P. G. County

by Connie Briscoe

  She walked to Kenyatta’s room and knocked. He opened the door holding a navy suit jacket in his hand.

  “Does this fit OK?” Pearl lifted her arms and turned around in the hallway.

  “Damn, Ma!” he exclaimed with a glint in his eye. “You done put on a lot of weight down south there.”

  She smacked his arm playfully. “I told you about cursing and using that Ebonics. I didn’t sweat all those years to send you to college to hear that garbage. And never mind my hips. Does the dress look all right?”

  Kenyatta grinned as he slipped into his suit jacket. “You crack me up, Ma. Yeah, it’s fine. You look real nice. But you really need to do something about all that weight you’re gaining. It’s not healthy.”

  Pearl put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just trying to keep it real here, ’cause I want you to live to a hundred. But how do you expect to find yourself a man unless you slim down?”

  Pearl scoffed. “Oh shoot. That’s the last thing I need. Some man to worry about. You’re plenty. Believe me.”

  “I won’t be around forever, you know. I been hanging around here for a year now, but don’t get used to that.”

  Pearl reached up and pinched both of his cheeks. “I know, I know. You can’t sit still for a minute.” She looked at her watch. “Speaking of which, you’d better hurry up if you’re going to pick up that girl and get to the wedding on time.”

  “Yeah, yeah. And that woman’s name is Ashley.”

  “Excuse me. Woman, then.” Pearl reached up to straighten his necktie. “You just make sure you introduce her to me at the wedding. And tell me, what does she think about this hairstyle?” Pearl touched Kenyatta’s shoulder-length dreadlocks.

  “She likes it just fine, Ma. She’s very open-minded.”

  Pearl shook her head. “Humph. For the life of me, I just plain don’t understand why you want to wear your hair like that. I spent all those years trying to get the kinks out of your hair, and here you spend all your time putting them back in.”

  Kenyatta chuckled, sounding just like his daddy. He had his daddy’s hair, too—thick and kinky, not wavy like hers. In fact, he was his daddy all over—tall, dark-complexioned and handsome as the devil. Trouble was, his daddy was the devil incarnate, with his arrogant Uncle Tom self. He had left Pearl for a white woman twenty years earlier, and Pearl’s heart still ticked like a time bomb whenever she thought about him.

  “We need to talk, Pearl.”

  A chill ran through her gut. There was something about the tone of her husband’s voice, the expression on his face. It was sad and happy all at once, and Pearl didn’t like the way it made her feel one bit. She stepped back, holding the picture she was hanging in the foyer of their apartment in her hands.

  “I’ve met someone.”

  Pearl gripped the picture frame tighter. Met someone? What was that supposed to mean? He worked in the mayor’s office. He met people every day.

  And why couldn’t he look her in the eyes? Why was he staring at the floor? The ceiling. The air. At everything but her.

  “It’s a woman.”

  Pearl gripped the frame tighter. She stared at him. Look at me when you tell me this, Gregory Jackson. Show me some respect when you tell me about your little fling. Can’t you at least do that?

  “… name is Holly, from the office.”

  Holly? Holly? Your assistant? But that girl is white. And she’s only nineteen. She’s a blond nineteen-year-old child. She’s …

  Pearl threw the picture at him. “You bastard,” she screamed with clenched fists as he ducked and walked away. She had left her family behind in Washington, D.C., as a young woman of nineteen and moved to Detroit to be with him. She dropped out of college to work full-time and help him get through vet school. Then she quit her job to stay home with the baby when he asked her to. She supported him when he decided to get into politics. She had made him the center of her life for years. And now this.

  “How could you do this to me?” she screamed after him.

  The next day she was packing her bags.

  She had wanted nothing to do with him after that. She didn’t want his help, his money or anything else. It was bad enough when a husband cheated on his wife, but with a white woman? That was unforgivable in her book.

  Her mama and most of her girlfriends thought she was insane walking away from a man with a good job without insisting on a big alimony payment and child support. Never mind who he was fooling around with. She had a child to support.

  But Pearl had made up her mind. She would raise her son alone. She left Detroit when Kenyatta was seven years old and never looked back.

  “I gotta run, Ma.” Kenyatta kissed her on the forehead and dashed down the stairs.

  She smiled and shook her head. Despite the hair and occasional sloppy grammar, Kenyatta had turned out to be a fine young man. She had done a pretty decent job with him, no thanks to his daddy.

  The sound of the television floated out of Kenyatta’s room, and she opened the door to turn it off. She stopped in her tracks and gasped at the mess that confronted her—clothes and shoes all over the floor, bed unmade, books and CDs piled everywhere. She had just put the books away on the shelves two days ago and even took the time to alphabetize them.

  She shook her head. OK, so it was more than the wild hair and sloppy grammar that bothered her. Sometimes she worried that Kenyatta wasn’t responsible enough. He was twenty-seven years old and had been out of Morehouse College for five years now. So far he’d held a half dozen jobs and lived in three states. Now he was back home. He claimed he was trying to find himself. Humph. What in the world was he doing all that time in college?

  And the girls, or women, as he insisted she call them. It seemed he had a different one every time she turned around—Glenda, Juanita, Keisha, Davida. The list went on. They came and went so fast that Pearl hardly ever got a chance to know them.

  Sometimes she thought it was her fault. She’d spoiled him by giving him everything. Other times she thought she just worried too much. He was still young, and she supposed he had lots of time to “find himself” and still make something of himself.

  She started on the unmade bed first. She had just enough time to make a dent in this mess before she was due at Barbara’s to fix Rebecca’s hair.

  Chapter 4

  “Mom, I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  Candice lowered the wet towel from her head and stared into her daughter’s green eyes. Ashley was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, twisting a lock of her long brown hair between her fingers. What was this all about? Whenever one of her daughters used that dreaded tone of voice and twisted her hair like that, it meant one of two things. They either wanted something or had news they knew she wouldn’t like.

  But it was a surprise to hear it coming from Ashley. Caitlin, at fifteen and still boy crazy and a little rebellious, yes. But Ashley had always been the levelheaded one of the two, and she was going on twenty now. She had done a lot of growing up since starting college.

  “Does it have to be right now?” Candice asked. “I just stepped out of the shower.”

  “It will only take a minute,” Ashley assured her. “It’s important.”

  Candice draped the towel around her wet hair and pulled the belt to her white terry cloth robe tighter. “OK, I’m listening. What is it?”

  Ashley smiled nervously. “Um. It’s about the guy who’s coming to pick me up to take me to the wedding.”

  Ashley paused, and Candice nodded slowly, warily. With two teenage daughters, she had already seen and heard just about everything when it came to guys—long hair, spiked hair, pierced noses and tongues, baggy jeans, drugs and booze. You name it. She’d seen it.

  She always tried to remember her own hippie teenage years growing up in the seventies. It was a wild time, and she had tried a thing or two herself. But in the end, she had come out all right, and her da
ughters would, too. She prided herself on being an understanding mother—tolerant and patient.

  “What about him, Ashley? Yesterday you said his name is Kenny.”

  “Um, yes. But he’s … he’s not white.” Ashley shifted her weight from one foot to the other and folded her arms across her chest.

  Candice frowned. Then it hit her. Ashley was dating someone outside their race. So much for thinking she’d seen it all. This was totally unexpected, especially coming from Ashley. Patience, patience, she told herself. “Ah. I see. Well, what is he? Latino?”

  “Nooo … He’s black.”

  “Oh. Really?” Candice tried to keep her voice steady, but it felt as if someone had just sucked the final, dying breath from her gut. She glanced at the door to the master bathroom. She wished Jim would hurry out of the damn shower. Where was that man when she needed him? They had only been married for a year, but he was good at handling stuff like this. He was always so much calmer when it came to the girls. He—

  “Mom? Hello?” Ashley snapped her fingers in her mother’s face.

  Candice blinked. “Yes?”

  “Um, you down with that?”

  “What?”

  “You OK with what I just said?”

  Candice pulled the belt to her robe tighter. “Well … I … I’m just surprised, that’s all. This is a first.”

  Ashley shrugged. “But you always told us that people are just people. Right? And that what counts is what’s in their hearts.”

  Candice stared at her daughter, at her white, longhaired, green-eyed daughter. She coughed. She supposed she had said something like that. It certainly sounded harmless enough. But if she had said that, she was thinking along the lines of friends, neighbors and coworkers, not lovers. Most of the families in Silver Lake were black, and Ashley and Caitlin both had black friends. Hell, she’d worked as a web designer for Bradford Bentley for seven years now. But this was different. This could involve romance, sex, love.

  But how do you go about explaining all this to your nineteen-year-old daughter without sounding like a damn hypocrite? Or worse, a bigot? You, the patient mother. The understanding mother. She twisted the belt to her robe around her fingers. “Um, I probably did say something like that.”

  Ashley smiled with relief. “Then I’m going to go and finish dressing. He’s picking me up in ten minutes.”

  “Um. Just a minute, honey.” Not so fast. She had a million questions about this young man. Where did she meet him? Was he in school? What did his family think of all this? And heaven forbid, had they slept together? But if there was one thing daughters hated, it was prying mothers. She had to tread carefully.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and attempted a smile. “Come here. Let’s talk a bit before you run off.”

  Ashley looked reluctant. “I really do need to finish getting dressed, Mom. He’ll be here any minute.”

  Candice frowned. “But the wedding doesn’t start for a couple more hours.”

  “We’re going into D.C. to pick up some of his friends.”

  “This will only take a minute, Ashley,” Candice said in an I’m-your-mother-do-as-I-say tone of voice.

  Ashley smacked her lips and entered the room as Candice patted the bed. Ashley flopped down.

  “So. Does he live in Prince George’s County?”

  Ashley nodded.

  “Well, tell me about him. Does he have a last name?”

  Ashley sighed. “Yeah. Jackson.”

  Candice cocked her head. “Jackson? Jackson? The name sounds familiar. Are they the ones who live in that big Tudor-style house on the north side of Silver Lake?”

  Ashley rolled her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. “No. Not exactly.”

  Candice frowned at her daughter’s strange choice of words. Then it hit her. Oh hell. Don’t tell me he lives in that part of Prince George’s, the rough part inside the beltway. Visions of her lily-white daughter walking around in the ghetto flashed through her head. Her frown grew deeper.

  “He and his mom live in the town houses at the southern edge of Silver Lake, Mom.”

  Candice nodded with some relief. A different class of people lived in the town houses than in the rest of Silver Lake, but at least it wasn’t the ghetto. “Just he and his mom?”

  Ashley nodded.

  “Where’s his father?”

  Ashley shrugged.

  “Does he go to Maryland University with you?”

  “No, Mom. He’s older.”

  Oh great. All she needed to hear was that this guy was in his thirties or forties. Then what? That he was a drug dealer? That he had just gotten out of prison? This might be Silver Lake, but they were only fifteen miles outside of Washington, D.C.

  “How much older is he?” Candice knew she was pushing, but she couldn’t help it. This was her daughter. She had every right to be pushy.

  “Kenyatta’s twenty-seven, Mom. Not that much older.”

  Candice raised an eyebrow. Kenyatta? What the hell kind of name was that? “Isn’t that the name of a country in Africa?”

  “It’s a derivative of Kenya, Mom,” Ashley said with strained patience.

  “It sounds so militant.”

  Ashley looked to the ceiling with annoyance. “I am so not believing you’re acting like this, Mom. There’s nothing militant about Kenyatta, I assure you. You’re probably more militant than he is. Didn’t you protest the Vietnam War in college?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Candice asked cynically. “That was thirty years ago. I was just a child during that war.”

  “Whatever,” Ashley said nonchalantly. “You’re still into that whole hippie scene. The way you dress, the crystals and the candles.”

  “It’s not rebellious. I just happen to like the look. And stop changing the subject. There’s a big difference between nineteen and twenty-seven. What does he do? Does he have a—”

  Ashley jumped up and faced her mother. “Jim is fifty, for crissakes, nine whole years older than you are.”

  “You don’t have to shout,” Candice reminded her. “I’m sitting right here. And that’s different. The years don’t mean as much when you get to be our age.”

  “You mean it’s different because Kenyatta is black,” Ashley accused. “And before you ask, yes, he has a job. I met him when his firm sent him to Maryland U. to recruit. What’s going on with you? You sound like a racist with all these insinuating questions.”

  Candice jumped back as if she’d been slapped in the face. “That’s not true.”

  “Pfft. You usually only start getting curious after I’ve been out with a guy a few times.”

  Candice licked her lips. If it was true, it was only because after the first couple of boyfriends she had come to realize that most of them hung around for only a few months or so before they were replaced by the latest craze—the quarterback, the drummer, the one with a brand-new sports car. The this or that. And that was just fine with mom. At fifteen and nineteen, Caitlin and Ashley were both too young to get serious about boys or men, in her opinion.

  She took a deep breath. Maybe she was jumping the gun here. Why should this one be any different? It was probably only one more date with one more guy. And she knew how these things worked. If mom protested, daughter would rebel. Like that time she tried to get Caitlin to stop hanging around some of her friends who smoked cigarettes. The friends she later picked up were into smoking a lot more than just cigarettes. It was probably best not to make waves with Ashley about this guy. At least not yet.

  Candice stood up. “OK. Fair enough, Ashley. No more questions. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m fine, Mom.” Ashley looked at her watch impatiently. “I’m going now. I’m really running late.”

  Candice nodded. “You be sure to introduce him to us when he arrives.”

  “I can’t. I promised him I would come out when he honks since we’re running late.”

  “Then you’ll just have to be late,” Candice insisted. “I �
��” She paused at the sound of a car horn outside.

  “Oh, darn,” Ashley said. “There he is. And look, you’re not even dressed. I’ll introduce you at the wedding, I promise. I gotta run now.”

  Candice nodded reluctantly.

  “Don’t worry, Mom. You’ll like him.” She kissed Candice on the cheek and darted out the door.

  Candice lit a candle and placed it on the windowsill. It was scented with lavender to soothe the nerves, and boy, did she need that just now. She closed her eyes as she removed the towel from her head and shook out her brown shoulder-length hair.

  There was nothing like a teenage daughter to keep you on your toes. And she had two. Her youngest liked fooling around with reefer. Her oldest was going to show up at Barbara Bentley’s house with a black man on her arm in front of her neighbors and coworkers. What the hell was everyone going to think? She let out a deep breath.

  No need to panic, Candice Jones, even if this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she preached open-mindedness and fairness to her daughters. This was the twenty-first century, and Prince George’s County had a lot of black and brown citizens. Hopefully, if the past was any guide, this new interest of Ashley’s would be gone soon, just like all the rest.

  She walked into the master bath and was greeted with the sound of Jim singing “I’m in the Mood for Love” at the very top of his baritone voice. She chuckled. So she wasn’t losing her mind. The world wasn’t falling apart. Jim sounded just as horrible as he always had.

  She knocked on the glass shower door, and he stopped singing and slid the door open a crack. He was covered with suds from head to toe, and Candice thought he looked so cuddly. He might be fifty but he was in good shape and had a head full of dark wavy hair, with a little gray around the ears and a salt-and-pepper beard.

  After divorcing the girls’ father twelve years ago, she thought she’d be spending the rest of her life as a single mom, since it was tough for a woman with kids to find a man. And after what she’d been through with her two-timing ex-husband, she didn’t think she wanted to find another one.