his own—turned hard. He remembered this woman. She was the one he remembered from childhood, the one who’d shouted at her “clumsy” husband who came home from the bar reeking of cigarette smoke and took a six-pack of beer to his green Barcalounger, ratcheting up the TV volume to blasting for his evening game shows.
“You would condemn me?” Brimstone was smoking in her eyes now. “After everything I’ve done for you?”
He felt his chest split open from the pain. “I would never condemn you, Mama. Never.” He would have to make sense of her choices and the woman he’d thought he knew later. “I only want the truth. Who is my real daddy?”
She laughed, harsh as a window shattering from an errant baseball. “No.”
/>
He blinked. “No? Mama, please. You owe me the truth.”
“I owe you nothing. You owe me, boy.”
He stared at her as her harsh tone crashed over him.
“Beau, I told you nothing good would come of this new album.” She stormed to the edge of the room. “Roots! There’s nothing but heartache and pain there. Look around you. Do you see this house and all we’ve built? Your career? You walk down the street, and people admire you for the man you are. This is what happens when you keep looking forward. The past will swallow you up whole. I won’t let you do that, Beau. I’ve worked too hard to get you where you are.”
“Mama, I’ve worked plenty hard myself.”
Her hand sliced through the air. “You will stop this nonsense right this minute and find a more decent topic for your album. And you’ll tell that Merriam woman you won’t be doing her French perfume. Her proposal was a bad influence. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into not being there. I see that now. Beau, I won’t have this roots nonsense continuing. You heed your mama. I’ve always known what’s best, haven’t I?”
His jaw tightened. “I’m not sixteen anymore, Mama. Maybe I need to take a more active role in the business side.”
“But you hate that part, and it’s my forte,” she continued, picking up her phone. She kept talking to him as she placed a call. “I have the perfect product in mind, honey. It’s more in keeping with your nice-guy image. And if you want to do a cologne, a new proposal just came in—”
“Put the phone down, Mama.”
“Yes, hello, this is Mary Ellen Walker, Beau Masters’ mama and manager. Well, aren’t you a sweetheart to say so. Yes, I talked to Beau about your offer, and we’d like to—”
He grabbed the phone out of her hand and clicked off the call.
She faced him down with fisted hands at her sides, eyes blazing.
“How dare you interrupt my call like that! I raised you better.”
