Fireside by Susan Wiggs Page B

learned how to please her, nearly weeping himself when she cried out in ecstasy. Afterward, replete with a soaring sense of accomplishment they called love, they lay together and built a future out of words. He would play baseball and go to college. She would work at her sewing, which she loved, making bride gowns and fancy dresses. One day they would marry and have a home of their own, with a porch and a little garden patch where they’d listen to the cicadas singing at twilight.
    Bo remembered trying to close that moment into his heart, knowing it was his first time to feel the utter wonder of perfect happiness. As the weeks went by they learned to steal away to secret places, where they would make love, sometimes with frantic, hungry haste and other times with unhurried, delicious passion. He would never know precisely which night the condom had failed. But indeed it had, and Yolanda’s blossoming, fertile body had done what it was made to do. The unseen division of cells that would one day be his son happened without his knowledge.

    His first inkling that something was amiss occurred when Yolanda stopped coming to school. Worried, he breached her cardinal rule and picked up the phone, even though she told him never to call her. In stern tones her father said Bo must not try to speak to her again. Bo persisted, going to her apartment, only to be turned away by her furious father, Hector Martinez. After that, Bo stole a ladder from a construction site to climb to her window late one night. She was startled awake by his tapping and greeted him, fearful and swollen-eyed, with an urgent whisper. The sight of her gave him an immediate hard-on, which made him vaguely ashamed, since she was clearly the opposite of turned on.
    “Go away,” she begged him. “If my father catches us, he’ll hurt you.”
    “What’s going on?” Bo asked in desperation.
    “The end of us, is what.”
    “But why? I love you, Yolanda. I can’t stand being without you.”
    She’d cried, her cheek to his chest. She felt so small and fragile. “I loved you, too,” she whispered, “but we can’t be together. I’m pregnant, Bo, and you can’t be a part of this.”
    Pregnant. The word had twisted him into knots. He felt no joy, only abject fear, confusion and disappointment. “I’ll help you,” he said. “We’ll do this together.”
    That only made her cry harder. “We can’t. Everything’s changed. I’m not the same person now. I’m not that girl anymore, not that girl who liked making out in the school library and sneaking away to the rice wells. This is real life. This is a baby, and neither of us is ready. But I don’t have a choice. You do.”

    “I choose to stay with you and help you through this.”
    “You don’t get ‘through’ a baby. I know you mean well. And I know you’d do your best. But the two of us—we have nothing, Bo. Nothing. And that won’t work.”
    “I’ll leave school, get a job—”
    “What about baseball?” she asked. “What about your dream?”
    “It’s not as important as you.”
    She smiled sadly. “I knew you’d say that. I don’t want to be with you, though. I don’t want to be with someone who sacrificed a dream for me.”
    “It’s not a sacrifice,” he protested. As soon as he spoke the words, he knew he was lying. He hoped she couldn’t tell.
    He never found out. Her parents burst into the room and made him wait in silent misery on the stairs while they called the police.
    “Mr. Martinez, I want to take care of her. Swear to God,” Bo said to her father.
    Just as Yolanda had warned him, her father backhanded him across the face. Blood trickled out the side of his mouth. He didn’t make a sound. His mother’s boyfriends had trained him the hard way that it was no use.
    He was arrested for breaking and entering, and for stealing the ladder. The last he saw of Yolanda was her face in the lighted window, her dark eyes enormous with sadness.
    At the substation, they