by E. N. Joy
Feeling a coldness coming from Willie, Doreen picked up the handkerchief while looking at him in a peculiar way. She wiped her tears away. “I tried to call you while I’ve been in here. I never got an answer.”
Willie repositioned himself in his chair. “Yeah, well, I, uh, probably was out.”
“Oh,” was all Doreen said—at first. “Where were you?” she asked on second thought.
Once again, Willie repositioned himself in his chair. “At the hospital.” His words were hardly audible, but Doreen had heard them. Still she wanted to make sure she’d heard Willie say what she thought he had.
“Where?”
This time he straightened himself up in the chair and spoke louder and more clearly. “I said I was at the hospital.” Now he was looking at Doreen. His eyes were almost daring her to ask why he’d been up at the hospital.
Never one who was big on dares, Doreen couldn’t let this one slide. “At the hospital for what?” she chuckled nervously.
“I needed to be there with her—to see what was going on with her and the baby.”
“Oh, I see.” The fact that Willie had been sitting up at the hospital with his mistress stung a little bit, but Doreen played it off. “How is she doing?”
“Not good. She’s all messed up in the mind.” Willie shook his head as if he was trying to shake away the tears that were forming in his eyes. “It was a boy. He was almost eight pounds. He was light as a feather too.” That last comment had brought a slight smile to Willie’s face as if he was reminiscing on something nice.
Doreen did a double take. Was this the same Willie sitting in front of her getting all emotional over the loss of another woman’s baby? The same Willie who had acted like he couldn’t have cared less when the two of them had lost their own baby just months ago? Although Doreen had been thinking it, eventually she spoke it to Willie and waited on him to respond.
“This was different. This was a full-grown baby pretty much,” Willie reasoned. “He could have lived and functioned outside of this world if you hadn’t of . . .” Willie’s words trailed off. He sniffed and wiped a tear that hadn’t made it as far as the corner of his left eye.
All Doreen could do was sit back in her chair feeling like the monster everybody probably thought she was. She felt like a monster because at this moment, she honestly couldn’t have cared less about that woman and her baby. All she cared about was why her husband cared so much. With the right questions, she was hellbent on finding out.
Chapter Twenty-six
Before she spoke, Doreen sat and dissected the few words Willie had spoken to her thus far. She worded her questions carefully in her head before she spoke them. In the past, Willie had been able to lie at the drop of a dime and make it sound believable. It was as if he had mastered the art of lying. Well, today, Doreen was going to see to it that Willie met his match.
“You said the baby was as light as a feather,” Doreen started. Her next question normally would have been, “How do you know?” but that was too general. That left open far too many options for Willie to dig up a lie about. She needed to close up the margins, so instead, she asked, “Did you hold him?” There, all that required was a yes or no answer. There wasn’t too much room for him to twitch and squirm on this one.
What tripped Doreen out was that Willie didn’t even try to weasel his way around answering the question. He flat-out said, “Yes.” Then he had the nerve to add more. “The doctors said it was okay. I mean, the boy was gone and all, but he was still warm. Still fresh.” Willie paused for a minute, and then that smile that had appeared on his lips before was back. “He had the biggest hands I’d ever seen on such a little fella. He would have been a ballplayer for sure.” Willie had the proudest look and the proudest tone in his voice ever.
“So the mother was okay with letting you hold the boy, huh?” Doreen stated, then once again calculated her words before she spoke them. “How did the daddy feel about that? I mean, not too many men are gonna be in a good way about another man holding their child.” Doreen knew she should have stopped there, but the woman in her just pressed right on. “Especially under the circumstances. Most people would already be disgusted at the fact that you was running up inside another woman while she was with child.” Doreen expressed her own disgust with the look on her face. “I mean, really, Willie, of all the women here in West Virginia, you pick the unwed pregnant soprano girl from the choir. You couldn’t have messed with somebody else?”
Maybe not at the moment did it make sense to Doreen, but the more she kept talking, the more sense she started to make of things. “I mean, is that why you dragged me all the way here to West Virginia, so that you could shack up with a pregnant woman? Is it, Willie ?” Finally Doreen had taken a breath long enough to let Willie answer. Once again, Willie didn’t even try to square-dance around the situation or make up a lie.
Willie simply said, “Yes, Doreen. That’s exactly why we needed to move here to West Virginia.” He lifted his eyes from the ground and directed them to Doreen. “I knew it would be next to impossible to be there for my child with me living all the way in Kentucky.” He’d said it. He’d just come right out and said it without Doreen even having to have poked and prodded him.
“Your . . . your child,” she muttered with trembling lips.
“Her cousin lives in Kentucky. She’d come up for a two-week visit. You was all into sitting up in church dang near every day of the week. When you was home, all you focused on was baking them pound cakes. So I just hung out with her. She headed on back to West Virginia. We kinda sorta kept in touch. She came back to visit a couple more times—once on my dime.”
Okay, Doreen had not asked for all this, and she surely wasn’t prepared to hear it. But Willie continued anyway, and she listened.
“The next thing I know she calls me and tells me she’s pregnant. I tried to talk her into . . .” Willie’s words evaporated.
Doreen decided to finish his sentence for him, “. . . going to see the same doctor Agnes went to see?”
Willie’s eyes shot up at Doreen. He couldn’t believe she knew about that. There was no need in trying to lie about it now. “Yeah, that’s what I tried to get her to do. She wouldn’t hear of it, though. She insisted on keeping the baby and made it known how she intended for her child to have his daddy in his life too. She was gon’ move to Kentucky, Doreen. We had to move here. It was easier that way.”
Doreen honestly couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was dumbfounded. “Now I see why you put up so much of a fight about us attending that church. You knew that was the church she attended.”
Willie didn’t deny it.
“And the way you’d look up in the choir stands like you was filled with the joy of the Lord. Heck, all you was thinking about was being close to her and her baby.”
“My baby. He was my baby too. That baby you beat to death was mine too, Doreen. I know it hurts your soul to hear that, and I’ve never wanted to hurt you, but that baby she was carrying was mine. And I moved here from Kentucky to help take care of it the best I could.”
Doreen wanted to pretend like she was a little girl and throw her hands over her ears and block out Willie’s words. But instead, she just sat there and took it. She took it like she’d taken all Willie’s mess for years until she had finally exploded inside that motel room.
“I can’t do this, God,” Doreen cried out. “It’s too much. It’s too much for me to be knowing.”
“I’m sorry, Doreen, but I had to tell you the truth. They was gon’ tell it in court, so I knew you had to hear it from me first. I’m sorry.” For the first time Willie reached over and touched Doreen. He cupped one of her hands into his. “But I just want you to know I’m not gon’ leave you. I’m gonna be here for you no matter what. I don’t hold it against you what you did to my baby. I know I brought it all on myself by living a lie. But I promise you, when you get out of here, I’m going to be waiting for you. And I promise you one other thing. I’m goin
g to be a better man.” By now, tears were streaming down Willie’s face and his nose was running. “I’m going to be a better husband to you, baby. I know it shouldn’t have taken all this, but at least I learned something from it. At least I learned from my mistakes. I’m hurting, baby. I feel like I done lost the two most important things in my life.” Willie gripped Doreen’s hands. “I can’t bring that baby back, but I still have you. And when you get out of here, you can give me another son. We can start fresh—even move again where nobody knows us for real this time.”
Willie had never been so emotional in his life, at least not that Doreen had ever witnessed. Although she managed to keep it together and hide her true pain, which she’d sort of mastered thanks to Willie and her many attempts to try to be the perfect wife and the perfect forgiving Christian, Doreen was hurting inside. She was hurting because of the lie Willie had lived. She was hurting because she was watching her husband suffer more from the loss of the baby he’d made with a mistress, rather than the one he’d made with his own wife. She was hurting because she’d done the unthinkable. She’d taken away a child’s life. She was hurting because she didn’t have to imagine, but she knew how that woman must be feeling as a result of her loss.
“Okay, Willie,” fell from between Doreen’s lips. “I forgive you, and I pray you can forgive me for causing the death of now two of your babies.” Doreen broke down just hearing herself say those words. She pulled herself together so that she could finish saying what she had to say. “I want to get past this. We will get past this. I know the God I serve will bring us through this, and we can start over and live the life we were meant to live together as husband and wife. Okay?”
“Okay, baby. Okay,” Willie nodded.
“All right, it’s time for Mrs. Tucker to return to her cage,” the guard said in a slick attempt to refer to Doreen as an animal. “I mean her cell.” She scooped Doreen up.
“I’m going to go talk to your attorney and see what he can tell me; see how much time you could be looking at,” Willie called out to Doreen. “But just remember what I said; no matter how much time it is, I’m going to be waiting when you get out. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Doreen cried as the guard pulled her off. “And I’m so sorry, Willie. I’m gonna pray for that baby’s soul. And I’m going to lift the mother’s name up too.” That’s when Doreen realized she had no idea what the woman’s name was. She knew she sang in the church choir and had spoken to her a time or two, but was never officially introduced by name. “What’s her name?” Doreen asked right as the guard got her to the exit.
“Huh?” Willie called out.
“The woman’s name—the baby’s mother. What’s her name?”
As Doreen was pulled from the room and out the door she heard Willie call out, “Lauren. Her name is Lauren Casinoff.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
“Lauren Casinoff,” the words fell from Mother Doreen’s lips as she stood at that altar on what should have been her perfect wedding day to Pastor Frey. But so far, it had turned out to be a complete mess. No, maybe disaster was a more fitting word. For some reason, not even that word described the full magnitude of what Mother Doreen would now describe her wedding day as.
“Aha; the name rings a bell, does it?” the man that had interrupted the wedding ceremony said. He bobbed his head up and down with a knowing grin on his face. “I thought saying her name would.”
This man started out as a stranger, but now Mother Doreen knew him to be the son of Lauren Casinoff. But a stranger, to a degree, he was. Exactly who was he? Meaning, why was he there? What did he want from Mother Doreen?
“Honey, what’s going on? Who is this young man?” Pastor Frey asked Doreen, who had not taken her eyes off the young man once.
Mother Doreen remained frozen, still gazing at the young man.
“Go ahead, Doreen, answer the man,” the stranger said. “Tell him what’s going on. Tell him who I am.”
Mother Doreen snapped out of her daze. “Uh, oh, yeah. Uh, he’s, uh . . .” Mother Doreen couldn’t even focus enough to speak a complete sentence. With just hearing the name Lauren Casinoff, her mind had traveled way back into the past, and then all the way to when she’d heard that name for the first time.
Not even in the courtroom during Mother Doreen’s arraignment had they said Lauren’s name. They simply just kept referring to her as the victim or the alleged victim, like she wasn’t real or didn’t even exist. Like the only thing that had existed or allegedly existed was the incident itself. Ironically enough, for years, she didn’t exist—not in Mother Doreen’s thoughts anyway. Mother Doreen had served her time in jail, repenting daily at first. Coming to realize that God had indeed forgiven her, she was released from jail and moved on with her life.
As promised, Willie had been there waiting for her once she got out of jail. As promised, they moved to another town in Ohio. They started their lives over together. They never looked back, never speaking about the incident that had cost Mother Doreen a year of her life behind bars and had cost Willie his son.
Not only did Mother Doreen and Willie never speak of it to each other, but the two never spoke of it to anyone else either. Willie never told his parents, and Mother Doreen never told hers. For that year she was in jail, her family had always thought she was caught up and consumed with chasing Willie around. They’d even shared that mysterious year of Mother Doreen missing in action with her baby sister, Bethany, over the years, citing Willie for being the cause. Mother Doreen never allowed them to think otherwise.
It wasn’t until about a year ago that Mother Doreen finally decided to share the dirty part of her life she had swept under the rug for years. First she told her pastor of New Day, Margie. Next she’d told Pastor Frey. He’d been so persistent in courting her in an attempt to make her his wife, she knew there was no way she could marry him without telling him.
Mother Doreen thought once Pastor Frey learned that she was a murderer, he’d withdraw his desires for her. That didn’t happen though. He loved the woman Mother Doreen was today, and he showed her so by proposing with a diamond ring the very next day after she’d shared her past.
Although Mother Doreen hadn’t told them herself, some of the New Day members even knew about Mother Doreen’s past. Margie’s former secretary had a problem with eavesdropping in on Margie’s prayers and conversations with the saints. The secretary would then spill what she’d heard like a toddler just learning to walk carrying a cup of Cherry Kool-Aid around a white-carpeted house. Some of Mother Doreen’s Kool-Aid, so to speak, dripped into other folks’ ears. Gossiping and rumors started, but Mother Doreen never really put a stamp on what was true and what wasn’t. She just let folks talk. She allowed people to think what they wanted to think. But now what’s-his-name was here, obviously to give his version.
“My apologies for not introducing myself to the groom,” the gentleman said, sticking his arm past Mother Doreen to Pastor Frey. “My name is Terrance Casinoff, and I drove all the way from my hometown in West Virginia just to be here today.” He smiled a cunning, devious smile.
Pastor Frey hesitantly shook Terrance’s hand. “I’m—”
“Pastor Wallace Frey,” Terrance said. “You’re all set to head back to Kentucky after the wedding and take over the reigns of Living Word, Living Waters, isn’t that correct? Congratulations.” Terrance began to shake Pastor Frey’s hand harder.
Pastor Frey kindly pulled his hand away and looked at Terrance suspiciously. It was written all over his face that he was wondering how the man knew that bit of information about him.
“Oh, you’re wondering how I know that,” Terrance said, responding to the expression on Pastor Frey’s face. “Well, you know I’ve been keeping up with the bride here,” he pointed to Mother Doreen, “for quite some time. As a matter of fact, my latest Google search pulled up a local article about Kentucky’s hometown preacher man to wed the woman of his dreams. It went on about some type of comeback from
a scandal you’d been a part of and how you’d redeemed yourself to the church. There were quotes from church members supporting you and your works and how they couldn’t wait to welcome you back with open arms as the head of their ministry.” Terrance opened his arms wide.
“Uh, yeah, I know exactly what article you’re talking about,” Pastor Frey acknowledged.
“It just moved my heart.” Terrance sarcastically put his hand on his heart and shook his head. “Heck, by the time I finished reading it, even I was cheering for the underdog. That’s why I couldn’t let you do it. I couldn’t let you ruin your life . . .” he glared at Mother Doreen, “or should I say, I couldn’t let her ruin your life. She’s ruined one life too many as it stands.” He looked back at Pastor Frey. “Man to man and just me looking out for a fellow black man, you’re better off dead than marrying this woman.”
Pastor Frey instantly flexed toward the gentleman. That’s when everyone at the altar either jumped to hold him back or jumped in between him and Terrance.
“Oh, feisty old man, are you?” Terrance chuckled. “Maybe you two are a match made in heaven after all. You both like to jump on people.” He shot Mother Doreen a glare before turning his attention back to Pastor Frey. “So, tell me, Pastor Wallace Frey, do you like to jump on pregnant women, beat ’em half to death, killing the baby inside their wombs too? Or is that something you leave up to the old lady here?”
Once again, Pastor Frey flexed and everyone put their guards back up to keep him from getting at Terrance. They almost didn’t move quick enough this time, as Pastor Frey’s hand had almost got the collar of Terrance’s suit coat in a grip.
Terrance dusted off his suit coat and held his hands up. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.” He let his arms drop. “I’m just here with your best interest in mind. I’m here to stop you from possibly making one of the biggest mistakes in your life. I’m here to share with you something I bet you never would have guessed about this woman.” He pointed an accusing finger at Mother Doreen. “She’s a killer. She even served time in jail for it.”