Destination Wedding

by Jacqueline J. Holness

  I was surprised that I laughed along with everyone else as we watched the movie.

  “See purrrty, I knew you would laugh.” Wendall’s lips barely grazed my ear, but it was enough to make me shiver. I hoped he hadn’t seen that. “You look like you haven’t laughed in a while.”

  After the movie was over, he walked me to my car. “So I noticed that black women in Atlanta do one of three things if they are still single in their mid-thirties,” Wendell stated. “And if one of those doesn’t work, they get depressed, bitter about men, and eat up erethang.”

  I started to unleash on him, but I did spend all of December depressed, feeling bitter about men, and eating fast food. So I opted to hear him out.

  “What three things?” But I did start rolling my eyes and curling up my lips in preparation for his answer.

  “Either they start working a bunch of overtime like it’s the end of the world. Or start being a church lady up in church every time the doors open. They at Bible Study. Prayer Meeting. Feeding the homeless. Or they start running marathons here and in other cities and countries, and changing their diet. Which one of those describes you, purrrty?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You could be right,” I replied, thinking about myself and my friends. “But I’m not going to tell you which category I could be in.”

  “That’s cool, because you won’t be single much longer anyway—”

  “What?” I interrupted, but he kept on talking.

  “So purrrty, I hope you had a good enough time to want to go out again. I’m off on Mondays and Tuesdays, but you look like you have a corporate job, so those days probably don’t work for you. But I would be honored to take you to lunch on Monday if you could make the time,” he said, stringing the words together like a rehearsed pitch.

  “Sounds like I make you nervous,” I said, finally getting a chance to speak. “I can meet you for lunch on Monday. Why don’t you pick the place, since that’s your specialty?”

  “What kind of food do you like?”

  “Puerto Rican food is my favorite,” I said, figuring he wouldn’t know of any Puerto Rican restaurants in town.

  “Hey, one of my chef buddies owns a Puerto Rican restaurant in Norcross. Is that close to where you work?” he said.

  “I can swing it,” I said, surprised again that he knew of a Puerto Rican restaurant. “It’s not too far away. What’s the name of the restaurant?”

  “Manolo’s,” he said. “Bet you didn’t think a country boy like me knew about an international restaurant?”

  “I guess I didn’t,” I said with a smile.

  He hugged me then. “Alright purrrty, gotta head home. A long day at the restaurant tomorrow so I gotta say goodnight. Call me when you get home so that I know you made it.”

  “Okay,” I said, keeping my arms at my side.

  He wasn’t suave and sophisticated like Dexter, but I had to admit he was a good guy. Not my type, though. But at least I had something to report to the girls.

  Destination Wedding Meeting #15

  Since Whitney offered to host their March meeting, Senalda, Mimi and Jarena ventured back to Henry County.

  “Every time I come to your house, I feel like I’m taking a day trip,” Senalda said as the women gathered their goodies to take to the den.

  “It makes me feel like I’m about to drive to Vidalia,” Jarena said.

  “Country girl,” Senalda said with a laugh.

  “Boogie or Bougie Down Bronx, in your case,” Jarena threw out with a faux New York accent. The women cackled as they placed the food on a table and sat down on the couches and floor.

  “So Mimi, how is married life?” Senalda asked, her voice rising in anticipation.

  “Great,” Mimi replied, as she snacked on chips.

  “I still can’t believe Mimi is married to a doctor of all things!” Senalda said with enthusiasm. “And that you beat me to the altar!”

  Mimi half-smiled while continuing to stuff chips into her mouth like the thoughts she wanted to push down. Richie stuck his head inside the room then, halting Senalda’s interrogation. Mimi had never been happier to see her program buddy.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, ladies, but I want your opinion on something,” he said. “Do you mind, Whit?”

  Whitney grimaced before replying. “Sure Richie, I guess so if y’all don’t mind.”

  “What’s up, Richie?” Jarena said, looking in his direction.

  “I don’t know if Whit told you, but I’m getting ready for my first photography show next Friday,” he announced.

  “I knew you took pictures,” Jarena said, “but I didn’t know you were serious enough to have a show.”

  Senalda raised an eyebrow and locked eyes with Whitney.

  “I didn’t know I was that serious until recently,” Richie admitted. “But some of my photographs are going to be displayed at an art gallery in Castleberry Hills.”

  “Congratulations!” Jarena said.

  “Thank you,” Richie said. “So would you ladies mind taking a few minutes to look at the photographs I’m thinking of displaying? I want to get your honest opinion.”

  In the basement, the women examined the framed photographs leaning against the walls.

  “You have a great eye, Richie,” Jarena noted. “You’re probably the first artsy doctor I’ve ever met.”

  “Ian’s artsy too,” Mimi said. “So there’s two of em.”

  His face aglow, Richie beamed at Mimi.

  “So do you think I should go with these photographs? I have more.”

  “They all really nice,” Mimi said. “I think you should use these ones.”

  “I agree,” Senalda said.

  Whitney was silent as the women praised Richie’s work.

  “Well, ladies, Whit is probably mad at me for keeping all of you down here this long, so I will let you get back to your meeting.”

  “Are we ready to head back upstairs?” Whitney said quickly without disagreeing with her husband.

  “Sure,” Jarena said. “Thanks again, Richie, for showing us your work. I want to come to the opening. Whitney, can you email the show info to all of us?”

  She mumbled, “Yes,” barely uttering anything else for the remainder of the meeting.

  CHAPTER 17

  April

  Whitney

  SINCE RICHIE WOULDN’T LISTEN to me, I decided to speak with his father about getting him to forget about his harebrained hobby. After his Christmas Day declaration that he was abandoning medicine to be a photographer, I managed to get him to agree to wait six months and really contemplate his decision before changing the course of the rest of our lives.

  But after his photography show earlier in the month, I knew he was still set on switching careers, if you can call photography a career. You can’t. In two months, our life was scheduled to implode if I didn’t do anything about it. So in the middle of the day, a day that I knew Richie didn’t have to be at the hospital until the evening shift, I met with Richie’s father at Grady. I was grateful my very important father-in-law had a last-minute opening in his busy schedule.

  I steadied myself in my navy Christian Louboutin pumps, took a quick look down at my pearls and Giorgio Armani business suit, shook my hair so that it cascaded straight down my back, and proceeded toward his office. But before I got there, the door opened and Dr. Brannon came toward me. He was one of the most handsome, distinguished gentlemen I had ever met, a caramel-brown older version of Richie, and his white hair only enhanced his coloring and features. I hoped Richie aged just like his father had.

  “Whitney, how are you, dear?” He kissed my cheek then took my hands in his, holding them for moment.

  “I’m well. How are you? Thank you for meeting with me.”

  “Anything for my beautiful daughter-in-law,” he said, closing his door behind him and pointing toward a cashew-colored leather armchair.

  “So what has got you so upset?” he said, as he sat down in the ma
tching armchair next to it and observed me through rimless glasses.

  “Dr. Brannon, I really respect you and Mrs. Brannon,” I began. “The both of you have always been so nice to me and you welcomed me into your family since the day we met, but—”

  “What is it, Whitney?” he said, interrupting me. “Just say it.”

  “Okaaay,” I said, slowly at first before letting the words tumble out. I filled him in on what happened on Christmas and told him about Richie’s showing.

  “I wish you had told me about this sooner,” he said, taking off his glasses with his right hand and placing his left on his now wrinkled forehead.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I remained silent.

  “I guess my son really does take after his mother,” he finally said, shifting in his seat and peering out of the bay window that gave a privileged panoramic view of the city.

  “You mean his real mother?”

  “How much has Richie told you about my first wife?” He turned back to face me.

  “Richie told me his mother left the family when he was a little boy and moved to Costa Rica,” I said. “I know he has seen her once since then. We invited her to the wedding, but she couldn’t come because she was sick. He doesn’t really talk about her.”

  “That is the abridged version of the story, my dear. Viola left us because she wanted to be a painter and no longer wanted to be a wife and mother. I tried to convince her to stay, but after a while, I realized that she couldn’t be the woman I needed her to be, and we divorced.”

  “Richie never told me all that,” I said softly.

  “From the time he was a little boy, he has reminded me of Viola. The way he looks at life. How he thinks. He asked me for a pretty fancy camera when he was ten. He was always taking photographs of the family or at family gatherings. When he was a senior in high school, he told me he wanted to go to an art school in New York. I told him that he if went to art school, I wasn’t going to pay for it, and he decided to go to Morehouse instead. After that, I never heard any more about it, and I thought he had outgrown all of that.”

  I still didn’t say anything, and Dr. Brannon continued.

  “I’ll have a talk with him.” He put his glasses back on and placed his hands on his knees.

  “What are you going to say? Threatening to not pay for his education won’t work now.”

  “Telling him how much it hurt when Viola left might,” he said while getting up.

  “He isn’t leaving me and the twins,” I said, wondering where he was going. He arrived at his desk and pulled out an old, tattered photograph from a drawer.

  “See this photo?” he said as he handed it to me. I took it carefully, afraid it would disintegrate, it was so paper-thin. It was a yellowed photograph of Dr. Brannon dressed in a ’70s outfit. He was hugging a very light-skinned woman with thigh-high boots, a dress that stopped at the top of her thighs, clunky hoop earrings and a huge Afro. A less curvy Pam Grier she was.

  “That’s Richie’s mother,” he said.

  I had always assumed that Richie got his coloring from his mother, and I was right. And she was as gorgeous as Dr. Brannon was handsome. Something about how she pushed her hips out although she was in an embrace showed me her wild streak. I couldn’t see her being Dr. Brannon’s wife, though.

  “That was the night we met,” he said with a sentimental smile. “It was our junior year. She was at Spelman. I was at Morehouse. She was the finest woman I had ever seen. Our parents were disappointed when she got pregnant with Richie a few months later, but I knew from that first night I was going to marry her anyway. I’m not sure she really wanted to marry me so soon or at all, but that is what you did at the time.”

  “Did you see it coming?” I asked.

  “You mean did I know she was going to leave me eventually?”

  I nodded.

  “I guess I did,” he said, as tears glossed over his eyes. “You’re the first person I ever admitted that to. Trying to make her stay was hard. One day, I came home from work and she was gone. She had left Richie at my sister’s house.”

  “Dr. Brannon, Richie never said anything about wanting to leave me,” I reassured myself as well as him. “He only wants to switch careers.”

  “Don’t you worry about it,” he said, wiping away tears with his hands and returning to his more controlled demeanor. “It’s time I tell your husband the truth about his mother. He won’t break your heart the way his mother did mine. I’ll see to that.”

  I realized that I was the one who needed to threaten to leave this coddled trust-fund baby I called my husband. Maybe then he would realize what was at stake.

  Destination Wedding Meeting #16

  Senalda volunteered to host April’s meeting at her home, but 45 minutes before her friends were scheduled to arrive, Wendell called with an urgent request.

  “Hey purrrty,” he said. “I really need your help. I thought I was gonna be able to stay at home with Kailen, but I got called into work because one of the other chefs got sick. Can I drop her off at your house and pick her up after work?”

  She had only met his three-year-old daughter once, but she said yes anyway. Kailen was only with her dad Mondays and Tuesdays and the occasional weekends.

  She looked around, wondering if she needed to childproof her home somehow. It occurred to her then that if she continued seeing Wendell, she could eventually become a stepmother.

  Unlike with Dexter, who fit so perfectly in her life, dating Wendell was an adjustment. Based on his small apartment near Little Five Points where many of Atlanta’s artists, healthy-eating advocates, and drug users hung out, Senalda concluded that she earned significantly more than he did. He had attended Bethune-Cookman College but dropped out when his grandmother, who raised him, passed away. He later graduated from a culinary school in Atlanta. He drove a black Honda Accord—a nice one, but still a Honda. And he had an ex-girlfriend, who was the mother of his child.

  But Wendell did make her laugh unlike any man she had ever dated, including Dexter. And he adored her and didn’t mind telling her so regularly. He took her to lunch twice a week, and if he wasn’t too tired on Saturday night after he got off of work and didn’t have Kailen, they saw each other again.

  Since she had very little experience with children, she wondered what she would do with his child until at least 11 p.m. Luckily, she discovered she had the Cartoon Network, deciding to park the child in front of her living room television. She hoped her friends wouldn’t mind the additional company. As she straightened her home, her doorbell rang.

  “Hey purrrty,” Wendell said, holding Kailen on his side. She looked just like him, a brown-skinned chubby girl with thick pigtails. “Kailen, you be good for Miss purrrty while Daddy is cooking, okay?”

  She nodded, her eyelids lowering.

  “Kailen, I’m so happy you’ve come to visit me,” Senalda said, holding her arms out. “Do you want to watch TV with me?”

  She just looked at Senalda for a moment before moving toward her. Senalda took her in her arms, straightening her pink T-shirt to fully cover the child’s rotund belly. She also got Kailen’s Princess Tiana backpack with her snacks and pajamas in it from Wendell.

  “She’ll be knocked out before you know it,” Wendell said, reaching over and kissing Senalda on the cheek. “Thanks. When are your friends coming over?”

  As if on cue, Jarena pulled into her driveway.

  “I would love to speak to them, but I gotta get to the restaurant,” he said.

  “You better get there fast before your boss gets on you,” Senalda said, giving him a hug.

  “We look like a family,” he said while touching her cheek. “Okay, gotta go. Bye bye Kailen. Bye purrrty baby.”

  He kissed Kailen and darted to his car.

  “Who was that, and who is this little cutie?” Jarena said.

  “That was Wendell the chef, and this is Wendell’s daughter. Can you say hello, Kailen?”

  Kailen laid her head on Sen
alda’s shoulder and hugged her tighter.

  “Awww, look at you looking like a mother,” Jarena said.

  “Really? Stop!” Senalda said with a smile. “So you don’t mind that we have another girl for our meeting?”

  “Of course not,” she said, “Jarena loves the kids.”

  Senalda put Kailen and her backpack on the couch, sitting down next to her while Jarena sat on Senalda’s other side.

  “Obviously, things between you and Wendell are going well. He trusts you with his daughter. That’s huge,” Jarena said.

  “Yeah, he’s really sweet,” Senalda said.

  “So where is this going?”

  “Let’s talk in the kitchen,” Senalda said, nodding her head toward the child.

  The two sat at Senalda’s island where she could watch Kailen while speaking privately.

  “I like him a lot, but it’s hard to think about us together long-term,” Senalda said, glad for the chance to air out her thoughts. She explained her thoughts to Jarena.

  “You are really trippin’,” Jarena hissed. “Dexter was bisexual or gay, and he didn’t even tell you until he had to… Senalda, take it from me, if someone demonstrates that he loves you and you love him back, don’t walk away from it just because it’s going to be an adjustment. Love is an adjustment.”

  During the time she had been seeing Barry again, it dawned on Jarena that part of the reason she didn’t accept his proposal back then was that she didn’t think she could go after her career and still have the time and energy to be married. Now that she was successfully balancing ministry, school, and a business, she realized it was a mistake in judgment she would probably regret for the rest of her life. The most successful women were able to pursue their careers and be happily married.

  “Is this your minister talk or are you speaking from experience?” Senalda said, raising her eyebrows. “You’re the only one of us that hasn’t had a relationship disaster since we started doing this project. As far as we know, you haven’t even been on a date!”

  Jarena’s phone beeped then. “It’s Mimi.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Sorry cldn’t make the meeting. Ian and I are in NYC for the weekend. Last-minute romantic getaway!” Jarena read.