Josie listened to this story in rapt horror. When Josie’s grandmother had been alive, she’d told Josie her father had been a Navy guy passing through Alabama and that her mother had gotten in trouble because she couldn’t keep her legs closed. Loretta, however, had never told her anything about her father, and had refused to answer any of the questions Josie had asked about him. But she never would have guessed this was her origin story, or that her father was white.
According to Loretta, her father had been dark and swarthy, and Josie had come out dark enough that she’d had no problem passing off the story Josie had heard about the Navy guy “just passing through.” In Alabama, Loretta explained, it was better to be so loose you’d have a one-night-stand with a black Navy fellow than to be so stupid as to get knocked up by a white man. In any case, Loretta and Josie stayed with Josie’s grandma, picking up housework here and there, until the theft rumors blew over and Kitty Prescott hired her on to take care of Beau.
By that time, Kitty had already gone through eight housekeepers and Beau had only just turned four. But Loretta had been too long without a job to let this one slip away.
“I put away my pride and let Mrs. Prescott talk to me any way she wanted. I put up with her and I tried my best to raise Beau and you right.” Loretta looked at her daughter forlornly, and for the first time Josie realized what all these years of docile servitude had cost her mother in pride and self-esteem. “I don’t want this for you, Josie. Promise me you won’t let some white boy with a bunch of smooth talk take away your future like I did.”
“I won’t. Beau and me are just friends. I promise you, Mama, nothing will ever happen between us.”
It had been an easy promise to make in the heat of the moment. And then Beau had shown his true colors on her very first day of school, embarrassing her in front of his cretin friends and letting her know he didn’t think of her romantically at all.
Or at least that’s what she had thought…
After days of squinting in order to see anything, when he’d brought those glasses out to the shed and said all those nice things to her, she temporarily lost her mind. For a moment, she’d thought Beau Prescott actually liked her as much as he claimed, as much as she secretly liked him.
Afterwards, she even felt bad about rejecting him the many times he’d tried to talk about what had happened over the course of the following weekend. He hadn’t seen how hysterical Loretta had been, how she kept saying she’d lost Josie in-between sobs. Her mother, who she’d never seen shed so much as a tear, actually sobbed over what she had caught her daughter and Beau doing in the shed.
Josie couldn’t have been more embarrassed or remorseful. And she spent the weekend in the somewhat strange position of assuring mother that really, it was just sex and that she and Beau had only been messing around, mostly out of adolescent curiosity. They’d used a condom, she told her mother, and Josie was not in love with him the way her mother had been in love with Josie’s father.
She’d tried to convince herself this wasn’t a lie, but in the end, she felt like she was betraying what had happened between her and Beau when she told her mother it meant nothing. And when Beau cornered her in the hallway right after Loretta had refused to let Josie accompany her to church that Sunday morning, she’d lashed out at him in frustration only to immediately regret it when she saw what looked like real hurt in his eyes.
Despite her conflicted feelings, Josie decided to seek Beau out the next day at school and explain what was going on with Loretta, how she wouldn’t talk to Josie, but at the same time watched her like a hawk all weekend. Fool that she was, she’d thought maybe Beau could help her, or at least figure out how to get her mother to start talking to her again. Even after everything that had happened, she still considered Beau a friend.
But then on Monday, Beau had shown her everything Loretta had said about him had been right on the money. And strangely enough, his awful behavior was what fixed things with her mother.
When Josie came home in an obviously foul mood, Loretta spoke her first calm words to Josie in over three days: “What’s wrong with you?”
And when Josie told her what happened at school, Loretta had sighed and put a comforting arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “I told you about messing with them rich white boys.”
“I know you did.” Josie had to work real hard to keep from crying. Apparently, that was all she’d been to Beau, a pawn, and a means for getting back at Colin.
For the rest of her time at Forest Brook, she’d concentrated on her studies. She’d even shut down Colin when he’d finally gotten bold enough to suggest they try to be more than friends their senior year.
“Colin,” she’d answered with a beleaguered sigh, “friends is as far as it goes with me and you… and any other white boy.”
It had been a little awkward for them after that, but they remained best friends until they left for college: Josie to the UAB in Birmingham and Colin to Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Music in Pittsburgh. But he’d kept in touch over email, even after he’d gotten his first record contract his first year of college, dropped out, and made himself over into a country singer who was known for his songwriting skills and ability to play a mean fiddle.
They’d probably still be in touch if Wayne hadn’t started checking her email behind her back in college and flew off the handle when he found out how often Colin had been emailing her.
She could still remember their first real argument like it was yesterday. Wayne had instantly morphed from a perhaps overly attentive, but otherwise perfectly sweet boyfriend into a green-eyed monster, so mad he’d flipped her dorm desk over and sent all her books and papers flying across the room. She’d actually been afraid to defend her long-time friendship with Colin, he’d been so physically angry. It had almost been a relief when he’d stormed out of her room, even though she was fairly sure his exit signaled the end of her very first relationship.
But then he’d returned the next day with a tearful apology and asked her to marry him. She knew now that what she’d thought was a out-of-character moment on Wayne’s part had actually been the first sign of things to come. But back then she’d been a naïve girl, thrilled to have her first black boyfriend, the son of an Atlanta judge no less. And he’d ask her for her hand in marriage!
Loretta’s approval of the relationship also didn’t help when it came to Wayne. Her mother had been so happy when Josie called her with the news. And though, Josie had thought Loretta would be angry about her dropping out of school to follow Wayne to Atlanta, where he’d be working as a junior attorney at his father’s old law firm after he graduated, her normally stoic mother had been just as blinded as Josie by Wayne’s charm and the fact that he was both black and fully invested in Josie.