Val nodded.
“And that’s only going to happen if we’re getting along.”
“You’ve said this before,” Val said, remembering the little chat Mrs. Taylor had initiated at the courthouse.
“I know. I know.” Mrs. Taylor laughed a little at her obvious backtrack. “But I really mean it this time. I heard Jamison’s voice today, and I realized something—I don’t want to hear him sad or upset. And I know he can’t handle this situation, so I have to. I need to step up.”
“Step up?”
“Yes. Look, I realized that after I get things in order here in this house between me and you and that baby, I can go. Jamison can handle the rest on his own. He’ll know what to do,” Mrs. Taylor explained.
“So, now you’re moving out?” Val worked hard to temper her voice to hide jubilant emotions concerning that revelation. Still, her excitement gleamed through unsophisticated eyes that led Mrs. Taylor back to her pot.
“Yes, I am!” Mrs. Taylor claimed, walking over to the pot as she wiped her hands on an old Christmas-themed apron she’d found tucked deep in the back of a cabinet beside the stove. “And to celebrate, I decided to make some of my famous soup”—she looked back at Val when she made it to the pot—“for my daughter-in-law.”
“You made that soup for me?” Val took two steps to the pot. Her hands were fidgeting behind her back like a little girl who’d just come in from playing in the snow to discover a cup of real cocoa simmering just for her on the stove. The unconscious emotion, a fuzzy memory of things Val had seen children expect and receive on television shows and in movies was something she’d hardly had in her life or appreciated enough to acknowledge as it was happening. It was mother love. Or mother comfort. Or something that was made to look like it.
Mrs. Taylor went to the cupboard and pulled out a huge sable bowl. “You sit down, baby. Get off those swollen feet and let me take care of you. I know you’re hungry. I heard your stomach growling.”
Val laughed and rubbed her stomach. “You sure?” she asked.
“Sure? I’m obliged. Go’on and sit down.” Mrs. Taylor was filling the bowl with a healthy serving of the stew. She grabbed a spoon as she told Val about Jamison’s love of summer soup and placed the bowl on the kitchen table.
Val was still standing. Looking at the chair and the bowl. The woman standing beside the seated meal.
“Sit down, baby. Eat!” Mrs. Taylor beckoned Val to the seat.
Something in the expectant mother’s toes felt numb or cold or reluctant. She considered moving her feet, but with even the thought of progress, there was a little sting, preventing any movement. It wasn’t sharp or painful. More like a pulse of a vibrating alarm set to low.
“Sit down,” Mrs. Taylor urged more directly this time. “The soup is for you.” She smiled when Val looked at her. “Come on. Sit and eat.”
Mrs. Thirjane Jackson had never been the kind of mother to make a meal for her child. She never expected that from herself, so no one else ever expected that from her. She was better at other things—writing checks in support of sorority fundraisers, ordering furniture for furnished bedrooms, predicting if the sun was too high in the sky for a disinterested person of any hue to go outside expecting acceptable results. With this in mind, when Kerry called her mother to set up taco night at Grandma’s for Thirjane’s only grandchild, Tyrian, it went without saying who would do the cooking . . . and cleaning.
When Kerry had pulled up in her mother’s driveway in a more dated section of Cascade where first-generation Cascadians whose parents had moved them to the Westside upper-class black utopia when they were just children still ruled the roost, she had brown paper bags in her backseat.
“No, you can’t sell your sneakers on eBay. I don’t care what Spenser’s mother let him do,” Kerry said to Tyrian in her mother’s kitchen. She was standing by the stove, tossing softening onions and green peppers in a skillet.
Tyrian was sitting at the kitchen table beside his grandmother, showing her how to buy a Herman Miller Eames chair off of eBay on his iPad.
“But I can make money,” Tyrian said. “A lot of money.”
“What do you need with money?” Kerry asked. “I give you money. You don’t need anything extra than what I give you. And I don’t give you sneakers to sell on eBay.”
Thirjane was struggling to keep up with Tyrian’s finger moving so swiftly over the screen. She squinted in her glasses and thought maybe she should’ve just bought the Herman Miller in the showroom like she’d planned in the first place. She was redecorating her fourth bedroom for the third time. The saleswoman at the showroom, who was actually just tired of trying to satisfy Thirjane, had suggested the old woman search for the perfect chair on eBay. The items were shipped straight from their warehouse and for half the price.
“Slow down, Ty,” Thirjane ordered her grandson. She’d refused to call the boy by his name or bother committing the jumble of syllables to memory. When Tyrian had been small and couldn’t talk to tell his mother, Thirjane would take him to tea parties with her and lie and tell people her grandson’s name was Thomas. Sometimes Thurgood. Depended on the crowd.
“Sorry, Grandma,” Tyrian said, backing his hands up off of the screen to let Thirjane get a peek through her silver wired Laurent glasses. He clicked on a chair and handed her the iPad, so she could zoom in closer herself. “What about Daddy? Can he do it?”
“Do what?” Kerry asked. Hearing “daddy” had sent a little tingle up her spine.
“Sell my sneakers on eBay.”
“No one is selling anything on eBay,” Kerry ordered finally. “Not you or your father. No one.”
“Maybe I should sell my old furniture on eBay,” Thirjane said, making it clear she was half listening to the conversation.
Kerry sighed and turned the fire off on the skillet. She took a sip from a glass of Coke she’d managed to spike with rum from her mother’s old mirrored bar in the living room. Her little rum nips were the only way she was guaranteed to make it through taco night with Tyrian and Thirjane a sane woman. Family dinner always seemed like a good idea in theory, but up close and personal, it was more like a country song that had death in the chorus.
It couldn’t be said that Kerry had a strained relationship with her mother. It was simply appropriate for its place and time. Southern stalwarts like Thirjane with her real diamonds and real pearls and classic St. John sweater at the dinner table didn’t have children to love and protect them. It was more of a mission of communal continuance. A new generation to continue a legacy of comeuppance. A tradition to ensure that a talented ten percent would carry on. And Kerry had been born into this world. She had been raised by a list of traditions relegated through Jack and Jill, sorority cotillions, prep school, summers at Hilton Head, and a list of acceptable HBCUs, sororities, neighborhoods, dates, and mates. And, for sure, the promise that eventually she’d meet a young man who’d been pushed through the same muck and birthed anew, fit to marry her to continue the tale. But Kerry had met Jamison at that Spelman /Morehouse Valentine’s Day ball. And, well, that had broken her mother’s heart. And when the new husband had danced with his new mother-in-law at his wedding, she’d whispered in his ear, “You’ll be her first husband.”
“So, how’s old Jamison?” Thirjane asked her daughter after they’d argued about eBay through dinner and Tyrian had happily excused himself to the den, where he’d sneak to watch music videos. She’d finished watching Kerry clean the kitchen and they’d moved to the sofa in the living room.
“Who?” Another little tingle went up Kerry’s back and kind of tickled the hairs at the nape of her neck, so she moved her hand to scratch there.
“Jamison, I asked about Jamison,” Thirjane repeated, slapping her daughter’s hand away from her neck. “And stop scratching your neck. You’ve been doing that all night.”
Kerry moved away from her mother in annoyance. “So, how is Jamison.”
There was the tingle again.
&nbs
p; “Fine. I guess.” Kerry sighed and promised not to bother with the tickle at her neck. She’d been trying to ignore it for days. Since she’d seen Jamison at the golf course there were all of these dreams she kept having of him. The two of them together. Sometimes in a pool. Sometimes in his old dorm room. Sometimes in his office. Always naked. Always panting hard. She’d told Marcy about the dreams and her friend just laughed. She said it was because Kerry hadn’t gotten “laid in like a year” and that it was probably just a little internal fight she was having about Val and the baby. She’d get over it . . . after she finally got laid. Kerry had no sexual prospects—she spent all of her free time at the divorced women’s group therapy house—so she found herself at a sex shop buying a vibrator in hopes of getting rid of her fantasies about her ex-husband. When she returned home, she loaded the pair of triple A batteries into the back of the skin-like plastic penis that had come in three color choices—knight black, brother brown, and mellow yellow (she’d gone with brother brown)—in the middle of the night for fear Tyrian would hear the noise and come rushing into her bedroom. She locked her bedroom door, turned off the lights and the volume on the television up to drown out the incessant sound of the vibrator. She initially found a little reprieve from her agony and was gaining confidence in her best friend’s advice. But then, when desire pulled the lids over her eyes and she found herself floating in the oasis of blackness in her mind, she found Jamison waiting for her. He was in the pool again. It was dark outside, but the lights shining from the bottom of the pool met the moon in a spectacular light show on the surface of the water. Kerry was standing on the side of the pool watching Jamison float naked on his back through the lights, his brown skin floating under and over the waves as they lapped against his back. “Come in,” he called to her. And suddenly she was in the pool beside him and he was undoing her bikini top. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered in her ear before kissing her there and then licking her earlobe. As they floated along, legs intertwined, he continued to caress her as he stroked her nipples and promised to be so gentle. Kerry’s bikini bottom was off then, sinking or floating away. His hands were between her legs and his tongue was in her mouth. There was silence but she felt him say, “I love you” as he slid his penis into her vagina and pulled her on top of him. He kept them afloat until he made it to the side of the pool where a Romanesque fountain sent trickles of cool water between them. Their bodies moved with the water pushed by the moon. Slow and ethereal. They moaned into each other and their human sounds became a vibration that united their sensations. Kerry thrust her legs up and down over Jamison’s waist, wrapped her arms tight over his head and felt them move against the waves. Hard and harder. She was about to forget where she was, but then, Jamison looked into her eyes and she saw that he was feeling the same thundering palpitation. She widened her legs and squeezed her middle, pulling him into her. Their moans became an animalistic crescendo into the open sky, chins facing the moon, they bayed and bayed and bayed.... and bayed.
“Girl, are you listening to me?” Thirjane plucked her child in the forehead. “Sitting there like you’re a zombie or something. Hello?” She plucked Kerry again and again until Kerry came out of the memory of the pool.
“What?” Kerry queried distantly.
“Finally,” Thirjane said. “If I wasn’t mistaken, I’d think you were fantasizing about something.” She cut her eyes.
“What? No. What are you talking about?”
“No, what are you talking about?”
“What?”
“About Jamison. You were about to tell me about Jamison.”
“He’s fine, Mama,” Kerry almost growled. She knew her mother really didn’t care about how Jamison was doing—unless he was doing poorly. It was no secret how Thirjane felt about Jamison and Mrs. Taylor. She’d held a dinner party the night Kerry’s divorce had been finalized.
“Fine, my ass,” Thirjane said. (She’d also sipped some of the rum—it was the only way she could make it through taco night too.)
“Mama, watch your mouth,” Kerry said, playing mother. “What if Tyrian hears you?”
“Listen, my mama, daddy, and husband are all dead; I speak as I please now,” Thirjane said. “Yes, Lord!”
“Fine, Mama.”
“So, how’s he doing?”
“I said he’s fine.”
“No, he isn’t. I saw him on the news.”
“Well, if you know he isn’t fine, then why did you ask?” Kerry looked at her mother.
“Lord, sometimes talking to you is like talking to an inmate,” Thirjane said. “You’re so defensive. Act like you’re still married to him.”
“I know I’m not married to him anymore. I’m the one who filed for the divorce. Remember?”
“Yeah, after he came back here with his tail between his legs after running off with that redhead gal to Los Angeles.” The rum made Thirjane shake her index finger in Kerry’s face. “I told you. I always told you. No class amounts to no class. Can’t change that. It’s just the way it is. Him and that mama of his. Lord Jesus, I saw that circus a mile away.”
“Well, thank you for all of your advice and support,” Kerry snapped, remembering how her mother had left her sitting in a jail cell after she’d been arrested for fighting with Jamison in front of police officers when she’d found his truck parked outside the redhead’s house. Kerry had been eight months pregnant.
“There you go again. What’s gotten into you? Why are you so touchy about this, dear?”
“I’m not touchy,” Kerry said. “It’s just that there’s a lot going on. And Jamison is Tyrian’s father, so . . .”
“So?”
“So, I care.” Kerry looked at her nude ring finger. For months after she’d removed her wedding band, she had been sure the sliver of blond skin would never darken, but soon it had. “It’s like everyone is trying to make it sound like he’s so horrible. Like he’s bad. All in the news. You know, a listener called into the radio today and said Jamison was a drug dealer? That he was leading a cartel?” Kerry laughed. “It’s like he’s down and everyone’s trying to kick.”
“So?” Thirjane flashed a sarcastic frown. This was reason to celebrate—not gain an attitude. While she was no Mrs. Taylor, her love for her daughter was as fierce as that of any mother who could produce a child imbued with such careful attention to others. And like any mother who’d seen her daughter through a painful divorce, she forever hated those she blamed for it all. So, if people were kicking Jamison while he was down, she’d volunteer to get right in line.
“So . . . it’s not right. He’s not a drug dealer. And he’s not a bad person. You know that, Mama,” Kerry said. “Come on, you may not like Jamison, but you know he’d never do anything to purposefully hurt anyone. His heart isn’t like that.”
“His heart? Kerry, that man broke your heart.”
“No, once upon a time, that man tried to mend my heart. You know what he did for me. What he did for us. For Daddy,” Kerry replied, bringing up the reason Thirjane couldn’t seem to get the decorations right in the fourth bedroom. After her husband had come home from the hospital after being in a coma for so many years, his ribs looking like they’d poke through his skin, Thirjane had moved him and his hospital bed into the room and painted it blue. The miracle of his recovery, which had given his wife two more years with him, was due to the stories Jamison whispered into his ear while he was still in his long sleep. While Thirjane and Kerry had long stopped going to visit their husband and father hooked up to machines and wasting away in a bed, Jamison had visited his father-in-law in secret.
“You feel sorry for him now?” Thirjane said as if that was ridiculous.
“I just want everyone to give him a chance to do what I know he can do. To stop this lying.”
“Nothing you can do about that now,” Thirjane said. “This is about old Atlanta. That old wall. I told you that when he was running for office. They may take him in, but he’s never going to be one of them. One of us.�
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“That world is over, Mama,” Kerry defended, though she knew her mother wasn’t wrong.
“It’s never over. Can’t be. Not in a city like this. Been here all my life and one thing I know is that history moves Atlanta—from Peachtree down here, to Peachtree up there,” Thirjane said. “And class moves history. You add that up and you know what I’m saying is true. Jamison may have the money to play, but they’re only letting him play because they need him right now because of his position. Need him for contracts, signatures, deals. That’s it. Money. Then he’s out. Atlanta. I’ve seen it too many times.” Thirjane laughed. “I told you first.”
“I know. But there has to be something I can do.”
“No. Better you sit aside. Keep your own name intact for when it all comes down. My name.”
Kerry looked down at her glass nervously and said lowly, almost as if she didn’t want her mother to hear, “I called someone.”
“Come again?” Thirjane leaned over.
“I called someone to, you know, to get some information for me,” Kerry revealed. She hadn’t told her mother about the detective she’d hired to follow Jamison after the divorce.
“Someone like who?” Thirjane leaned into Kerry and whispered, “Like a detective?” She backed up. “For what?”
“I can’t tell you now, Mama. It’s just a lot going on. I feel like I need to talk to him . . . but I promised some people I wouldn’t say anything. Do anything.” Kerry looked down into her empty glass. It was times like this when she missed her old aunt Luchie, Thirjane’s sister, who had worn heels with sweat suits and had run off to Paris with the love of her life when she was what most people called a senior citizen. Aunt Luchie had taken Kerry in when she first walked out on Jamison. She would’ve understood about the detective. Told Kerry to follow her heart and back it up with her brain. She’d died a month after Kerry’s father. Kerry had flown to Paris alone and sprinkled her ashes into the sea in Cannes. “But I need to protect my family. I have to say something. That’s my son’s father.”
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