“Ah-ha, there it is. I didn’t want to wait until Christmas to give you this, and now seemed as good a time as any. And remember, you already said yes, so this is a formality,” he reminded her as he slipped a ring on her engagement finger. Renee couldn’t utter a sound as she stared at the ring. It was a huge emerald cut stone with three ¼ carat diamonds on either side. The stone itself was remarkable; it caught the light and showed bronze, golden and amazing bluish highlights with every turn of her hand. Andrew spoke into the silence.
“I wanted something as rare and beautiful as you are,” he said softly. “That’s an alexandrite, from Russia. All those colors seemed to match your eyes and it just looked like something you could stand to keep on your hand for the rest of our lives.”
Renee still hadn’t said a word. She finally raised her tear-wet eyes from the amazing ring to her beloved’s sweet handsome face. She locked her arms around his neck and kissed him with every bit of love and passion she had. “Andy, you will never know in a million years how much I love you,” she sighed.
He looked into her eyes for a long time and smiled the smile of a very happy man. “I do know how much you love me. You love me as much as I love you now, as much as I’ll love you forever, as much as I have loved you for a lot of long and lonely years, Renee DeShawn Kemp.” Then he kissed her back, a long, sweet, wet kiss that spoke from his very soul. It had been much, much too long since they had shared the act of love, something that he planned to remedy that very night and as soon as possible. “Let’s go tell everybody and then get rid of them,” he pleaded. “I need to be alone with my future wife and I need it now.”
Renee could not have agreed more. She stood up on shaky legs and Andrew got up with her. They held each other tightly and exchanged one more hot, passionate kiss before making their way back into the living room. Just as they neared the front door, the bell rang several sharp rounds. Renee jumped out of her skin before she could collect herself to open the door. Then she froze. Her mouth opened and closed several times before she could make an intelligent utterance. Finally, she found her voice. “Daddy?”
Chapter Twenty –Three
Renee was curled in the corner of the huge leather sofa in Andrew’s living room with. His home had become her refuge since her parents’ unannounced visit to Detroit. For most of that time she’d walked around with an expression that the witty Valerie referred to as her “Lucy, you in big trouble look”, meaning that she looked just like Lucy Ricardo when she had done something that Ricky had forbidden. Her eyes were almost always wide open and her smile a just a bit forced these days. Andrew had nothing but sympathy for her.
“It’s not that I’m not glad they’re here, Andy, I really am,” Renee said for about the tenth time. “It’s just that everything feels so…so surreal. It feels like a Fellini movie in blackface,” she said in a voice that begged for contradiction.
Unfortunately, Andrew couldn’t offer her the denial she so desperately wanted. From the time she opened the front door to find her normally diffident father and her always-voluble mother on the front porch, her life hadn’t been her own. And it was, as she said, not because she wasn’t glad to see her father, she was thrilled. She had hugged him with the ferocity of someone welcoming a loved one back from the dead, which was in effect where he had been. She couldn’t stop hugging him, or holding his hand all night and her father, bless his heart seemed to know exactly from where all the emotion was pouring. He was too much the devoted husband and father to bear a grudge; as Pearlie Mae had often said during the early years of their marriage, John Kemp had gone back for a second helping of humble because the line was so short. Pearlie had actually been on her best behavior during the party. She was the engaging social maven who could charm the very songs from the larks when she chose, the one who could make everyone feel that they had been graced by a queen when she smiled on them. She barely raised an eyebrow when she heard her daughter being referred to as ‘Uncle’ Renee, although Renee knew that she would have some pithy comment to make later. But while their were guests in her daughter’s home she was gracious, effervescent and delightful to Renee’s everlasting relief.
But as coats began to be donned and sleepy children carried out to cars, Renee could sense her mother’s real character shining through. Sure enough, as the last guest made their way to their vehicle and Andrew was bringing in the Kemps’ luggage, the sea change began. Pearlie Mae place her hands on her hips and the look she gave Andrew made him wish for a moment that she actually had a gun instead of just her rapier tongue and her laser glare.
“Young man, I expected better of you, I really did. Why did you allow this to happen to my daughter and why is that man not in jail or the morgue where he belongs?”
Andrew didn’t let the fact that his future mother-in-law had just impugned his manhood enrage him. He had been pretty much expecting this and was prepared to answer on his behalf when his future father-in-law spoke up.
“Pearl, now enough is enough. From what you told me, Andrew here was as much in the dark as everyone else about this situation. Our daughter, for whatever reasons, chose to keep this to herself, something that I regret.” John Kemp’s handsome face showed that exact emotion along with a range of more subtle feeling. “Since he found out, Andrew has done exactly what he should have done to protect and take care of Renee as best he can and that’s all we can ask of him. The whole reason I’m here is to see with my own eyes that my daughter is all right and from what I can see, she looks fine. So please stop carrying on like some vigilante mother on one of those cable movies and calm down.”
There was a finality in his tone that even Pearlie Mae didn’t question. Amazingly enough, she did just what he said and calmed down. She got in a couple of well placed “hmmphs” to let him know her spirit wasn’t broken, but she finally shut up. To Renee’s shock, the rest of the evening went well, although it was a brief one due to the lateness of the hour. Andrew and her parents sat in the living room and chatted while she made them herbal tea and prepared a guestroom. Pearlie took to Renee’s puppies right away but they seemed to prefer Mr. Kemp, to her mother’s chagrin. There was really no time for Renee to question the whole situation; she went into hostess mode with a vengeance and had the elder Kemps all settled in for the night before she realized that her evening with her fiancé was now torpedoed by subatomic machine gun Pearlie Mae.
The living room was unnaturally silent, as the little dogs had willingly gone to their kennel to sleep off a night of chasing and being chased by small children. Her parents were safely upstairs and she and Andrew were facing the fact that any amorous pursuits were going to have to wait until another time. Renee tried not to let her disappointment show too much as she walked Andrew to the door. Andrew was also trying to take it in stride, but looking down at Renee’s velvety skin; her luscious lips and all her glorious curves made it truly difficult. The fact that they’d reaffirmed their abiding love for each other just a few hours earlier made it even more unbearable. Renee stared at her lovely ring and sighed. “You know, we didn’t even get to make our announcement tonight,” she said ruefully. “But honey, it’s just as well we didn’t. Mama would have pitched a side door fit if we had said something before we told her. God help us if we had said one mumbling word before speaking to her!” Renee shuddered at the thought.
For some reason, Renee’s words cheered Andrew immensely. “Look, baby, everything is going to be fine. We’ll take your parents and Dad and Martha out to a fabulous dinner and spring it on them then. Or I’ll ask your father for your hand or tell him to post the banns or whatever will make them happy. Who cares? The important thing is you and me and our life together. Nothing can stop us now, Renee. We’re almost home free.” He pulled her into his arms and kissed her thoroughly with the air of a man who is deeply in love with nothing but time on his hands. And at that moment, he was. It took a couple of days for reality to sink its teeth into his butt.
That had come the next day when he did
indeed ask Renee’s parents for her hand in marriage, something that sounded romantic and sweet, but instead opened up avenues of unspeakable horrors as far as Renee was concerned. Her parents were thrilled to the extent that Pearlie Mae actually got it into her head to act as a duenna for Renee until the nuptials. The news of the impending marriage coupled with the fallout from the recent news that her daughter had been raped made Pearlie Mae exceptionally protective, like a middle aged lioness with an unexpected and much-loved cub; she wasn’t letting her baby out of her sight until she was safely married. And this was the main reason that Renee was now sitting in Andrew’s living room looking shell-shocked.
“Andy, she’s driving me nuts,” Renee confessed. “I got rid of her this afternoon by sending her and daddy shopping at Somerset. I claimed I had to be at the spa, which was kinda true, but in reality I just needed to be away from them for a while. I don’t even get to play with my babies because they’re too busy following my daddy from room to room. They like him better than they like me, I swear they do. If they don’t go back to Cleveland soon I’m going to be sitting in a corner strumming my lips with my eyes spinning around like pinwheels,” she said glumly.
Andrew brought her the steaming mug of brandy-laced tea he’d prepared and sat next to her. He pulled her legs into his lap and started rubbing her feet, something that ordinarily had her purring with enjoyment, but she was beyond noticing his ministrations. “Well, how about calling your sisters? Surely they could prevail upon her to come home,” he said reasonably.
Renee snorted inelegantly. “Those harpies are ganging up on me. They’re all pissed because I kept the dark secret from them in the first place. They feel like the Kemp girls should have issued out some Cleveland justice back when it happened and I wouldn’t be going through all of this now. The only one with any sense about it is LeeAnn and she’s all the way in New York, too far away to help.” Renee’s brow lowered as she remembered the long and colorful conversations she had with each of her sisters who each berated, consoled and condemned her before the talks ended.
“They were also not too happy that I kept the news about you on the downlow—it’s a Kemp tradition that all the sisters celebrate engagements and I hadn’t let them know that things were this serious between us, so I must be punished at least for a while. Those heifers won’t lift a finger to help me,” she sniffed, clearly put out at the betrayal by her aces in the hole.
Andrew tried not to look amused, but he couldn’t help be delighted that Renee was being so thoroughly distracted by her folks. At least the Bailey business had taken a back seat to the goings-on at hand. Suddenly their attention was drawn to the television, which they had been ignoring while Renee ranted. A special bulletin was forming before their eyes.
“This just in: In a bizarre turn of events, prominent media personality Donovan Bailey was found near death in his Southfield apartment. He has apparently been badly beaten and shot. He was taken to Beaumont Hospital where he is currently undergoing emergency surgery. There are no further details at this point.” The only sound in the room was Renee’s now-empty mug hitting the oak floor.
***
The next hours were some of the most confusing that Renee had ever had the misfortune to recall. What with the telephone ringing and various family members checking in, it was like a huge circus had arrived from the ninth circle of hell with Satan as the ringmaster. All Renee knew for sure was that she had nothing to do with Donovan Bailey’s plight, nor did Andrew. After that, all bets were off. They continued to monitor the televised reporting with a morbid fascination. A competent, dispassionate female reporter was giving yet another update on what was being referred to as the ‘bizarre shooting of the highly respected newsman’.
“The police can only speculate about the events leading up to the tragic shooting of Donovan Bailey. Mr. Bailey, recently returned from Europe, was residing in a furnished apartment in this building while the contract negotiations for his new position were finished,” she said as she gracefully indicated the high-rise building behind her.
“As you will recall, the deal with Cochran Communications of Detroit and The Deveraux Group, based in Atlanta, was abruptly broken off recently when it was announced that Mr. Bailey was to be replaced. Neither organization has had any comment to make about his dismissal, which has led to rampant speculation as to the circumstances behind the parting of the ways.
“It appears that Mr. Bailey was surprised in his apartment by an assailant or assailants unknown and was severely beaten. The extent of the injuries is unknown at this time, but he was shot at close range by a small caliber handgun.”
The woman stopped speaking abruptly and placed a hand at the headset that was feeding her information from the studio. “Mr. Bailey has just been taken to the recovery room after emergency surgery that appears to have been successful. He will be placed in Intensive Care in critical condition, and at this point, that is all we know. Further details will be available, as they are known. I’m Rhonda Sampson with Channel 5 News.”
The newsroom reappeared on the screen as Andrew clicked the remote to silence the endless bulletins and updates. He looked over at Renee, whose fingers were flying in her usual distress pattern. One, two, three, four…one, two, three, four…Andrew frowned and grasped the hand closest to him to reassure her.
“Hey. It’s okay, Renee. I know you’re shocked, and this is…ironic to say the least, but it doesn’t involve us. This has nothing to do with us, honey. Don’t look so scared,” he said soothingly. Renee’s face was blank with distress.
“Andy, it’s just that I wished, hell, I even prayed so many times for something bad to happen to him. And now, something terrible has happened. And I know that I didn’t do it, and you didn’t do it, but who’s to say how it happened? That small caliber handgun they were talking about? That pretty much describes the gun that Mama had stashed in the linen closet,” she fretted. Andrew slid closer to her in the corner of the sofa.
“Renee! Don’t even go there! Your mother could no more shoot a man than she could flap her arms and fly to the moon! You’re being crazy, baby, and it’s understandable, but don’t go off the deep end on me, now.”
Renee buried her head in the crook of his neck and allowed him to stroke away some of her fear. Then she gave a soft, laughing snort. “You don’t know for a fact that my mother can’t fly. You’ve never seen her in action. And believe me when I tell you that you don’t want to see Mrs. Queen on a tear. But let’s go over there and make sure that they’re okay. I’m sure they have heard the news by now and I don’t want Daddy’s pressure going up.”
When the news first broke, Renee’s parents were still out shopping, so going back to the Indian Village house seemed the logical thing to do. She wasn’t going to try and interrogate her mother over the phone so she went home and played with Patti and Chaka while she had them all to herself. The Kemps came back to the house and seemed to be in very high spirits. But even when she could see her parents with her own eyes, Renee wasn’t completely relieved. Pearlie Mae seemed a bit nerved up and giddy, and her father wasn’t much better. The reason for their nervy state was soon out in the open. Pearlie Mae announced that they had heard the news bulletins while in the car.
“I’m a Christian woman and I wish I didn’t feel like this, but I’m glad it happened to the rotten son-of-a…gun. You know, God doesn’t love ugly and what you do in the dark will eventually come to the light,” she said in ringing tones of self-righteousness.
Renee had nothing to add to that statement, nothing whatsoever. She went into the kitchen where her father was making a pot of tea; his usual cure for what ailed one. She wanted to be appalled at her mother’s callousness, but she understood exactly where her mother was coming from. Donovan Bailey was a bastard first class and she knew that better than anyone. But somehow, in the face of all Renee had gone through to get rid of the specter of his presence in her life, it seemed wrong to do a happy dance over his shooting. What would Miss
Manners say about this situation? How does the well-brought-up rape survivor react upon hearing that her rapist has been bludgeoned and shot?
Renee’s conflicted feelings erupted in a strained laugh that was more like a bark; which made Mr. Kemp start patting her on the back and offering her water. Renee shook her head in refusal and studied her father’s concerned face carefully “I’m fine, Daddy, really I am. I’m more concerned with you right now. This has been a lot to take in for you. How are you doing?” she asked solicitously.
John embraced his daughter tightly and assured her that he was fine. “My pressure is right where it should be, if that’s what’s worrying you. And everything else is where it should be, too,” he said obliquely, although Renee got his message.
He meant that he understood the reluctance of his daughters to be close to him over the last years, that he accepted it and bore no ill will. Renee could feel the tears that never seemed to be far away these days making a comeback, and she tried to will them away. Her father sensed her distress and sat her down at the work island for a cup of his fragrant tea.
“Look here, Renee. As much as I want to be with you right now, I think I need to take your mother back to Cleveland until things calm down around here.”
As if to underscore his words, the phone rang for the fourth time since Renee had entered the house. This time, though it was someone she wanted to speak with, Ceylon.
“Oh, Renee. Dear heart, how are you holding up? I saw the news this morning and I know you must be going through hell. On the one hand, no one deserved it more, but on the other hand, it’s a terrible thing to have happened to anyone, even that…creature,” Ceylon sighed. Renee relaxed for the first time that day.
Until the End of Time Page 29