by Neta Jackson
“All right. Tell me.” My words came out gentle; she gave me a brief smile.
“I thought . . . I could do it,” she said in a half-whisper. “I knew what his birth date was, but I prayed about it, I really did, and I knew Yada Yada was praying for my visit.” She suddenly squinted at me. “You did send that e-mail for me, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I sent it! Whose birth date? Andy’s?”
She nodded. “When I got his case reassigned . . . there it was. That date. And I wasn’t sure I could do it. Becky was counting on me, though, and . . . I knew all the Yadas were wondering why I hadn’t been to see him. So I asked God to help me, but—”
“Stu.What in the heck are you talking about? What about Andy’s birth date?”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and I pushed a wicker holder of paper napkins toward her. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. “His birthday,” she whispered. “The same day . . . the same day . . .” Her shoulders began to shake.With a dose of wisdom from on high, I said nothing, just reached out and touched her arm.
She finally took a long, shuddering breath. “His birthday is . . . the same day my baby was due.Would be the same age. But . . . but my baby died. I mean . . .” Her voice fell to a mere whisper. “I killed my baby.”
It wasn’t wisdom that kept me from saying anything this time. Killed her baby?! I was so shocked, I could hardly breathe, much less talk.
Now that Stu had said the words, it was as if she’d pulled her finger out of the dike. “An abortion. I had an abortion. Maybe it was a little boy—I don’t know. A little boy like Andy. I didn’t want to, but what could I do? The jerk left me, dumped me like a rotting carcass when I told him I was pregnant—”
A loud knock at Stu’s back door made us both jump. “I’ll get it,” I told Stu, hastily rising from my chair and spilling my tea in the process. Stu waved me away and mopped up the spilled liquid with a wad of napkins. I could see Josh’s shaved head framed in the glass window of Stu’s kitchen door.
“Mom!” he said when I slipped out onto the second story porch. “Stu’s car is blocking the garage door! I can’t get the minivan out, and I want—”
I held up my hand to stop him, stepped back inside and scooped up Stu’s car keys, still lying on the floor, and went back outside. Josh’s quizzical expression made him look like an overgrown, comic-strip Swee’Pea. “Here. Move Stu’s car into the garage. Leave the keys downstairs on the counter. Yeah, yeah, take the Caravan.”
He shrugged. “Okay.” As my lanky teenager headed down the outside stairs, it occurred to me that I hadn’t done my errands yet. Or asked Josh where he was going. It also occurred to me that it didn’t matter. Not now.
IF I WASN’T GOING to call 911, I sure didn’t want to leave Stu alone for even a minute. I didn’t trust her. Wasn’t even sure I understood what was really going on. I knew I needed help; I couldn’t be her shadow every second.With another person we could spell each other, get some sleep, whatever. I thought about asking Stu whom I should call, then decided just to tell her I was calling Avis. She opened her mouth to protest, but I was getting good with the steely eyed “This is the way it is, buster,” and she deflated.
All I got was Avis’s voice mail. Humph. Where could she be? Now that she’d given Peter Douglass the boot, seemed to me Avis ought to be home staring at her four walls, realizing she’d made a big mistake.
Who else could I call? Chanda lived closest—ha, not likely. Not the way Stu had skewered her a few weeks ago. There’d be no sympathy there. Adele? It was Saturday. Adele’s Hair and Nails was surely full of weaves, pedicures, and braided extensions.
I dialed Flo’s number, told her Stu was having a melt-down, and asked if she could help me sit it out. Florida didn’t even ask what it was about. Just said, “Be there in an hour. But Carl and the boys ain’t here. I’ll have to bring Carla.”
My heart sank. “Carla? I don’t think—”
“Carla?” Stu, who’d been slumped on one elbow at the small kitchen table, sat up. “Sure, let Carla come. I’d like that.”
I covered the receiver. “Stu, I don’t think that’s a good . . .”
But she was smiling. I let it drop. If Stu was comfortable with Florida and Carla being here, so be it. Maybe it was a cover, so she wouldn’t have to talk about her feelings or what had just happened. Almost happened. Or maybe it’d be a good thing. It wasn’t as if I really knew what I was doing here. Just knew, for the first time since I’d met Leslie Stuart, that God had crossed our paths, and I needed to walk with her right now.
Turned out, Carla was a good thing. An air of normalcy returned to the second-floor apartment. Carla’s short, beaded braids bounced from room to room, then she settled down to play with a set of Russian dolls from Stu’s bookcase—ten wooden babushkas of graduated sizes hidden inside one another.While Florida hunted in the refrigerator for something to cook for supper, I took advantage of the distraction to go downstairs, where I dis-covered Amanda and José eating pita pizzas and watch-ing Spiderman in the living room.
“Ahem!”
Amanda sparred first. “Where were you, Mom? I would’ve asked if José could stay to watch a video but nobody was home, and the door wasn’t even locked!”
I let it go, even though we had a no-boyfriend-if-an-adult-isn’t-home rule. When Denny got home, I gave him a brief rundown of what had gone on upstairs, told him not to ask any questions because I didn’t know any answers, and handed him the grocery list. “Would you mind?”
He recovered from the blitz. “Sure. Except the car’s not here.Where’s Josh?”
Huh. Like I know. Probably down at Jesus People. He’d been hanging out there nearly every weekend. Undaunted, I spied Stu’s key ring he’d returned to the kitchen counter. “Here. Take Stu’s car. Take Amanda and José. Buy out the store.”
“Cool,” Denny said—which struck me so funny, I started to laugh. The pent-up emotions of that day suddenly erupted like a Texas oil well, and I leaned against Denny’s shirt to stifle my torrent of wet giggles, pointing silently upward at the ceiling, not wanting Stu to hear my hysterical laughter. Denny circled me with his arms till I’d calmed down and wiped my eyes on his T-shirt, leaving black mascara smudges. “You did good, Jodi,” he murmured into my hair. “Go back upstairs. I can handle the Alamo down here all by myself.”
FLORIDA HAD PUT TOGETHER a taco salad from Stu’s pantry and refrigerator, and Carla kept us entertained with her new repertoire of vampire jokes. Carla: “What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?” Three ignorant adults: “We dunno.” Carla: “Frostbite!” Laughter punctured the tension, and supper almost felt like a party.
Later, while Florida and I cleaned up the kitchen, we could hear Stu reading Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends to Carla in the front room with much giggling at the silly poems. “Maybe I overreacted,” I murmured, loading the dishwasher while Florida tackled the dirty pots in the sink. “Stu seems okay.”
“Nah.What you told me ’bout how she was actin’ this morning? She shouldn’t be alone. We’re okay, Carla and me. Don’t have church clothes with us for tomorrow, but I did grab some clean underwear.” She smirked.
Stu appeared in the kitchen doorway just as we gave the counters a last swipe. “Carla’s asleep. I put her in the spare bedroom. Hope that’s okay.”
“Good,” Florida said. “Now we’re goin’ to talk.” She steered Stu toward the living room. To my surprise, Stu didn’t resist but curled up in one of her wicker basket-chairs while Florida and I took the futon. The fading daylight outside the front windows filled the corners of the room with shadows, leaving the three of us in a small pool of lamplight.
“You carried this too long by yourself, girl,” Florida prodded. “Get it off your chest.We’re listening. An’ God already knows about it; no surprise to Him.”
The hours of just hanging out, giggling at dumb jokes over taco salad, and putting Carla to bed seemed to give Stu the needed strength to bring the
dreaded memories into the light. It was a common story, yet strangely peculiar coming out of Stu’s mouth. All my stereotypes of “Ms. Perfect” crumbled as she spoke, and in their place was a wounded, vulnerable woman, opening her soul and letting it bleed.
She’d been dating the guy for several months, some-one she met through a friend. Said she didn’t know for sure what had happened that night—they’d gone to a singles’ nightclub, had some drinks, woke up the next morning in her apartment—until she skipped a couple of periods and the home pregnancy kit tested positive. When she told the boyfriend she was pregnant, “He just disappeared,” Stu said, her forlorn features betraying the sense of abandonment. “I couldn’t prove I’d been date raped, couldn’t face telling my family, couldn’t bear raising a child alone. I’d seen too many single moms trapped, struggling, ending up on welfare. And I . . . I was embarrassed. I was thirty-two, for heaven’s sake! I’ve got a master’s degree! How could I let this happen to me? I’m smart, I’m educated, I’m supposed to be helping people who make dumb mistakes!” Stu’s eyes glittered for a brief moment, and then her shoulders slumped. “So I . . . I told myself I had no choice. But I cried for days. Everyone wondered what was wrong. To cope, I . . . I shut every-body who knew me out of my life. Distanced myself from my family, stopped going to St. John’s, quit my DCFS job, took a real-estate course, moved, started a new life. Put it out of my mind. Proved to myself I could survive one mistake and start over. But . . .”
She picked at a loose thread, lost in her thoughts. Florida and I exchanged glances but said nothing. Stu looked up. “Then I heard about the Chicago Women’s Conference last May. I was so hungry for something—I didn’t even know what.” A wry smile twisted the corners of her mouth. “Ended up in this crazy group of women. The Yada Yada Prayer Group! Don’t know why I stayed. You were all so . . . so . . .”
“Weird,” Florida finished. “Uh-huh. Thought the same about you.” I stifled a giggle, but Florida plunged right on. “It was God who called us into this here prayer group and gave us that name, Yada Yada, even when we didn’t know it had all sorts of God-fearin’ meanings. Called each one of us by name too—Jodi, here, been helpin’ us with that. Called you, Stu. Called you by name and said, ‘I’m puttin’ that Leslie Stuart in Yada Yada, ’cause they need her. An’ she needs them.’ ”
Florida’s hopeful words raised goose bumps on my arms, but Stu began shaking her head, and the tears welled up again. “No . . . no . . . I ruined it! Ruined my name. ‘Caretaker,’ Jodi said . . . but I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .” Stu rolled herself up into a ball and gulped air between sobs. “I didn’t take care of my baby!”
Florida shot off the futon and pulled Stu’s flaxen head against her small chest. “Jesus! Jesus! ” Her own brown face was wet with tears. “Now we know Your blood done already covered this terrible pain in Stu’s life. You came to take the sin and the pain and cover it with Your own. An’ Jesus, we know You’ve got that baby in Your hand right now. You’ve called that baby by name too. He . . .”
Florida stopped. “Stu. Did you name that baby?”
Stu shook her head between Florida’s strong hands. “No. I . . . told myself it was just a blob of tissue—you know, so I could go through with it.”
“Stu, now you listen to me, girl. Somewhere in the Bible it says God knows us even before we was born, still inside our mama’s womb. An’ somewhere else God says, ‘I called you by name, you are Mine!’ Hear that? Your baby belongs to God, and nothin’ you did changes that. ” Florida held Stu at arm’s length, eye to eye. “So we goin’ to name this baby, an’ give him back to God, where he’s already safe and waitin’ for you when you get to heaven. What name you want?”
Stu shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t know.” She looked at me, pleading. “Jodi, you’re good at this naming business. You pick a name. For a boy. I just know in my heart it was a boy.” The tears kept running—her nose too—and I handed her another wad of tissues. But a light had come into her eyes.
My mind scrambled.What did I remember about the meaning of boys’ names? Biblical names. Isaac? No, that meant “laughter.” Not so good. Jacob? Matthew? David?
Yes.
I knelt down beside Stu and took her hands, which were busy wadding the damp pile of tissues. They stilled under my touch. The moment felt sacred, and I could hardly find my voice. But I whispered, “His name is David. It means . . . ‘Beloved.’ ”
35
The three of us cried a lot and talked until late. Then we tucked Stu into her bed and fell out ourselves—Florida in the double bed with Carla, and me on the futon with an afghan. In the middle of the night, I woke up confused and sweating. I felt overwhelmed by loss. Someone had died! But who?
Oh God. Stu’s baby. David. David Stuart.
And . . . Jamal Wilkins.
I struggled upright under the afghan, which had knotted itself around my body, pulled my knees up to my forehead, and wept. I wanted Denny—needed Denny to hold me. Yet Denny was downstairs, out cold and oblivious, no doubt. God was here, though . . .
God is gracious. That was the meaning of my name. God is gracious . . . God is gracious. “My grace is sufficient,” Jesus said. Did I believe that? I laid back down on Stu’s futon and imagined crawling up in God’s lap, a lap already cradling a baby named David and a teenager named Jamal. And Stu. And Florida and Carla. All on God’s lap. And God had His arms around us all.
I DIDN’T THINK STU would be up for going to church the next morning, but Florida just said to her, “We’re goin’.”We let her take one antidepressant, and I took the bottle with me as I hustled downstairs to take a quick shower and change out of my sweats—and discovered José eating breakfast cereal with Denny and Josh. I blinked and counted noses. The shower was running in the bathroom—Amanda, no doubt, unless there were more gremlins hiding in the woodwork I didn’t know about.
“Good morning, Señora Baxter,” José said politely. I burbled something I hoped sounded like “Hi,” but I was so startled, I probably sounded like I was gagging. I shot Denny a look that said, “What’s the meaning of this?”
Denny chewed placidly. “Gotta drop José at the el on the way to church. You play drums at Iglesia this morn-ing, José, right?”
José nodded and poured another bowl of cereal. “Sí.”
Florida and Carla rode with Stu in her Celica, and I rejoined my family, feeling as if I couldn’t be gone twenty minutes, much less twenty hours, without something going amiss. “Thought you said you had the Alamo covered,” I hissed at Denny as we trailed Josh and Amanda up the stairs at Uptown.
“I did.” Denny leveled his eyebrows at me. “Gotta trust me, Jodi.Tell you about it later.” His tone also said, “Don’t push me.”
I pressed my lips into a firm line, but they fell open when we reached the second-floor meeting room—and there was Peter Douglass, urbane and handsome as ever, sitting by himself on the far side, halfway back. My head swiveled. Avis was huddled with Pastor Clark; she must be worship leader today. Florida and Stu, who had arrived before we did, saw me staring at Peter and grinned. Florida pumped her fist surreptitiously. Yes!
Denny immediately headed over to Peter Douglass, and the two men spoke and nodded, as if agreeing to talk more after service. When Denny came back, we sat behind Florida and Stu, and I noticed Stu dabbing at her eyes throughout the entire service. But I also noticed that when we sang the Israel Houghton song, “We worship You, for who You are . . . You are good! All the time! All the time, You are good!” Stu lifted her hands and her face upward—the first time I’d ever seen her worship like that.
Now I was the one who needed the tissues.
“YOU FIRST,” I TOLD Denny, wrapping my hands around a double decaf cappucino at the Heartland Café while we waited for our nachos grandes. Denny sipped the head off an iced mug of beer—the first beer I’d seen him drink in months.
I’d been so exhausted after church that I took a long nap. Denny had finally shaken me awake
at five o’clock. “Jodi! You’ll be up all night if you don’t get up. C’mon. We’re going out. You and me. Oh—Avis called. I said you’d call her back. Later.”
Yeah, I bet she did. She’d caught me after church and said, “Stu’s pretty weepy.What’s going on? My caller ID showed you called yesterday.”
“Uh-huh, big stuff. You can either ask her or I can fill you in. But”—I jutted my chin in Peter’s direction, who’d been cornered again by Denny, and grinned wickedly—“only if you fill me in, sister.”
Now I looked at Denny across the “naturally stressed” wooden table of the Heartland’s sidewalk café, still enclosed till the weather warmed up a bit more. I was curious, but the steam I’d felt when I’d first seen José at our breakfast table had dissipated. “You gotta trust me,” Denny had said. And Me, the Holy Spirit had echoed in my spirit. Hadn’t God been at work all weekend on the second floor? Had to spill down to the first floor of our house too.
“Okay, me first.” Denny shrugged. “I took Amanda and José grocery shopping, like you said. At the fruit market the kids threw a couple of cans of salsa verde, some cornmeal, and a package of corn husks into the cart, and José promised to show us how to make authentic Mexican chicken tamales.”
“You’re kidding. Amanda helped cook?”
“Uh, well, she found the salt and stuck the corn husks in some warm water to soften.” He grinned. “Wasn’t exactly the cooking breakthrough we’ve been hoping for. But José knew what he was doing.”
“Amazing,” I murmured. “José can cook.”
“I think he’s had to do a lot of things as the oldest of the Enriquez brood.Working mom, blue-collar dad who’s gone a lot driving trucks—you know. But José and I had a good talk; he kinda opened up. Amanda, bless her, pulled back and just let José and me talk. I was kinda surprised—ah! Here’s the nachos.”
A blue-jean clad waiter put a huge plate of corn chips covered with beans and melted jack cheese on the table between us. Lettuce, tomatoes, salsa, and sour cream toppings made the plate look like an ad for the Rocky Mountains.We each pulled out a crisp corn chip loaded with stringy cheese and spicy beans. “So what else?” I mumbled between crunchy bites.