“Paschal’s?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s so . . . so, like public,” Val said. The only time Jamison had ever taken her to a place like Paschal’s, where Atlanta’s own black heads of state gathered just to say they’d been there, was when she was still holding on as his assistant, and then she’d had to sit two chairs away from him and keep her legs uncrossed.
“We’re married. We should be seen in public together. Why don’t you put on something nice?”
This sounded like the tape-recorded voice of his publicist. Just an hour after Val had left Jamison at the hospital on Sunday, pictures of her stomach and middle finger had been all over the Internet and on the front page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Muriel went into full spin mode and had Jamison release a statement complaining about the nurses at the hospital not respecting his space as he was dealing with his sick mother and that his wife was so stressed out she’d had no choice but to act when she saw that the illegal pictures were being taken. She’d advised them not to fight back against the pictures of the baby bump and pregnancy rumors. They’d let it sink in, all the while acting like newlyweds that had each other’s back, and then release their own statement. In the meantime, they had to be that perfect couple. Suddenly, Jamison’s simple date idea sounded like a media move.
“Oh, I see,” Val said, each single-syllable word loaded with a hidden response.
“So, no Paschal’s?” Jamison went right for the easiest interpretation of her words.
“Paschal’s is fine. But what are you going to do about your mother while we’re out?”
As lackluster as Mrs. Taylor’s “sick mother” performance at the hospital had been, her visit had turned out to be timely. The doctor, who actually hadn’t noticed any true health-related symptoms other than the fact that Mrs. Taylor was talking so loudly he thought she was deaf, had only run basic tests for people with heart problems. He found that two of her arteries were basically closed. It was amazing that she was walking around and complaining and talking so loud. He ordered more tests and more medication. He talked in low tones with Jamison about a possible surgery. Said his mother was a very sick woman. Jamison thought it was a joke at first. His mother was just trying to get his attention. She was probably jealous of Val. But then he saw X-rays.
She went home with him and seemed to get sicker by the day. The doctor was looking at more aggressive treatment options. In the meantime, his mother needed someone to look out for her around the clock. She was still trying to move around like nothing was wrong with her, but Jamison didn’t want to risk anything happening.
“I’ll ask Lorna to stay here until we get back,” Jamison answered Val. “Mama won’t be a problem. Probably try to send Lorna to the store for some Boone’s.”
Val laughed and mentally planned out her outfit. “Okay,” she said, forgetting all about her initial desire to join her husband at the golf course. She went to the closet to try on some of her shoes. Her feet were swelling. Then she heard the voice that was keeping her in the bathroom: “Jamison, baby boy, come in here and see about your mama.”
Before Tiger Woods had been a success or a thought, black men had been spending early mornings in tiny carts, wheeling around grassy knolls until they absolutely had to go home. Golf wasn’t just a sport or a hobby for these men. It was a conviction. A way of life. What united them and divided them. Kept them sane. Kept some of them alive.
Even before the white golf courses had been integrated (and that wasn’t too long ago), the golf course had been the meantime matter of the country-club black man in Georgia. Where he made new connections and new deals. Somewhere at a hole on a quiet lawn was someone he needed to know or see. A business owner, pastor, or politician who was relaxed and open to talk. But there were janitors there, too. Hardworking blue-collar black men who saved and paid pretty pennies to go up against men who were their bosses or enemies in other settings. Here, they all dressed alike and had the same amount of information. Any man could make the shot as long as he had the skill. Not the money. Not the degree. Not the standing in the community or accolades of any kind. His fame came with his swing. Everyone cheered—but none too loudly.
When Jamison had gotten to Morehouse, his mentor had told him he needed to learn three things if he was going to make it: how to play chess, how to play tennis, and how to play golf. He explained that Jamison had to know those things if he was going to communicate with other men. Men who mattered. Jamison didn’t understand that at the time, but he committed himself to the charge. Succeeded at all three. And like most things his mentor had told him to do, the payoff had been enormous—maybe even immeasurable.
“Hey there, my big man.” Jamison took all of his son up in one arm. The little boy had run toward him after spotting Jamison heading down a brick walkway that cut through a pristine path of green that led to the practice holes at the Yates Country Club on the East Side of Atlanta.
“Da—Daddy! Daddy! You—you—you’re here!” Tyrian was stuttering. He was past being beyond himself. His little body was shaking in Jamison’s arms because he was so excited to see his father.
“I know I’m here. I had to be here,” Jamison said, stroking Tyrian’s back to calm him the way he had sometimes when the boy was just a baby and got so anxious about something he couldn’t stand up straight or sit still. “I had to see my best guy practice his swing.”
“Really? Really?” The pupils in Tyrian’s eyes glittered as he waited for his father’s confirmation. And it wasn’t really a confirmation that he’d heard his father correctly, but that this was important to him. That it was special enough.
“Of course I had to come. You’re the next Tiger Woods.” Jamison placed his pointed index finger on Tyrian’s heart as he said, “you’re.” He could feel the little gathered flesh thumping toward his fingerprint. Jumping toward the affirmation from his father.
Jamison put Tyrian down, and the boy merrily led him to the practice session he’d abruptly exited. It was a carefully selected group of five or six well-groomed, well-dressed little black boys and girls standing dutifully before their teacher, Sir Fently Adams, a svelte older gentleman in archaic golf attire that looked more comical than classical. For effect, Sir Fently Adams spoke with a deep British accent and carried a pipe that was never lit. Most of the parents and grandparents and godparents who surrounded the to-do in support chuckled lowly to one another in decided agreement that Sir Fently Adams was a joke.
Jamison spotted Kerry standing toward the back of the well-entertained group, holding a cup of coffee. She was talking to Clara Lindsey and her daughter. He knew Kerry had spotted him when Tyrian ran toward him on the pathway, but she wouldn’t acknowledge him until he walked over to say hello and then she’d probably ask him how long he’d been there. During the separation and divorce, Jamison had thought this was a kind of “game” Kerry played to get his attention, gain some kind of point on the divorce champion scoreboard of mind manipulation, but more and more he was considering that this was just who she was—how she was. That was the woman he’d met. The woman of rules and order who claimed so much that that wasn’t what she was about. But Kerry was really just her mother’s daughter. A black socialite’s progeny. And because of that, he knew, she’d always return to those games. Sometimes he’d play into it to keep things moving along and make peace so he didn’t have to deal with the aftereffects of not playing the game. But today wouldn’t be such a day, because of her company.
The daughter standing beside Emmit Lindsey’s wife was Congresswoman Countess Lindsey. On a cloudy day, the loudmouth Countess was moderately attractive, but she had big breasts, loose morals, and a husband who’d only slept with her to produce his one son—and even that had been up for debate. A month after Kerry signed the divorce papers, Damien, Marcy’s husband, invited him to a private swingers party at some plastic surgeon’s estate in Alpharetta. “You need to get on with it now, Jamison. Move on. Let her go. Let your dick go,” Damien joked o
n the way there in his charcoal Bentley coup. Though it wouldn’t be Jamison’s last time attending a party at that address during those murky months after the divorce, the first visit had been like a jolt to his every sense. He’d never been to a sex party or even really dedicated time to thinking about what one would be like and even if he had, there was no way he could imagine anything like what he saw that night. There were women and men he knew and respected walking around inside and outside with bare backsides. They were pinching and pulling, touching and sucking each other like the sun would never come up. Damien disappeared before Jamison made it to the bar to ask for a drink and shot to calm himself. Damien’s assistant and her best friend were waiting for Damien there and they knew they had to handle their exploit expeditiously because Marcy was known to show up at the parties looking for her husband.
After downing enough shots that equated to a chaser fifth of alcohol, Jamison wasn’t getting the desired effect of his alcoholic intake. He wanted to calm down. To accept everything going on around him and maybe see some action of his own. But instead he was feeling edgy, a little too alert and so nervous there was no way he’d be able to get his penis hard enough to even get close to any action. Enter Countess and her breasts. Jamison didn’t remember how he’d ended up in the pool house with Countess’s right nipple between his teeth, but there he was. And there she was.
Jamison could hardly look at her in public anymore, but as life would have it, she always seemed to be everywhere he went.
He decided to take the long way around the hole, so he’d walk past a few of the other divorced dads before making it to Kerry, in hopes that Countess would be gone or have dropped dead by that time.
The interesting thing about the old people who came out to see the new golf players was that most of them were there for business and networking connections. During his campaign, Jamison had raised more than fifty-five thousand dollars while chatting up other fathers at one of Tyrian’s tee-offs. These were the sons and daughters of people who understood that it was worth paying five hundred dollars a month for their children to play golf for a total of ten hours with a man dressed up as Bagger Vance—all so they could meet others who could afford to do the same thing. And who might those people be?
“Christopher ‘Ludacris’ Bridges! What’s up my man?”
“I can’t call it, Mr. Mayor. Just out here watching my little girl beat the breaks off these young fellas.”
Jamison laughed after hugging one of Atlanta’s top rappers, who was enjoying a lengthy career and budding standing among the elite due to his many investments and community projects.
Beside him was AJ Holmes, a popular news anchor who’d had a show on CNN but quit and started his own Internet news network when he realized how much control the station had over his programming.
Jamison hugged him as well and then the three men stopped chatting for a minute to watch AJ’s daughter, the youngest in the group, swing in the exact opposite direction of the ball.
“Ohh.” They grimaced in unison with the other parents and kids.
AJ’s wife, Dawn, who was devotedly standing behind the three-year-old, covered her face as if the hanging jaws around her were a judgment of her parenting skills. Her shame was only interrupted by little Zora, who turned around all cherry-eyed to her mother and cheered, “I swing, Mama! I swing!” To this, Dawn smiled weakly and looked back at AJ.
“Guess I’ll have to take her to get ice cream after this to cheer her up,” AJ said to Jamison.
“Zora looks fine,” Jamison said. “She’s handling it like a big girl.”
“I’m not talking about Zora. I’m talking about my wife.”
Luckily, by the time Jamison had pushed through a few more of these middling exchanges, Countess was nowhere to be found. Emmit had taken her place beside Clara and Kerry.
“Your boy’s got a pretty good swing there,” Emmit said as Jamison hugged Clara.
“We’ll take all the compliments we can get,” Jamison said. Tyrian’s swings hadn’t been any better than Zora’s. Then, again, none of the children had really hit the ball just yet.
“Compliment? I was just pointing something out. My grandson’s swing is better,” Emmit added.
“By better, you mean Alexander came closer to hitting the ball?” Clara said, jumping in on the joke. She was thinner than Jamison remembered from the last time he’d hugged her. But her hair was coming back in and the summer sun had her skin less pale.
“Thank you, Mrs. Clara,” Jamison said, adding an additional kiss to her cheek.
The couple waited in silence, looking away as if nothing was going on as Jamison greeted his ex-wife.
“Oh, you made it,” Kerry acknowledged weakly, hoping Jamison couldn’t read anything she was thinking behind her greeting. Her coffee had been replaced with a bottle of water.
“Yeah, I did,” Jamison said. “Had to see my little man.”
“Well, I’m glad you did. It’s all Tyrian’s been talking about for days.”
There it was. She couldn’t just say hello and leave it there. She had to add some kind of meaning. Something that was meant to diminish what was being done right by invoking the specter of what had been done wrong.
Slammed on top of an endless mountain of uninvited evaluation of his personal life from everyone from Internet-crazed nurses to blood-seeking reporters, this felt especially unwarranted. Jamison was about to react when Emmit knew he should step in with a lifeline for his fraternity brother.
“Jamison, you have a look at that WorkCorps city place proposal? The committee sent it to your office earlier this week.”
“Yes. It looks good. Brother Perry Watson came to my open office hours with it. Training and jobs for young brothers who graduated from high school with no skills? I can’t see why the city couldn’t get behind it. We’ll just have to figure out how much support we can give. The governor has my hands tied on some of these funding projects.”
“Well, all we need from you guys is to push the contract through the public school system. We want to know that we have their commitment to passing these kids along to us. We can get them to work in the city where they live,” Emmit said. “People want to know why crime is so bad in this city? I see it all the time in my courtroom. These young men don’t have jobs. They have no way to make money. And no one to teach them how to do it.”
“No fathers at home,” Clara added.
“WorkCorps will bridge that gap,” Emmit went on. “Get them off the streets and tracked to work.”
“And speaking about getting them off the street, what’s going on with that fella from the midnight basketball program?” Clara asked. “Drugs? Guns? White girls? Is that where our tax dollars were going? Hard to believe.”
“No,” Kerry said. “That’s not Ras. He’s a great guy.”
“Well, he’s a good guy with a long rap sheet right about now,” Emmit reminded everyone after they stopped to clap for Alexander, the first to swing and hit the ball within feet of the hole.
“And I don’t believe any of those charges against him,” Kerry added passionately. “Not one of them.”
“Do you believe it?” Clara asked Jamison.
Everyone, even inquiring ears in circles beside them, stopped to listen to Jamison’s response.
“I can’t say it sounds like something Ras would do,” Jamison said, picking his words wisely.
“Doesn’t sound like?” Kerry’s face called the sincerity of Jamison’s comment into question. “You lived with him for one year.”
“Yes, and that was more than a decade ago,” Jamison pointed out.
“So you’re saying he is capable of being some kind of pimping, drug-dealing underlord who’s planning to arm every little black boy in Atlanta? Is he capable of that, Jamison?” Kerry pushed.
Clara and Emmit traded stares. There was nothing they could do to stop Jamison and Kerry from sparring at that point. They were wise enough to know that maybe the little debacle was about Ras bei
ng in jail, but likely it wasn’t. Conversations between divorcees were seldom that first level.
“I didn’t say that either,” Jamison said. “But people change.”
“People don’t change that much,” Kerry retorted.
“People change enough.”
“Jamison!” Countess appeared in the circle and immediately threw her breasts against Jamison’s chest. “I thought I saw you walking up earlier.”
“Hello, Countess,” Jamison said, sounding as stiff as a British court guard.
“For some reason, I’m always so surprised to see you at these things,” Countess said.
Kerry frowned at this a little, but Jamison decided that she hadn’t really picked up on the meaning of Countess’s bright stare set on him.
“So how are things?” Countess asked. “I hear you have a new wife and a baby—”
Clara grabbed Countess hard by the arm and shook her head for Countess to shut up, but the monkey wrench had already been thrown.
“Everything is great,” Jamison said judiciously. “Thanks for asking.”
Kerry crossed her arms and looked away.
“Wonderful,” Countess said.
Tyrian and Alexander showed up at the circle to claim their parents.
Alexander had his chest poked out, but Tyrian was obviously crestfallen and ready to go.
“Alexander played better than me,” Tyrian said when his parents knelt down beside either shoulder to comfort him.
“Ahh, he’s a little older,” Kerry lied to pull her son out of his rut.
“Just two months,” Tyrian said.
“Don’t worry. You’ll do better next time,” Jamison tried. “We’ll get you some private lessons with old Bagger Vance over there.”
“Don’t make fun of Sir Adams,” Kerry whispered. “The kids love him.”
“I want you to teach me, Daddy,” Tyrian requested softly. “Can you?”
“Yes. I can do that,” Jamison said. “We’ll start next weekend. All right?”
“Great!”
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