2-in-1 Yada Yada

by Neta Jackson

  What about Jodi? I’d never thought about it before. Did my name—

  The phone rang. I thought I’d heard Denny come back and hoped he’d answer it, but it kept ringing, so finally I tried to make a dash to the kitchen phone. My leg had stiffened up sitting so long, and I almost fell. The answering machine started to pick up by the time I got there.

  “Hello? We’re here! Sorry it took so long.”

  “Jodi.” I recognized Florida’s voice, but there was something in her voice . . . Was she crying?

  “Florida? Is something wrong?”

  “No. It’s good. I’m just . . . Jodi, DCFS just called. They’re bringing Carla home. Today.” Florida’s voice faded; she must have put the phone down. Somewhere in the background I could hear her crying and praising. “Oh, thank ya, Jesus. Thank ya!”

  “Florida? Florida!” I called into the phone. This was incredible! Wonderful news. She’d been trying to get her daughter back even before I met her last spring. Even after Stu—our wannabe social worker—had located Carla, the red tape had been like hacking through a jungle. I could hardly imagine how Florida got through each day, not knowing for sure when or if she’d get her daughter back.

  Florida finally came back on the phone.

  “Florida, that’s wonderful,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Florida blew her nose. “But you gotta get the sisters to pray for us; that’s why I called. Because they didn’t tell me in time to get her registered for school”—Florida’s tone got testy—“so I gotta take off work tomorrow, and—”

  “Of course, Florida. I’ll send an e-mail to everybody.”

  “That’s not all.” I could hear the tug between pain and joy in Florida’s voice. “The social worker said Carla’s upset. She doesn’t want to start a new school. Wants to stay with her foster . . .” I could hear her crying again, softly. “Jodi? Am I doin’ the right thing?”

  14

  Ihad no idea how to answer Florida. The right thing? The right thing, Florida, would’ve been not to get strung out on drugs and lose your kid in the first place!

  But I wasn’t about to say that. After all, “the right thing” for me would’ve been not to have a stupid fight with my husband and end up driving angry behind the wheel of our car—which had had far worse consequences.

  A spasm of regret made me feel sick to my stomach.

  Florida was hurting and waiting for me to say something. I tried. “Flo, I don’t know. Except . . . God’s done some pretty big miracles in your life already, including DCFS returning Carla to you today! So she can start school! You’re always saying God didn’t bring you this far to leave you, and He’s not going to leave you or Carla now either.” I heard the words I was saying, desperately wanting to believe them.

  We’d no sooner hung up than the phone rang again.

  “Jodi!” It was Yo-Yo. “Heard I missed all the excitement last night! Had to work.”

  I was in no mood to joke about it. “Guess Ruth told you what happened.”

  “Yeah. Can’t shut her up. She’s beside herself about what that kook did to Hoshi’s mama.”

  “Her name’s Becky Wallace.”

  “Who?”

  “The kook, as you called her.” I was feeling testy, though I wasn’t sure why exactly.

  “Ha. She told you her name? Like, hey, my name’s Becky Wallace. Pleased ta meetcha. Gimme all your jools.” She laughed.

  “No.” My annoyance meter was rising. “Look, Yo-Yo. If you called for some reason . . .”

  “Hey, sorry.” Her tone sobered. “Must’ve been tough for you guys. Really sorry to hear what happened to Hoshi’s mom. That perp musta been postal.”

  I was too tired to unscramble Yo-Yo’s language. “Yeah.”

  “Uh, I really called to tell Josh and Denny thanks for taking my kid brothers to the Jazz Fest yesterday. They came home tanked— you know, all excited. Mostly ’cause somebody was payin’ attention to ’em I think, though you’d never get either of ’em to admit it. Ben and Ruth used to do that kind of stuff with them—did it a lot when I was in the joint—but Ben’s getting kinda cranky with them these days. Can’t blame him; they drive me over the edge. They’re, you know, mouthy teenagers. Anyway, tell your man thanks. Josh too.”

  “Okay. Sure.” My insides relaxed a little. “Know something, Yo-Yo? If Denny had driven the boys home first instead of letting Josh drop him off here last night, no telling what might have happened.” “Yeah.” A pause. “Guess the Big Guy upstairs was lookin’ out for ya.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. Yo-Yo could never be accused of “churchy” language.

  Neither one of us spoke for a moment. Then, doing a mental U-turn, I found myself saying, “Yo-Yo, remember when we were introducing ourselves at the women’s conference last spring? I stuck my foot in it and asked where you learned to cook?”

  The phone crackled with Yo-Yo’s laugh. “Yeah. Wish you could’ve seen your face when I said prison.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Even now I could feel my face getting red, but I pushed on. “You said, ‘I had my reasons’—you know, for committing forgery. Uh, can I ask . . . what reasons?”

  “Huh. Nosy chick, ain’t ya.” But she didn’t sound mad. “School clothes. School supplies. Didn’t know no other way to get what Pete and Jerry needed. My mom was in the ozone; she sure as heck wasn’t getting them ready for school. It wasn’t that hard to forge all those checks with my mom’s ID. ’Course there wasn’t no money in the bank . . .”

  “Did the crime, served my time. It’s behind me now.” That’s what Yo-Yo had said last spring. Like it was nothing. I couldn’t imagine even eighteen months shut away with people like . . . like Bandana Woman, who spewed filthy words five times in one sentence.

  “What was it like?”

  “What? Prison?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man!” That’s all Yo-Yo said for a moment or two.

  What were you thinking, Jodi? She obviously doesn’t want to talk about it! I was just about to say, “Forget it,” when Yo-Yo said, “It’s tough, Jodi. Ya gotta be tough to survive in prison. Learned that the first day at Cook County. Was sittin’ there in the common room, smokin’ a cigarette an’ mindin’ my own business, when this big black girl comes over and says, ‘Gimme a cigarette. Now.’ ”

  I wondered why Yo-Yo mentioned the girl’s race. It wasn’t supposed to matter, was it? Yet it probably did matter in prison. “Like” allied with “like.” I could just see Yo-Yo slouched in a chair, legs stuck out, one arm over the back—but probably without the overalls she always wore. Didn’t prisoners at Cook County wear orange jumpsuits or something? Her skin was pale, and she rarely wore makeup; but her spiky hair with blonde tips called attention to itself. Yo-Yo wasn’t a big person; she just seemed that way to me because of her blunt talk.

  “Knew if I gave it to her,” Yo-Yo went on, “it’d be over for me. I’d end up being some big mama’s sissy. So I cussed her out good, told her to get out of my face. She backed off.”

  My knees literally got the shakes, and I had to sit down. I couldn’t even bring myself to think beneath the surface of Yo-Yo’s words. I wasn’t tough. I was a wimp. I’d never have survived one day in prison.

  I heard Yo-Yo sigh on the other end of the phone. “Didn’t especially like the person I had to be inside the joint, but that’s the way it was. Ruth had to soften me up a bit once I got out.”

  Soften? “Soft” was not a word I would associate with Yo-Yo.

  “Say, what’s with all the questions?” she asked. “You got acquitted, remember? Don’t go lookin’ backwards.”

  “I know. Thanks, Yo-Yo. Sorry for getting so personal.”

  “It’s okay, but gotta run. The Bagel Bakery is not closed on Labor Day.”

  We hung up, but for some reason I felt all confused. Uneasy. Yo-Yo forged checks to get school clothes—school clothes!—for her kid brothers and spent eighteen months in jail. I killed a kid in a car accident and didn’t go t
o jail.

  Then along comes Bandana Woman—yeah, that handle fit her a lot better than her so-called name—who terrorizes Yada Yada and cuts Mrs. Takahashi’s hand and, frankly, I’m hoping she’s going down for a long, long time. She’s a tough cookie, I tell myself. Nobody’s going to mess with her. Then an afterthought, But if they do, it serves her right.

  MY PARENTS CALLED just as we were getting ready to eat supper.

  I heard the phone ring, but it seemed like the phone had been ringing all afternoon—first Florida, then Yo-Yo, then Chanda, who was practically hysterical, even though she hadn’t even been here last night. Somebody must have told her. Adele? They went to the same church—Paul and Silas Apostolic—but otherwise didn’t seem to interact much. It annoyed me no end that I had to calm her down when she hadn’t even been here to get robbed. “Oh, sista Jodee,” she moaned. “Such a terrible t’ing.” Her Jamaican accent got thicker, till I could hardly understand her. “So bad. So bad.”

  By the time Denny and the kids got home from their last fling with summer, the most I could manage for a Labor Day “picnic” was grilling some chicken in the backyard. Correction: Denny did the grilling. He knows I don’t have the patience to sit there baby-sitting the grill, so the meat ends up BBB—“Blackened Beyond Belief.”

  Denny had just yelled, “Five minutes!” and I was putting some corn on the cob and fruit salad on the small back-porch table when the phone rang again. I was all for letting the machine pick it up, but Amanda can’t resist a ringing telephone any more than Willie Wonka can resist scratching a flea. I heard her say, “Hi, Grandma! Yeah, it’s Amanda.”

  My mother’s timing is always exquisite. Just as we’re sitting down to dinner, or just as we’re rushing out the door to school, or even just as Denny and I are climbing into bed for a marital “roll in the hay.”Which probably means I should call my parents more often when I do have a free minute—or ten, or thirty.

  I heard Amanda say, “Yeah, we had a lot of excitement here last night—” I snatched the phone before my dramatic daughter could give her grandmother a blow-by-blow account of the robbery. “Hi, Mom!” I said breezily, shooing Amanda out the back door. “Go ahead and eat,” I mouthed at Denny.

  “Hi, sweetie,” my mom said. “Excitement? What excitement? You doing all right?”

  My mom would probably never forgive herself for not rushing to my side when I’d had the accident earlier that summer.Yet she’d had a bad chest cold at the time, verging on pneumonia, and the doctor had advised her not to travel—praise be to heaven. I loved my folks, really I did. They were good parents, solid, full of faith, a bit too serious perhaps—but whew! They would’ve gone into shock when I got charged with vehicular manslaughter, even though it later got dropped. And what if they’d found out we’d been fighting that day over Denny drinking beer with the guys? Denny would never hear the end of it. Never mind that I was the one “driving mad.”

  No. God had created three hundred miles between Chicago and Des Moines, Iowa, which made it easier to keep things simple: “It was raining. I had a car accident. A boy was killed—so tragic. I broke my leg and several ribs and lost my spleen, but I’m better now.”

  “Sure, Mom. I’m fine. We all start school tomorrow, you know. The kids are excited.”

  “I know. That’s why I called. Don’t you think handling a classroom so soon after surgery will be too much? Maybe they could assign a substitute for a few weeks.”

  “No, Mom, really. I’ll be okay. It’d be much harder to start late.

  How’s Dad? You guys decide to get that motor home?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s secondhand, you know. Still in good condition, though . . .”

  I closed my eyes as my mom fussed about spending the money, feeling relieved that she didn’t pick up on the “excitement” we had around here last night—and guilty that I wasn’t sharing things straight up with my parents. Yet I knew they’d be terribly upset and start fussing about why we were living in the city. Right now I could hardly handle my own raw feelings, much less theirs. There were some things you just didn’t want to tell your parents—

  Sheesh. Listen to me! Did Josh and Amanda think like that?

  What weren’t they telling us?

  Hmm. Maybe I should tell my parents. But later. I’d tell them later.

  “. . . come to see you for your birthday? Josh’s birthday is the week after—maybe we could come the weekend between and celebrate both.”

  That got my attention. “Uh . . . sure, Mom. Let me check the calendar.” Oh God, give me strength. Sure I wanted my parents to visit; the kids hadn’t seen their grandparents all summer. At that moment, though, I felt overwhelmed. School was starting tomorrow. The upset at Adele’s beauty shop was still unresolved. We’d just been robbed and terrorized right in our own home . . .

  Well, at least that weekend looked free, between two Yada Yada meetings. And it was three weeks away. “Sure, Mom. That’d be great. Let’s talk more about it later. Denny and the kids are eating without me, so I’ll call you in a couple of days, okay?”

  TRYING TO GET THE KIDS TO BED EARLIER because it was suddenly a school night was like trying to get a cat to heel. Finally I had a few minutes to send an e-mail to the Yada Yada list about praying for Carla and her reentry into the Hickman family. There were a few incoming messages—one from Stu, saying she had nightmares last night and for the first time in her life felt anxious about living alone, and she would have a hard time waiting another two weeks to pray together.

  Hmm. That was a different side of Leslie “Stu” Stuart than I’d seen before. Nothing ever seemed to faze her. Guess she was human like the rest of us.

  Nony had sent out a brief e-mail, bringing the group up to speed about the Takahashis leaving abruptly for Japan and urging us to pray for Hoshi, who was quite distraught. We all knew she’d been anxious about telling her parents she’d become a Christian, but this was far worse than anything she’d imagined.

  Poor Hoshi. Maybe we could invite her to dinner soon and give her some emotional support. If I had any to give, that is. I moved that idea into a corner of my mind labeled “to think about later.”

  The last e-mail was from Ruth.

  To: Yada Yada

  From: Yid-dish@online.net

  Subject: Rosh Hashanah

  If Yada Yada wants to visit my Messianic Jewish congregation, the best time would be during our “high holy days” this month. I meant to invite you all last night, but with a robbery in progress, I can be forgiven, yes? But it can’t wait till next time because Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) services are this weekend: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday 10:30 a.m.

  Or it could be Yom Kippur ten days later. Depends on whether you want to celebrate the New Year and EAT, or confess your sins and FAST.

  Whichever, why doesn’t Yada Yada meet at my house next time (right before Yom Kippur), and I could explain it all better then, though I’ll probably have to throw Ben out.

  Celebrating and eating sounds good to me, I thought. Something to get our minds off the trauma of yesterday’s Yada Yada meeting, though this coming weekend might be a little soon for another church visit. Yet like Ruth said, the Jewish holy days weren’t going to rearrange themselves for our schedule. I moved my cursor to Reply All and typed: “Great idea! Either holiday is fine by me. Jodi.”

  “Jodi?”

  I turned from the computer screen. Denny was leaning against the doorway of the dining room, stripped down to a pair of boxer shorts. I thought he was going to say, “Coming to bed?” but he didn’t.

  “Could we”—he shrugged, as if embarrassed—“uh, pray together before we go to bed? I’m . . . I dunno. Just feeling unsettled. The business last night, but also Adele taking off without saying a word to me about MaDear and what happened. Still hasn’t told me how much I owe her for your hair and nails either.” He shrugged again. “Don’t know why that bothers me so much, but it does. I’ve been trying to pray about it, to put it to rest, but se
ems like I go around in circles.”

  I just looked at my husband a moment, trying to read his face. Denny didn’t often admit to “going around in circles.” Or ask to pray together at bedtime. Unsettled? Yeah. I felt the same way. Like our private fears were lurking in the shadows, just out of reach, refusing to come into the light.

  Standing there in his boxers asking us to pray, Denny looked about as vulnerable as I’d ever seen him.

  15

  The next morning the typical Baxter hurry-scurry kicked in, but we all managed to get out of the house roughly on time. Denny drove Josh and Amanda to Lane Tech in the “new” used minivan for their first day, then he headed for West Rogers High. I stuck the books I’d mended, the last pieces of my Welcome Bulletin Board, and a pair of loafers into my tote bag and headed out for the twenty-minute walk to Bethune Elementary.

  I actually found myself looking forward to the first day of school. Hoo boy! Now if that wasn’t a miracle!

  Must have been the prayer with Denny last night. We’d just held each other in the dark in the living room, pouring out all the confusion and upset we’d both been feeling, telling Jesus it had been a rotten summer. We didn’t know what to do about MaDear. Getting robbed in our own home had been terrifying. We also thanked God for a lot of stuff. Like Josh and Amanda and the rest of Uptown’s youth getting home safely from Mexico and having a great time building houses with Habitat for Humanity. For the strength our Yada Yada sisters had poured into both of us with their prayers and their presence during those awful days following the accident. That the charges against me got dropped, and I was healing fast. That Denny still had a job at the high school.

  Once we started, it seemed like there were so many things to pray about: Carla coming home to her family and starting a new school, Hoshi and her distraught parents, and even MaDear and the painful memories that haunted her.

  “Good thing God is God all by Himself!” I’d muttered after our final amen. Florida’s favorite phrase. “I’d sure hate to sort out all the stuff we just dumped in God’s lap.” That set us off laughing— but oh, my mutilated abdomen still hurt when I laughed.