“My mama has the baby,” she said, “all night if we want. I was thinking after this we could go to Dooky Chase’s like old times.” She reached for his hand. “Something special, you know.
“So tell me about it,” she added before he could answer.
“About what?”
“The new job, what else?”
“Aww, it’s not much.” He was being humble, but she could tell he was proud. “Mostly sitting in a cubicle listening to people complain about their orders, but I like people, and it’s a fresh start. I needed this, you know.”
She nodded. “What about the coworkers?” she asked. “You like them?” She heard an edge of nervousness creep into her voice.
“The ones I met seem cool. I’m the only black, as usual.”
“That’s okay,” she said. She was careful about what she said next; she didn’t want to nag. “Maybe keep to yourself this time, anyway,” she added after a while. “You have so many friends; you don’t need new ones at work.”
“You got that right.” He squeezed her hand, pulled her closer. “You and T.C. are all I need,” he said. Then, “You smell good. What’s that?”
“Soap,” she smiled.
“Oh, okay, you’re getting real fancy, taking showers in the morning and whatnot.”
“Anything for you.” She winked at him.
He paused, then said, “Tell me something, if I jumped in the water, would you save me?” It was an old joke between them, started during their early nights at the Lakefront when he confessed to her that he couldn’t swim.
“Hell, no.” Jackie play-pushed him backward. “Not with my hair just permed.”
He laughed. “What, girl? Didn’t you tell me you and Sybil took swimming lessons back in the day? What’d you do with your hair back then?”
“Well, I didn’t have a man to impress back then.”
“Oh, is that right? And is there somebody now? That you’re trying to impress?” He leaned in, studying her face, gazing at it as if he’d be questioned on the details of it and couldn’t afford to forget.
She pulled him closer, shut her eyes, when she heard someone: “Look at the happy couple.”
Jackie blinked, felt her husband pull away.
The white man in front of them looked familiar but Jackie couldn’t put her finger on why.
Terry recognized him though. He pulled back from her more when he spoke. “Hey, Michael, what’s going on, man? So good to see you.”
Jackie could tell he was happy to see the man, but he was embarrassed about something too.
“Don’t pay us any mind,” Terry went on, “we’re just horsing around. Don’t get much time out without the baby,” and that
sentence came out like an engine dying; all the comfort and excitement that had been building inside them since they were teenagers seemed to dissolve right there at their feet.
Michael didn’t know it though. He was all handshakes and shoulder pats. “You look so good, buddy. I’d heard you had gotten yourself together, but it’s one thing to see it in person.”
“Oh, thanks, man. Wouldn’t have been able to do it without my family, let me tell you.” Terry looked back at Jackie. He started to introduce her, but the man cut in.
“Anyway, you still keep up with Darren and Chase?”
“Nah, man, I haven’t heard from them.”
“Oh, okay, well, I’ll have to tell them I ran into you. They’re still over at the VA.”
It hit Jackie then who the man was; he wasn’t the one who had introduced Terry to the drugs, no, but a member of that same crew, and he could have been one of the ones who’d gotten high with Terry on coke those nights, then abandoned him as soon as he veered into crack. In her early research she had read about triggers, that addicts shouldn’t go places where they’d taken drugs, that they shouldn’t hang out with the people they used with, that seeing those same faces, or smelling the kitchen of the restaurant where they’d smoked in the bathroom might send them reeling back. She looked this man up and down, up and down. Maybe he was high now. Sybil had warned her people on cocaine had dilated pupils, that they wiped their noses a lot, that they couldn’t stand still. This guy seemed normal though; he was over-the-top happy but maybe he was just glad to see his old friend okay.
“Have you found anything yet?” Michael went on. “I think hiring is starting to pick up, and if you want me to put a word in—”
Terry cut him off. “No, no, buddy. Don’t worry about it. I have something now.”
“Oh? What is it?”
Terry mumbled the name of the place, and Michael’s face scrunched up in surprise.
“You’re kidding. You can do better than that, Terry. You were the smartest one out of all of us.”
“I don’t know about all of that,” Terry shrugged, but Jackie knew; everybody did; it was just a fact. She started to say something to that effect, but Terry kept talking.
“It’s a process, buddy.” His voice sounded strained all of a sudden, and Jackie cleared her throat.
“Oh, excuse me, Jackie, you remember Michael?”
She nodded.
“Of course, of course, the beautiful Jackie, and how’s the baby?” Michael asked.
“Hungry,” Jackie said, and they laughed. “He’s twenty-five pounds now, not even one year old.”
“Wow,” Michael said, stretching the word out. “Wow. He’ll be tall like his dad.”
“Yeah,” she smiled, “handsome like him too.”
They all stood there for a while, awkward silence shifting between them.
“Well, all right, Terry, we’re all getting together next week if you want to join,” Michael said finally.
“Oh, that sounds good.” Terry sounded surprised but lifted like a child with a Valentine in his locker when he was sure he’d be forgotten. Terry looked at Jackie while he answered. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and they said their good-byes.
Jackie felt relieved once the man was gone, but the interruption had ripped into their glee too, and she couldn’t locate the exact space where it tore, or she’d try to put it together again.
Terry grabbed her hand, but they didn’t walk far before they decided to turn around on the path and head back for the car. He said he was hungry all of a sudden, starving. They talked about what they would order, fried chicken and corn bread for her and red beans and rice for him.
She didn’t ask him whether he would meet up with Michael or not. It was obvious he wouldn’t. He hadn’t said it that way because he was a people person; like her, he had trouble saying the word no. He’d come up with some excuse the day of and press on as if he had never even seen him though. She was proud of him for that, even before it happened.
Even still, a weight hung over them while they ate, and though she’d picked up new lingerie from Macy’s and planned to put it to use that night, she turned over when he tried to touch her. He asked what was wrong, and she said nothing, she was just tired. But when he went to sleep, she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling for hours.
A couple of weeks later when Jackie got home, her answering machine was blinking. Her parents had called her four times. She’d just left them at work, and everything had been fine, but in the time it took her to drive back to Stately Grove, they must have talked to Sybil. Jackie wasn’t surprised. She’d known this was coming. She’d expected to be angry when the day hit, but if anything, she felt relief.
She put off calling them back for the time it took to fix supper, set the table, bathe the baby, but she found her calmness grew thorns the longer she waited. Terry was working late, so she had to wait until the baby fell asleep before she returned the call. Of course today it took longer than normal, four stories instead of two, three songs instead of one. She normally waited ten minutes after his eyes closed to give him time to sink into a slumber that she coul
dn’t rouse with footsteps or door creaks, but tonight she left as soon as his head fell back against the blanket, grabbed her cordless, stepped out on the balcony with the door ajar, and dialed the number.
Mama answered on the first ring.
Jackie couldn’t catch it all; she heard Daddy’s voice stream in too; they must have been on separate receivers, screaming over each other, barely decipherable. For every few sentences, she was able to catch one.
“What were you thinking? It’s not just you anymore, Jackie Marie, you’ve got that baby to take care of too.”
Then Aunt Ruby, who was probably sitting next to Mama: “The cat is out of the bag now.”
“We’re not trying to run your life but you’re not doing a good job of it yourself.”
“We know he loves you but he’s an addict.”
“He’s not lying to you, he’s lying to himself, and he doesn’t even know it. That’s what’s so sad.”
“You can’t fix a man who doesn’t want to be saved. You’ll just wind up paying for his sins in the end.”
And then Aunt Ruby: “A leopard damn sure can’t change its spots.”
“And you know it was wrong too, that’s why you were trying to hide it. Sybil said if she hadn’t gone over unannounced, you might have kept that secret till Christmas.”
Aunt Ruby piped in again, “What is done in the dark will come to the light.”
Jackie didn’t say anything, just waited for the uproar to die down. Then she heard herself speak as if the voice was coming out of somebody else’s body, slow as tar drying. “I love you, but this is my family now. Me, Terry, and T.C., we have to make our own decision about what’s best for us.”
Her daddy was hot on the heels of her explanation. “And who’s going to be there when it all falls apart again, huh? Answer me that. You’re ruining yourself, Jackie, lowering yourself beyond recognition, messing with him. You’re throwing away everything your mother and I worked so hard for, and I can’t spend my old age bailing you out.”
For the rest of her life, Jackie wouldn’t forget that comment. She and her daddy weren’t as close as they had been, and she felt a pang in her chest whenever she saw him with Sybil, but most of that jealousy was mitigated by T.C. When she had the baby, she realized how much a parent loved a child, and she assumed her father’s feelings for her were at least as sturdy. Because of that perspective, all this time she had also assumed that when he asked her how she was doing, when he drove her car to the lot for oil changes, moved her furniture, stopped by unannounced, and paid her light bill, that there was nothing else in the world he’d rather be doing. In reality though he’d been building up anger with every check he signed, every mile he drove, and the last thing she wanted was a favor laced in resentment. She waited for her mama to cut in with a word that might coat the ferocity of what had just been said, but there was only silence, a heavy resolve as though Jackie were the one who needed to explain, as if she would do anything differently if the circumstances tumbled into her lap again.
“Then don’t, Daddy,” she said, just as cool as rainwater, and she threw the phone across the cement. She heard it crack, saw the batteries tumble out.
“It wasn’t the phone’s fault,” she heard her husband say. Terry was back, walking up the steps toward her.
“What?” Jackie asked, still angry and looking for some way to distill it.
“I said, it wasn’t the phone’s fault. Whoever got you so mad, that’s who deserves to be thrown out. Now you gotta fork over thirty more bucks.” Terry smiled, and Jackie felt herself sigh.
“Some people you can’t just throw out,” she said.
“Your parents.” Terry had reached their floor now and leaned against the balcony beside her.
While she’d been talking to her folks, two police officers had pulled up across the street, cornered a young guy walking with his pants hanging past his drawls. She couldn’t hear what they were asking him but she could see the young man shaking his head, heard him shout, “I ain’t do nothing.” He couldn’t have been more than seventeen.
Jackie shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. And it was in the scheme of things. What mattered was Terry was here. He had been working at that pharmacy for a couple of weeks now. His passion for it seemed to be fading, but he’d get his first check next week, and pretty soon they’d be looking at places again; fingers crossed, they’d have enough for a down payment in the East. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling of that call having emptied everything meaningful inside her; the filling she had managed to hold on to even when Terry left her seemed to be splayed out on the concrete just like that phone.
“Gotta be more than nothing,” Terry said. He kept his eyes on the boy downstairs while he spoke. “Your parents found out I’m back, huh?”
Jackie nodded.
“Parents will be parents,” he said. “They can’t help worrying over you. I know with T.C., even when I was out there on the streets, I’d be thinking about him. Did he put something he found on the floor in his mouth? Is he going to grow up killing animals or worse ’cause his daddy’s out there fiending for crack instead of reading him bedtime stories?” He shook his head.
Jackie hadn’t heard him reference his life on the other side before and she felt a mix of curiosity and disgust.
The boy across the street was repeating himself now, his voice rising each time, “I ain’t do nothing. But I ain’t do nothing.”
One of the officers gripped his arm and slammed him into the door of the police car. The boy didn’t even wince, but Terry did. Still, he didn’t take his eyes off him.
“Me too,” Jackie said, trying to grasp his attention. Different concerns of course, but what mother didn’t fear the worst for her child? When he was with her, when he wasn’t, it didn’t seem to make a difference. “But I’m a grown woman,” she added. “That’s the difference between me and my baby. At some point they have to accept that I have to take responsibility for my own choices in life, that I’m qualified to make my own decisions.”
And that was the part where she stumbled, because she’d never been as judicious as her sister. Sybil said everything with a sense of certainty that obviated the presence of all doubt anywhere. Her failures seemed to only grant her more confidence. Tulane, for instance, was her dream school, but she didn’t finish reading the rejection letter before she changed her tune, a shift so abrupt and thorough it swept out all evidence of any opinion preceding it. All of a sudden, everybody knew the best judges came out of Loyola. Tulane was all well and good if you wanted to teach, but when you looked at the best practicing lawyers in the city, most of them had studied at Loyola. Jackie didn’t know if any of that were true or not, but more important, its veracity never would have crossed her mind.
“I’m a grown woman.” Jackie repeated it to see if it would stick.
“I know,” Terry said. He was nearly whispering. The police had cuffed the boy and were pushing his head into the back of their car.
“What do you think he did?” she asked, to change the subject.
Terry shrugged. The car’s sirens cut on, twinkled down the block. “Maybe drugs. Maybe nothing. Hard to know sometimes.
“You did the right thing,” he said once the car was out of sight, “hanging up. That’s the only way to draw that line, to make them understand it’s time to push back. Otherwise, they’ll be riding your back for the rest of your life.” He walked toward the front door of their apartment, but turned back toward her to speak. “Sometimes people have to see it to believe it. Sometimes you got to show them better than you can tell them.”
She studied his face. He seemed spooked, maybe from the arrest downstairs. She wondered if anything like that had ever happened to him on the street. Who knew what he’d witnessed? He never talked about it, but he’d told her once that crack wasn’t like alcohol, that he’d pay anything to be able to block so
me of his memories out, but that it wasn’t that kind of drug.
“But everything is going all right otherwise?” she asked. His hand was on the doorknob now, but she wanted to keep him with her.
He nodded. “Everything’s good. If you’re good, and the baby’s good, I’m good, girl.”
Jackie smiled, but she wasn’t satisfied; something in his demeanor was worrying her. “At work too, I mean?” she asked. He hadn’t talked about it much. The first day, he’d been so excited to wake up with a purpose, but now it seemed he got out of bed later and later, and he was quiet more than buoyed up when he got back.
He turned back toward the house. “Umhmm,” he grunted. “Same ol’, same ol’.”
“It’s going to get better, baby,” she said, not quite sure what the it she was referencing was. At that, he turned toward her again.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just tired, baby, but everything’s good.” He stretched his smile out, reminding her of herself all those days before he came back.
“Well, that’s good, baby,” she said, and though she recognized her own fake smile in his, she let his words soothe her. “That’s good,” she repeated.
She walked toward him. He was still grinning, but she could see the defeat in his eyes.
T.C.
Summer 2010
T.C. decided it would be easier to clone than start from scratch. Then he realized this was too big of an operation to run from his mama’s house, so once he bought the cuttings from his boy who also grew, they headed over to Tiger’s. Tiger stayed in the Ninth Ward like T.C., in a house about the size of his, with the same rust-colored brick and postage stamp lawn out front. But unlike T.C.’s, Tiger’s house wasn’t done up with sofas from Aaron’s, or salvaged baby pictures on the wall. No, the place looked as if it had been gutted in preparation for a remodel, but whoever was in charge stopped midway through, and the only thing that had been set down was an uncovered mattress and a TV in the last bedroom off the hall where Tiger planned to house the plants.
After Tiger gave him a tour of the space, T.C. stepped back out on the porch. There used to be a housing complex across the street, but now the townhouses were all fenced in, hollowed out, boarded up remains amid dead grass and neglected tires. Crackheads
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