Fireside by Susan Wiggs Page A

the case of Yolanda Martinez, she’d walked away with more than a piece of his heart.
     
    It was only months later, after Yolanda had forced a goodbye on him, that Bo learned he’d become a father. There was no way to pinpoint the exact moment of conception because the fact was, once he and Yolanda got started, they did it all the time. They were just kids, seventeen and revved up by hormones, and they were in the first flush of tenderness and excitement.
    They had met in English class, when they’d both been struggling through the leaden phrases of Last of the Mohicans, which felt like a punishment, yet gave them a feeling of kinship in their shared suffering. They took to staying late in the library to study, quizzing each other on vocabulary words no living human would ever have occasion to utter: Vaunted. Cunning. Chaste.
    The study sessions were only an excuse to sit close, to eye each other over the pages of the musty tomes, to trade smiles first, then touches that escalated from accidental to deliberate, and finally whispers that bloomed into kisses. She roused in him a sense of protectiveness that made him feel as though he could take on the world. Although she was an only child of strict parents, he persuaded her one hot September day to drive out to a rice well he knew of, where cool water cascaded through a thick pipe, emptying into a vast natural holding tank the size of a baseball diamond. For people who had no money, there was no better swimming pool to offer blissful relief from the heat.
    Holding hands, they leaped into the crystalline depths, laughing and paddling, kissing while the water eddied around them in a swirl of sensuality. Later, they lay together on a bed of towels in the back of his rusted-out El Camino.
    Bo wondered if Yolanda knew he’d never been laid. While all his friends were getting it on, Bo had foolishly clung to some chivalrous ideal about girls. He didn’t want to be that close, that intimate with a girl unless he loved her. There were tons of reasons this made no sense, not the least of which was that he wasn’t real sure what love was. How could he, growing up the way he had? His mother drifted from fellow to fellow the way a bee gathered nectar from flower to flower, sucking one dry and then moving on to the next without a backward glance.
    Bo had grown up watching this changing array of guys parading through their lives. Sometimes she admitted she liked a guy because he let her drive his nice Volvo whenever she wanted, or because he worked at a music store and gave her free CDs. When Bo was old enough to question his mother, she explained herself with a self-deprecating laugh. “Baby boy, I got to use my looks while I still have them.”
    As a little boy, he’d wondered where a person’s looks went. Did they get left in a heap in the bottom of a closet, discarded like last year’s Halloween costume? And why would guys quit liking her, unless the only thing they liked was her looks?
    Whenever Bo tried to pinpoint what love was, he thought of his coach, Landry Holmes, and Emmaline, his wife. Emmaline was, to put it in the kindest of terms, a plain woman. Yet Landry had a way of looking at her that made her beautiful, simple as that. He’d get this peculiar expression on his face, and when she looked back at him, she was lit from within, and beautiful didn’t even begin to describe how she looked in those moments. Bo’s mother worried about losing her looks but Emmaline would always have hers.
    That was the kind of feeling Bo was meant to find; he was convinced of this. He hadn’t had much luck…until now. His hand shook as he peeled off her swimsuit. He’d been overwhelmed by her beauty, her flickering shy passion. They were each other’s first time, with all the attendant awkward tenderness. He was clumsy with the condom, and there was blood and discomfort, but she clung to him and said she wept because she loved him. Over time, their passion and boldness grew and he