Always

by Timmothy B. Mccann

  I’d not seen Brandon and Chianti’ since Darius’s funeral. I knew they’d broken up because she saw me in a line at the bank and told me she was moving to North Dakota with a landscape artist. The last time I’d seen Brandon, he’d had six-inch dreads and a baby face, but now he was a full-grown man with a conservative banker haircut parted on the side and a fully matured body. And it had matured in all the right places.

  I was at the swap meet when I saw this man dressed in denim jeans and a knit black turtleneck and vest. He caught my eye because he looked mixed. As if he were half man and half amazing. He moved like a long, slow, tender orgasm as he thumbed through the pants the way only men look for clothes, but I knew there was something about him that was vaguely familiar. And then he looked up, and although he had a mustache, I asked, “Brandon? Is that you?”

  His mouth opened, and he said, “Cheryl Kingsley?” He seemed elated to see me as he ran around the long row of irregular pants in my direction. As he got closer, my first inclination was to shake his hand, but it was too late. I was already in his embrace, enjoying his cologne, which lingered in my senses and then disappeared like morning dew. As he released the physical hold on me, he looked in my eyes, and said, “So how have you been doing?”

  “I’m doing fine, thank you. I hardly recognized you without the Bob Marley look.”

  “The Bob Marley . . . Oh, that’s right. I had the dreads last time you saw me. Jeez, that’s been at least seven or eight years, I guess, huh? I cut them off a while back. I’m with the Sheriff’s Department now.”

  “Really? So you did go into law enforcement after all. Congratulations.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thanks. How have you been? How’s little Sarah?”

  “She’s in college now. Playing basketball for Tennessee State, believe it or not.”

  “Whoa. Good for her. I always knew she had it in her.”

  As we talked, he told me about his change of plans regarding going into the army as well as his intentions to move back to Atlanta to be closer to his family. The more he spoke, the more I thought of the possibilities. I hated to think that way because I knew a young man like him would see nothing in me, but every now and then I’d catch myself giggling when I had no reason to or getting just a little too touchy-feely when he would make an interesting point. But I loved grabbing his forearm and saying, “Really?” and “Are you serious?” His biceps were as large around as my thigh, and his hands were powerful, although they were as soft as if he’d never done a decent day’s work in his life. As he told me of his promotion in the Sheriff’s Department, I found myself looking at his lips. They were full, and masculine, and the top one was just a shade darker than the bottom. The more he talked with that sophisticated, slow sexy voice, the more I found myself wanting to . . .

  “Don’t you agree?” was all I heard him ask.

  “Well, umm, yeah. I mean, of course.” I wanted to change my panties and if I were Catholic, I would have had to say so many “hail-Mary-full-of-graces,” I would have cramped my tongue.

  I noticed him glance at his watch, then he looked at me, and said, “I had no idea it was this late. Tell me something.”

  I stared wordlessly with my lips slightly apart, ready to say yes. There was no way he was going to ask me . . .

  “What’s the best way to get to Key Biscayne from here? I don’t want to run into traffic.”

  What was I thinking? As I gave him directions, he took out a pen and wrote them on a slip of paper he had in his pocket as a couple of women his age walked by, no doubt jealous, thinking he was giving me his number.

  “Cool,” he said. “This way I can avoid 1-95.”

  “Yeah,” I said as he put the piece of paper in his front pants pocket and even that looked seductive. My nipples itched and I wanted to squeeze my thighs a little tighter as he said, “Well, Mrs. Kingsley, you were definitely a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Same here.”

  “Are you done shopping?”

  “No, I mean, yes.”

  “Me too. I thought they’d have a few more bargains today, but I guess we got here just in time for the leftover junk. Where’re you parked?”

  We walked to my car and I found myself once again giddy with excitement. But here I was, a few weeks shy of the big one, and I was acting like a child. I knew he was around twenty-seven or twenty-eight and I knew what he would want an almost forty-year-old woman for. But as we got to my car and he said good-bye, I felt even older than my birth certificate.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, I slid in a Maze CD and put on my sunglasses as I buckled my seat belt to “Joy and Pain” and I tried to forget how I’d just acted. I wanted to forget about the fact that the last time I’d had a real date, Reagan was president. I knew my next birthday would be a tough one, but I didn’t think I’d be ready for a blue special parking decal. Check you out, I thought as I looked in the mirror. Acting like that over that li’l boy. You ought to be ashamed of yourself And then I was able to laugh at the situation. In hindsight, it felt good to feel attractive again, if only at a swap meet. I put the car in reverse and my hand on the passenger-side headrest to back out, when I was startled by a knock on my window. It was him.

  “Sorry to bother you, Cheryl. This might sound strange,” he said, and then put those husky, thick brown forearms on my car windowsill and squatted. “But I was sorta wondering if you were still in the phone book.”

  “Yessss,” I purred, sorta like a kitten curling around one’s leg.

  “Cool.” Looking down, he said, “Well, if it’s all right, would you like to maybe”—then his eyes met mine—“go to dinner sometime?”

  “Yes!” is what I screamed inside my body so loud I hoped he’d not heard the sound coming through my pores. “I dunno,” is what my lips replied. “Give me a call sometime and we’ll play it by ear.”

  Sarah excelled at three sports. Basketball, the discus, and volleyball. She accepted a hoops scholarship but dropped out because she said she just got tired of competing. I learned later she’d flunked out of school and was living off campus with a guy named Austin.

  When she brought him to meet me for the very first time I was talking to Brandon on the phone. By this time we’d gone out for several months and Brandon had just asked me if I would like to drive up to Atlanta with him for the Labor Day weekend. Just as I was parting my lips to say yes, Sarah walked in the door with Austin.

  “Brandon, that sounds like a good idea, but can I call you back? Something just came up.” As I hung up the phone and looked at the something named Austin, I wanted to like him, but I couldn’t. He walked into my house as if I owed him money. Looking down at the sofa, he wrinkled his nose up as if he were too good to sit on it and then sat on its arm.

  He wore jeans that were pulled down to midthigh, silver on his upper and lower teeth, and a tight white tank top. He had a toothpick in his mouth that stayed in place even when he spoke, and he had what my daughter would describe as a zero. I just called it a bald head. As he sat, he kept massaging the inside of his forearm for some reason as I visually inspected the rubbed area for needle tracks. And on the outside of his arm was a tattoo of something that extended from his shoulder to his elbow; I had no idea what the drawing was. He may have called it art. I called it the aftermath of a flesh-eating bacterium.

  To say the least, I was too shocked for words as Sarah said, “So, Ma . . . this here is Aww-stin.” I forced myself to smile, and I must say it warmed my heart to hear my daughter call me anything other than Cheryl for the first time in years.

  “Austin . . . it’s nice to meet you.”

  “Yo,” he said, and tipped his shiny head. She’d told me just how cute she thought he was one night, but as I sat looking at his slanted eyes and sharp mouth, he looked like a human salamander.

  Sarah sat so close to him it was hard to see where her body ended and his began. After staring at him with big doe eyes, she glared at me to keep the conversation going. Grasping for straws, I contin
ued. “Sarah tells me you’re in the computer industry?”

  “The what industry?”

  “No, Ma, I didn’t say he was in the computer industry,” she said, knowing that’s what she had led me to believe. “I just said he worked at IBM. He’s in the environmental control division.”

  “Environmental con-what?” he said, looking down on her head. Then he sucked his nasty silver-plated teeth and looked at his nails as he said, “If that what you wanna call being a fuc—I mean if that’s got anything to do with a mop and a bucket, then that’s what I do.”

  Sarah tilted her head and widened her eyes as I begged myself not to go off on both of them. Sarah had very few boyfriends in high school. Actually she only went out on one date and went to the prom alone where she got into a fistfight with a baseball player, so I was determined to give him every benefit of the doubt.

  “So do you like working for IBM?”

  “It’s a job.”

  “I hear the benefits are good.”

  “It’s a job.”

  I tried once again. “I had a friend who worked there. She said—”

  “Like I said.” And then he looked at his watch. “It’s a job. Yo, Big Baby, if we’re gonna make that concert on time, you might wanna get dressed.” Before he came, Sarah had spent an hour picking out her clothes and putting on makeup. She even asked if she could try to squeeze her size tens in my size-seven imported leather boots, to no avail. Too embarrassed to even look at me, all she could say was, “Okay.” Then walking to her room she said with a sad smile, “But I don’t care what you say, I don’t look like no Notorious B.I.G.!”

  I glared at him as he said, “Sure you don’t,” with his eyes fixed on my child’s behind, and then looked at me, shaking his reptilian face.

  When Sarah returned that night, I decided just how I had to talk to her about Mr. Aww-stin. I tried to put my words together carefully, making sure I got my point across without patronizing her. When she walked in the door, I said, “Can we talk?” and she said, “Not now, Cheryl.” She proceeded to walk into her room and lock her door; she did not come out the rest of the evening.

  The next morning she was in the kitchen eating breakfast and I said good morning in hopes that she would initiate the discussion.

  “We broke up last night.”

  “What happened?”

  “I, umm . . .” And then she stared at the microwave pizza on her plate and balanced the Coors can on her knee. “I didn’t like the way he talked to you, so I told him to go to hell.”

  I was astonished. I pulled up a chair, sat beside her, and said, “But why, honey?” knowing all along that I wanted to kiss her for making the decision.

  “’Cause he was in here acting like he was all that and it was just . . . I don’t know. Disrespectful and shit, I guess.”

  “Well, darling, if that’s what you wanted to do. He seemed like a nice enough kid to me. He was a little abrupt and misdirected, but I’m sure it was because he was nervous.”

  With a sarcastic smile she said, “Yeah, nervous. That’s what it was.”

  I went back in my room to watch Good Morning America because they were running a feature story on a guy from Miami who was due to be electrocuted and I’d read about the case in the newspaper. Brandon had actually worked at the crime scene and gave me a few of the gory details. Then I heard the phone ring. Before I could reach for it, Sarah was saying hello in the kitchen.

  “What? Fuck you! Well, that’s yo problem. What? No, see, you don’t disrespect me like that.”

  I was shocked. Had she really quit him because of—

  “Nigga, please, that bitch was all over you last night, and no, you were not blitzed. Nobody had to tell me anything, ‘cause I saw her. What? That was you, fool! How many niggas look like . . . That was you, Austin! I guess now my eyes lying too?”

  When I went to Atlanta the following week with Brandon, I was concerned about my daughter and hoped she would be okay while I was away. I felt guilty dating a man only a few years older than she was, and even talked myself out of going more than a few times. But then knowing my daughter, who always had a problem sharing her feelings, I thought a little distance might do both of us some good.

  Once in Atlanta, I read in the newspaper about a special taping of The Phil Donahue Show in the CNN Center. I wasn’t a fan of the show but I noticed that the controversial murder case from south Florida would be one of the topics of the show that week. When I shared that with Brandon he made a few phone calls to friends he knew in the Sheriff’s Department and was able to get a security clearance and a couple of complimentary tickets.

  Once inside the studio, I was shocked by the number of people who’d actually shown up. Everything looked like it does on the television except the set seemed a lot smaller. The topic that day was the death penalty and we could hear people discussing it all around us as we walked around the multimedia, state-of-the-art complex. In a hot dog line a lady with very dark roots, no eyebrows, and a tight halter top talked about how it wasn’t a deterrent to crime. In the bathroom another lady repeated the eye-for-an-eye axiom from the Old Testament. And as we took our seats, a black man who looked like he was in the Nation of Islam sat beside us and told his friend loud enough for all to overhear the percentage of black men on death row. He knew statisically how many black men were executed for killing whites and how many white women were ever put on death row for killing a black man. “Did you know that ninety-eight percent of men on death row for rape are black men who raped white women!”

  Phil walked in before they started taping. The room was buzzing as a few people said, “There he is! It’s him,” and all heads turned toward the middle-aged talk-show host with the signature white hair.

  “You having a good time so far? You like that seat?” Brandon asked me, thinking I was annoyed by the facts being spewed by the Muslim in the next seat, who then started telling his friend and whoever else would listen just how electrocutions were against the will of Allah.

  “I’m fine,” I said, looking at the bright lights over the makeshift stage and leaning my head on Brandon’s shoulder.

  “Y’awll just wait,” the brother repeated as he tapped his finger in the air as if he were tapping on a door. “Wait till I get my chance to speak. I’m going to tell them how it tis. You can kill the man, but you can’t kill the truth, my brother. Truth lives on. The truth shall never perish,” he said, shaking his head and then tapping his fist on his thigh.

  I noticed Phil with his wife, Mario Thomas, on the floor level speaking to a few members of the audience and then talking to his staff. And then from nowhere it seemed, he appeared like a bright light in a tunnel. He was in the midst of and head and shoulders above about five other people and he looked stunning. If Hollywood had directed the moment it would not have been more memorable. For the first time in more than twenty years I saw Henry Louis Davis in the flesh. When he walked out, although he was a senator, he looked presidential. His staffers were talking to him and showing him color-coded index cards, but he seemed more concerned with looking into the crowd. I’d told Brandon I knew him from high school, but I never told him just how well I knew him. As his eye scanned the crowd, he looked right at me, but then his attention was diverted by a lady holding her face and stammering as if he were one of the Beatles.

  “Well, look who showed up,” Brandon said, patting me on the knee. “Your schoolmate. Can you see him?”

  As I moved my leg I didn’t want to tell Brandon about the relationship Henry and I had shared because I didn’t want him either to think I was full of it or feel I was comparing him in some way to a childhood boyfriend. I also feared that if he knew me as well as I thought he was starting to, when he asked me about him, he’d see just how deep the feelings ran.

  “Yeah, I see him,” I replied with nonchalance.

  “Do you think he remembers you?”

  “It’s been a while. I don’t know.” Henry ignored his staffers and started talking to peopl
e who were near the stage. A few came over with cameras and asked him to pose for pictures or to sign various objects for them. Then someone in the audience called out his name and said, “Over here.” Even from sixteen rows up, I could see this was what he lived for. He went to the young lady who’d screamed out his name and shook her hand as her friend searched for something to write with. After signing his name, he walked up the next row and started talking to people as if he’d known them for years. Women were especially excited to pose with Henry and allowed their husbands or boyfriends to take their picture with the first African-American senator from the deep South since Reconstruction.

  He walked up to the fourth level and I was nervous and excited. What would I say to him? I had no idea. I knew he had to go on TV, so I didn’t want to startle him, but then I thought, What if he doesn’t even remember me? As he walked up to row eight, he was halfway up to us and I could feel tumbleweeds rolling in my throat.

  “Cheryl, looks like he’s gonna come up here, so you’ll get to see him again after all,” Brandon said with a smile. I had no idea what to do. I started worrying about my makeup, but I didn’t want Brandon to think I was trying to get cute for Henry. And then I thought, What the hell, and I reached in my purse for my compact. As I flipped it open and reapplied my face, Brandon laughed and said, “Well, check you out.” I could care less since he was on mute.

  Then the brother from the Nation on my right stood up and said, “Mr. Davis! Senator! My brother! Can I have a minute with you? Can you explain why since 1990, eighty white convicted death row felons have been exonerated! Why the death penalty is just court-sanctioned genocide!” He spoke so loud every head in our section turned to his direction. “Yo! Can I get a minute?”

  Henry looked at him with that smile I knew so well and then held up two fingers to indicate that he’d be with him momentarily. Then he glanced at me, or at least I thought he did. As I put my compact away, there was a panic riot in my chest. This man whom I’d fallen asleep thinking about most nights of my life was only four steps away from our level. And then I saw her. I’d seen her on television a couple of times, and while I hated to admit it, Leslie Davis was even more beautiful in person. She appeared to be two or three years older than he, but other than that, she looked like a television reporter dressed in a clearly expensive aubergine pin-striped suit. She called his name with a smile on her face and stepped down two steps so they could speak. Then Henry looked at Leslie’s watch as a strawberry-blonde staffer huddled with them. Henry squinted his eyes as he looked in our direction when the Muslim to the right of me stood up again, waving his arms fanatically.