Never Knew Love Like This Before

by Denise Campbell

  She did want a baby—exactly what other women wanted. She didn’t want to miss out on her chance at motherhood, but she knew she didn’t want to have a baby without a husband, even though many of her friends were doing it. Lord knows, she hadn’t forgotten how hard her mother had struggled to raise her by herself. And now to find some snake, claiming to be her father, had crawled from beneath a rock thirty-four years after the fact, it was just too much to take right now!

  Hell to the twentieth degree no! If she was married and settled, perhaps she’d feel different. But she kind of felt like it was this absent father’s fault in the first place. If he’d stuck around, she’d know how to act with men and how not to be so independent. All she knew was being strong like her mother. Even though she had a good income, she didn’t want to be responsible for a child without benefits of a mate.

  She paused. Maybe, she was being a bitch about Shana’s pregnancy. Maybe she was jealous. Jealous of Shana? Deni found the thought too unsettling.

  Chapter 2

  Coleman

  August 29, 2005,

  Category Five Storm

  Breaking news. Katrina is no longer just brewing in the Gulf. New Orleans residents are warned to evacuate. We’ve upgraded Katrina to a Category Five storm. Please evacuate New Orleans.

  As long as he lived, he would never forget how the winds sounded like a jazz riff with a woman moaning and giving birth at the bottom of a well. The winds of God’s choir were enraged; Mother Nature gone awry. Later, he regretted that he’d waited so late to get out. The next time, if there’d be a next time, when they said “run,” he would run.

  Faces drawn tight, fear etching every move they made, they’d thrown everything they could into his Ford Explorer.

  “Daddy, can I take my skateboard?” Britton had asked when they left their three-bedroom ranch brick house. “Can I take my Power Ranger too?”

  “Okay. Just one thing.”

  “You still gon’ buy me my own saxophone?” Britton gave Coleman a serious look.

  “Not now, Britton. We’ll talk about that later.”

  So Britton picked his metallic skateboard with the blue-black background bearing silver decals on it.

  “Daddy, let me get my blankie,” Blossom said. That was all Blossom wanted. That old faded, bedraggled baby blanket. He’d bought that blanket when she was a baby. Without her saying it, Coleman knew the blankie reminded Blossom of her vague memories and the smells of her mother who’d run off when she was three going on four.

  Most of all, he would have never believed that Katrina would take away the levees. He’d always remember the sounds of cars crashing through the air, the roar of the muddy waters roiled by Katrina, the drenched homes and neighborhoods. At the end of the storm, over eighteen hundred were confirmed dead. Until the day he died, the dreadful roar would haunt his nightmares.

  All his life he’d grown up hearing that a hurricane could hit New Orleans, but he didn’t believe it. That’s why he’d evacuated so late.

  For the last eight hours, his vision could only see the long trail of cars ahead of him and the ones behind him, on the Interstate 10, cars he presumed like his own, which were filled with fear. He hoped his Ford Explorer would make it to Los Angeles, which was his destination. For some reason, he felt called to go to LA. He heard this was a place a saxophonist like himself could always get work.

  After a while, surrounded by the darkening buffalo of clouds, everything looked as wavy as a mirage. His eyes began to water just when the cell phone rang, interrupting the deadly silence in the car. He recognized the number as that of fellow musician Malik’s.

  “Y’at, Blue?” In New Orleans, they used to say, “Where you at,” now it had been abbreviated to “Y’at?”

  “I’m still in New Orleans, but I’m trying to get me and my babies and my mother out of here.”

  “Man, the storm is coming in. I made it to my sister’s house in Baton Rouge. Where you headed?”

  His fellow musician friend Malik and everyone he knew had scattered to the four parts of the earth. Suddenly his cell phone blanked out. Blue clicked it shut.

  “I’m scared, Daddy,” Britton said.

  “Don’t worry.” Coleman didn’t feel so sure himself.

  His mother, whom everyone called Miss Johntrice, began to pray, holding her Bible to her lips. “Lord, please deliver us safely.” A devout Catholic, she also held her rosary beads to her lips and fingered them nervously. “This reminds me of the hurricane when I was a little girl and the bridge was blown out.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Coleman said absently, but his mind was on when they evacuated. “What happened?”

  “My mother went into labor and delivered my youngest sister, your Aunt Miracle.”

  “So that’s how Auntie got her name?”

  “That’s how most Black people got their name . . . Your daddy used to say that.”

  Coleman chuckled nervously, remembering his father who had taught him how to play the saxophone. His late father had been a musician too. His mother, with her genteel ways, was paraphrasing how her husband, the satyr, used to say it. “Niggaz get they name catch as catch can,” he used to say.

  Miss Johntrice added, “It was a miracle that any of us made it through other than by prayer.”

  “Daddy, do you think Mommy’s okay?” Blossom interrupted.

  “She’ll be all right.”

  Chapter 3

  Deni

  Los Angeles, California,

  Category Two Storm

  As she stared down at her mother’s faded sepia high school graduation picture, Deni tried to remember her. Because her mother, Esther, had always worked two jobs, which had afforded Deni the privilege of attending private Catholic school as a child, she’d spent most of her time over at Mama Ticey’s surrounded by a shipload of cousins. Although Esther had given birth to Deni when she was only seventeen, there were no remembrances of her mother ever being young and frivolous. Esther had been a stern, serious young woman. After Deni’s birth, she had been baptized as a Catholic and just about led the life of a nun.

  In spite of her relatives, Deni had been rather shielded as a child. She was a grown woman before she realized that the reason she’d worn the same two blouses every other day with her school uniform was that she had no other blouses. Her mother used to wash her blouses out by hand every night. Sifting through each precious sliver of memory of her mother—her hardworking mother—Deni knew her mother’s short existence had spanned so briefly because she lived on about four hours of sleep after Deni’s birth.

  Following Deni’s graduation from high school, her mother had a stroke and collapsed. Shortly thereafter, Esther died. So whenever Deni had wanted to give up throughout the years of struggle in undergraduate school, then later, law school, the specter of her mother’s life pushed her forward. She made it on grants, scholarships, and loans until she graduated.

  But thinking of her cousins, Shana and Shawn, it didn’t make sense how trifling they’d both turned out. Deni was raised in the same environment and managed to pull herself up by her bootstraps, so why couldn’t her cousins have done better?

  As far as Deni was concerned, they’d had a better chance at making it in life than she had. Shana and Shawn were both the pampered progeny of her Aunt Martha and Uncle Earl. They had had the luxury of two parents, something Deni had never known, as well as a live-in grandmother, Mama Ticey. She didn’t even know who her father was—that is until this letter came from this stranger alleging he was her biological father.

  In fact, the first three years of her life, Esther had lived with her mother, Mama Ticey, and Aunt Martha and Uncle Earl, who still lived together to this day.

  Deni and Shana and her twin brother had been born months apart and raised together in subtle competition. If Deni made an A on a paper in school, Aunt Martha was hell-bent that Shana would get an A, even if it meant doing the paper herself. It had always been assumed that Shana would go to college (even if Deni and
her mother, Esther, knew Shana was as learning challenged as a salt shaker), so when Shana got married to her high school sweetheart and began to produce baby after baby, Aunt Martha had been devastated.

  Deni knew in her heart how Aunt Martha felt. That it was Esther’s illegitimate daughter who’d turned out to be the family’s successful child. A Los Angeles County dependency court attorney, to boot. Deni, the one who lived in a four-bedroom, spotless condo in Santa Monica—how could she afford it by herself?—and drove that nice, expensive car? Hmm, mmm, mmm.

  To compensate for her deflated hopes and dreams for her daughter, Aunt Martha would make over Shana’s kids excessively. Especially in front of Deni. Her aunt even pretended to be pleased with Shana having so many children.

  “Oooh, my baby Shana has another little one in the oven,” she’d coo. “When are you going to get married and have some babies?” Aunt Martha would often chide Deni. “You aren’t getting any younger.”

  Remarks like this would set a conflagration smoldering in Deni’s heart. Didn’t her family know that if she could find a qualified African-American man—one with what she considered a comparable education—who didn’t already have a harem of women, she’d get married?

  Whoever she married would have to be someone of equivalent educational standing. Her former fiancé, Trent, had possessed the education, but he already had a full life, one too full of himself that there was not enough room for Deni. One that also included another woman, as she’d found out after her aborted wedding.

  The door cracked open, slanting a sliver of light into the darkened room. Deni was surprised to see Shana step into the room.

  “Hey, girl.” Shana averted her gaze from Deni. “Forget what I said. I’m just stressed out. Slammer is going to be the death of us all.”

  Deni couldn’t believe Shana was offering an apology. She knew how hard it was for her cousin to go against the grain of her proud nature, but she also knew that Shana had an ulterior motive. Shana was only making up so that Deni could post bail for her fraternal twin, Slammer. Still—

  “Hey, girl,” Deni conceded. This was the way they had always made up as children. In a seamless, language-without-words communion.

  Deni had an idea. “There’s this new restaurant called Masquerades down in the marina. Let’s run over there for dinner.”

  “I ain’t got no restaurant money.”

  “No, it’s on me.”

  Marina Del Rey

  The line was so long at Masquerades that it wound around the outside of the restaurant like a boa constrictor and contracted onto the pier.

  Besides the seafood being fresh, Deni had always loved how the waiters and waitresses wore masks, reminding you of the old Parisian masquerade parties. The sophisticated ambiance inside the oceanfront restaurant matched the celebratory atmosphere. Violin music decorated the air.

  While the two women waited, leaning against the balustrade, Deni looked out over at the ocean. The waves capped and curved into a dark undertow. The sky had an ethereal quality, as the pink penumbra of the sunset left a lurid track following its descent into the ocean. Seagulls screamed a requiem to one another as they dived onto the ocean’s surface, trying to catch fish. Turning away, Deni tried to make small talk.

  “Did you have the ultrasound or get those four-D sonogram pictures?” Deni knew about 4-D sonograms because a coworker named Ashley Winbleckler had brought in her sonogram pictures, which actually showed impressions of the baby’s face in the uterus.

  “No, I like to be surprised.”

  “What do you want—a girl or a boy?”

  Deni felt like a hypocrite, knowing that her first reaction had not been more diplomatic.

  Shana let out a sigh and shrugged her shoulders.

  “When is the baby due?”

  “About the first of the year.”

  Deni stopped talking and decided to let the conversation die. Shana just wasn’t on the same plateau with her.

  As the line inched its way into the inside vestibule of the restaurant, Deni noticed that they were standing in front of a full-length mirror. Furtively, Deni studied herself and her cousin’s reflections.

  Without a doubt, she was the better dressed of the two women, with her matching black leather pumps, her power suit, and designer purse. She wondered which one of them looked the oldest. In all fairness, though, Shana still had some of her former youthful looks in that her arms and legs were still slim.

  In fact, when she wasn’t pregnant, she surprisingly had retained the figure of a teenager. Deni studied how Shana’s back arched like a bow, her legs waddled, her hands placed in the small of her back.

  But still, with the stresses of childbearing, the only salient feature remaining about Shana’s face was her twin, blue-gray-flecked eyes. In her face, which had once been as lush and pretty as a mango, they had pronounced her to be a stunning beauty as a teen. Now, with the vestiges of all her pregnancies sagging at the corner, her face resembled a round cantaloupe. She wore her husband’s name tattooed on her neck. Deni cringed inside. Tacky.

  Even so, to talk to her, Deni felt she was still talking to the former teenager she had known. The irony of it all was that Shana seemed to be frozen in time, suspended somewhere psychologically at age nineteen or twenty, when she’d given birth to her first child. Deni decided then and there if she ever got married and had a baby, she would not vegetate and become stagnant as Shana had.

  Deni wanted to tell Shana how ghettoish the cornrows looked, and that the three earrings lining each earlobe were too “teenybopperish.” She thought of the jokes, “You know you’re ghetto when . . .” She itched to suggest that Deni shouldn’t wear the African-looking kente cloth if she ever went on an interview. And maybe she could have the tattoo Lionel removed from her neck. Not that Shana had ever intimated that she even wanted a job. But using her better judgment, Deni held her tongue. Why risk cracking this thin layer of peace temporarily sustained between them?

  Still, but, how could Shana stand her life? Deni began to muse over all the good things about her own life, such as her credit card, which was going to pay for whatever Shana selected and her lobster dinner, when she heard Shana ask the waiter, “Excuse me, sir. How much longer do you think it’ll be?”

  The waiter, who was dressed in the Masquerades black jacket and tie uniform, accompanied by a Zorro mask, was brusque. “I don’t know.”

  Shana turned back to Deni. “I’ve got to get back to my kids.”

  “It shouldn’t be too much longer, Shana,” Deni assured her.

  Less than ten minutes later, the same waiter escorted two white women to a table. The women had arrived at the Masquerades considerably later than Deni and Shana.

  “Did you see that?” Shana’s voice held the threatening crackle of lightning slashing an indigo sky.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s a mistake,” Deni said, touching Shana’s arm, which had tightened up in her grip.

  Deni could see the beginning of the swelling look—the one she knew resembled a swelling toad, which generally preceded Shana’s “going off.”

  “I come here all the time,” Deni added. She thought of how often she had come to this restaurant with her white colleague attorneys, Jennifer and Megan, from work and had been waited on promptly. True enough, she’d never gone to Masquerades at night, but she had always thought they provided excellent service. For the first time, Deni noticed that they were the only two African-Americans in the restaurant.

  The same waiter, who had brushed Shana off as one might flick a flea off his sleeve, sauntered by. It was very apparent this time that his intent was to seat the white family who stood behind them in the line. Shana tapped the maître d’ on the shoulder. The man stopped in his tracks. He stared at Shana’s sable hand lightly pressing against his starched white shirt, as if it were a snake.

  “Hey, I think you made a mistake, mister. We were here first.” Shana’s voice sounded controlled.

  “Miss, lower your voic
e or we will have to ask you to leave the premises.”

  “What? Tell me something, sir. Don’t our money spend just as good as theirs? I always thought it was ‘first come, first served.’”

  “Lady,” the waiter said in a condescending tone, “I will have to call security and have you put out of here if you don’t stop disturbing the peace.”

  Deni tried to interrupt, to mediate the situation, before it got further out of hand. “This is all a misunderstanding, sir. I can explain.”

  Shana was not to be placated that easily. “You won’t have to put us out. We are leaving. Ain’t that right, cuz?”

  Shana waited patiently for Deni’s reply. For a moment, Deni’s feet felt glued to the floor. They turned into blocks of sludge. The professional side of her wanted to apologize and explain the idiosyncrasies of her Black clients whenever she approached the bench.

  Suddenly, she remembered Shana taking up for her when she was eight years old, when a gang of bullies tried to beat her up after school one day. That was one day she’d been happy that her cousin was crazy enough to go up against three older girls. They’d left her alone after that.

  Deni started to tremble all over as an emotion long denied bivouacked in her heart. She was angry. Angry over the injustice that she’d witnessed in the courtroom earlier that day when an African-American mother lost all four of her children in what should have been a family law custody case. The father was married and had money. In America, money still talked and as they said, BS walked.

  Outraged over the sense of rejection she’d felt when she saw the only brother down at court taking out his white secretary to lunch. Unmasking the ropes of professionalism she wore, a silver glimmer slugged her in the solar plexus, leaving her breathless. What made her think she had more sense than Shana?

  What made her think she was the one better off? Was she? At least Shana didn’t have to pretend she didn’t know an insult when she saw one. Now what was crazier than that? Before Deni could will her feet into motion, a security guard materialized.