“What?”
“Don’t play stupid with me.”
“What? About the picture frame missing?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Taylor said. “That and that silver candelabra from the dining room. And the little card holder from your office. Now, what does that tell you?”
“That Tyrian probably took all of that stuff and hid it somewhere in this house.”
“And you’re a damn fool if you believe that. Her mama stole that stuff. Probably pawned your stuff as soon as she got off the bus in Tennessee. Worse, she took it to the geechie man and got a voodoo rook on you. Ever think of that?”
Jamison rolled his eyes and finally broke free of the hold he let his mother have on him. He promised to do anything she wanted, only so he could escape her mouth.
After I saw Keet at Paschal’s that night, he started calling me every day, at every hour. I had Leaf change my phone number twice complaining some crazy person must’ve gotten my number, but when Leaf mentioned that he could stop the crazy person by having the calls traced, I knew I couldn’t go back to him again. I had to answer the phone.
Keet wanted to meet. He wanted information. I told him I didn’t know anything and he just laughed. He reminded me about some naked pictures I took for him in Negril. Said he was looking at them on his phone. Then he reminded me how often people lost their cell phones. I knew what he meant. And I knew Keet wasn’t one to place idle threats. He was more than serious, so when he called from outside the house one morning when the sun was really low, I got my ass out of bed and went right to the window. He was standing beside his car in the driveway. Waving at me.
“You always look beautiful in the morning,” he said when I got in the car.
I ignored him and insisted that he pull out of the driveway and drive around the corner so Jamison didn’t happen to come to the window and see us sitting there. I had no intention of telling him anything—I didn’t know anything. I just wanted him to go away.
“What’s going on with my mayor? How’s he doing?”
“He’s fine,” I said.
“No one’s seen him around. I keep calling the office about my new job and everyone’s quiet.”
“He’s sick.”
“Sick or fine?” Keet looked at me, and I felt as fragile and breakable as that girl in the blue skirt outside his apartment that night. He looked at my stomach. “How’s my baby?”
“Stop.” I looked around the car to see if there was anything I could grab.
“I was thinking the other night about the last time we had sex.” Keet relaxed himself dramatically and cradled his head in his headrest. “I know we slept together last year. But that was eleven months ago, so if that was my baby you’d have had it by now.”
“This is not your baby,” I said, but he kept talking right over me.
“But there was also that other time,” he went on. “You know when you came crying to me about how your new boyfriend and his mama were so mean to you. You remember that?”
“This is not your baby.”
“Now, that couldn’t have been more than six months ago, First Lady.” Keet laughed. “You’re about six months pregnant right? Isn’t that what you told that reporter during the press conference you had with Mr. Mayor?”
“This is not your baby.”
He looked at me. “But that’d be nice. Right?” He ran his finger along the side of my face. “So fucking pretty. Make a brother lose his mind, fucking with you. Got the mayor whipped—don’t you?”
“What do you want to know?” I asked, remembering that Keet kept a loaded .38 in the glove compartment and probably had another gun under his seat and behind his back. “Just tell me.”
“What’s he been saying about Dax Thomas?”
“That reporter?”
“Yeah. Jamison been saying anything about him?”
“What about him? What would he say about him?”
“Everyone’s seen the news,” Keet said. “You know. Has he mentioned who killed him?”
“Do you know who killed him?” I asked.
“Don’t play with me, bitch! What did he say?” Keet’s eyes cut my face cold to let me know what was at stake. It was the look he’d give one of his girls on the street. I looked at the glove compartment without moving one of my pupils from his eyes.
“He didn’t say anything! Didn’t tell me anything.”
“You sure?”
“I don’t know anything,” I said again.
Keet cut and cut and cut with his eyes.
I took every slice hard, but I didn’t let on that I knew anything because I didn’t know anything. Since that night Dax died, every inch of rope Jamison had given me had burned to nothing. He’d told me nothing. He was moving around like I wasn’t even there. Looking around me. Past me. Through me. In his empty eyes I almost saw Keet. Keet in Jamison. It was like I’d left one gangster to be with another gangster, only the second gangster didn’t even know that he was gangster. Or did he?
When Val entered the back door of the house, Jamison was washed, shaved, and standing in the kitchen drinking a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice that had come compliments of his mother. He hadn’t yet decided what he was going to say to Val, but he started anyway.
“My mother saw you.”
Val hadn’t expected that Jamison would be out of bed. She tried to rush past him to get upstairs, but he kept talking.
“You were in a car around the corner?” he added.
“No.” This flimsy answer was all she could divine in response to the direct accusation in her new husband’s tone.
“So, she didn’t see you in a car?” Jamison formed his question in a new way that gave Val little extra time to come up with something more explanatory.
“No. It wasn’t me. I was walking.”
“Walking?” Jamison looked Val over—she was wearing jogging pants, a tank top and flip-flops. Her darkening nipples were pressing through her shirt.
Val looked down at her flip-flops and nipples, too. She needed something better to say.
“It was just an old friend,” she offered. “I was walking and I saw him and we talked for a second.”
“Really?”
“Really. Is that a problem?”
“Well, a friend comes to knock on your door, not sit around the corner in a car,” Jamison said, sounding like a father who’d caught his teenage daughter sneaking into her window after a night out partying.
“It was too early for him to come in,” Val said, and she, too, was beginning to sound as if she was caught in the father/teenage-daughter scenario. Somehow that stung her nerves like a whip against her back. She felt she could hear Mrs. Taylor upstairs in her room laughing.
“Too early?” Jamison repeated the response as weakly as it had come off. “Do I look like a fool to you?”
“Well, do I look like a kid to you? Have to answer to you when I’m coming and going?” Val asked.
“Yes, I guess you do. Running around here with your breasts out, pregnant, jumping in cars with other niggas. Yes, you do,” Jamison said.
“So, now I was with another nigga? You don’t even sound right saying that word.”
“You said you were with someone. I’m just going by what you told me. By who you are.”
“Who I am?” Val stepped toward Jamison.
“I’m just saying, you know what they say about taking a girl out the projects,” Jamison said. “Kerry never did anything like that.”
“Fuck you, Jamison!” Val said, backing off from Jamison. She felt a little kick at her bladder as she hurried out of the room.
“Yes, fuck me,” Jamison hollered at her. “Fuck me! Fuck me in my fucking house!”
Jamison threw his empty glass into the sink, where it shattered. He cursed to himself a few more times without looking at the tiny glass shards scattered around the drain.
He thought to follow Val up the stairs, continue the fight and put out the flames of a fire that would burn the backside of a
ny man. But, somehow, the situation hadn’t made that strong of an impression on him as he’d thought, as it maybe should’ve. The fire was competing on a long to-do list of situations that had higher flames scorching his rear. Flames that had him lying in bed pretending to be asleep when Val’s phone had rung early that morning.
“Just send her the money. Call right now to say you’re sending the money,” Jamison said after calling Leaf to catch him up on a list of things he wanted done before they met at a lunch date with the chief of police. Leaf already had rescheduled twice after Jamison had come down with his summer flu.
“It’s 7 AM in L.A. right now,” Leaf pointed out.
“I don’t care. Get it done,” Jamison said.
“Okay. But you know we already sent something. I’m thinking we could just—how long do you think you can keep this up?”
“I didn’t ask what you think,” Jamison said. “Just do it.”
“Okay . . . and what about the meeting? You need me to pick you up?”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll get over there myself. And, look, get together all the information you can about Ras’s case and the Hawks’ starting-five program.”
“For the meeting with Chief York?” Leaf asked.
“Yes. I want everything at the meeting.”
“Why?” Leaf pushed. The meeting was supposed to be a short political photo-op where Chief York and Mayor Taylor were to be strategically spotted in deep discussion to put a stop to the media’s hype about a new spike in violence in the city. Since Dax’s death, a bunch of city-dwelling yuppies and buppies had reported to the letter any social infractions that would make headlines: rapes and bar fights, muggings and murders. Bad press about Atlanta was making its way around the country, and that bad press meant bad news for both the mayor and his chief. For the former, it meant a shortening list of new investors to the city; for the latter, it meant a longer list of new criminals to the city.
“Why? Because I told you to do it,” Jamison said to Leaf while remembering his mother’s charge about the younger man trying to take the older man’s seat at the big table. He was sure this probably wasn’t the case, but then there was also the matter of how many times his mother had been wrong about such things. If he was taking tally, she was right about Leaf getting cozy in his chair.
“Mayor Taylor, I’m not trying to step on your shoes, but I don’t think it’s a good time to bring that up. This is just a short meeting, and I’m not sure Chief York would be keen on hearing anything about Ras right now—not the way he’s been talking about it with reporters.”
Chief York had been using Ras as a poster child for his mission to clean up the filth on the dirtiest streets in the city, but during his sorrowful slumber, Jamison had determined that his first order of business would be to find any justice he could for his friend. Wallowing in his sadness about seeking revenge against Dax, he’d decided to avenge Ras. Well, maybe not “avenge,” not “save” in the way superheroes swoop down from the clouds to capture a little boy who’s about to be flattened by a train. And maybe not even find “justice” in a way that would make someone envision him going before a grand jury, putting his right hand on a Bible, and vowing that he’d never known his friend to be a lover of marijuana, white girls, and guns. But he was going to get rid of the questions picking at him. The old ones he’d had and the new one Ras had brought to his attention at the prison. He didn’t intend to unfold his laundry list before the chief like a pop quiz or make a bunch of accusations and demands. He still wasn’t even sure what he was dealing with, what he was thinking. But he’d try something anyway. He had to. If what the chief wanted was a photo-op with the makings of a marketing campaign that could save both of them, Jamison would give it to him. In the face of bad press, he’d bring up the possibility of more good press in the gold mine of promises from the basketball players.
“Don’t worry about timing,” Jamison said to Leaf before hanging up the phone. “Just have the paperwork.”
A husband gone to a meeting meant a wife left home alone—a wife and a mother. And not just any wife. And not just any mother. One who was angry. One who was furious. Both who believed the other was the source of the overwhelming emotion.
And while the husband was away having barbeque chicken with specialty white sauce and macaroni and cheese with the chief of police, who also happened to be his fraternity brother, before cameramen miles away in Candler Park at Fox Brothers BBQ, these two women, who were actually more alike than different, stayed in their separate corners of a mini-mansion that might seem more like a castle to people with smaller personalities. But these two had big personalities, and as one might imagine even in the biggest space, two bigger things will eventually cross paths.
So, when the sun went down, the big personalities found themselves moving from their separate corners in the shrinking mansion, one from her bedroom with soap opera reruns playing on the television and one from her bathroom, where the cold tile was no longer useful to soothe her swollen feet. Both wandered somewhere neither could really avoid for long: the kitchen.
The mother was at the stove, in front of a boiling pot, stirring and singing and smiling and maybe whistling in between.
The wife was walking in, rolling her eyes, wondering what in the hell her mother-in-law had to sing and smile and whistle about. She went to the refrigerator and opened it, looked around for whatever compelled her to the kitchen. As usual, Lorna had packed the chrome subzero with all of Jamison’s favorites, although Val had repeatedly emailed Lorna her list of items.
Val eased back on her swollen feet and considered calling Jamison to have him bring her back a plate from Fox Brothers when she heard a pleasant greeting from a familiar voice that wasn’t ever pleasant.
“Baby, you hungry?”
Val couldn’t see Mrs. Taylor. The open refrigerator door separated them like a partition between work cubicles. Val frowned and looked in Mrs. Taylor’s direction suspiciously. She was sure Mrs. Taylor knew her son wasn’t in the house, so she wondered who Mrs. Taylor thought could be on the other side of the refrigerator door who wanted to be called her “baby.” Maybe Mrs. Taylor was sinking into senility, too?
“Well, I’m cooking over here if you’re hungry. Making some soup. Got me some okra and chicken breasts and truffle salt and cayenne pepper in it. Just the way I like it.” Mrs. Taylor droned on with Val still on the other side of the refrigerator. “A lot of people don’t like it like this, but I do. Nutritious and delicious! That’s what I like to say. What Jamison likes to say, too.” She laughed some more.
Val was trying hard to keep her eyes rolling in steady rotation, but the list of select, otherwise odd ingredients in the peppered pot had her ears at attention. Those were the things on the list she’d emailed the maid. The things her belly bump had her craving. She closed the refrigerator door slowly, like a cat climbing out of a corner.
“You put a lot of pepper in it?” Val asked without realizing she’d said a word.
“Hell yeah! I like my food Cajun style! Hot and sassy—like me. Why—you don’t like it like that?” Mrs. Taylor frowned regretfully.
“No, I do! I love spicy food!” Val’s eyes and heart and gut softened at the idea of the boiling matter on the stove finding its way into a bowl for her. For the last three days she’d been craving the kinds of spices Mama Fee cooked in her big pot in Memphis. A soup of okra and cayenne might make her forget an old enemy. Might. But old habits seldom die in a kitchen. And when Val looked from the pot to the pot stirrer, her little phony smile hiding beneath a black wig, Val remembered everything Jamison told her about his mother’s little spy job outside that morning and the frown returned to her face.
“I ain’t hungry,” Val said suddenly.
“What? Not hungry? But you just—”
“I ain’t hungry!” Val set her eyeballs back into circular motion and turned to walk out of the room with a still empty belly that was now hollering out for food in audible ways. But when she reached
the threshold, the fiery child who could tongue lash her own mother to tears realized she’d been walking away and turning her back from trouble all day and she was just plain tired of the action. Tired of all of the acting.
“And, so you know, you need to mind your business,” she said, with her rolling eyes back on Mrs. Taylor. “What I was doing outside didn’t have nothing to do with you. And if you had a question, you needed to come to me first. Because I don’t have nothing to hide from you. Everybody else, including your son, might be scared of you, but I’m not.” Val snapped back, crossed her arms over her chest, and waited for a return jab, but Mrs. Taylor just kept smiling and stirring at her pot. After a long time waiting, she had no choice but to ask the smiling woman, “What?”
Mrs. Taylor looked at Val with her purest smile. “I’m sorry,” she offered meekly.
“What?”
“I’m sorry for what I did.” She placed the long wooden spoon she’d been stirring with on the counter beside her brew and walked over to Val. “I was upstairs listening to you two argue and”—she extended a hand to place it on Val’s shoulder in a tender way—“I felt bad. I feel bad.”
Val snatched away from a touch that felt cold. “You should feel bad.”
“You’re mad. I get that, but I was just looking out for my son’s best interests,” Mrs. Taylor said. “You’re not a mother yet, so you don’t know, but you will soon. Being a mother is hard. You’re always looking out for your kids—sometimes you can be blinded by it.”
“Whatever. Look, I’m not about to take parenting advice from you.”
“Okay. You don’t have to, darling.” Mrs. Taylor reached for Val’s shoulder again and this time she did not move. “But I am asking that you accept my apology. Just for right now. We both want what’s best for Jamison. Right? To make him happy?”
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