One Way or Another

by Rhonda Bowen

  Toni watched her brother in amusement. No one liked jail, but she was sure she didn’t know anyone who hated it as much as Trey. You would think that he had been on lockdown at some point the way he avoided going anywhere near a jailhouse. The mere fact that he drove across several states to a place like this to pick up Adam proved just how deep their friendship was.

  “Definitely,” Adam said, motioning for the keys. “Let me drive.”

  Trey raised an eyebrow. “You sure you remember how?” “Man, I was in there for three weeks, not three years.” Adam laughed as he grabbed the keys from Trey.

  “So where we going?” Trey asked as they pulled away from the Baltimore City Correctional Center.

  “Home,” Adam answered simply.

  Toni understood more clearly what he meant by home twenty minutes later when she found herself back in front of the two-story blue and white house where she had last left Adam three weeks earlier. They had barely stopped the car and gotten out when the front door flew open.

  “Q, is that you?”

  Long cocoa-colored arms and legs with a mass of curly weave attached came flying down the steps and jumped on Adam. He seemed just as happy to see the woman as he swung her around easily, laughing.

  “It’s so good to see you!” she exclaimed, cupping his cheeks and grinning when he finally set her down. “Jonah told me you saw him before everything went down and I was actually jealous. We’ve missed you so much. It’s been so long.”

  “I know, I missed you guys too.” Adam grinned at the woman in his arms. She gave a little scream and then threw her arms around him again.

  Toni looked over at Trey, who just shrugged.

  “Trey, Toni, this is my sister, Esther.” Adam managed to extract himself from his sister’s embrace long enough to make the introduction.

  “Nice to meet you,” Trey said, reaching out his hand.

  They had all barely greeted each other when a voice cut the meeting short. “You gonna bring that boy inside or what?”

  Esther rolled her eyes. “Comin’, Momma.”

  “Well, you heard her.” She linked her arm with Adam’s and pulled him toward the steps. She smiled at Toni and Trey. “Ya’ll better come on too.”

  As soon as they stepped through the door they were hit by a blast of music and activity. It seemed like they had crammed the entire neighborhood into this little house for Adam. Toni watched as Adam was almost immediately swallowed up in a group of people hugging him, laughing, and asking a million questions at once. She stepped closer to Trey.

  “Guys, I want you to meet the rest of my family.” Adam pulled away from the crowd and pointed to some guys behind him.

  “You already met my sister, Esther, outside. This is my oldest brother, Jonah,” Adam said, grabbing the shoulder of the tall, wiry guy with a sprinkling of gray hair and a toddler sitting on his shoulders. Toni remembered him from her first time in Baltimore.

  “That’s Benji.” He nodded to a shorter, stout guy who looked like a bouncer.

  “And Jacob.”

  The last brother, who wore glasses and was about the same height as Adam, gave her a warm smile. Toni liked him instantly.

  “Man, you got a lot of brothers,” Trey said with a whistle.

  “And this isn’t even all of us,” Jonah said with a grin, as he balanced the boy who was unmistakably his son on his head. “Israel isn’t even here.”

  “He’s Jacob’s twin,” Esther supplied.

  “Guys, this is my other brother, Trey, and ... his sister, Toni.” Toni continued to smile, but the wind had been knocked out of her. Trey’s sister? She didn’t even rate being called a friend. But before she could overthink it, she felt the wind knocked out of her again as she got swallowed into a hug. Before she knew what was happening, she lost Trey as they both were swallowed up into the welcomes and embraces of Adam’s family and friends, who had barely known them for five seconds but treated them as if it were five years.

  “Nice to meet ya’ll,” Benji said, not too long after his large, hulking frame had simultaneously embraced Trey and Toni. “Ya’ll staying for dinner, right?”

  “Are you sure there’s enough?” Trey asked, looking around skeptically at the overflowing living room just beyond the hallway.

  Benji laughed. “Momma ain’t never run out of food yet. There’s always enough.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Just let her know you’re here.”

  Adam’s mother had to be close to sixty but she easily looked ten years younger. When the three of them entered the kitchen she was busy giving instructions to a younger woman on how something was to be done. Whatever it was, it was clear that Miss Thing hadn’t done it properly the first time.

  The moment she saw Adam, however, all was forgotten as she pulled him into a big hug. The love was so strong it filled the kitchen like a thick aroma. Toni didn’t miss the dampness in the older woman’s eyes as she held on to her youngest son.

  When she finally let him go, Adam turned toward them. “Mom, these are the people I was telling you about.”

  Adam’s mother wiped her eyes and smiled.

  “This is my buddy Trey and his sister, Toni.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you.” The older woman took Trey’s hands into hers. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  “It’s great to finally meet you too, Momma Bayne,” Trey said, grinning. Other people’s mothers loved Trey, and he loved them right back. Toni could already tell that he had taken to Adam’s.

  Momma Bayne turned to Toni. “It’s good to have you.” She squeezed Toni’s hand. “Any friend of Q’s is welcome here.”

  Except that apparently she wasn’t a friend—only Trey’s sister.

  “Thank you,” Toni said, forcing a smile.

  She was about to pull away but Momma Bayne pulled her closer and whispered in her ear. “And I like you. You got spunk.”

  Toni’s mouth fell open as she realized Adam’s mother must have remembered her from the day Adam was arrested weeks earlier. But Momma Bayne only winked at Toni before turning her attention back to the bustle in her kitchen.

  “We’re almost ready,” Momma Bayne said, going back to the stove. “Ya’ll wash up. Q, tell the rest of them to get ready, and tell Esther to come help me get these things on the table.”

  Toni handed her purse to Trey, and gave him a warning look before he could protest. Then she turned to Momma Bayne. If she was going to be here, she might as well be useful.

  “How can I help?”

  Chapter 28

  “Where is it you said we were going?” Trey asked from the passenger seat. It had been almost twenty-four hours since Adam had been out of jail, and he was enjoying freedom more than he ever had before in his life. Their plan was to leave Maryland and head back to Atlanta later that day, but there was something Adam needed to see first.

  Adam grinned. “I didn’t say. But that was slick.”

  “Come on, Adam, now that you actually got me out of bed and into the car, the least you can do is let a brother know what’s up,” Trey protested, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

  Adam laughed out loud. “Trey, it was ten a.m.! You should have been up hours ago.”

  “Man, between my job and Jasmine’s to-do list for baby-proofing the house, I haven’t slept late for a long time.” He yawned. “When I can get it I take it. And why didn’t Toni have to get her behind up too?”

  Adam sobered up a little and turned the car off the main road onto a narrower street. “Because she can’t know about this yet.”

  Trey raised an eyebrow. “About what?”

  Instead of answering, Adam pulled the car over to the side of the road, shut off the engine. He opened the door and climbed out. “We’re here.”

  He looked across the street at the long two-story building with the for-sale sign still on the lawn. He heard Trey come around to stand beside him.

  Trey yawned again. “What’s here?”

  Adam stuck his hands in hi
s pockets as his eyes took in the slightly overgrown lawn, the thick foliage at the back that needed to be dealt with, the cracked windows on the second floor, the peeling paint and the rusted gate posts that had long parted ways from an actual gate.

  “This, my friend, is House of Judah.”

  “Q, my brother, I can’t believe you beat me here.”

  Adam turned toward the sound of the voice and grinned. He had been so focused on evaluating the building that he had not heard his old friend pull up a few feet behind him.

  “Chauncey,” Adam grabbed his friend by the hand and pulled him into a quick man hug. “Man. It’s good to see you after so long. E-mails are just not the same, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Chauncey grinned. “I always meant to get down to Atlanta to see you, but you know how crazy the church gets up here.”

  “Yeah. And I know that there is no way Natalie is letting you out of her sight either,” Adam said with a laugh.

  Chauncey raised an eyebrow. “You know my wife well.”

  “Chauncey, this is my brother from Atlanta, Trey.” Adam introduced his friends to each other. “Trey, this is the youth pastor for my old church, Chauncey Brown.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Trey reached out to shake the man’s hand. “Adam mentioned you a few times.”

  Chauncey accepted the offer. “Same here. I’m glad to know he’s got some brothers looking out for him in Atlanta.”

  “Chauncey and I go way back. Fortunately, he took a better path than I did,” Adam said. “Instead of running the streets he stayed clean, went to college, and eventually became a pastor.”

  “Hey, it was just the grace of God.” Chauncey rested a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “And you’ve come a long way. If that wasn’t true we wouldn’t be standing here today, talking about getting you involved with this place once it gets started.”

  Adam glanced at Trey, whose eyes were throwing up all sorts of questions. He knew he needed to tell his best friend what was going on. But sometimes it was easier to show someone your vision than talk about it. Hence the reason he dragged Trey out of bed and brought him here.

  “Hey, nothing’s been decided yet.” Adam grinned. “Let’s get a look at this place before any of us start making promises.”

  The three men crossed the empty street and walked through the open gateway of House of Judah. The property, like those around it, was quiet and seemingly abandoned. Its closest neighbors were a hilly grassy field on one side, and what looked like a storage yard on the other. Behind it was a high wall, every inch of which was covered by leaves and vines. Chauncey told Adam that there was a high school on the other side.

  “Wow,” Trey said. “This place looks like it lost a fight with a bad storm.”

  “Yeah, it needs a lot of work,” Chauncey said. “The previous owners fell into financial difficulties and weren’t able to manage the upkeep. But the location is amazing. And we’ve had a few assessors come by and they’ve all said the foundation and the structure are sound. We would just need to do some upgrading and some work on the aesthetics.”

  Adam heard his friend, but he hadn’t needed a structural engineer to help him see the potential in House of Judah. From his count of the windows, he suspected that there were about fifteen units on the second floor. That was room for at least thirty boys. And then there was the first floor. He was itching to find out what kind of facilities were down there.

  “Can we go in?” Adam took a few steps ahead of his friends toward the front doors.

  Chauncey grinned and shook a bunch of keys. “That was the plan.”

  The front lobby looked shabby but not terrible. It was nothing some new furnishings and paint couldn’t fix. The lobby led straight to a long hallway that ran the width of the building. Chauncey led them through a tour of the lower level of the building, which came with a huge kitchen, a gymnasium, computer room, laundry room, and offices.

  Trey whistled. “This place came fully equipped.”

  “Yeah.” Chauncey nodded. “We got really lucky. It was almost as if it was built with a Jacob’s House type project in mind.”

  Adam heard Trey stop walking. He glanced back, already picturing the “what’s-going-on?” look on his best friend’s face even before he saw it.

  Chauncey, being the wise man that Adam always knew him to be, seemed to sense the tension. “Uh, I gotta make a few phone calls,” Chauncey said, already backing away to the lobby. “Just holler at me when you want to head upstairs, okay?”

  Adam nodded.

  “All right, Adam,” Trey said as soon as they could no longer hear Chauncey’s footsteps. “Start talking.”

  Adam watched his friend leaning against the wall eyeing him, a look of soberness, with the slightest hue of anger, resting on his features. He had a right to be mad. Adam knew he should have told Trey what was going on before now. But with everything so uncertain on so many levels, he hadn’t wanted to rock the boat unnecessarily.

  “Remember about a year and a half ago when my mother’s pastor came down to Atlanta to visit the center?” Adam began after a moment.

  “Yeah,” Trey said. “He asked a lot of questions and spent a lot of time at the center. He was a pretty cool brother.”

  “Well, he was pretty impressed with what he saw and was inspired to start a similar project,” Adam said. “He’s been in touch with the center’s leadership board at Immanuel and with me about it for a while.”

  Trey frowned. “And you didn’t say anything to any of us?”

  Adam shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal. They just wanted information on our operations. I figured all they wanted from me was research.”

  “But then?” Trey prodded.

  “But then about six months ago they asked me if I would be willing to join the team.” Adam began pacing the narrow hallway. “Since I already knew the program inside out, the possible problems, and the needs, they figured I would be a good person to help lead in a similar kind of program here—at least in the initial phases.”

  “I thought we were tighter than that, Adam.” The frown lines in Trey’s forehead had deepened. “Why am I just hearing about this?”

  “Because it wasn’t even an option for me,” Adam said. “There was no way I was moving back to Baltimore with all those charges hanging over my head. Furthermore, I had no desire to leave Jacob’s House. And I told them all of that.”

  “But that’s changed?” Trey asked.

  Adam ran a hand over his head, as if it could help shift away some of the confusion and weight there. “A lot’s changed, Trey. The charges are being taken care of, so that’s not an issue anymore. And even though the board members know everything about me being in jail, they still want me to be a part of things here.”

  “Adam, this is a big decision,” Trey said.

  “I know.” He sighed. “And I’m still making it. I haven’t said yes yet.”

  “But you’re looking really interested.” Trey narrowed his eyes at Adam. “Is it the fancy facilities? Are they offering you more money here? Is it ’cause Jacob’s House doesn’t have all this?”

  “Come on, Trey, you know I don’t roll like that.” Adam was disappointed his friend could even think that way about him. “You’ve known me for how many years? Have you ever heard me trip over a salary? Yes, I talk about what’s lacking at Jacob’s House, but only because I know the boys could do better with so much more.”

  “Yeah, about the boys,” Trey said. “How you think this is gonna affect them?”

  “I haven’t said yes yet, Trey.”

  But as they both stood in the hallway in silence, they both knew that Adam was a lot closer to yes than to no.

  Adam was the first to speak. “So what do you think?”

  Trey stared at Adam for a long time. “I think you’re running.” Trey’s gaze didn’t waver as he said the words.

  Adam’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  “I think now that everything about you is in the open in Atlanta, it’s not the
hideaway it was for you before,” Trey said simply. “I think you’re afraid to face everyone now that you’re not as spotless as you appeared to be before.”

  Adam’s face hardened. “I never thought I was spotless.”

  “But you were okay with people thinking you were,” Trey said. “You know that things would have been different if everyone knew the full details about your past. You knew the boys would look at you differently. And you know you’re going to have to answer their questions now. I think that scares you.”

  “If that was the case I wouldn’t come to Baltimore,” Adam said coldly. “Who I am is no secret here.”

  “Exactly,” Trey said. “Your face was never on the front page of a newspaper here. You never needed to explain to anyone who you were—they already knew. But you’re still going to have to explain to the young men you work with here who you are. And you’re still going to have to work to gain their trust just like you had to at Jacob’s House.”

  “I know that,” Adam said. “I’ve been working with those guys full time for years.”

  Trey narrowed his eyes, and Adam knew his friend had caught his jab at the fact that Trey only volunteered at the center on a part-time basis. Adam appreciated the hours Trey gave to the center, but it was just a side activity for Trey. Jacob’s House was Adam’s life. Adam knew all about having to gain the boys’ trust. That was his everyday goal.

  “Yes,” Trey said. “And this is your opportunity to show them how to handle things when their past comes to the surface. Are you going to teach them to run and keep hiding who they are? Or are you going to teach them to stand strong and prove to those around them that they have changed?”

  “You think you know everything about me, Trey, but you don’t,” Adam said.

  “You might be right,” Trey said. “But whose fault is that?”

  The words stung, and Adam realized that his friend was more right than he wanted to admit. But he pushed the thought away. This new House of Judah project in Baltimore was a good one. It would help a lot of young men who needed direction, and Adam knew that he could do good work there. What could be wrong about that?