Her words caused a burst of excitement to rise up in him as he stood there sucking on his finger as if it were a red-and-white peppermint stick.
“Penda, are you sure? You won’t let proceedings get started and then call a stop to it?” he asked, now hitting the up arrow on the phone to make sure he’d hear her response.
“I said, I’m agreeing to what you’ve wanted all along, legal disentanglement from me. I just want that property, and then I’m leaving the area, maybe for good.”
“Wait a minute, I hope this isn’t about you going up to Portland to live in some commune with some two-bit, washed-out hippie.” He couldn’t restrain himself though he knew it was none of his business, there was always something so natural and ordinary and stable about Penda living so close.
“I thought I told you that you don’t control me, ever, married or not, so I don’t give a shit what you think, you go try to control Verdi. Which reminds me, why I really called, because believe it or not, I didn’t call you to tell you about the divorce, I was going to surprise you and just have the papers served on your sixtieth birthday.” She laughed her husky laugh. “Just that hearing your voice and I couldn’t resist telling you about the divorce myself. Anyhow I really wanted to find out what happened to Verdi’s family over there on Sansom Street?”
“What are you talking about, Penda?”
“You know my niece and her three girls moved over there, lovely block, I must say—”
“Yeah, what about Verdi’s family?” he cut her off.
“Say excuse me, Rowe.”
“Penda, please.”
“Look, you are going to respect me.”
“Excuse me, Penda, now please, what were you saying?”
“I just spoke to my niece and she said something happened in that house, an ambulance took somebody out this evening, not long ago. Justine thinks it was the aunt. Knows it wasn’t Verdi though because she saw her rushing half-hysterically into somebody’s car and taking off behind the ambulance.”
“Whose car?” Rowe’s voice was tight as he exchanged the speakerphone for the cordless attachment and took measured steps into the bedroom, hardly breathing. He’d realized now that he’d seen them when he sat on the bed and looked into her closet, didn’t want his brain to register that he’d seen them there. He was in her closet now, looking at the floor where there should be a bare space, where her gym sneakers sat boldly laughing at him right in his face.
“Sad. I do remember how close they all were,” Penda went on. “And I also remember the aunt actually coming down to visit with me after that whole fiasco of you moving out to say how sorry she was about the way things had turned out with you and Verdi, but that Verdi was a good girl and she hoped I could find peace with the situation as she and her daughter were trying to do because it was all so disturbing to them too. I must say I’ll never forget that. That took a special breed of class.”
Rowe wasn’t hearing any of this, just stood there in Verdi’s closet while her sneakers mocked him. “Penda, please. I asked you about the car, whose car, Penda, I’m being polite, please tell me whose motherfucking car?”
“Rowe, calm down. Why are you losing control like this? I mean can’t the poor woman get in a car with someone and you not know who it is?”
“Penda, please.” Now he was begging, feeling as if his scalp was going to choke the neurons right from his brain, that’s how tight it was right now.
“You really need to get a grip, I guess you must be beside yourself since Johnson’s back in town.”
“What did you say?”
She realized then that he was hearing this news for the very first time. She got quiet then. They both did as they listened to each other’s hard breaths. And though this could have been Penda’s finest moment of revenge, she could have let go a series of racking, convulsive laughs like the evil witch who’d just cast a spell, she didn’t. She just fell silent and Rowe even detected a bit of pity in the silence now.
“I’m sorry, Rowe. Honestly. I thought you knew.” But then she was talking to dead air because he’d hurled the phone across the room, and now he punched into the air, cursing Johnson, Verdi, Kitt, Penda, his depraved sisters, his dead mother; he ran into the kitchen, flung the pot of half-boiled pasta across the room, crashed over the widemouthed urn with the two dozen startling red roses, just stood then and watched the waters mixing, the pasta’s, the roses’, and listened to the beep beep beep of the phone off the hook.
He grabbed his keys. Moved through the house like a derailing train knocking over chairs, books, pictures off the shelves. No wonder she’d been so happy, so moody. She’d been fucking around, with Johnson. With. Johnson. He was out the front door. He’d find him. Find her. How dare they do this to him? He understood now the rage that could propel a man to commit murder with his bare fucking hands. Let that rage take him over as he ran to get to his car.
Seventeen
Posie would live at least through the night. They didn’t know how badly her heart had been damaged, whether she’d also suffered a stroke, but she was on a ventilator now, she was medicated, reasonably comfortable, for right now, she would live. And they were beginning to disassemble themselves from the waiting room, the faithfuls from Sansom Street who’d jumped in their cars and followed the ambulance down here to Mercy to give Kitt emotional support—though if Posie had been given a choice she would have insisted on the University Hospital, she so swore by the University Hospital, called it her hospital the way people claimed churches. So Kitt’s neighbors sighed out, “Thank you, Lord,” and squeezed Kitt’s shoulder, and reassured her that they were there for her, whatever she needed, don’t hesitate. And finally Hawkins said good night, as did Leanne from next door, and Kitt waved them away expressing her gratitude for their kindness, said that she wasn’t going anywhere though, that she’d secured Sage with the Whitney girls down the street, and she was just calling this waiting room her home until her mother was completely out of the woods. And Verdi said she’d share a couch in the waiting room too; she’d already called her parents and they were taking the first flight they could get booked on, a night owl; Hortense had already called back with her efficient self and said that they’d rent a car at the airport and be rolling into the parking lot by one o’clock in the morning. So Verdi insisted she’d hang out there too, but she hadn’t been able to get through to Rowe, hadn’t told him about her auntie, that her parents were on the way, that they would spend the night with them. The phone was off the hook and it was almost ten and she was sure he must be out of his skull with worry. She needed to go home, she said, but she’d be back in time to greet her parents, she’d borrow Rowe’s car and be right back. And now it was just Verdi and Johnson and Kitt.
The lightly paneled walls in this waiting room gave off the scent of oil soap, and the fluorescent ceiling lights diffused a buzzing sound that streamed down with the lights, and the three were silent with their heads lowered: Kitt with her eyes closed no doubt praying for her mother’s total recovery, and if not that then at least for Peace that surpasses all understanding; Johnson’s and Verdi’s eyes were on each other as they raised their heads slightly and now Johnson looked at Verdi with his eyebrow cocked.
Johnson used to look at Verdi like that often during the years when they were so totally fused. Strategically, that one eyebrow with the deep furrow would shoot up higher than the other if they were maybe in a packed room, a party, a lecture, and suddenly her appetite for him would become engorged, her feeling of emptiness so expandable and he’d look at her with that eyebrow darted and she’d know he was feeling exactly as she was, and they’d do signals with their bodies motioning toward the exit and then fade into the crowd and then out of the room, giggling and silly until they could get on the other side of the closed door and a seriousness would charge the air between them as they’d proceed to shift and grind and fill each other up. And after they’d started popping the syringe under their skin, and Johnson would walk into a place whe
re Verdi was, he’d raise his eyebrow that same way to let her know that he’d just copped their stuff, that it was on, all the way live, so say your good-byes and let’s go do it, Verdi Mae, is what that eyebrow would say. And just for a flash as she looked at him in this waiting room, looked at the upside-down U his eyebrow made, her brain was confused, understandably so considering the onslaught of impulses her brain had had to ferret out and redirect to new emotional levels when she thought that her aunt was dead. And in her confusion she didn’t recognize the eyebrow as Johnson simply asking, well, are you ready, Verdi? Should I be the one to drive you home or what? But instead she misread his face as an invitation, an enticement to tie up their arms, to just dibble and dabble, just hit it and go into a nod one more time just to see if it would still be as sweet as it once was. And when her brain straightened out the confusion, it only took a millisecond really, she gasped because in that instant of misunderstanding that felt like an eternity to her, she hadn’t recoiled in horror, neither had she felt the need to vomit, nor fall to her knees and call on Jesus to lead her not into temptation. She’d felt instead a dot of desire to pop her vein, felt it as a heat in the recesses of her being, maybe a speck of glowing charcoal that had disguised itself all these years as immutable ash but that still held the memory of how lavishly the fire burned right there during the days when she tasted hell.
She just stood in the middle of the waiting room, her hand against her throat unable to cough or gag or breathe, so stunned was she by how favorably she’d reacted to the misinterpretation of what Johnson’s out-of-sync eyebrow meant. She could hear Johnson’s voice coming from some remote place, as if she’d already been swallowed up by that dot of desire that had gone monstrous, dragonlike.
“Are you, okay? Verdi? Verdi? What’s wrong?” Johnson said, his voice going right in her ear now as he shook her gently.
“I’m fine,” she said finally, swallowing hard to unclog her ears that seemed to be reacting to a sudden change in altitude, trying to take all of Johnson’s voice inside of her. “I’m going to go down out front and hail a cab and run home, and I’ll be right back,” she said.
“Cabs in short supply out there this time of night, girl,” Kitt said, her tone heavy, her eyes darkening toward Verdi, somewhat, shaded with resentment that she’d sat on the porch gearing all of her attention to what might happen to Verdi and Johnson and Rowe when that storm cloud settling in her stomach was really meant for her to direct her attention toward her mother. “You not at the University Hospital, you in West Philly at Mercy, I don’t know what makes you think you can just wave your little old hand and a cab’s gonna appear.” Kitt’s voice was shaking and she was struggling with this new sensation of being totally alone once Verdi and Johnson left the waiting room, of being needy.
“Come on now, Verdi, don’t be ridiculous, you know I’ll take you,” Johnson offered in a rush. “Please, Verdi, let me take you.”
“No, no,” she insisted, still swallowing, still patting her chest.
“Verdi Mae, let the man take you!” Kitt said, snapping it out like a Doberman taking off somebody’s hand. “You claim it’s not a problem, Johnson being around you so goddamned much. So let him take you the hell home, let him stand in the middle of your living room while you reintroduce him to Rowe. Stop being so coy acting for once in your life; be a woman.” She didn’t know where that came from nor did anybody else as a hush took over the waiting room then Verdi started to cry.
Johnson took Verdi in his arms. “Shh, it’s okay,” he said.
“She doesn’t have to be so mean to me,” Verdi cried into the hollow between Johnson’s shoulder and his neck.
“Kitt’s upset, Verdi, I mean, um, it is her mother.”
“It is, it is,” Verdi sobbed. “I know it is. I’m being so selfish, Kitt, I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry.”
Kitt didn’t respond. Just held her face like stone and folded her arms tightly across her chest and shrugged her shoulders. There were too many sensations climbing in her now, each trying to outclaw the other: terror that her mother might die, gratitude that so far she hadn’t, envy that Verdi always got everything she needed, always; she couldn’t also allow this sensation of feeling needy, alone, to further complicate the range of feelings.
Verdi and Johnson were on their way out of the lounge door, and Verdi was sniffling and sounding like the little girl Kitt would always rush to protect, and now Verdi’s childlike sounds were tugging at Kitt too and making her feel guilty and now she felt the urge to at least accept Verdi’s apology because given what had just happened to her mother there was no predicting when would be the last time she’d hear the voices of the few people she truly loved. “I forgive you.” She sniped it out but at least she said it. And it was enough for Verdi who untangled herself from Johnson and ran to her cousin and now they both cried, hugged up in each other’s arms.
Eighteen
The maroon Grand Am was familiar to Johnson now as he slid in behind the wheel. He could adjust the radio without looking, sprinkle the windshield with cleaning fluid minus all the fumbling for the controls, the sideview mirrors were set to his liking; it was as if this was his car as much as he’d driven it since he’d been in Philadelphia. Though certainly not a car he would have selected himself had he gone into a dealership and stood in the middle of a showroom and watched the salesmen in their too-tight suits rush him because everyone knew how easy it was to exploit a black man buying a new car, the Grand Am had a nonpretentious homeyness about it, almost as if it should be his, with a four-year note attached, not the short-term monthly rental fee.
Verdi should be his too, he confirmed to himself all over again as he glanced at her snapping her seat belt into the silver clasp. She should be more than these borrowed hours he was allotted with her where if they were in public he couldn’t even hold her though sometimes the desire to take her head against his chest was so intense that his shoulders ached. And now it was more than his shoulders that were aching, it was all of him because his time in Philadelphia was just about up. The season for their togetherness was slipping through his fingers though he’d cupped his hands, tried to hold on to their contents, their time, but what hadn’t oozed out through the spaces between his fingers was quickly evaporating; seeping, or drying up, either way his hands were almost empty of this, their season, and he hadn’t even been with her in a way where he could take his time, fully express the mountain that had sprouted over his heart because his heart alone couldn’t hold how he felt, hadn’t been with her purely and honestly without the complications and the guilt that her ties to Rowe kept in the air between them.
They had only driven a few blocks and he could tell by the rhythmic spaces in her breathing that she was falling asleep. “Watch your neck, baby,” he whispered as her head dropped forward and then she sat up with a jolt. “Put the seat back, go ahead and relax before you give yourself whiplash.”
She reclined the seat and nestled against the fabric upholstery and went into a quiet snore, and Johnson was impatient for the light to change so that he could just drop her off at her house, or at least at the corner of her house. He tightened his hand around the steering wheel at the thought of having to drop her off to Rowe, couldn’t get around that it seemed, from twenty years ago until now he was still dropping her off at Rowe’s feet.
He looked over at Verdi sleeping so soundly now. He relaxed his hand on the steering wheel as right then, instead of keeping straight on Chestnut Street just ten more blocks to turn to go where he’d drop Verdi off on the other corner so that Rowe wouldn’t see that he, Johnson, was the driver of the car, he turned instead, turned on red and went north, went directly to City Avenue, to the modest leased apartment with the slightly tattered tweeded couch that was his for only one more week.
He just sat in the car once he pulled into the blackened parking lot in the space that had become familiar to him too. He listened to Verdi’s sleeping breaths and thought about what he should do if she woke and
tried to claw his eyes out for being so audacious as to bring her here. He guessed that wouldn’t happen though. Verdi had always been so easily led down paths she knew were wrong, that had always excited him about her; he’d loved her for that, and now he was acknowledging for the first time, he’d hated her too, hated her for not holding on to her right mind, for not resisting more, for not tying a rope to a tree and then hurling him the other end so that he could have climbed out of the cesspool he’d made of his life; he did hate her for that, for being so weak.
He remembered Posie’s words then when she’d apologized to him for putting him on a pedestal and then hating him for falling from a place where he had no business being anyhow. It was as if he could hear Posie in this car, in his ear, telling him that he owed Verdi such an apology too.
And now that he’d thought of Posie in that context he allowed himself to feel the terror he’d put a cap on while he was trying to be strong for Verdi and Kitt. Damn. Posie. “Please don’t die,” he said out loud. He was rushed with an onslaught almost as if it was his own mother for whom he’d returned too late to say good-bye. He gritted his teeth to hold it back, but he couldn’t hold it back and he let go a cracked sob, and then another one and he covered his face in his hands and it was that sound that startled Verdi awake as she sat up and looked around confounded, trying to see where the hell they were.
“Johnson, Johnson, what is it?” she asked frantically as she squinted through the darkness and found his arm and shook it. “Is it my auntie? Tell me, Johnson, what’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer, stretched across the bucket seat and found her mouth instead, could taste his own salty tears running into her mouth as he covered her lips with his own, she didn’t resist, pushed back with her mouth, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and said, “Come on, baby, come on, let’s go inside.”
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