She turned to thank him for bringing up the antique telescope, but her smile faded to confusion when she found him staring at her instead of the stars.
She cleared her throat, which had suddenly gone very dry, and said, “Here, you take a look.”
She carefully handed him the spyglass, and this time she made sure their fingers didn’t touch.
He peered carefully through the lens and then gasped softly. “Yeah, I see it! Ain’t that something! This nerd stuff of yours isn’t half bad, Josie.”
“Yeah, it’s something all right.” She kept her eyes firmly on Jupiter, which could also be seen with the naked eye, just not as clearly as with the help of a more powerful lens. “So why are you up here instead of out with your girlfriend?”
“Got grounded,” Beau answered. “Old man’s pissed because he found out I was back in two-a-days this week.”
Two-a-days were the morning and afternoon practices Forest Brook football players were expected to attend almost two full months before school began. “But Mr. Prescott’s been telling everybody you weren’t going to play this year, since your already won the state championship last year.”
“I know that’s what he’s been telling people, but I never agreed to that.”
“You just let him believe it,” Josie said.
Beau lowered the spyglass. “I just let him believe what he wanted to believe and got Mom to sign the permission slip after she came back from tennis at the club.”
Josie cracked a small smile. Mrs. Prescott ostensibly went to the Forest Brook Country Club every week to play tennis with the other trophy wives, but almost always came home without a bead of sweat on her body, slightly unsteady on her feet, and smelling of the expensive bourbon the club used in their mint juleps.
“So now he can’t threaten to yank you out of football because Mrs. Prescott already signed the permission slip.”
“And, more importantly, him yanking me out of football would make us look bad.” He lowered his voice to his father’s grave registers. “We Prescotts must never show dissention in our ranks.”
Josie laughed.
“So now he says I’m grounded until the beginning of the school year unless I either quit football or apologize for going behind his back.”
These options, Josie knew, were actually a trick. Prescott men didn’t apologize, and on the few occasions Beau had done so as a child, he’d gotten leveled with an even worse punishment for daring to break one of the family’s most steadfast rules. So really, Mr. Prescott was telling his son to either quit football or spend the rest of the summer in the house.
She took the spyglass back from him. “I think you can see Saturn tonight, too.” She scanned the sky. “There it is, and you can sort of make out the rings.”
She handed the telescope back to him and pointed to a star shining less brightly than Jupiter. “Take a look for yourself.”
“Oh, yeah, I see it,” he said. But then after a few beats went by, he said, “I know Dad wants me to grow up to be like him and all those other Prescott men, but the truth is, I’m scared to death of becoming like him.” He lowered the spyglass. “I’d rather die than turn into my dad.”
She peeked sideways at him. “If you don’t want to be like him then you should keep on playing football. Don’t let him take it away from you.”
Beau turned to look at her then, his silver eyes gleamed almost as brightly as the stars in the moonlight. “You think it’s that simple?” he asked, his voice laced with skepticism.
“If you wanna do the things you love and not the stuff your daddy says you should, then yeah, it is,” she said. “So I guess the question is, do you love football like that?”
He regarded her with the strangest expression on his face, and then he said, “Yeah, yeah I do.”
She grinned. “Then you don’t have to worry. You won’t turn out like your daddy.”
She would have thought he might have left after that. Gone to watch TV or talk on the phone with Mindy. But he had stayed up there with her on the roof, helping her look up constellation after constellation and then find it with the telescope. And even though it was a Friday night, he’d acted like there was no other place he’d rather be.
In fact, it had been she who’d ended the constellation search shortly after realizing it was midnight and that she had totally blown her curfew.
“Oh crap! I’ve gotta go or my mama’s going to be real mad,” she told him.
For a few seconds he just stared at her, his eyes thoughtful, like he was trying to make a decision. But in the end he said, “Sure, run on. I’m probably going to call Mindy anyway.”
She had to school her face to keep from showing how much the thought of him talking with another girl hurt her feelings. And as she walked back to the house, she reminded herself that despite how big her feelings for Beau were becoming, there was no way on earth he’d ever feel the same way back.
But now here was Loretta, looking at her hard, like she could see through the skin on her chest into her heart of hearts where she nursed her hopeless crush on Beau.
“No, not with Colin,” she answered. “I was with Beau. He brought an old telescope up to the shed roof to help me look up constellations.”
She expected her mother to drop the subject then since she’d never had any problem with Josie and Beau hanging out alone before, but that night it was as if Loretta could smell the teenage pheromones coming off her daughter.
“You like that boy?” she demanded.
“Colin?”
Her mother glared at her. “You know who I’m talking about. The one you done spent all night with. You got feelings for Beau?”
“Beau?!” she said, hoping her extreme questioning tone would throw her mother off the scent. “Why would you even ask that?”
“Because when I was just a little older than you I made the mistake you about to make.”
Then Loretta told her a terrible story: about a naïve little girl, working her first job as a maid for an Italian-American family in Birmingham. There’d been a son living there, too, three years older and home from college for the summer.
“He was just like Beau. Confident—a big deal around those parts. He used to bring me little presents, roping me in until my heart was all in my eyes. I didn’t think nothing about raising up my skirt for him. I thought he was in love with me, too. I wrote him every day after he went back to college up North.” Loretta’s face contorted at that part of the story. “But then my monthlies didn’t come and I went to the doctor, who told me it for sure. I was with child. I used just about my whole weekly paycheck to call him at that college of his. At first he sounded happy to hear from me, but when I told him what was in my belly, he acted like I was a stranger. He must’ve called his parents because his mama came in the maid’s quarters and dragged me out of my bed, called me a whore, and made me pack up my little suitcase. I had to go back home to live with my mama in our family trailer. She was so disappointed in me and nobody in Birmingham would hire me—at first because that boy’s family turned my name to mud by telling anybody who would listen that I’d been stealing from them, and then because I was showing.”