“Ma-mayor Ta-Taylor, I-I thought that was you wa-wa-walking in.”
Smiling, Jamison shook hands with a face that froze away the feeling from every extremity on Val’s body.
“Brother—” Jamison scrunched his face in a way that let the person shaking his hand know he needed reminding as to who he was.
He started, “Keet—”
But then Jamison recalled his last name and added, “Neales—Brother Keet Neales.”
“Y-yes. Th-that’s me,” he said. “You—you remember.” There was a big smile, almost childlike. Grateful.
“Of course. The brother from the last chapter meeting. You approached me in the parking lot about a job,” Jamison recalled.
“Did you get my-my resume?” Keet asked.
“Actually, I did,” Jamison said. “Very impressive. Howard Law? Three years working for the DA. Makes me wonder what you’re doing working for the police department.”
“We-well, I’m n-not one to sii-iit behind a desk all day. I-I-I prefer a hands on approach to ju-ustice,” Keet got out.
“Good thinking,” Jamison said. “Smart.”
There was an awkward extended pause after Jamison spoke and so he felt a need to fill the space.
“I’m sorry, man,” he went on. “We’ve been talking and I forgot to introduce you to my wife. Keet, this is Val.”
Keet extended his hand with a smile that went from soft to sly, but Jamison didn’t see this. His eyes were on Val’s icy face.
“Oh, the first lady,” Keet proclaimed without stuttering on one syllable.
Val offered her hand for a shake, but Keet turned it palm down and kissed the soft spot on top of her wrist.
“Hello,” Val said.
“It’s wonderful to meet you,” Keet added.
“Same here.”
Keet released Val’s hand and looked back at Mayor Taylor.
“You’re a lucky man—the mayor, married to a beautiful woman, and expecting a child,” Keet listed admiringly.
“Well, my father once told me that luck is just preparation meeting opportunity,” Jamison said, his unwavering pride eclipsing concern for Val’s silence and full detachment. “Nothing can quite prepare a man for every opportunity, but if he’s lucky, worlds collide.”
“I can only imagine,” Keet said, looking at Val.
Then there was that pause again; as some eyes went darting around, others seemed determined to not move at all.
“Well, let me leave you two to dinner,” Keet finally said as the waiter arrived at the table. “I’mmmm sure Mr. Mayor and Mrs. First Lady ha-a-ave a lot to discuss.”
“Thank you,” Jamison said. “And look, brother, my office will be contacting you this week. I think we can find something for you.”
“Re-really?” Keet’s tone regressed.
“Yes. Nothing big, but something to get your foot in the door,” Jamison said.
Keet nodded at Jamison and nearly bowed to Val before backing away into the crowd.
After Jamison and Val ordered their food, Jamison noticed that Val was hardly speaking or looking at him.
“Are you okay?” he asked in the middle of a review of all the things he’d seen on Keet’s resume. “You’re starting to look sick.”
“I just feel a little nauseous,” Val said, before taking a sip of her water.
“Do you want to leave?”
“No,” she said, “I just think I need some air or something. I’m going to walk to the bathroom.”
“Want me to walk with you?”
“No. I’m fine. Just need a minute.”
“Okay.”
Jamison stood and helped Val out of her seat.
I almost forgot to put my shoes back on before I left the table. And if Jamison wasn’t looking at me so crazy like he was, I might have run away without them. Run far away from that fucking restaurant. And Keet.
But I couldn’t. I knew he was coming for me soon and I’d promised myself I wouldn’t run when he did. But how he came—that wasn’t something I could have expected. Not from him. Or could I?
I closed the bathroom door and went into a stall. I locked it. Sat on the seat without pulling my dress up and lifted my feet as high as my baby would let me. I needed to be alone for just one minute to think. To plan.
Some woman who was standing in the bathroom talking too loud on her cell phone to some dude about nothing flushed the toilet in the stall next to mine and walked right out of the bathroom without washing her hands.
The door swung open again. I heard a click. Someone was locking the door. I didn’t have to look down to see that the shoes clacking against the floor in the small bathroom weren’t heels.
They stopped. I looked down. They were in front of my locked stall.
“Keet. What do you want?”
“Madam First Motherfucking Lady.”He laughed. “Well, ain’t you gonna come outside and holler at me? I know you ain’t taking a shit in here.”
I let my feet down.
“What do you want?” I asked again.
“Man, stop all this bullshit. In there acting like you done got all soft on a motherfucker,” Keet said. “Bring your ass out here.”
I put my hand on the lock. There was no other way out of that bathroom. And even if there was, I knew there was no other way out of this.
“That’s right. Open the door. I ain’t gonna hurt you. What, you think I’m gonna hurt you?” Keet laughed in a way that reminded me of how his breath smelled like cigar smoke and cognac. Of nights when I felt so wild and free but not safe.
I undid the lock and opened the door.
He was looking at me with a smile that said I owed him something.
“What do you want?”
“That’s all you have to say to me? After all this time?” Keet held his arms out to me. “Don’t you miss me?”
I sighed and struggled to stand my ground.
Keet was my ex-boyfriend. I was dating him when I met Jamison. He was a cop. A small beat cop, who was too smart to want to get off the streets. He liked fucking with people’s heads too much. He mind fucked me for the longest time. Had me thinking he was some kind of prince charming coming to save me on his white horse, but all the time I knew something was off. There was something about how his eyes moved when I was speaking. How he could be so cold so quickly. One night we had been walking down Peachtree after dinner and one of those fat palmetto bugs had run across our path. I’d screamed or something, and Keet had stomped the thing so hard the insides had squirted out from under his shoe like shrapnel. Something about the sudden death had made me sad, but Keet had laughed like he’d enjoyed it and hadn’t cleaned the bottom of his shoe.
He kissed me on the cheek and I smelled the cigar smoke.
“Come on. For real. I just want to say hello. See how my baby is doing. Got married. Expecting a baby. I see you’re moving on up. Mr. Mayor himself.”
“Why are you talking to Jamison?” I pushed Keet out of my way and walked out of the stall.
“No. Why are you talking to Jamison?” Keet grinned. “I guess I know that—onward and upward. Right?”
“Whatever you’re planning, just stop it, Keet. What happened between you and me is in the past. Move on.”
“I would. I should. But I can’t,” Keet said, coming up close to me. “See, my heart is broken. My baby left me and I can’t seem to get over her.”
“I never was your baby. You’re your only baby.”
Keet looked down at my stomach. “Am I my only baby?”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m thinking, if we do that math, we might be able to add old Keet’s name to the equation. Should we call Maury?”
“We broke up a long time before I got pregnant,” I said. “This is Jamison’s baby, so let go of whatever shit you’re trying to cook up.”
“Wrong. We never broke up. You disappeared. And even then, we weren’t thr
ough.” Keet’s eyes moved from my eyes to my lips and then peeled my shirt open. I felt him ingest me. Learn something I knew but didn’t want him to know. “Were we?” he whispered.
I’d been dating Keet for three months before I’d realized who he really was. There were always girls around him. Calling. Stopping by his place. He claimed they were just friends. But they weren’t just any girls. I knew some of them. Faces from night clubs. Bars. Double dates with basketball players. I started thinking he was a player. Was cheating on me probably. Just like all the other men. But Keet kept trying to reassure me. Telling me I was his only woman and every dime he had, even from his low-paying job, was going to keep me happy. And that money seemed to go far. Too far. He had a fifteenth-floor three-bedroom apartment in Brookhaven Square and a garage full of cars he switched in and out of weekly, though his primary car was a silver Maserati. It was unreal. And it was obvious something wasn’t adding up. But I wanted to believe my dream was coming true. I didn’t have to work. I had all the money I needed. He was talking about knocking me up. Then a little girl, she looked like seventeen years old, was Asian, Filipino or something, showed up at the apartment one night with no shoes on. Blood was running down the inside of one leg from underneath a royal blue miniskirt. She was crying hysterically. No purse. No keys. She was looking for someone she kept calling, “Daddy!” Saying she didn’t know where else to go. Someone had taken everything she had. Raped her. She needed “Daddy.” I was telling her I didn’t know what she was talking about when Keet came charging down the hallway. He grabbed the girl by her hair and dragged her toward the elevator. “Close the fucking door,” he’d yelled at me. “Don’t let anybody in my spot.” I didn’t have to ask Keet what I was seeing. I’d been out there in the streets long enough to know.
“What do you want from me?” I asked in the bathroom. We’d been in there more than ten minutes and I knew Jamison was wondering what was taking me so long at that point.
“There you go with that same question again. Let me ask you this: what do you think I want?”
“I’m not giving you any money.”
Keet laughed so loud I was sure anyone standing outside the bathroom could hear him.
“Money? You think I want money? From you? Nah, baby, you got Daddy all wrong.” His voice was slithering then, and I remembered everything I’d felt that day when I’d met Jamison at the strip club. For a long time I’d pretended that I didn’t know what was happening. How a cop could have so much money. So much control over so many people in the street. But you can only play dumb for so long. Soon, Keet had me in the middle of everything. I was meeting his girls. Taking them shopping. Making them feel good before he put them out on the street. It made me feel powerful. Like one of those mob wives on television. It was stupid, but I was falling for it. Our lovemaking became so intense. I convinced myself that we were our own mafia. All we had was each other and a whole bunch of clichés that went against whatever little piece of self I had left. But then Keet showed me what that really meant. The next time a girl showed up at our front door, this time asking for me, he stomped her into the ground and when she cried for someone to call the police, he laughed and dialed 911 himself. I realized then that I had to get out. It was only a matter of time before I’d be the girl on the floor. But I had nowhere to go. No money. Nothing. That was how I’d ended up at Magic City looking for a job. That was when I’d met Jamison.
“So, if you don’t want money, what is it?” I asked Keet. “Why are you here? What’s up with you lying to Jamison? Pretending you stutter?”
“You li-li-like that right?” Keet snickered. “That’s my acting skill. I took an improv class at Dad’s Garage. You’d be surprised how a simple stutter disarms people. Learned that in my class.”
“And I must’ve missed that you went to Howard Law,” I said when someone knocked on the door. We stood there quiet for a second, but then we heard the person sigh and then walk away.
“There’s a lot about me you missed. So much that it had me thinking, maybe I misrepresented myself. Maybe I didn’t show you who I am,” he said. “How does a man like Jamison—and not to take anything away from Mr. Mayor—take a woman away from a man like me? Like from right underneath me.”
“He didn’t steal me. I left.”
“And I just kept thinking about it, and thinking about it,” Keet went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “And I realized that if that brother got what I had, then I want what he has. Everything.”
“That’s crazy. What you want to be mayor?”
“Yes. And I don’t think that’s crazy at all. You heard Jessie Jackson and Obama and all those other motherfuckers. All I have to do is dream. Believe and I can achieve. Right?”
“You’re a pimp, Keet.”
“People change.” Keet smirked. “No, really. Look, it’s simple. I don’t want to hurt you. And I ain’t trying to be nobody’s baby daddy. I just need you to keep an eye on things for me.”
“An eye?”
“Yeah. Let old Keet know what’s going on in the mayor’s head. If you hear some things. Some information . . .”
“What kind of information?”
There was another knock at the door.
“Val, you in there?” Jamison called from outside the bathroom.
“Yes,” I said in a stare-off with Keet.
“Everything all right?”
“I’m coming out. Just finished cleaning up. I threw up, but I’m fine.”
“Okay.” Jamison stood there for a second. Keet turned one of the faucets on at the sink and let the water run loudly to make him think I was washing my hands or something. He turned off the water and we heard Jamison walk away.
“Isn’t that sweet? Mr. Mayor coming to see about his wifey,” Keet teased. “If he only knew.”
“I’m not doing anything for you, Keet,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
“Jamison will figure out who you are. He’s not stupid.”
Keet laughed and walked to the door. He unlocked it and looked at me.
“If he’s so smart, don’t you think he’ll figure out who you are, too?” he said harshly. “That is, unless he doesn’t have to figure it out at all. Like if someone tells him first.” He smiled like a used-car salesman. “I’ll be in touch.”
I walked back to the table with what sounded like police sirens blaring in my brain. When I sat down and fumbled through dinner, from a distant place in my mind, I watched Jamison eating and talking to me through my eyes like he was on television and so far away from everything that was happening in the world. Behind him, Keet was at the bar laughing with some of his other fraternity brothers. He’d turn and look at me and smile. I felt dizzy. Like someone was sitting right on top of my chest, bouncing up and down.
I’m sure it didn’t look quite like that to Jamison. I laughed when he laughed. Answered his questions. Asked some of my own. I pretended for the rest of the night to be present for a conversation I knew I needed to have.
Jamison touched my stomach again. Put his hand on top of mine. He softened. Spoke about us needing to get along. To make it work for the baby. He wanted to try. He had to.
With the blaring sirens in my mind and the man sitting in front of me, I wondered which world was real. Which one would survive what was coming.
PART II
“. . . for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health . . .”
“Old Acquaintances”
In the capital of the New South, for as long as time could remember, the heat of the summer meant more shootings. Random gun violence. A robbery gone bad. Street crimes. Gang tiffs. Scores to be settled. There was something about the months of June, July, and August that made the city become a wild world where white women with baby strollers jogging along dark streets or black boys walking to the corner store to buy a bag of potato chips fell victim to a bullet that could’ve been meant for someone else.
For Jamison, the heat in the streets mean
t heat on him. He’d have to go around to make speeches, declarations to stop the violence, make the streets safe, and save everyone from themselves. He’d attend funerals where the caskets were so small they’d looked like they’d been made to contain kittens and not humans. Hold a mother’s hand and say what he really believed—someday things would be better. Sadly, the longer he was in office, the less he actually believed that.
Just when the headlines seemed to need a break from Jamison and his personal life and Ras and his white girl, weed, and guns, a home invasion that had left two Mexican men dead from gunshot wounds on the Southside of the city became the bloody steak the media could sink its teeth into. Jamison, of course, felt the pain any young leader would feel for his people, and he made a few phone calls from his office and then saw the situation for something else it could be: a distraction. With eyes off of him and his old roommate, he could do what had been on his heart to do for days since Kerry had implored him at the golf course.
He didn’t tell anyone on his staff that he was going to the jail. He didn’t want opinions or projections, a script of what to say and do. This wasn’t about politics. This was about what he had to confirm he knew—his friend.
When Ras walked into the visitation room, his long locks braided tight to the back of his head and his orange jumpsuit barely holding on to a slender frame, Jamison did exactly the opposite of what he’d thought he was going to do. He stood up and smiled, clasped hands with his friend, and hugged him.
“Taylor! Word!” Ras said, smiling back at Jamison.
“Ras!”
The guard at the door signaled for the men to sit at the only table in the small room that was actually reserved for prisoners meeting with their attorneys. Jamison had pulled a few strings so he didn’t have to talk to Ras through a Plexiglas wall and old phone that was attached to a tape recorder. Jamison thought maybe when Ras walked in he’d look worn down, beat up, and starved near death—the way prisoners looked in movies when friends and family came to claim them. That there’d be feces on the wall and the stench of loss in the room so wicked it would bring tears to his eyes. But there was none of that. The room looked like some space in a community center and Ras looked as scruffy as any Rastafarian who didn’t believe in touching a comb or cutting his hair. If it wasn’t for the guard, orange jumpsuit, and silver cuffs, it might look like the two old friends were on their way to have a beer.
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