His For Keeps: (50 Loving States, Tennessee)

by Theodora Taylor

  “Tell you the truth, I am, too. You’re not my usual type, but I’m feeling something between us. Something I’ve been thinking about following up on for quite a few of these phone calls now.”

  The thought of him thinking about me like that… I feel my face heat and I’m glad he’s on the other side of the phone, because he’d for sure be asking me why I’m blushing right now.

  “What’s your usual type?” I ask, too curious to keep the question inside.

  “Submissive,” he answers. Casual, like he’s talking about the weather.

  And I laugh, because Colin really is the king of saying the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate moment.

  But he doesn’t laugh, and in the ensuing silence, I realize… he’s serious.

  “I’m… I’m not submissive,” I tell him. “I mean, I haven’t even read Fifty Shades of Grey, that’s how not submissive I am.”

  “Nope, you’re not,” he agrees easily.

  “Then why me?” I ask him. “I mean, you’re a big deal. Don’t you have, like, a truckload of groupies dying to be your sub or whatever it’s called?” I send a silent thank you to Grandma’s talk shows for educating me about the finer points of kinky sex lifestyles.

  “Sure,” he says. “But you got something they don’t.”

  He goes quiet on the other side of the line, forcing me to ask, “What?”

  “A smart mouth,” he answers. “And I want to close it.”

  Outrage. That is the only emotion I should be feeling at this moment. But instead I feel heat. Not just in my face. No, this time, a crude, undeniable hotness floods my entire body and pools between by legs, tugging so hard, it makes my core ache.

  It’s not a familiar sensation. But it is one I’ve had before. A very long time ago, when I was too young to handle it. And for moments on end, I’m stuck between then and now, with feelings I shouldn’t be having raging so intense inside of me, they steal my voice.

  “I’m in town for a few days at the end of the month,” he says into my silence. “Thursday through Monday. I’ll send you the details and the address for where to meet me. Then I won’t bring it up again. If you show up, you show up.”

  I should say no. No, of course I’m not going to use my days off and a couple more besides to meet up with him so he can live out his BDSM fantasy on me. That would be crazy. And what about our friendship? This thing we’d been building for the last two months now. What is he trying to do here? Doesn’t he value what we already had? Because I sure do, and I’m not looking to wreck it with… weird sex.

  But instead of saying that, I ask. “And what if I don’t show up?”

  “If you don’t show up… alright then,” he answers.

  That’s not really an answer. But I get pretty quickly that it’s the only one I’ll be getting from him.

  “I guess I’ll… think about it,” I say carefully, not quite believing the words coming out of my mouth even as a I say them.

  “Alright,” he says. “I got a show tomorrow in Grand Rapids. I can never remember if Michigan’s on Central or Mountain, but count on me calling you sometime around four your time.”

  “Alright,” I stupidly parrot. My body is still on fire, and it feels like I’ve had most of the words I’ve ever learned flushed straight out of me by this sudden fever.

  I hear Ginny’s voice in the distance say something to Colin, and he answers casual as you please. “Yep, sure, I’m finishing up here. I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  “My manager wants to go over the set list,” he tells me. “Talk to you tomorrow, Purple.”

  “Alright,” I say again.

  And then he hangs up.

  “Kyra? Kyra? You out there?”

  It takes me a few moments to realize it’s Beau’s Alabama accent coming at me now. Not Colin’s. Colin would never call me by my real name—I’m not sure he even remembers it from the one time I told him.

  No, it’s Beau. The only man, other than my Paw Paw, I’ve ever truly loved. His voice is now calling to me through the intercom, located on the kitchen wall. And the two chicken breasts I’m making him are close to burning.

  I slide them out of the pan and onto the waiting plate before pressing the intercom’s talk button.

  “Yes, Beau, I’m here,” I say, trying not sound as flustered as I feel. “What can I help you with?”

  15

  I take Beau’s lunch with me when I go to meet him in his basement workout room.

  I’m not sure what the room looked like before, but Josie told me Beau and his old assistant, Mac, had rigged it out. Getting rid of the traditional workout equipment and barbell racks that were there beforehand, and replacing them with machines Beau could safely use on his own.

  Beau is very independent and usually comes to the kitchen to eat his lunch as opposed to making me bring it to him. But I see why he’s called me down here almost immediately.

  Or rather I hear it. “Alabama Girls Bring the Party,” Colin’s hit song about… well, how Alabama girls bring the party, is blasting on the room’s sound system. And Beau’s standing underneath his chin-up bar with his hands covering his ears.

  “Hey, Beau,” I yell over the music.

  “I need you to turn this crap off!” he yells backs, holding out his phone to me. “I’d do it myself, but it’s a Pandora station, and I need you to do that thing where you tell it to never, ever play this fucking song again.”

  I set the plate down on the room’s only table and do what he says. But I feel all sorts of weird as I push the thumbs down icon and Beau’s phone skips to an upbeat Luke Bryan number. What would Beau say if he knew I talked to the guy he considered his worst enemy every day, because his wife asked me to? A chill runs down my back just thinking about it.

  “This is a good song for working out,” I tell him, and I try to hand the phone back to him, but he says, “You can just go ahead and turn it off. I was about to break for lunch anyway, and it smells like you brought it with you.”

  “Yep, sure have, and I already put it on the table. Do you need me to—”

  “Nope,” Beau answers, taking back his phone before I can even halfway finish offering to guide him over to the table. “Got the room memorized. I know where the table is. Mac made sure I did when he put it there.”

  “Alright then,” I say. Then I blush, because I’ve somehow suddenly come to associate those three words with Colin.

  “Have a nice lunch,” I say to Beau, before I turn to make a hasty escape.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I answer.

  “You sound kind of weird. Like something’s on your mind.”

  “I’m fine,” I say again. Lie again. “Just let me know when you need me to come get your plate.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I can get it to the kitchen myself,” Beau answers with a smile so dazzling, I can easily see why Josie took him back with marriage on top at the beginning of the summer.

  I start to leave again. But then he asks me, “Did you maybe date somebody on the Forest Brook football team? I remember DeAndre Fields had a girl from Beaumont, and that’s where you’re from, right?”

  I shake my head, which is stupid because it’s not like he can see me do it. Then I say out loud, “I’m from Beaumont, but I’ve never heard of DeAndre Fields.”

  Which is not the same as saying I’d never dated anybody on his team, but luckily Beau accepts that as my final answer. He seems disappointed though.

  “Damn, I was hoping that would solve the mystery. I know I’ve heard your voice before. I just can’t remember where.”

  “Tell me when you figure it out,” I answer again, this time putting way more effort into keeping my voice light than in schooling my face to look innocent. Wow, I must really be getting used to being a home aide for a blind person. I’m even lying differently nowadays.

  “I’ll do that,” he says to my back as I rush out of the room.

  I hope he’s wrong. I hope h
e never figures it out. Because if he does, then it will all be over, this job, the small relationship I’ve managed to build with him, my friendship with Josie. And that is something I can’t abide even thinking about—

  My frantic thoughts are interrupted by the sound of my phone beeping with a text message. I stop in the hallway to take a look.

  It’s one line from Colin. A house number, the name of a road, and a zip code. And somehow this text scares me even more than Beau figuring out who I really am.

  16

  True to his word, Colin doesn’t bring it up again. He calls me every day, just like before, and we talk about stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with his invitation to meet up with him when he returns to Nashville. Things like all the places he’s been traveling on his world tour, current events, what we’ve been watching on Fyos, the movies we want to see, the sitcoms that make us laugh. Our mothers.

  Colin tells me his dad left him and his mom when he was eight, “for his real old lady, Booze.” He tells me about how his mother worked her fingers to the bone at various minimum wage jobs to provide for him. And when it turned out Colin was a violin prodigy, she took a live-in servant job with a family of rich assholes so she could use the money she saved on rent to get him the training he needed.

  “A family of rich assholes.” That’s what Colin calls them. And of course I know he’s talking about the Lancers when he describes them as a pack of snobby, well-groomed demons who never worked a day in their lives, thanks to the dad being the only son of an oil baron. However, according to Colin, the older Lancer’s lack of employment didn’t stop him from thinking he truly deserved everything that had been handed down to him, and he’d taught his only son to expect the same. Colin tells me Mike was only a few years older than him, so he had to spend nearly his entire childhood under that prick’s entitled thumb, taking his shit so his mother wouldn’t lose her job.

  When I make the comment that living with a guy like that must have been hard for him, he tells me it was harder for his mother. That’s why he bought her a big house across the street from that family with his first big royalty check.

  I think I know the house he’s talking about, and I go to my attic window to peep out at the sprawling white colonial down the street. It looks just like the Lancer Colonial, except it’s both taller and wider, like its whole point in life is to overshadow the house sitting across from it. I can see why Colin bought it for his mom, but I feel a little sad thinking about her rattling around that big old house by herself.

  Colin says he thinks she enjoyed living like the people she used to serve. But he could only guess because Rose Gaither wasn’t the type to lord it over others, even though she had every right to do just that.

  “She lived in that house for most of the rest of her life. But after she got sick, I bought her another house in Nashville so I could visit her more often when I was in town. That was a mistake. I should have come off tour. Stayed there with her. If I’d known…”

  “Hey, you had no way of knowing,” I say, gripping the phone when I hear the sadness in his voice. “Your mom might have gone on a few more years whether you were there or not if she hadn’t filed that DNR, and I’m assuming she didn’t tell you about that.”

  “No, she didn’t. Probably cuz she knew I would’ve gone through the roof if I found out. Make her take it back.” Colin’s voice gets a little quieter now. “But she’s always been stubborn. Always wanted to do things her way. I guess I got that from her.”

  “There are worse ways for a mom to be,” I tell him, thinking about Valerie. “Believe me.”

  “Sounds like you got a story to tell about your mother, too.”

  My first instinct is to change the subject, to make this another one of those things I’m not telling him about. Like Mike. And Beau. Or how I’m looking right at his mama’s old house as we speak. But he finally opened up a little to me about his mom, and it feels like I should pay that back.

  “What mother?” I joke, trying not to sound as bitter as I am about the situation—and failing. “There’s only Valerie Goode, and she never admits to having a daughter.”

  “Where have I heard that name before?”

  “Did you see that documentary, Standing Back, about back-up singers that won the Oscar a few years ago?”

  “Goody? Goody’s your mom!?”

  I can tell from his tone that he’s finding it hard to believe the flamboyant back-up singer, who recounted her struggle to find recognition with such humor and flair, is actually my mother. It probably doesn’t help that as much time as the filmmakers gave to her story, she doesn’t mention having a daughter. Not even once. Just “real disapproving parents from West Tennessee.”

  “Technically yes,” I answer Colin. “But we don’t have a lot in common.”

  “So that story she told about trying to make it as a country music singer before she moved to Los Angeles…”

  “Yeah, that’s true. She just forgot to mention I was her backup singer and guitar player.”

  I think about how she only provided the filmmakers pictures of her solo in her cowgirl outfit. It had been enough to make me wonder if I had actually been in Alabama with her. Made me touch my scar, the only real proof I have of the time we performed together, just to make sure it was still there.

  I’ve never told anyone else that story. Your mom not mentioning you in the documentary someone did about her and other backup singers lives isn’t something you go around bragging about. And my family, the only other people I’d tell it to, already know. They also know my mother isn’t a subject I like to talk about.

  But Colin, with his twisted sense of humor, has the perfect response. “That’s going to be a hell of a song when you finally write it,” he says, like I’ve won the songwriter’s jackpot.

  Over the next few weeks I have a real hard time keeping all my secrets to myself. Colin’s got a way of making me want to tell him everything, even though I know it will be the end of whatever this weird thing is that’s building between us if I do.

  The grandma-confusing gifts that keep arriving in the mail don’t help either. A package of hokey guitar picks with koalas, kangaroos, dingoes, and other Australian animals printed across their fronts. A state-of-the-art recording microphone he said he “just found” in one of Tokyo’s electronic districts. And an original pressed vinyl single of “(Love’s) Ring of Fire.” The one recorded by June Carter Cash’s sister, Anita, that he’d found while rummaging through an old record shop in London.

  “Thank you,” I tell him when he calls me from Scotland, “I don’t have a record player, but I’m going to figure out how to listen to it.”

  Two days later, my grandma calls to tell me an Amazon package with a portable Crosley record player just arrived. She’s not even trying not to open my mail these days, and I’m afraid Colin’s re-created a monster.

  “When are you bringing this boy around to see me?” she asks for the umpteenth time. “He’s obviously trying to court you with these strange gifts he be sending.”

  “He’s not…” I stop myself there, because I can’t really explain what Colin is doing to myself, much less my grandma.

  “Thank you for the record player,” I say the next time Colin calls. “But you’ve got to stop sending me things. My grandma keeps saying I need to bring you around to meet her because she thinks you’re courting me or something. Not to mention, I’m going to have to retrain her not to open my mail after all this is done.”

  “Is this the same grandma you claim makes better chicken than Josie?” he asks.

  The very next day a stack of Gospel records from an Edinburgh record shop arrives in the mail addressed to “Purple’s Grandma.” And every single one of them has a version of “Go Tell It On the Mountain.”

  “I like this boy,” my grandmother tells me when she calls with one of the records playing in the background on the new Crosley. “If you don’t bring him for Sunday Dinner soon, you go’on to hear about it from me.”
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  Colin gets me in trouble with my grandma. He pisses me off. He makes me laugh. Sometimes I wish I’d never agreed to do this friendship thing with him for Josie. I look forward to his calls every day.

  Meanwhile, the last week in September gets closer and closer and Colin continues not to bring it up. Not even on the Monday before the Tuesday he’s set to fly back from the European leg of his tour. He calls to tell me he’ll be leaving Norway before I wake up and won’t be landing in Nashville until after midnight on Tuesday. Then he has a bunch of interviews on Wednesday, so he might not be able to call me until Thursday.

  He tells me this and I say, “Okay, talk to you Thursday, then,” doing my best impression of a person who is not going crazy at the thought of us skipping just one phone call after a 100-plus day streak.

  “Hope so,” he says. Like whether we talk or not is up to me, not him, even though he’s the one who’s supposed to be calling next. “Bye,” he says.

  “Bye,” I answer softly, hoping he doesn’t hear what feels like something cracking apart inside of me.

  He doesn’t call on Wednesday, and I resolve not to think about it. I tell myself I’m looking forward to a lazy weekend. Beau and Josie are flying with Josie’s best friend, Sam McKinley, to set up a second Ruth’s House location in Indiana. And I don’t have to drive up to Tennessee this weekend, because my cousin, Darnell, is driving my grandma and Auntie Beulah Mae up to St. Louis to visit family and maybe gamble some at the casinos.

  For once, I don’t have anything planned over the weekend, which means I can spend it however I want, doing whatever I want. Maybe I’ll call Bernice and we can have the long conversation we’ve been promising to have with each other, ever since I moved down to Alabama.

  In any case, I should just go on ahead and erase that text Colin sent me with the address. Because that was a weird conversation. With his crazy sense of humor, who knows if he was even serious? And even if he was, I’m definitely not going up there.

  But I don’t erase the text.

  Eventually Thursday comes. I drive Beau and Josie to the airport. Hug them good-bye, because at some point in the last few months we’ve become the kind of employee/employers who hug each other good-bye. Then I go home, and instead of erasing that text, I start working on a few songs that have been rattling around inside my head.