'Til I Want No More

by Robin W. Pearson

  Is your life a psalm or a Gregorian chant? Maybe it sways to Kirk Franklin or skips to the lilting rhythm of George Gershwin or Scott Joplin. I think mine pulses to the beat of all these, with Gregory Hines as a dance partner and Karen Carpenter crooning on the rainy days. The “Wedding March,” Canon in D, or simply “Here Comes the Bride” is always humming in the background.

  Yet I know that in the end, I’ll give God the highest praise: a standing ovation.

  . . . but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God. Ephesians 5:18-21

  Maxine checked the clock before she closed her laptop with a click. Less than twelve hours to go before her meeting. “For whom the bell tolls . . . ,” she murmured to herself.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  MAXINE PULLED INTO GRACE CHAPEL’S now-familiar parking lot. Same cracks, same grass, same Scripture promising sanctuary. Greater weights and worries to bear.

  She let her Volvo idle as she waited for her parents to join her, trying to decompress after her weekly meeting with her editor. More, more, more! Jean always wanted more. Maxine was experiencing more—more pain, more regret, more tears, more fear—but writing about it all wouldn’t encourage her readers—or the author. As her stepfather drove through the gate, she wondered how she would encourage her parents after this meeting. Resigned, Maxine waved hello as she turned off the ignition and climbed from her car.

  “So what’s this all about, Maxine?” Vivienne was never one for mincing words. It seemed in her mind, time was like the gold California miners sifted for—a precious commodity she hoarded. She apparently wasn’t up for wasting precious minutes on a reunion in a church parking lot.

  “You’ll see soon enough, Mother.” Maxine looped an arm through Vivienne’s and kissed First John on the cheek. “They’re waiting on us, so let’s head in.”

  Sure enough, Reverend Atwater flung open his office door before they could knock on it. Lilian, her smile as luminous as her scarlet pencil skirt and matching lip gloss, was perched on a corner of his desk. She hopped to her feet when the group stepped into the room.

  “Reverend, I’d like to introduce you to my parents, John and Vivienne Owens. Mother, First John, you already know Lilian Atwater,” Maxine managed through stiff lips. She tried to coat her words with oil, but she couldn’t pretend they were all friends preparing to dig into a meal of fried chicken and potato salad. She was about to serve up her past, memories and feelings she’d sealed away for decades, and invite those present to feast upon them.

  Lilian hugged First John and then Vivienne, even more tightly. When she pulled back, she inclined her head in her husband’s direction. “I’m glad you finally get to meet these two. My life—and my waistline—will never be the same after eating that chicken salad.”

  Vivienne hinted at a smile. “Wait ’til you taste my heavenly cake.”

  “The kids called it Jesus’ favorite cake, but Viv didn’t want to be disrespectful,” First John explained.

  “It gets my vote.” Reverend Atwater patted his stomach and waved toward a small sitting area on the other side of his office. “Let’s sit down, Mr. and Mrs. Owens. Maxine.”

  “Please call us Vivienne and John.” Vivienne led the way to an overstuffed love seat.

  Maxine trailed behind the group but chose a wooden side chair with a needlepoint cushion. She found comfort in its unyielding frame.

  “May I offer you coffee or water? Iced tea? I warn you, it’s heavily sweetened.” Lilian lifted a crystal pitcher from the server by the pastor’s desk.

  Vivienne looked at her husband before giving her full attention to Reverend Atwater. “No thank you. I think we’d just like to know what this is all about.” The fingertips of her left hand tapped out a rhythm on the arm of her chair while the fingers on the other hand clenched and unclenched in her lap.

  First John coughed and clasped his wife’s wrist—whether in agreement or as a restraint, Maxine couldn’t tell.

  Reverend Atwater scooted to the edge of one of the chairs that faced them. “Well, that’s why we’re here. Your daughter called last night and asked if we all could meet, and I didn’t ask any questions.” His smile invited Maxine to stay for a spell. “Let’s pray, and then you can start whenever you’re ready.”

  At amen, Maxine’s eyes flitted from one expressive face to another—dread, frustration, patience—before they landed on Lilian’s. Expectant.

  The pastor’s wife touched the twinkling diamond in her nose.

  Maxine swallowed. “Well, I hope you cleared the afternoon.”

  ________

  It never occurred to Maxine that JD was too old for her or too mature or too driven or too smart or too smooth. He wasn’t too anything, except maybe too perfect for her, if there was such a thing. God knew he was handsome. And though she’d never thought of the words charming or masculine as a sheltered fifteen-year-old, she was aware that there was something about the way he carried himself that shouted, “I know where I’m going, and if you knew better, you’d come, too—not that I want you to.”

  Except for Maxine. Maxie, he wanted.

  ________

  “Manly,” Vivienne interjected from the love seat. “Just too manly. I never liked him.”

  First John patted her hand. “Shh. We know all about how you felt. Let the girl talk.”

  So Maxine did.

  ________

  She would have followed JD to the ends of the world, the man-child who filled a need she’d never voiced or put a finger to. And half-full, or half-empty as she saw herself, that’s exactly what she did—she followed him until her world shattered into a million pieces. Getting married and pregnant at seventeen had a hand in that.

  “Are you ready to tell your mom and dad, Mrs. Lester?” JD took a bite of his sandwich.

  “My stepdad. And no, not yet, Mr. Lester.” She fiddled with the door lock. Up. Down. Up. Down.

  “You’re going to break that. You know how old this truck is? She barely got us to Jordan Lake and back.” He balled up the wrapping for his Big Mac and polished off the rest of his fries. “Why not?”

  “Why not what?” Although she knew “why not,” and he knew she knew it. “Because they’re not ready to hear it.”

  “They’re not ready to hear, or you’re not ready to tell?”

  It was obvious he knew the answer to that, too.

  “So when?” He twisted and dropped his bag into the truck bed beside their blankets and jackets. A brisk December breeze had driven them from the park, forcing them to “reconfigure” their picnic spot within the confines of Blue’s cab. “They’re preparing to move. It’s only getting harder the longer you wait. Won’t they wonder why you aren’t packing up your stuff?”

  Maxine nibbled on a french fry.

  “Maxie?”

  “Do you want these?” She wrinkled her nose and dropped the half-eaten fries. Nothing tasted the same these days. The only thing she wanted to eat was cantaloupe and red meat, any kind. Mother couldn’t make enough pot roast, beef ribs, meat loaf, or hamburgers. She was glad everybody in her life was too busy to notice her thickening waistline, frequent naps, and change in appetite. “They won’t wonder because . . . I’ll actually pack up my stuff.”

  He dropped the fry and stared at her, brown eyes wide enough for her to fall into. “What did you say?”

  “I said, I’ll—”

  “I heard what you said. What do you mean?” He threw the carton of uneaten fries into the back. It spilled onto the normally pristine floor of the truck.

  “I mean . . . I’ve decided to go with them to Alabama. We leave in February.”

  “What?”

  Maxine ducked as if to avoid shrapnel when JD sprang from his seat and flung open the door of Blue. She waited a moment before she pulled the
handle and stepped out.

  “I can’t believe this, Maxie! What are you telling me? What about us? You’re my wife.”

  But she didn’t feel like somebody’s wife. She certainly didn’t feel like somebody’s mama. She felt like a seventeen-year-old girl watching her boyfriend kick the gravel in the parking lot behind McDonald’s because he wasn’t getting what he wanted. They’d chosen this spot because it faced the woods, and at the moment, Maxine was grateful for the privacy. JD’s passion was one of the things she loved about him—until it was vented in her direction.

  His chest heaved. “Maxie?”

  She stared at him for a second. “Jay, you’re heading back to Princeton in a few weeks. You’ll be gone all spring semester.”

  “You knew that when we got married.”

  “Maybe. But I didn’t know I’d get pregnant. At least not while I was in high school.”

  He froze. “You didn’t know . . . pregnant?”

  As he absorbed her words, Maxine wanted to jump back into the truck, but she endured his examination as his eyes slowly traveled from her face to her midsection.

  His bottom jaw dropped open. “But we only—”

  “I see we both skipped Mrs. Bibb’s ninth-grade health class. There just has to be an ‘only.’” She crossed her arms and leaned on Blue’s cooled hood.

  JD stared past her. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “That’s why I can’t go with you to Princeton! We might have been able to support ourselves, but a baby? I’ll go with First John and Mother to Alabama for now. Maybe with their help, I can still finish school.”

  “So they know?”

  JD’s voice was so low, Maxine could barely hear him over an 18-wheeler rumbling into the lot. She watched a robin hop about in the grassy edge of the lot, its red chest puffed out. She picked at a light-blue chip on the nose of the truck. Oh, to be a bird. I could fly away and not answer that question. Lord, do You really care about me as much as You care about this robin?

  “Maxie? What did they say when you told them? I thought we were going to talk to them together.”

  A sharp edge of paint sliced into her fingertip. She swiped at the blood that seeped under her nail. “We planned to tell them we were married, not pregnant.”

  “Maxie? Will you look at me?” JD’s feet crunched on the pebbles as he moved to her side.

  But she couldn’t face him. He always could tell when she was avoiding the truth. Maxine intended to tell her parents. At some point. It was hard enough telling JD. The truth was the same in the end no matter the way you got to it, she reasoned. And the fact of the matter was, she couldn’t go away with JD to Princeton. Not now. Probably not ever.

  He stroked her hair.

  When she wrenched away from him, she fell to one knee. “Don’t touch me! You’re the reason we’re in this mess! ‘Let’s get married,’ you said. ‘We’ll go away and live happily ever after.’ Does this feel like ‘happily ever after’ to you?”

  “Maxie, let’s calm down.”

  “Just stop, JD. We should’ve known better than to think this could ever work out. You have a full scholarship to Princeton. Plans to move to New York after graduation. What will you do with a pregnant, teenage wife who doesn’t even have a high school diploma?” She rose shakily, ignoring the rip in her khakis and the blood trickling down her shin.

  He thrust out his squared jawline. “I would never leave you like this.”

  “But you have to. If you don’t, how will you ever support me, me and a baby—your family? You may not want to go, but you have to.”

  “May not? I won’t!”

  “You will.” Though he’d been the force that had driven them to elope, Maxine now wrenched the wheel from him. “You will, Jay. We made a mistake. But we can’t make another one, a bigger one.”

  “How can raising our baby together be a bigger mistake?”

  “Because I’m barely more than a baby myself. This whole thing has been one big crazy . . . mistake. I . . . I hate you for putting me in this position, talking me into this.”

  JD’s eyes narrowed, but a tear squeezed through and ran down his cheek, dripped past the throbbing pulse in his neck. “No, Maxie.”

  “Don’t call me that. You’ve ruined my life, JD. And now . . . now I don’t know what I’m going to do. The only thing I do know is I’m not going with you. And one more thing. My name is Maxine. Maxine Amelia Clark Owens.”

  ________

  “I can’t stand to hear this.” Vivienne pushed First John away. “If you say married one more time . . . It just burns my buns! Stop it, John. I don’t feel like calmin’ down. Maxine, how could you not have told me you got married . . . to him?” She swatted her husband’s hand and, bracing her fists on the sofa, pushed herself to her feet. She stalked to the window and stared out through the venetian blinds.

  Maxine silently entreated Reverend Atwater.

  He held up a hand in her direction and faced First John. “Please, if I may. I can’t imagine how you feel—well, I guess I can imagine, but I don’t know. But neither can you know how Maxine feels now, nor how she felt then. The one way for us to learn, to walk in her shoes, is to listen and listen closely. That’s what I once told Maxine . . . and Theodore.” He swallowed.

  Lilian clasped his shoulder and squeezed. “William.”

  He looked at her, and she nodded toward Maxine. He took a deep breath and touched his clerical collar that peeked out from his pin-striped suit jacket. He blinked, and he was the same Reverend Atwater who’d greeted them almost an hour ago. “Vivienne. John.”

  Maxine’s mother slowly rotated one hundred eighty degrees toward the group. First John looked up.

  “I told Maxine we’re all part of her story, her family. And as hard as it is for you to rehash this—and even to hear it for the first time—it has to be even harder for Maxine to share this part of her. To risk your rejection, judgment, her own sense of shame and loss. But God doesn’t condemn her for her feelings or her honesty or her past. And neither should you.”

  He paused as Vivienne shuffled to her spot beside her husband. Then he asked Maxine, “Do you feel like going on? I think we’re ready.”

  “I don’t know that I am. Not anymore.”

  Lilian offered Maxine a box of Kleenex. “Your parents love you. They just hurt when you hurt. Because you hurt. It’s okay, Maxie.”

  A tear crept down Maxine’s cheek. “Please don’t call me that,” she whispered. With a dry throat, she resumed.

  ________

  “Okay. I guess this is good-bye.” JD loaded his trunk and closed the hatchback of his mother’s Mercedes. He kept his back toward her.

  His eyes had widened when she’d strolled up. They hadn’t seen each other in nearly two weeks, since their confrontation at McDonald’s. For an hour, Maxine watched him stow his things in his parents’ Mercedes, but she couldn’t let him go without saying something to repair the breach between them. She took a few hesitant steps in his direction. “I’ll miss you so much.” She winced as JD stiffened like she’d stabbed him between his shoulder blades.

  “You said you hated me, Maxine.” He didn’t turn.

  “I could never hate you.” When he faced her, she closed the remaining inches between them and wrapped her arms around his waist. She let out the breath she’d been holding as he pulled her closer. “I love you,” she choked out.

  “Then why are you doing this? What kind of person would I be to leave you? I’d be that self-centered boy your mama already thinks I am.” He spoke into her hair.

  Each time he said her given name, she felt the rope tying them together unravel. She locked her fingers together in the small of his back, under his cable-knit sweater.

  “How can you raise our baby by yourself? I don’t care what you say. I’m going to talk to Mr. Owens.”

  “No!” At his threat, she pushed him away, against his parents’ car. “No, JD. That’s what I came to tell you.” She backed up another step.
/>   “What you came to tell me?”

  “About the b-baby. There isn’t . . . a baby.”

  JD’s eyebrows furrowed, creating a line on the bridge of his nose. He edged toward her. “What are you saying?”

  She inched back. “I lost the baby, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “That? You mean a baby.” He stepped closer until they stood toe-to-toe. Fingers from one hand wrapped around her forearm, keeping her in place, while the fingers on his other moved a flyaway strand of her hair behind her ear. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  Maxine tried to disengage herself. “No, I’m not. But I had to tell you. So you wouldn’t worry.”

  “So I wouldn’t worry?” JD was breaking all his own rules by repeating his words. “And you think I won’t worry now? How are you feeling?” He scanned her from head to toe as if he wanted to see right through her.

  “How do you think I’m feeling?” Seeing the hint of relief in his eyes, Maxine finally broke free with a yank. She started to wrap her arms around herself but thought better of it when the movement tightened her shirt around her midsection. “You’re off the hook. Now you know you don’t have to say anything to First John, ever. Ever, JD!”

  Tears and snot warred for space on her face as they streamed from her eyes and nose. But she didn’t care. Maxine just wanted to get away. She had to. “You have to realize this is it for us. Please . . . please . . . go to Princeton and forget about me. Focus on your studies and your music. Another girl. Whatever you have to do. I just don’t want . . . this—us. I don’t want it anymore. I can’t want it.”

  Behind them a garage door whirred open. Frantic, Maxine rose on her tiptoes, clasped his face between both hands, and kissed him hard—on the lips, his cheeks, his forehead—leaving a moist trail. Then she drank in his eyes as if she’d never see them again and whispered, “Good-bye, James Dee.”