Whatever It Takes

by Gwynne Forster

  “I don’t think so,” Kellie said. “I expect Daddy’s leaving humiliated her, and she’s out to show him she doesn’t need him. Bully for her.”

  “Maybe, but I’m worried about her.”

  “Don’t be,” Kellie said. “Mama was gorgeous when she was young, and she’s just reaching back and grabbing some of that.”

  “You think she’s trying to get Daddy to come back?”

  Kellie got up, retrieved the log she dropped earlier and walked over to the fireplace with it. She stood there for a while gazing at the hot coals, then put the log on the fire. “I sure as hell hope not, Lacette. If I know Daddy, he’s gone for good.”

  “Yeah. I guess so. Too bad.”

  As she walked up to her room, it occurred to her that that was the friendliest conversation she’d had with her sister since the lawyer read their grandmother’s will to them.

  Cynthia had expected her daughters to look askance at what she considered her new self. She’d made what was probably a life changing decision, and she prayed that she could stick to it. Everybody was entitled to one mistake, whether it was a short one or a long one, and she didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life beating herself to death and moping about that one. People didn’t think a minister’s wife should look like a woman? Well, she hadn’t been a minister’s wife for more than six weeks. If Marshall didn’t announce that he’d left his wife and daughters, people would think his wife no longer respected him. Well, let them. She pulled up to Carriage Inn and cut the motor. She’d never been in a bar, and it was time she learned whether the people who frequented them seemed headed for hell, as Marshall preached. She stepped inside, looked around for her cousin Jack and headed toward him, smiling in relief that he’d gotten there before she did.

  He walked to meet her, more resolute than was normally his wont. “Hi, babe. Say . . . can I . . . uh . . . buy you a drink?”

  She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with cigarette smoke and her nostrils with the odor of liquor, both fresh and stale, and stepped backward until the edge of a baby grand piano sent shock through her right rib cage.

  “I want you to know that . . .” She gaped at the man. “Jack! What the devil’s the matter with you?”

  “Hold it! Hey, wait a minute. Cynthia? What have you done to yourself? If you hadn’t opened your mouth, I never would have known who you were.” A sheepish expression marked his face, and then he began to laugh. “I’ll bet my head Marshall didn’t see you when you left home. You revved up my engine. I thought I saw this gorgeous dame walk in alone, case the joint and pick me out of the crowd of Joes hanging around here. Biggest let-down I’ve had in years. Let’s go back to the cocktail lounge and get a drink.”

  She had wanted a change, but maybe she’d gone too far. And maybe not, she thought, for as they walked through the bar, half the men took the pains to catalogue her assets, and some of those who did smiled in approval. She ordered a Lime Rickey, because it was the only drink whose name she knew other than wine, and toyed with it for nearly an hour.

  “If you’re in a mid-life crisis, Cynthia, be sure you don’t get into trouble. You still have your looks, and there’re a lot of lonely guys out here.”

  “Oh, Jack, you know I’m not going to pick up a man.”

  However, as she walked along Bolton Street in Baltimore the next day after a visit to a spa—her first—she couldn’t help noticing the appreciative looks men gave her. “I’m going to make a play for the next good-looking man I meet,” she told herself, “just to see what kind of reaction I get.”

  She noticed a tall, well-dressed, African-American man wearing a black chesterfield coat and a gray hat, who walked directly toward her, and decided that he would be her first target. As the man got closer to her, she prepared her smile and a flirtatious air and began to slow her steps. He was about twenty feet away when she gasped and ran across the street, barely missing contact with an oncoming car. She got behind a dark blue sedan and leaned against it, panting for air. So much for flirting with strange men; the first one she picked had, until recently, been her husband for over thirty-five years. How Marshall Graham would love to have been the object of her indiscretion!

  After some time, she made her way to where she parked her car, got in the Mercedes and leaned her head on the steering wheel. I’d better get myself together. I’m not the first woman to find herself without a husband and needing a sex life. She put the car in drive and headed for Route 70. Heck! When I had him, he was too busy half the time to pay attention to me. She pushed the thought from her mind. As soon as I can brooch to Kellie and Lacette the idea of their getting an apartment for themselves, I’m going to move out of that parsonage and get a place where people don’t feel they have the right to barge into my house whenever it suits them. I wonder why I ever thought being a minister’s wife was such a big deal. I’ve spent almost thirty-six years pretending about a lot of things.

  She stopped at Brady’s Chicken and Ribs and bought two sides of barbecued baby back ribs, her contribution to supper. With their father gone, both girls had become lazy about cooking, and she’d as soon never see another kitchen. Her earlier resolve to be her age forgotten, she went to Francis Scott Key Mall—half the important places in Frederick were named for an historical person, place, or event—and bought a pair of spike-heeled, beige leather boots that were more suitable for her daughters than for her. She sucked her teeth and shrugged it off with the lift of her left shoulder; when she was Kellie’s and Lacette’s age, she dressed like an old woman to suit the brothers and sisters of whatever church Marshall was pastoring at the time. Let them say what they liked; she had paid her dues.

  “Where have you been all day, Mama?” Kellie asked her when she walked into the house. “Do you realize you went out of here last night and didn’t say where you were going and you did the same thing this morning? Just because you and Daddy are on the outs is no reason for you to act as if you don’t have two children living here with you.”

  She passed within a foot of Kellie, the older of the twins, without looking at her. Kellie had a habit of solving her problems by attacking someone else, usually those closest to her.

  “How many times have you walked out of this house and said nothing but ‘Bye. See you later’? I have as much right to do that as you do.”

  “Mama, let’s sit here and talk. I want to know what’s come over you. You were always . . . well . . . sturdy . . . I mean—”

  “You mean like an old shoe. A person people looked through and never at, who let other people, including you, walk over her, whose youth was spent as an old woman.” She opened the shoe box, sat down and pulled on the high-fashion boots. “How do you like these?

  Kellie threw up her hands. “I rest my case.”

  “While you’re criticizing me and the way I look,” Cynthia called after her daughter, “be sure your own page is nice and clean.” She thought she heard Kellie miss a step on the stairs, and she wouldn’t have been surprised at the reason for it.

  Chapter Three

  Lacette knocked on Lawrence Bradley’s office door and waited, shifting from foot to foot. Was she doing the right thing? He opened the door and extended his hand for a handshake. “Come on in. What can I do for you? I doubt I’ll be able to locate that brooch until we have a chance to go through Mrs. Hooper’s effects and, considering how big that house is, finding it there may prove difficult.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. I didn’t come for that.” When his right eyebrow shot up, she hastened to make herself clear. I want to talk with you about a business venture. I’m planning to open a marketing consultancy, and I need legal advice.”

  She couldn’t tell whether he was relieved or disappointed; he certainly hadn’t expected that she would engage him as a lawyer. “Well. Have a seat. The first thing we have to do is get you incorporated. Next, you want a loan. I think it’s inadvisable to start a business solely with your own money.”

  He was all business, and she liked
that. Two hours later, she had a plan and the confidence that she could carry it through. What an odd man, she thought as she left his office. Very professional. Yet, he had allowed himself to think she might have wanted something personal that had nothing to do with his being a lawyer and everything to do with his gender. She mused over it until she reached home and heard Kellie singing out of tune in the confines of her room. Immediately, she knew that Kellie not only had made passes at Bradley—that much she witnessed—but had gone far beyond that. No doubt he wondered if she would do the same. Don’t wait on it, buddy.

  She had intended to begin filling out the mass of forms Bradley gave her, but Kellie waylaid her as she reached the top of the stairs. “What do you think? Mama’s in there preening and fussing like a teenager. Go in there and talk to her. I’ve had it up to here”—she sliced the air over her head—“with Mama’s foolishness. She bought some black fishnet stockings, for heaven’s sake, and I caught her reading a letter from Daddy and smiling like a lottery winner. I asked her if he was coming back, and she got mysterious on me. Lacette, talk to her.”

  At her light tap, Cynthia opened the door at once, almost as if, by extrasensory perception, she had anticipated Lacette’s arrival. “Guess what?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Your father wrote me a letter, and he can complain all he wants to about me, but that’s not why he wrote me.”

  “Which letter? Let me see it?” She walked to the Duncan Phyfe–style secretary near the window, picked up the letter and handed it to her mother.

  Cynthia opened it and read, “Dear Cynthia, I hope you have not forgotten that Frederick is a small place and that most of the African Americans in this town know us. Gossip is their main form of entertainment. Please bear this in mind before you hang out in bars, and go out in the street dressed like a teenager. I hope neither of us does anything to shame our daughters. And if you don’t want to come to Mount Airy-Hill, please go to a church; protestant or catholic doesn’t matter. You need to be around religious people. Faithfully yours, Marshall.”

  “Mind if I see it?”

  Cynthia handed her the letter, and after reading it twice, Lacette folded it, handed it back to her mother and said, “I don’t see anything in this letter that you should be happy about. If my husband sent me something like this, I’d be furious.”

  “He can’t fool me; after sleeping in the bed with him for thirty-five years, I know him. He still cares for me, and that’s why he sent me this asinine letter.”

  “Mama, that’s preposterous. You know Daddy doesn’t talk in riddles. He says what he means. He told me he was gone for good, and I have to believe him. But you know more about this than I do, and neither you nor Daddy told either one of your children why you split up after over thirty-five years. Don’t you think—”

  Cynthia grabbed her head. “I knew I shouldn’t have shown you that letter. You and Kellie have no sympathy for what I’m going through. Please, let me be. I’m going to lie down; my head is killing me.”

  I’ll bet it is, Lacette thought, but didn’t say. “Sorry, Mama. Do you have any aspirin?”

  Cynthia walked toward the door, wordlessly inviting her daughter to leave the room. “Yes, thanks.” Lacette didn’t believe her mother had a sudden headache. She was afraid she would have to tell me why Daddy left home. If she knew what my imagination conjures up, she’d tell me, because it can’t be worse than some of the things I think of.

  During the next two days, she tried several times to bring up that question to her mother, but couldn’t summon the courage to do it. Lodged in her mind was the thought that she had no right to delve into her mother’s privacy. Yet, she firmly believed that her parents had an obligation to tell her why they no longer lived together. She raised the matter with Kellie while they cleaned the kitchen after supper that night.

  “For goodness sake, Lacette, don’t sweat it. What’s done is done. Mama is a better woman single than she ever was when she was married. She looks and acts like a female, and not like some groveling, frontier wife. This is the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You have a great figure,” she heard Kellie say to her mother the next morning, “but you don’t take advantage of it. Get some dresses and skirts that fit across the hips and the bust. Join a reading group or take classes that attract men, and put some spice in your life. The only way to get a man back is to show him that another man wants you. I wouldn’t waste myself mourning over a man, whether he was dead or alive. Ten years from now, it won’t matter how you look.”

  Lacette didn’t hear her mother’s reply, but she imagined that if Kellie hadn’t shocked the woman, she had at least made her wonder how her daughter developed that philosophy. “Maybe it’s better I don’t know what’s going on with Mama,” she said to herself. “It’s all I can do to get some order into my own life.”

  The next morning, Kellie darted past City Hall Fountain as fast as she could, bracing herself against the fierce wind that whipped through the open square and smarting from the icy splinters punishing her face. Inside City Hall at last, she leaned against the wall beside the elevator and breathed deeply. She was about to push the elevator button when she glimpsed Douglas Rawlins in her peripheral vision, barely recognizable in a gray overcoat, red woolen scarf, gray hat and black leather gloves. His arrogance had piqued her interest, and she’d checked the staff roster to find out who he was. According to the personnel listing, he was Douglas Rawlins, groundskeeper. When she recognized him, her first thought was that he didn’t look like a common laborer. She stared at him until he reached the elevator and pushed the button.

  “Hi,” she said, “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  “Good morning.” He said it grudgingly, almost as if he wished he could walk away. The elevator arrived, and with only the two of them on it, she’d have thought he would at least make small talk, but he focused his gaze upon the floor numbers above the door and ignored her.

  She got off first, looked over at him and said, “Have a nice warm day.” Annoyance surged in her. He could pretend he didn’t know who she was, but he knew, and she would make certain that he got even more familiar with her. She refused to allow a man to treat her as if she was a nobody and to do it with impunity. Mr. Rawlins would hear from her.

  “What you so heated up about, girl?” Mabel asked her before she had a chance to sit down.

  “Who said I was hot? As cold as it is outside, I’ve been trying to stay warm.”

  “I’ll be nice and not comment on that. Guess who’s leaving us.”

  “You’ll tell me.”

  “Douglas Rawlins, and I never got a crack at him,” Mabel said. “I’m a thirty-four-year-old, decent-looking woman, and that brother hasn’t given me a thing but the time of day. He doesn’t believe in smiling, at least not at me. Heck, I don’t even know whether he’s got any teeth. Maybe he swings the other way.”

  “That’s not the impression I got of him. He’s an arrogant SOB, and if he wasn’t leaving, I’d show him a thing or two.”

  “Yes, I bet you would,” Mabel said, “’course, he might have done the same for you. You have to watch those quiet ones.”

  Kellie answered the phone on the third ring. “Transportation. Ms. Graham speaking. Daddy! How’s everything?”

  As she listened, she recalled how she had always loved his deep masculine voice and how, during her rebellious teenage years, his patience and willingness to listen to her and to reason with her had shamed her into obedience. Where Cynthia had alternately pampered and lectured her, he had at no time indulged her misbehavior; when she deserved punishment—which to her mind wasn’t often—he administered it. She loved him, and she could not understand why her stronger loyalty resided with her mother.

  “You want us to have lunch together today?” she asked him, and agreed to meet him at Nellie’s, two blocks from City Hall, where she worked. She hoped he didn’t want to talk about her mother, because she didn’t plan to listen to him criti
cize Cynthia.

  “I won’t second-guess him,” she told herself. “I’ll deal with it when I see him.”

  To Kellie’s surprise, her mother was not the reason why Marshall wanted to have lunch with her. No sooner had they settled at their table and picked up their menus than he let her know what he had in mind. “I’ve collected the keys to Mama Carrie’s house and signed the papers. It belongs to me now.”

  She hoped he didn’t hear her heart thundering in her chest. “Uh . . . when are you planning to move in?”

  “I’m having lobster bisque and a green salad,” he told the waitress.

  “I’ll have the same.”

  “Now,” Marshall said, “I want you to understand what I’m saying. I intend to renovate that house before I move in. Bradley will accompany your mother to choose any of Mama Carrie’s clothing that she wants, though the way she’s acting, I don’t suppose she’d want to have any decent dresses.”

  She toyed with the glass of water beside her plate, using that as an excuse not to look at him. “Why don’t I go with her in case there’re some clothes she doesn’t want that I can use?”

  He leaned back in his chair and let laughter roll out of him. “I’m surprised that you’re so transparent. There isn’t a chance that you would wear any of Mama Carrie’s things. This is why we’re having this conversation, Kellie. You are not to enter that house for any reason until after Bradley delivers Lacette’s brooch to her.” He shook his right index finger. “Not for any reason. If you do, I’ll get an injunction to prevent your doing it again. You have your diamond ring, and that brooch belongs to Lacette. I intend to see that she gets it.”