Adrienne spent another two hours in the shop, but the results were lovely. Sharon had washed, conditioned, clipped, dried, and styled Adrienne’s shoulder-length chestnut-colored hair into a sleek pageboy that framed her honey-brown face perfectly.
As Adrienne left the salon, she wondered how long her hair would hold up in the stifling weather. It was hot—the type of hot that was oppressively humid, a distinct feature of New York City in July. She started the car and hesitated for a moment, knowing she should go straight home. It was 4:30 P.M. now, and Mel had to leave for work by ten. Adrienne shrugged. I’ll be up all night with Delilah, she thought, I’m entitled to a little fun. I won’t stay at Dan’s’s house long.
Dan was Adrienne’s little brother, but people couldn’t tell by looking at him. He was over six feet tall and stocky. His beard, sideburns, and mustache also made him look older than his thirty years. He was a photographer who specialized in weddings and sweet-sixteen parties. Adrienne loved him and her sister-in-law, Charlene. The couple lived in a one-bedroom apartment on West Fifty-second Street.
As usual, he was delighted to see her. “Come on in,” he said grinning as he stepped aside to let her pass.
Adrienne gave him a peck on the cheek. “Hi, yourself. Is Charlene here?”
“No, she’s up in Connecticut, visiting her parents.”
Adrienne sniffed the air and smiled at her brother. “I don’t smell anything cooking and I’m real hungry.”
Dan headed for the kitchen. “I was going to make some salmon cakes later, but I don’t mind doing it now.”
Adrienne pushed him aside on their way to the kitchen. “Man, go away. I can do a better job.”
Dan laughed and sat down.
Adrienne took an onion and a green pepper out of the refrigerator. A can of salmon sat on the counter nearby. She opened the can of salmon, chopped the contents into a bowl, and cut pieces of onion and green pepper into it. A small amount of flour quickly followed. Adrienne cracked open an egg and floured her hands before starting to mix the concoction. When all the ingredients were blended, she washed her hands, poured a small amount of oil into a frying pan, and turned on the flame.
Dan watched her movements closely, just as he had done when he was a little boy. Adrienne noticed the hungry look on his face and laughed. “They’ll be done in a minute. Do you want eggs or grits?”
“Grits. How is married life and my beautiful niece?”
“My marriage is wonderful. I just wish we could get Delilah to sleep more at night.”
“Sleepless nights go with the territory, Sis. Just be grateful that everything else is going well. When are you going back to work?”
“In two weeks.”
“Who is going to watch Delilah?”
“Mel will stay on the night shift so we don’t have to pay a baby-sitter.”
“That’s great.”
She nodded in agreement and continued to cook.
“Have you heard from the folks?”
“Yeah, Mama called yesterday,” Adrienne said dryly. “I didn’t give her a chance to start grilling me about my mothering skills. Delilah was fussing, so that gave me an excuse to get off the phone real quick.”
“Well, if you hadn’t hung up so fast, you would know that she and Dad are coming to New York for a visit.”
Adrienne sighed. “Why?”
“I didn’t ask but they probably just want to see Delilah. Besides, it’s boring as hell in Dietsville.”
Adrienne laughed. Her parents had retired and gone to Alabama two years before. They had come back once when Delilah was born and had stayed at her house for a week. “Is Mama still insisting that Delilah looks like her?”
“No. She finally gave in and admitted that her only grandchild is the spitting image of Mel.”
“How is Dad?”
“All right. Says he’s doing a lot of fishing.”
“Good,” Adrienne said. “What’s new with you?”
“I had two wacko customers at the studio yesterday.”
Adrienne stirred the grits. “What happened?”
“This guy comes in with his woman, and they start looking at my portfolio and wall samples. She wants them to have a formal engagement photo. I could tell he wasn’t feelin’ it, but it was her show. Anyway, I started to help some other customers and then I heard shouting. Well, I couldn’t have them disturbing the peace, so I politely went over and asked them to quiet down.”
“What were they arguing about?”
Dan chuckled. “Her engagement ring. She said he had to go out and buy a bigger one or she would hide her left hand in the photo. That pissed the brother off, and I couldn’t blame him.”
Adrienne laughed heartily. “That union is off to a great start.”
“She decided to sit on both her hands while I took the picture!”
The two of them laughed some more.
“If it were me, I’d call the whole thing off,” Dan ended.
Adrienne set two steaming plates of food on the table as her brother gathered the utensils, napkins, and soft drinks. When they sat down to eat, Adrienne said, “This place is so quiet when Charlene isn’t here.”
Dan nodded. “That’s because my wife likes noise. The TV or radio always has to be on. She doesn’t value solitude at all.”
“Leave my girl alone,” Adrienne chided him.
“I think you sometimes forget who your sibling is,” Dan teased. “Every time I turn around, she’s on the phone with you. What do you find to talk about all the time?”
“Charlene is my friend, and we talk about woman stuff. Do you want to hear some of it?”
Dan held up a hand as though he were warding off an evil spirit. “No way.”
Adrienne chuckled, and the two chatted easily until their stomachs were full.
Delilah was sleeping soundly when Adrienne left. Mel took a shower, slipped his pajamas on, and crawled wearily into bed. He awakened hours later to Delilah’s furious screams. Cursing, he got up. She must have been crying for a long time, because her face was contorted, her body was rigid, and the baby pillow was wet from her tears. Mel lifted her out of the crib and held her close until she stopped crying. “What do you want?” he asked her in frustration. “Daddy needs some sleep so he can go back to work.”
Once calm was restored, he laid her back in the crib. As soon as his hands were removed from her body, the little face scrunched up and she began to wail again.
“So that’s it,” Mel chuckled softly. “You don’t wanna sleep in this cage. Come on. You can lay down in the bed with me.” He placed the baby on the bed beside him. She closed her eyes, and Mel sighed in relief. All he needed was a cigarette, and then he could settle down again, too. Mel hoped that Delilah would sleep until Adrienne returned from the hairdresser. His face sagged with weariness, his eyes heavy with fatigue. He reached over and grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand, then fumbled around on the crowded surface until he found a book of matches to light it.
The cigarette was still lit when he dozed off. It fell out of his hand, igniting the sheets and acrylic blanket that covered him and his daughter.
Delilah’s cries woke him a few minutes later. Shit! he thought, the bed is on fire. He dashed to the bathroom, ran some water into a pail, and careened back into the bedroom just as a whoosh, followed by brilliant, soaring flames that danced rapidly, almost daintily from his side of the bed to the other.
Mel charged into the glow, trying desperately to reach Delilah.
By the time they finished eating, it was nearly dark outside. Adrienne glanced at her watch. “Goodness, it’s eight o’ clock!” she said, grabbing her purse. “I’ve got to get going.”
“Why don’t you stay for dessert? Charlene baked a chocolate cake last night.”
“No. Mel has to leave for work at ten. Maybe he can catch a few winks before then.” Adrienne paused with her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” She blew her brother a kiss and was gone.
When she turned the car onto 147th Avenue, a smile flitted across her beautiful face as she thought of her husband, and she speeded up slightly. She hated it when Mel worked the night shift. Lying in bed alone, she longed for his gaze, his touch, his scent. Adrienne grabbed a tube of matte red lipstick out of the glove compartment and glided on a fresh coat. Mel loved that color on her because it accented the small round mole near her mouth. Smoothing back her hair, she stole another glance in the rearview mirror. She couldn’t wait for Mel to see how beautiful she looked.
Since the car windows were up, Adrienne didn’t smell the smoke, but two fire trucks and an ambulance whizzing by forced her to pull over. The lights flashed and the alarms screamed their purpose as Adrienne covered one ear in a futile attempt to block out the noise. It wasn’t until she made a right turn onto 149th that she realized that the fire was on her street. Even then, it didn’t occur to her that the angry flames shooting into the night sky were coming from the peach-tinted two-family house on the corner. A fireman approached the car and motioned her to open the window.
“You’ll have to turn back, ma’am. No one is allowed past this point.”
Adrienne peered anxiously over his shoulder, and panic seized her. The fire trucks, police cars, and ambulance were all double-parked right in front of the house in which she and Mel rented a two-bedroom apartment from an Indian couple.
“I live on the top floor of that last house on the end. Is that where the fire is? Please, I have to make sure my husband and daughter are all right.” Adrienne’s heart beat furiously and her mind raced. Suppose Mel and Delilah were lying on the lawn suffering from smoke inhalation, or worse, had broken bones and internal injuries from leaping out the window?
The expression on the man’s soot-covered face changed from annoyance to sympathy. Adrienne opened the car door and stumbled out. Before he could say another word, she ducked under his arm and charged forward. Her arms and legs pumped furiously as she ran. She felt like a character in a silent movie. There was a lot of action and noise surrounding her, but she couldn’t see or hear it.
The neighbors lined both sides of the street, held back by police officers and blue wooden barricades. Some of them cried softly; others screamed Adrienne’s name. Consumed with terror, Adrienne was only dimly aware of them. The Indian landlord and his family stood by helplessly. His facial expression was one of shock. Adrienne couldn’t even remember his name as she looked up at the house. Flames and smoke poured from the top-floor windows of her apartment. A fireman caught her as she reached the house. Adrienne struggled in his arms, trying to get free. “My husband and baby are in there!”
“Miss, we got them out,” the fireman told her.
Adrienne’s body relaxed. “Oh, thank God!” She breathed. “Where are they?”
Mel was unconscious, lying in the back of the ambulance with an oxygen mask pressed over his face and white bandages wrapped around both hands and arms up to his elbows. The only indication that he was still alive was the slow rise and fall of his chest. Two of the paramedics worked feverishly on him. A third paramedic patted her shoulder, saying, “He has some shards of glass in his arms. My partners are more worried about smoke inhalation than anything else right now.”
Adrienne shouted to Mel over the noise, “Mel, I’m here. What happened? Where is Delilah?”
The paramedic rubbed her back. “Ma’am, he is in shock right now and probably doesn’t remember what happened. We’re taking him to the hospital.” He took her elbow. “Have a seat. You can ride along right beside him.”
Adrienne kissed Mel’s forehead and then looked frantically from one face to the other. “Where’s my baby?” she pleaded. The paramedics looked away, but not before their eyes told her what their lips could not.
Adrienne jumped from the ambulance, and a black female police officer rushed over to guide her.
What remained of Delilah was zipped up in a body bag and already placed in the coroner’s wagon. “Ooooooh,” a cry of pain escaped from Adrienne, and the agony ripped through her body with the force of a thousand knives.
Adrienne thought she was sleeping, that the horrific scene in front of her was a bad dream. She would go mad if it were real. Black tears from her mascaraed eyes streamed down her face, and her perfectly manicured nails began to break as she clawed at the doors of the vehicle that held her baby girl. Strong arms grabbed her from behind. It was the female officer, and she was crying, too, as she clutched Adrienne to her bosom.
PART ONE
A BLAST FROM THE PAST
CHAPTER ONE
“Wake up, fool.” Debra Jordan shook her brother’s shoulder. “Your wife is on the phone.”
Melvin groaned and pushed his head deeper into the pillows. What the hell did Adrienne want now?
“Tell her I’m just walkin’ out the door,” he said.
Debra shook harder. “What you talkin’ about? She say you was supposed to meet her this afternoon. Now git up and talk to her. I got company.”
Six months after the fire, Mel lay on a thin mattress on a single bed that was much too short for his lanky frame. He had never bothered to decorate these sleeping quarters, so his back room in Debra’s thirteenth-floor housing-project apartment was practically bare. One scarred bureau held a broken mirror, a rickety lamp, and a cheap clock that didn’t work most of the time.
Mel sat up and shook his head in confusion. “I just lay down for a minute. What time is it?”
Debra sucked her teeth on her way out the door. “Nighttime, fool. It’s just after eight.”
Mel groaned. He had been supposed to meet his wife at 1:00 P.M. to see an apartment. “Damn! Adrienne must be boilin’ mad.”
The sounds of the Mississippi Mass Choir were blaring. Debra played gospel music every Sunday. She also held a card game in her apartment every Sunday night to pick up extra spending money for the coming week. It didn’t matter which players won or lost, because the house got five dollars per game. Debra was a big woman with a toothy grin and dyed red hair, which at this moment was standing straight up on her head, her black roots showing.
It sounded as if there were a hundred people in Debra’s living room, but Mel knew that it was the same half dozen who played blackjack and bid whist and drank rum there every Sunday night. He pushed himself up off the bed and went out into the noisy, smoke-filled living room.
There was a new face at the card table. A woman who looked to be in her late thirties, with caramel skin, full hot pink lips, and wearing a low-cut hot-pink dress to match. Her dark-brown hair was all twirled up in a fancy style. The thin gold bangles that decorated both her arms jingled as she played cards. Mel had not planned to join the game, but the beautiful unknown female in the living room changed his mind. He knew he’d be playing his last five dollars as soon as Adrienne finished telling him off.
It didn’t bother him that Adrienne was annoyed. Sooner or later, she was going to have to face the truth, and then she would dump him anyway. When he and Adrienne first separated because she blamed him for the tragedy, he had prayed for God to take him to his mother so that he wouldn’t have to think about his lost wife and daughter.
With nowhere else to go, he had arrived on Debra’s doorstep, mired in grief and anger. For the first few weeks he didn’t sleep for more than three hours a night. The bus company had forced him to take a three-week leave of absence after a cop found him sobbing at the wheel with a load of irate passengers and other drivers honking their horns and shouting obscenities in the traffic around him.
The truth was that her husband was a street guy who had turned his life around, only to find out that God was determined to return him to the gutter where he belonged. God had killed his baby, driven his wife almost insane, and returned him to his sister’s house, where nothing mattered but the next card game. Mel no longer believed he could have the American dream, but he would not
risk Adrienne’s mental health by telling her that. Sooner or later she would realize it herself. Until then, he’d just go along with the charade.
He winked at Hot Pink, who was sitting between Ann and Ann’s mother, Belle, Debra’s coworkers. From Tuesday through Saturday, Debra worked in Harlem as a barmaid for an illegal dive that couldn’t be seen from the street. The owner paid the cops off every week to keep them from shutting the place down. Everyone prospered except the semiliterate women who worked there. Most of them were middle-aged high school dropouts, who worked for the less than minimum wage plus tips because they couldn’t get a job anywhere else.
Big Boy, a three-hundred-pound fool with only five teeth left in his mouth, took up the whole sofa, which had been pulled up next to Belle. He was an asthmatic who chain-smoked cigarettes. He had also started more than one feud in the projects, yet always emerged with his few remaining teeth intact. Mel didn’t understand why no one had killed his ass yet. Big Boy slapped an ace down on the table and noticed Mel at the same time. “If I was as ugly as you and somethin’ that pretty was on the phone for me, I’da been outa that bed long before now.”
Everybody thought this was real funny. Mel ignored the laughter while he shuffled through the room and picked up the receiver, which was lying facedown on a washing machine that hadn’t worked in more than twenty years. Debra refused to get rid of it, because, aside from some old pictures, it was all they had to remind them of their mother.
“Hey, Adrienne, what’s up?”
“What do you mean, what’s up? I waited at the token booth for over an hour.”
A Mighty Love Page 2