A Mighty Love

by Anita Doreen Diggs

  “Are you sure they can be resolved?” he asked. “Sometimes two people come to a fork in the road, and the only thing left to do is go in opposite directions.”

  “I’m trying to avoid that.” Adrienne answered. “Lloyd, I just want to say that I’m sorry for anything I’ve ever done to hurt you. Please believe me.”

  Lloyd gave her a wan smile. “I know that, Adrienne. You were just a kid. Neither of us knew anything about life or love. Now, please stop sniveling and tell me about Dan. I thought about him a lot over the years. He always seemed so meek. The exact opposite of you. How did his life turn out?”

  Adrienne wiped her eyes and blew her nose again. “Dan is fine. He graduated from City College with a degree in history and then went to a trade school to learn photography. He’s married now. His wife, Charlene, is a social worker.”

  “That figures,” Lloyd said, a strange grin on his face.

  Adrienne felt uncomfortable. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, reaching for his drink. “It’s just that I would not have expected any less for Dan. It sounds like he has lived the perfect life.”

  Adrienne didn’t know what Lloyd was getting at, but she wasn’t in the mood to press it further. She picked at her salmon and watched him eat. The odd lunch date could not end soon enough.

  Late that night, as Adrienne lay in bed waiting for Mel to come home, she went over every minute of her lunch with Lloyd. There was something cold and remote about him, but that was really none of her business. She admired the way he had dragged himself out of a hopeless situation and built a successful career. He was also an old friend who had power and influence at her place of employment. Since she was too old for a singing career, maybe God had sent LaMar back into her life so that she could make a second grab at the brass ring. But why would God do that for her after she had failed as a mother and wasn’t setting any records in the wife department either?

  Adrienne fell asleep with that question floating in her mind.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The bar didn’t have a name. It was located in an abandoned tenement off 135th Street. The outside was so scrawled with graffiti that it was impossible to discern the building’s original color. Years ago, people had lived in the apartments upstairs, but now every single window was broken, and trash littered the stoop. The front door had been cemented shut to prevent squatters and drug users from getting in, but if you were brave enough to take a short walk through the back alley, there was a black door with a small pane of glass in the middle.

  To get in, a customer had to ring the bell and wait until one of the barmaids peered suspiciously through the glass. If she didn’t recognize the face, the bell went unanswered. It was as simple as that. If the door opened, the customer followed the barmaid down a short, dark hallway, where a man with a handheld metal detector stood in front of another door. There was a cardboard box sitting on the floor beside the man. If you were packing any kind of weapon, it had to go in the box. No one had ever been dumb enough or high enough to refuse to put their knife or gun in the box. Mel dropped his switchblade without being asked and followed the young barmaid, whose name was Tina, down a short flight of steps and through a second door that led into the bar where Debra and her friends eked out a living. Tina turned and smiled at him as they entered. “Ain’t seen you here in a long time, Mel. Where you been hidin’?”

  Mel swatted her on the backside. “Busy workin’, Tina. You stayin’ outa trouble?”

  She giggled and sashayed over to the jukebox without answering.

  Mel blinked so his eyes could adjust to the dim room after the bright streetlight. He noticed that there were only about ten customers in the gigantic space. The joint wouldn’t start jumping until it was dark and the other businesses on the street had closed up for the night.

  He took a stool near the door and waited while Debra slapped down a mug of beer in front of a young guy who seemed to be talking to himself. She sauntered over and stood in front of Mel, her hands on her hips and a friendly grin on her face.

  “Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”

  Ann, who was washing glasses at the end of the bar, waved a soapy hand at him. Belle was wiping down the counter. She wiped her way to stand beside Debra.

  “Tina’s feedin’ quarters into the jukebox. Damn,” Belle said.

  “Hey, Tina!” Debra hollered. “Nobody wanna hear that rap mess, all right?”

  “I sure as hell don’t need it,” sighed Mel. “All that noise gives me a headache.” He liked the song that was playing now, “The Midnight Hour,” by Wilson Pickett.

  Tina answered the older women without turning around, “I hate this old fogey music.” She punched some numbers into the jukebox and stomped defiantly behind the bar. She said something to Ann, who laughed loudly.

  “So, what you drinkin’, Mel?” asked Debra.

  “Same as always. Rum and Coke.”

  Debra went away to fix the drink, and Belle watched the jukebox as if it were about to come alive. She continued to complain about Tina.

  “That girl can’t be no more than nineteen or twenty and been in jail three times. It doan make no sense at all.”

  “Belle, leave that girl alone,” Mel said.

  She slapped his arm with the wet towel and laughed. “How come you don’t stop by Debra’s and play cards no more?”

  Belle stared right into his eyes and her cheeks puffed up as she tried to look seriously concerned instead of just plain nosey. Mel knew that meant she knew all about the trouble between him, Big Boy, and Lillian. Before Mel could think of an answer that would put her in her place, lyrics from the female rap group TLC rollicked out of the jukebox. Belle headed toward Tina, hollering and cursing with every step.

  Debra pulled up a stool. She had made a drink for herself, too. Mel took a sip of his and winced. It was a hell of a lot more rum than Coke.

  “Listen at what those young girls are saying,” Debra said with disgust.

  The bass line was booming, but when Mel listened closely, he could understand that the lyrics were saying that it was okay for a young woman to beg a man for sex if she was feeling hot enough.

  Mel grinned at the lyrics and at the way Tina, the dive’s youngest barmaid, began to shimmy as she mixed a Long Island iced tea for her customer. Debra lit a cigarette.

  “Tina loves that song,” she snickered.

  Mel could hear Debra’s feet doing a tap-tap-tap on the rungs of the stool. “You like it, too.” He laughed.

  “Yeah. I don’t like rap, but I can damn sure dig this one.”

  Tina started chanting along with the record, Ann joined in, and Belle scowled at both of them before giving up the fight.

  Since there were no windows in what was essentially the basement of an apartment building, the place reeked of stale cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and liquor. The walls were bare except for the space right above the liquor bottles. That wall held pictures of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and John and Bobby Kennedy.

  Mel drank silently while Debra watched him. He glanced at his watch. 7:00. He had finished his route two hours ago.

  “You know what today is?”

  “Yeah,” Debra answered sadly. “Mama’s birthday.”

  “I was thinkin’ about it today while I was driving the bus. I’m one year older than she ever lived to be.”

  “I think about that shit every day,” said Debra. “I watch people come in and outa here all the time that I know ain’t takin’ care of themselves but they still alive. Mama never took a drink or a smoke in her life, and God only gave her thirty-nine years on earth.”

  Mel nodded. “God is impossible to figure out.”

  The abrupt death of his mother had been a cruel blow. At her funeral, he had stood before the open coffin in stunned disbelief, unable to cry. For two years after she died, Mel had been paralyzed inside. Then, one day during his freshman year in high school, he was sitting in English class as the teache
r was reading James Baldwin aloud. It was a passage that had to do with love torn away without warning. At that moment he felt the sorrow, the agony, the dreadful separation. He ran from the classroom, out of the building, and home to Debra. He needed to make sure she was still alive. Without her love, he would have felt completely alone in the world, with no firmly fixed place to head for and no idea how to get there. Their aunt had made no secret of the fact that she wasn’t happy about having them around. She didn’t like young people, which was why she had never married or had children of her own. Debra let him cry on her lap, murmuring softly, “I knew this day would come. You’ll be okay now.” The next day he went back to school and finally noticed the girls who had been trying to get his attention for quite some time. He also made a couple of male friends. All the guys talked about was girls, an old seventies movie that had just been released on videotape called The Mack, and its charismatic star, Max Julien.

  Mel saw The Mack three times at his friend’s house that month and started to walk like Max Julien, talk like Max Julien. He became popular, and it made him feel good about himself. Debra was so happy to see him smiling and laughing that she even defied their aunt and worked after school to buy him some clothes that made him look as much like a lady-killer as possible. The girls flocked to him. It wasn’t long before he had sex for the first time, and by the end of freshman year he was tired of looking at tits and asses. Years later he would cringe in embarrassment at photos of the fourteen-year-old boy he had been, all dressed up in flashy clothes in imitation of the famed celluloid pimp.

  Debra poked his arm, returning his thoughts to the bar and the drink in front of him. “Look behind you,” she whispered. “I think you got a fan.”

  She walked away to wait on some men who had just come in, as Mel turned to see what she was talking about.

  The woman advancing toward him with a huge grin on her face was about five feet two, with dyed blond hair that she wore short and slicked to her head. Her lipstick was ruby red, and her eyebrows jet black. Her eyelids were streaked with blue eye shadow. She was wearing tight black leather pants and a yellow turtleneck sweater. Her perfume was cheap and overpowering. Mel shuddered as she slid, grinning, onto the stool beside him.

  “Tina say you Debra’s brother.”

  “Tina told you right.”

  “Debra’s brother got a name?”

  “My name is Mel, and I ain’t in the mood for conversation.”

  The smile turned to a grimace. “To hell wit’ you.”

  She jumped off the stool and stomped over to the pay phone, but Belle was standing in front of it. “Go outside if you wanna make a call,” Belle told the woman.

  Mel watched the woman leave the bar in a huff and kept his eye on Belle. She dragged uneasily on a cigarette, and her left arm, which hung free, quivered tautly. Her eyes darted around the room, and she glanced suspiciously at the last three men who had come in. She puffed a last drag of the cigarette and dropped it to the floor, grinding it beneath her heel. She was about to walk away when the phone rang. “Where the hell you at?” she asked. “You still comin? . . . Make that three hours. . . . Yeah . . . Uh-huh . . . I said all right, damn it . . . See you in a few.” She put the phone back on the hook, and their eyes met. Her eyes said, You didn’t hear nuthin’, and his answered, I damn shore didn’t.

  She went back behind the bar to wait on the three new customers. Mel ordered another drink and waved Debra over to join him.

  “You still gonna help me out on the rent? Big Boy’s showing his ass over what you did to Lillian, and I’m stuck.”

  “Yeah.” Mel stood up and pulled out his wallet. “I got paid today so I can help you out, but I wish you wasn’t so dependent on him. Can’t you find a job in a regular bar?”

  Debra took the money and jammed it into her bra. “I been thinkin’ about that.”

  “Don’t just think about it. Make a move.”

  She nodded in agreement and then changed the subject. “We miss you at the games.”

  Mel grinned. “I’ll be back when things simmer down a little bit. I don’t wanna have to kick your man’s ass.”

  “Ain’t nobody fightin’ in my house,” Debra said sharply, “and you can’t duck Lillian forever.”

  “I don’t have to. She got on my bus last week with two little kids.”

  Debra’s eyes widened as he described the brief encounter. “I would have slapped the shit out of you,” she said when he finished.

  Mel shrugged. “That’s cuz you ain’t got no class.”

  “Maybe not, but your face would still be on fire.”

  They shared a laugh and a lot more drinks before Mel staggered home.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Adrienne woke up in the morning to find Mel stretched out beside her, his inert frame still in the blue uniform he had worn the day before. The only sound in the room was Mel’s deep snores. He and the room smelled like old booze. She felt like kicking him once to get him off the bed, and several more times to roll him right on out of the house and into the streets, where he obviously wanted to be. Instead, she punched him hard in the chest, more to ease her frustration than to wake him up. Mel responded to the blow by jerking slightly. His eyelids twitched and his face turned sideways as he settled back into slumber. Adrienne remembered that the baby used to react the same way if she or Mel made a loud noise while Delilah slept in her crib. Mel’s face was just an older, harder picture of his daughter’s. All of a sudden, Adrienne didn’t want to kick Mel anymore. He was the only part of Delilah she still had.

  She craned her neck to look over his body at the clock. It was almost 8:30, which meant she was running late. She jumped out of bed and went to brush her teeth. The bristles were soft and slid across her teeth without offering any real resistance to the food particles that could be lodged between them. That meant it was time for a new toothbrush. She had read somewhere that bristles were supposed to be stiff. She spit out the toothpaste, rinsed, and then poured mouthwash into a Dixie cup and let the minty green liquid fill her mouth. It tingled the inside of her cheeks.

  Even though she made a great deal of noise getting ready for work—slamming drawers, running water for a shower—Mel never moved. She left without kissing him good-bye.

  Lloyd called her late in the day. “I’d like to talk to you about something. Can you stop by my office?”

  “I’ve got to finish a report for Regina. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Lloyd chuckled. “I’ll wait here until you’re done.”

  It was after six when Adrienne got to his office. His face lit up as she walked in. He stood up, walked around his enormous desk, and gestured toward the sofa. “Let’s sit there,” he said. “It’s a lot more comfortable.”

  She sat.

  “Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Soda? Hot chocolate?”

  “Hot chocolate.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He returned with two PWE mugs filled with the hot liquid and sat down beside her. “You look positively wounded tonight. Is Regina working you too hard?”

  Adrienne shook her head no, picked up her mug, and took a sip.

  “Your hands are trembling,” he said. “More problems at home?”

  Adrienne sighed. “Something like that. How did you guess?”

  “I’ve done enough time in bad relationships to know the signs.”

  Adrienne steered the conversation away from herself. “Do you have a girlfriend now?”

  “No. I went through a bad breakup a few months ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Lloyd crossed one leg over the other. “So am I. Patricia is a lawyer. We would have made a great team.”

  Adrienne wanted to know if they had been planning to live together or get married, but she decided not to pry. Instead, she asked him another question that was on her mind. “What should I call you?”

  Lloyd chuckled, put a finger to his lips in a motion for silence, and got up. He walked tall
and erect, like Peter, her Hunter College love. Funny, she hadn’t thought of Peter in years. He had been a studious and attentive suitor who was unable to understand her decision to leave school and join Starship. They had argued until there was nothing left to say, then drifted apart.

  Lloyd closed the door and sat back down before answering. “At times like this, you can call me LaMar if you want, but in public it’s Lloyd.”

  Adrienne waved a hand. “Forget it. Too complicated. I’ll stick to Lloyd.”

  He accepted that with a slight nod of his head.

  “I’m really proud of you, Lloyd,” she said gently.

  “Thanks. Sometimes I can’t believe that I actually made it.”

  He was a handsome man. The horrible acne that had earned him the nickname “Pimple Jenkins” in high school was gone. The thick, black-rimmed glasses were gone, too. Adrienne figured he must be wearing contact lenses, because nothing could have fixed LaMar’s terrible vision.

  “I owe a lot of my success to you and your family.”

  “Why do you say that?” Adrienne asked in amazement.

  He explained that she had been his only friend back in the old days, when he was lonely, penniless, and scared. “At your house, there was warmth and affection. You guys showed me what real family life was all about. Patricia and I were going to raise our kids in an atmosphere just like that.”

  So Lloyd had intended to marry his ex-girlfriend.

  They were quiet for a few moments, and then Lloyd broke the silence. “What did you expect married life to be like?”

  Adrienne laughed. “That’s the easiest question you’ve ever asked me. I expected that Mel and I would have a loving, happy union, just like my parents have.”

  “Patricia’s folks are still together. Maybe she would have known how to make it work,” Lloyd said.

  “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?” Adrienne said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

  “I want to talk to you about a job, but first let me tell you something about your boss,” Lloyd chuckled. “I’ve had women come on to me before, but that Regina Belvedere gives new meaning to the word shameless. She made an appointment to see me one day, and while I wondered what it was about, I didn’t want to be rude and refuse her. So she comes in and sits down across from me with her skirt hiked up so high, I could see her panties. I didn’t say anything, but the possibility of a false sexual harassment charge did cross my mind. Well, Regina sat there talking about ways that she could be a valuable member of the PWE Multicultural team, and all the time, she’s licking her lips and playing with her hair. When I’d heard enough, I called in Sally Gomez. I told Regina that I wanted Sally to take notes so that I could consider her request for a transfer later on. She fell for it, but I had no intention of hiring a woman like that. The only reason I called Sally in was to have a witness in case Regina someday says that I came on to her or something. Anyway, about three weeks passed, and I ran into her on the street. She starts batting her eyelids and stuff like that. I told her that I had considered her proposal but that my team was already chosen and there was no more room for additional staffers. I was polite, but she got the message. Now I hear that she wants to start her own company and take the Puerto Rican girl who sits with you along with her.”