“Zeely’s fine.”
“She hasn’t gained any weight, has she? I have some skirts for her. I would have bought you some too, but they didn’t have your size.”
Not that she’d checked. My mother wouldn’t be seen on that end of the rack. “No problem. As for Zeely, not a pound. In fact, I think she’s lost some.”
The voice on the phone changed pitch. “If you were that size, you’d be married. I just don’t understand you.”
Halt. Do not enter.
Like a fool, I raced past the mental warnings to respond. “Zeely’s still single too, Mom. And I’m not looking for a husband.” I ran a hand down my hip. Contrary to my mother’s opinion, I looked pretty good these days. If Brian’s reactions meant anything, real good.
“Zeely would be married if she weren’t so picky. Before the African died—”
“Mom.” In all the years I was married to Peter, my mother had rarely spoken his name. It was always “the African.”
“Anyway. I introduced her to a nice fellow. His wife left him with a new house and she didn’t ask for a dime. No children. A perfect opportunity.”
I smiled, remembering Zeely’s frantic phone call detailing the incident.
My mother’s account continued. “She spent the whole evening interviewing the man. Was he a Christian? What church did he go to. On and on.”
I giggled. That’s my Zee.
“That boy’s daddy has been a deacon for thirty-five years, and his mama is the superintendent of Sunday school. Zeely acted like he was a heathen.”
I checked the timer on the stove. Almost done. The last three minutes were the most dangerous. Especially on my end. “No offense, Mom, but what do his parents have to do with anything? He’s a grown man now. You act like faith can be passed down or something.”
A blowing sound came through the phone. “See, I can’t talk to you. You are so negative and judgmental. Ina Mae was right.”
Here we go. No conversation was done without Aunt Ina being thrown in my face. “Mom, I didn’t mean to hurt Aunt Ina’s feelings. The Lord put it on my heart—”
“Don’t go bringing the Lord into it, Miss High and Mighty. Writing my sister letters on her deathbed about how to become a Christian. As much as she did for you? The nerve.”
I thought the same thing the whole time I was writing it.
The timer sounded.
“Mom, that’s why I wrote it. Aunt Ina did so much that I wanted to share with her the best gift in the world.”
“You are so sickening. We were singing in the choir before you were even thought about.”
And long after I was forgotten. “I love you, Mom. I’ve got to go.” “Don’t you hang up this phone. You think you’re so holy. At least I was a grown woman before I had a b—”
I closed my eyes and rested the phone in its cradle. “Lord, forgive me, but I just can’t take it. Not today.”
45
Ron
“So where’ve you been?”
I stared across the restaurant booth at Zeely, not sure how to really answer her. I’d been nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I’d tried to call her before leaving, but in the end, I just had to go. “I took the Greyhound to Florida. I had some coupons for a free hotel stay. Once I was there, I decided to stay for a few days.”
She picked up a rib bone and nibbled one side. “You should have turned your phone on at least. And Greyhound? That’s insane.”
“It was nice actually. I read quite a bit. Stared out the window and thought about some things. I forgot how nice it is to think.”
Zeely spooned baked beans onto my plate from the Styrofoam cup on the table between us.
“I hope you didn’t think too hard. You were messed up enough before.” She smiled, a spot of barbecue sauce at the corner of her mouth. “Speaking of messed up, what did your lady friend think of your disappearance?”
“Good question.” After our last encounter, she was probably relieved. I still had her father to deal with, but at this point, I didn’t care about that either.
Zeely poked a hole in her napkin as she wiped her hands. “I’ll leave that alone.” A serious look replaced her smile. “I’m glad you emailed to say you were okay, but I was worried.”
That was nice to know. “Look, I’m sorry. I bungled the whole thing. I invited you here to make it up to you.”
“The Rib Hut is supposed to make it up to me? You’ve got to cook to make up with me, mister.”
I’d known that she’d have wanted that, for me to cook for her. I’d planned a menu, even bought the ingredients. And then I’d looked at that empty space in my dining room where Mindy’s curio was supposed to go, that bare stretch of carpet that would have been behind Zeely’s chair. I thought about it so long that I settled on the Rib Hut and went for a walk. I was going to have to get over that. She’d have to come over sometime. “No problem. I’ll cook for you. You can even pick the menu.”
“Deal.” She pushed back from the table, tugging a sweater dress away from her curves. She put her tray into the trash. “So what are we going to play tonight?”
I tossed my stack of bones too and hugged Zeely as I passed her, expecting her to wiggle away as always.
She didn’t. “For real, what are we playing?” Her voice softened. She relaxed in my arms.
“Monopoly.” I smiled down at her, hoping she’d pull away before I did something even more stupid.
Zeely tapped my chest. “Monopoly? That’s a switch.”
The first of many.
Her perfume crept up my neck. I loosened my grip—for both our sakes. “Do you mind playing something else?”
She shook her head. “I like Monopoly. I just wondered why you chose it.”
“Tonight, I need to own something.” I pulled my house keys from my pocket and grabbed her hand. “Come on, my place for dessert.”
46
Grace
The secret is out. Mom saw me naked. She kept me home from school today and took me to a clinic for them to kill it. There were three girls with their fathers and some women with wedding rings. I don’t know why a married woman would want to kill her baby. I wanted to ask somebody, but it’s probably another one of those things that women are just supposed to know.
Diana Dixon
“Miss O, you looking good today. Not that you don’t every day—” Sean stood in the hall, trying to salvage his compliment.
“That’s okay. I know what you mean.” I took a second look at him. A low afro had replaced his usual fuzzy cornrows. No earring. Was he standing up straight?
“You don’t look too bad yourself.”
“So I’ve been told.” He walked away like a prince.
A brown tree of a girl, all eyes and hair, turned the corner. Jerry’s daughter. Sean nodded and walked to meet her. I shook my head before starting my own journey. Relief washed over me at the sight of Brian’s empty chair. We had an assembly today, so he and I had two free planning periods this morning. Maybe he’d stay away as long as he could.
I hoped that he would and prayed that he wouldn’t.
For the last few weeks, I’d been on the losing side of a war between my heart and my spirit, and Brian was the spoils being fought over. I didn’t need to see him now, no matter how much I wanted to. And yet, he’d appear before long.
This weekend in Thelma’s at-home beauty shop, with a straightening comb sizzling through my hair, I’d sat and listened to the old ladies unashamedly telling their tales as their hair smoked and sizzled into precision. When they got to me, I said a little about Mal and they laughed, waiting for more. I couldn’t get the words to go past my lips, but I watched with wonder as they aired fifty-year-old laundry and cut through family dramas as though they were chicken bones.
“You remember when my Joe used to slip around with heifer Sally on Kentucky Street?”
“Yes, Lord. That Negro had his nose wide open, didn’t he? Well, we prayed him right up, didn’t we? Got snowed in over t
here. Frostbit and all. He don’t even walk on that side of the road no mo’!”
The ladies under the dryers strained to hear, pressing their plastic rollers against the hoods until there were bobby pin imprints on their foreheads. I tried not to listen, but it was impossible.
“And oh, remember when Toot went out there to meet the white side of her family?” someone said from under the dryer.
Miss Thelma paused to look up without disturbing the bobby pin between her teeth. “She went and found her white folks. Walked right up to ’em. Ain’t her people the ones that own part of that bank downtown in the Tower? They was one of the first ones to pass. You know they wasn’t gone claim that chile.”
“I know that’s right,” someone else said. “The mayor is my cousin. His daddy still comes to my grandmother’s house on New Year’s to get some chitlins.”
Thelma commenced her pinning. “Girl, that’s how they do. I know plenty of folk passed over. I see one of ’em every time I go over to Columbus to do my insurance. You should see the man looking at me all crazy like I’m going to out him. I walk by like I don’t even know him, but when the white folks turn away, I pass him some pound cake and hug him close. It was his mama that made them do it. You should have seen her husband and ’nem when all those black folk showed up at that woman’s funeral. They probably still confused . . .”
And on and on it had gone like that: secret babies, secret husbands, secret lives. I’d always thought Testimony was slow and boring, but now I saw that below this slow, easy river of a town ran a sweeping current of secrets. And I was the main one being swept along.
“And who are you, baby?” the loudest, largest woman asked.
Thelma eyed me while I considered my answer, but she didn’t say a word. There were many things I could say, but the most obvious was the last thing that I wanted to say: Trey Dixon’s daughter, that girl who . . .
“Me? I’m Grace. A new teacher at Imani Academy.”
The woman, Nita was her name, stared at me for almost a minute before accepting my response.
“Joyce Rogers’ school. Oh yes, they do a lot of good things for the blacks over there. Them Latinos too. Even white children. That Mayfield boy is still over there, right, Thelma?”
I’d squirmed a bit at hearing Brian called a boy. He was anything but.
“Yes, Nella. And he ain’t nobody’s boy, especially yours.”
“You got that right. Don’t nobody know whose boy he is. That’s what’s wrong with him now. He’s right handsome though, ’cept for those worms all over his head. I always used to watch him when he was on TV. Did you see him on Oprah that time about black boys? Powerful, I tell you. Liked to make me cry . . .”
I had cried. Under the dryer with a plastic cap over the conditioner on my hair and hiding behind a ten-year-old issue of Ebony, I’d bawled like a baby. And not just for Brian. Most of it was for me, a grown woman too scared to say who she really was, to tell what she’d been through. At some point, I was going to have to do what I feared most—tell the truth. Give my real testimony. It’d been so much easier to do this, be someone else, when I was away. It was the one way I could overcome all the things going on in my head.
And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony . . .
Resurrection was what I needed. And to get it, I’d have to bare my heart. I wasn’t sure who to open up to, but when the time came, God would provide someone to partake of my broken bread and poured out wine. The memory of Thelma’s home beauty shop faded and my eyes fell on Brian’s empty chair again.
He’d have to come in soon. I smoothed my temples, gathering materials for today’s lesson. It was Brian’s day to lead, but the way he’d been acting lately—quiet and withdrawn—I’d better be ready for anything.
I reached into a stack of books from the desk and selected a volume of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar. With Dayton, his birthplace, so close by and his work so rich, he was always part of my curriculum. Brian agreed. After making a few notes, I checked my freshly painted nails for chips and picked up my Bible to copy the passage from yesterday’s sermon onto a file card to carry in my pocket. Reading it aloud three times a day for a week usually sufficed for getting the verses into my memory bank.
With a pen and index card, I scribbled down the words still ringing in my head from the sermon:
Who can lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?
After years of hearing the passage used to excuse church leaders from accountability for their actions, it was not one of my favorite places in Scripture. Yesterday, though, when Pastor Rodriquez taught about the verses at Tender Mercies, he’d come from another angle. Instead of a leader-follower application, he gave a personal relationship twist by suggesting that Saul had been used to refine David. It was at that point in the service that I’d dropped my pen.
“Stop trying to put out God’s refining fire!” The pastor’s intense gaze burned into my memory. “If you want to reach your potential in Christ, keep the home fires burning, even if the house starts burning down. If God started the fire, he can put it out.”
What he’d said was true, but how long would the fire burn? I had enough scars already.
I put the Bible aside and skimmed another poem, searching for an excerpt to read to the class during homeroom. As the words blurred in front of me, a troubling concept emerged—Brian as God’s anointed.
The door creaked and Brian filed in, wearing a suit the color of cashews. His mane, freshly retightened, fell to the middle of his back. He beelined to his desk, risking only a nod. He kept all his questions simple since we’d gone to give our stories to the EEOC. Maybe he felt that I’d somehow sided against him, but I could only tell what I saw, what I’d heard. Lately he didn’t give me more than a passing glance, but this morning, he turned away from his desk and gave his eyes what they must have been craving—a good, long look.
His gaze slid down the shine of my kimono like a child on a slide. I looked down too, first at my knees, slimmer now since I’d been taking Zeely’s class, then at my waist, my shoulders . . . My hair. He was staring at my hair. And he didn’t look happy.
“What did you do to it?”
“Got it pressed. Wanted something different.”
Brian looked again at my sleek updo that I’d pierced with two chopsticks for a final effect before leaving the house. It was too cold outside to be dressed this way, but I didn’t care.
He seemed to understand. “It looks good. I wish you’d said something though, about wanting a new style, I mean. I could have tried my hand at it before you let Thelma get to it.”
I raised a brow at the mention of Thelma. This town really was small. “So you’re a cosmetologist too, huh? What happened to ‘this is all natural, just take the handout’ when the kids asked you about your hair the first day?”
Brian inched his chair toward me, abandoning his former reserve. “Did you read the handout? I know a little. I used to braid my mother’s hair most nights when she couldn’t do it herself anymore. I cared for my wife’s natural hair. I also had a friend with braids, the little ones. I used to put them back in when they started sliding.”
My smile dissolved. The only person I knew with micros was Lottie. “A friend? I’ll bet you just tightened her right up.”
Brian rolled back to his desk and swiveled away from me, obviously regretting breaking his new get-to-work-but-keep-quiet plan. He picked up his bag and headed for the door.
“I’ll be back in a few. Long before the assembly.” He got up and moved around his desk, carefully navigating the space between us. My shoulders crumpled for a second, rising only when Brian brushed my arm on the way out. I grabbed his fingers. “Wait. I shouldn’t have said that. Will you forgive me?”
Something in his eyes stirred. Hope. A spark among the ashes. I dared to keep looking, tracing the outline of the contacts around his pupils. He leaned down until his hair tickled my shoulders. “You have n
othing to be forgiven for. I’m going to go now so I can say the same.” He straightened.
Tell me about it. Brian’s suits were enough to make this grown woman a little teary eyed. Only God could create something— someone—that fine.
“If looking good is the best revenge, then somebody somewhere is hurting. Bad.” I covered my mouth. Did I say that out loud?
He turned and stared at me. “What?”
I did say it out loud. I forced my face into the book I was reading. “Nothing.”
He turned and left the office, but not before giving me a sly smile. I forced my chair back to my desk. If God planned to use Brian to reveal my weaknesses, I couldn’t think of a better man for the job.
PART 3
RHYTHMS
47
Brian
“What book, written in 1958, is often considered the classic of African literature?” I asked the class.
“Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe,” Monique answered from the back.
There she was again. Real potential. I stroked my beard. “It seems this is going to be a tête-à-tête between Miss Terrigan and me this week.”
Sean frowned. “That’s not fair. She answered the first one.”
“Maybe you can answer the next. And don’t worry, Monique, you get your money regardless.”
Sean shrugged. “If the question is about that book, the one she said, I’ll try to answer.”
This was new. “You read it?”
“Yes, Doc. I did.”
“Interesting. Here’s the question. In one sentence, tell me what Things was about.” Hands went up all over. I waved them all off, pointing at Sean instead. “He’s Mr. Literature today. Let him tell us.”
“Yams.” He said it with a straight face too.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Boy . . .”
“Okay, it’s a story about white colonization, from the perspective of the son of an African chief who was converted by missionaries.” Sean straightened in his chair. “And yams.”
Rhythms of Grace Page 24