Val didn’t try her key. She turned the knob and the door opened right up.
Jamison was sitting on the couch in the living room, obviously waiting for her.
The fresco was already gone—compliments of Mrs. Taylor.
Neither Jamison nor Val knew what to say at that point, so they said hello to each other.
Though he had so many questions, accusations, and contentious exchanges in his thoughts, Jamison typed a few words on his cell phone in a decisive move to show he was busy and didn’t want to be bothered with Val. If this was his “out” from this relationship, he’d take it. He’d already called a lawyer and planned to tell Val he’d pay for hers. He just wanted it to be over. His emotional landscape looked something like someone who’d been in a long-term relationship that shouldn’t have made it past the first date. And that “someone” wasn’t just Val—it was both of them. Days later, he’d look at Kerry and realize he’d never gotten over his marriage. He wasn’t fit to date anyone, let alone get married. Maybe that was why he had been with Val—some kind of personal sabotage to make himself hurt so he couldn’t feel his real pain. But, again, like Val, he didn’t know the future and hadn’t yet considered that, so he typed on his phone.
Val, who’d never really felt like more than a visitor in the house anyway, was made more nervous by his detachment. She readjusted her purse on her shoulder.
“Guess I’ll go get my stuff,” she said coldly.
“Do your thing.”
Val turned to the staircase and found her foe looking down at her.
“No, you aren’t. Only over my dead body are you coming up these steps,” Mrs. Taylor said. She was wearing one of her sweat suits and one of her wigs and one of her attitudes.
“Have it your way,” Val said, climbing the steps.
Mrs. Taylor started coming down toward her and they met in the middle.
Jamison was on his feet and begging his mother to calm down.
“Mama, I told you Val was coming to get her things,” he argued.
“And I heard you. Don’t mean I’m allowing it.” Mrs. Taylor eyeballed Val from a step right over hers.
“Stop it!” Jamison went to the steps to come between the women. “You know you haven’t been feeling well. You don’t have any business being out of bed—let alone out here starting something. I told Val she could get her things.”
Mrs. Taylor pointed at Jamison like he was a boy. “No way she’s coming here.”
“It’s not that serious. You’re acting like I’m here to steal something,” Val said. “Ain’t shit in here I want but my stuff.”
“How do I know what you want and what you don’t want?” Mrs. Taylor said. “Might get a case of the old sticky fingers like your mama.”
“Don’t you say nothing about my mama!”
And those were fighting words. Val had cocked back her fist and she had every intention of punching Mrs. Taylor in her mouth.
But the baby boy was there to hold the blow.
“Ya’ll stop this, now!” Jamison said. “This is crazy. It’s my house and I am not having this.”
Val tried to pull away from Jamison, but soon she was calmer.
Mrs. Taylor wasn’t budging though. She’d balled her fists and was ready to rumble.
“I ain’t moving,” she said to Jamison. “She ain’t coming up here. She might’ve made a jackass out of you, but now she’s at the bull and the bull gonna charge.”
“Mama!” Jamison let go of Val’s hand and pushed himself between her and Mrs. Taylor. “Look, what if we compromise?”
“What? How?” Mrs. Taylor asked.
“I can get Val’s things for her and she can wait downstairs where you can see her,” Jamison suggested. “That work?”
“Humph.” Mrs. Taylor rolled her eyes to show she was still annoyed but softening.
“Val?” Jamison turned to Val.
“I just want my stuff,” Val said. “I don’t care if a blue leprechaun comes in here to get it, I just want all of my stuff.”
“Okay.” Jamison turned back to his mother and her rolling eyes and muttered expletives. “Mama? You okay with that?”
“I suppose.”
Before going up to the bedroom with three trash bags, Jamison shored up his arrangement by leading Val to the couch and making his mother promise him she’d stay at the top of the stairs. It wasn’t the best idea, but being a man who wanted this to just be over, it was all he had to work with.
Before he could get one bag filled, Mrs. Taylor found something she couldn’t resist saying to the woman at the bottom of the steps. She felt it was okay to share her thoughts, no matter how ugly they were, as she hadn’t broken her promise to Jamison—yet.
“Funny how you’re making an escape in a car my son bought. Seems like you’d have your own car to drive off in. Was your name even on the lease for that car?” Mrs. Taylor teased.
Val didn’t respond. She was becoming familiar with the bait.
“Oh, you don’t have to respond, dear. Trust me, you don’t. I’ll find out. And I’ll make sure my baby gets that car right on back.” Mrs. Taylor laughed. “And where are you going?” She paused for a response, but only gave it a second. “Probably right back to the strip club where Jamison found you. Or maybe with the man in the gray car. Or maybe that man in the gray car is taking you to the strip club! Wasn’t he your pimp?”
Something inside of Val came crumbling down when faced with a secret she’d whispered to Jamison when they were alone. The little comment took her right to her past. Put her back in that place where she felt like she was never going to get what she expected or deserved. Kept her believing she’d never been enough and never would be.
Mrs. Taylor was laughing loudly and going hard at Val about whatever came to mind and might tick the woman off.
“Yeah, you can sit down there and act like you don’t hear me if you want to, but I’ll tell you what, I made good on my promise, didn’t I?”
Val didn’t respond.
“I told you that night that I was cleaning house. Sure did. Didn’t I?” Mrs. Taylor laughed. “Couldn’t have my baby up in here with this bullshit. Had to make things right. Get things in order. That’s what a real mother does. Guess you’ll have to wait to find that out.” Mrs. Taylor lowered her voice to something above a sigh, and Val thought she heard her say, “Glad I took care of that.”
“What did you say?” Val shouted so loudly Jamison almost heard her in the bedroom. And had he been paying attention, he might’ve taken that as his cue to stop packing and take whatever he had in his hands downstairs to get Val away from his mother as quickly as possible.
But he was on the phone. Lazily throwing pieces of Val’s wardrobe into a plastic bag with one hand and holding his phone with the other.
Ras had called to thank him for his support. To say he knew he’d had a brother in Jamison and he was happy to call him his friend. It was the kind of ego massaging few people could resist. And though Jamison tried twice to get off the line, Ras kept coming back with his future plans and stories about women showing up at his house.
Meanwhile, downstairs (because Mrs. Taylor was downstairs then), heads were about to butt. The son couldn’t miss out on a kind word and mother couldn’t miss out on the chance to deliver a mean one, so when Val demanded that she come downstairs to say what she’d had to say at the top of the stairs to her face, Mrs. Taylor rushed down the stairs like a six-year-old girl going to fight behind a school building.
“I know you stupid, but you ain’t deaf!” Mrs. Taylor said, meeting Val toe to toe on a small landing between the living room and staircase.
“Whatever. You can save all of that. I just want to hear you say what you said, so we can get this all out in the open,” Val said.
“I said, I’m happy you’re getting your ghetto ass out of my son’s house!”
“No, that’s not what you said. You admitted it! You just admitted it. In your own evil way, you admitted it.”
“That you killed my baby!” Val charged and in a voice so low and hateful, Mrs. Taylor felt her resentment and vengeance vibrating through her eardrums. Suddenly, she was taller than her aggressor. Her eyes caught hold of Mrs. Taylor’s pupils and any other word she had leveled against this woman shot right through to her mother-in-law’s conscience. And guilt at being accused or maybe having acted sent that tingling quickly throughout the entire left side of Mrs. Taylor’s body.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Mrs. Jackson retorted, feeling her body jolt backward.
“Yes, you did! And you’re going to jail,” Val lied to scare the old woman and she was surely successful, looking over Mrs. Taylor’s body as she fell to her knees.
“Jail? No! I didn’t!” Mrs. Taylor wanted to call for her son, but she knew her body couldn’t handle the strength she’d need to complete a sound that he’d hear.
“Yes, you did and the doctors found what you put in my food in my blood work and they’re coming to get your old evil ass right now!” Val went on. “Remember, you said you were leaving here as soon as you got things right? Well, now you can go.”
“No!”
The tingling made ice of every blood vessel and the freeze spread to her heart, where Mrs. Taylor’s hands went to somehow catch the final kick that was tugging her to the floor. But it was no use.
She fell backward and her eyes rolled up at the ceiling. Her brain cut loose from her body and she thought she was calling for help, crying, laughing, singing, looking for her little boy who had always loved her. But she was just seeing shadows and half in and out of the world. She saw Mama Fee in her red wig, smiling in Val’s face over her body. She tried to get away, but couldn’t move.
And if she could’ve, Val wouldn’t have stopped her. The freeze had come upon Val, as well. She couldn’t move herself for a hold that went past fear or anger. She was under a shroud of sadness that had been born with her, in her, and that had grown into an iceberg that stood between her and the reality of a woman dying at her feet.
“You could’ve shown me kindness,” she said in a low, creepy tone that would stay in the walls of that house.
“Jamison,” Mrs. Taylor called out breathily. “Jamison, I loved you.”
Upstairs, Jamison was off the phone and had gotten an inclination to drop what he was doing and run, run, run. It wasn’t due to the noise. It was the silence. A nagging silence of doom, like the voiceless cries of fish flipped out of water onto a side of the strand where the waves would no longer roll.
He saw his mother’s contorted body seizing at the bottom of the steps. Val standing against a wall a foot away.
“Mama!”
He was at her side, on his knees watching her eyes rolling fast, her hands still clinching her heart.
“Mama! Hold on! Hold on!”
He shouted to Val for her to call the police, but she was still against the wall calling for kindness.
“Mama, stay with me! Come on! Stay with me!”
He reached into his pocket and called for an ambulance. When the dispatcher asked for the matter, he said that his mother was dying. It was her heart.
He held this woman’s head in his lap and felt the powerlessness men knew only in the face of God. The face that nature had imprinted in his mind as the safest place in the world—for he knew every line and gash and mole and the way it could say whatever it wanted—was leaving him. And this full man wanted to yell out to the world that he was not yet grown.
“Why couldn’t you love me? Tell me!” Val whispered to Jamison’s back from the wall.
“What are you talking about?”
Mrs. Taylor’s eyes were slowing; her hands were loosening over her breasts. The freeze was leaving her.
“Why? I tried everything . . . and you just let her come in here and—”
“Mama! Mama, stay with me. The ambulance is on the way!”
The eyes stopped.
“I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
The hands fell to her sides.
“Mama? Can you hear me? Mama?”
The eyes rolled up at nothing.
“Look what you did to me, Jamison. Look.”
There was no movement.
“I loved you,” Val said.
“Mama! No! Mama!”
PART III
“. . . until death do us part.”
“There Are No Good-byes”
In a perfect world, Mrs. Taylor’s son wouldn’t have had to bury her. Well, in a perfect world, she would’ve died, yes—and maybe sooner than she had—but in that perfect world Jamison wouldn’t have had to bury her. Burials, funerals, wakes, memorials, those were things people did who wanted to move on, who intended to let go. But Jamison wasn’t one of those people. He wanted his mother back. And instead of planning her funeral, he’d spent most nights considering how he might do that. It was dangerous. He was a smart man. Not a crazy man. So he knew he couldn’t revive the cold body he’d had to look at for a second time at the morgue on a rainy night after waiting for the perfect flash of lightning. There was only one way. The gun was in the nightstand. He lay in his bed for days looking at the oak box.
Mrs. Taylor’s sisters showed up to bury their baby sister—three short bullets of women with wide hips and attitudes that showed they’d been raised in the same sandbox. They descended upon Jamison’s home like a swarm of bees. Cleaning and cooking, whispering and making phone calls. They told Jamison planning a funeral was women’s work. He didn’t need to worry about a thing. They just needed his credit card—Mrs. Taylor hadn’t had any life insurance. Calling him “baby boy” and vowing that they’d take care of him for the rest of his life the way their sister would see fit, they only pulled him from his bed for dinner and signatures.
One night, he called for water and no one came, so he went downstairs and found a party of women in his kitchen. There were pictures of his mother in various stages of life scattered all over the table. They were laughing. His aunt Belinda was in the middle of a story about the day her baby sister got saved and got to rolling all over the pulpit until the entire deacon board picked her up and carried her out. Jamison was still aching, so he pretended not to listen. He went to the refrigerator with a cup and pressed for water.
“Baby sister went a hundred percent on everything. She ain’t never went half. All heart, she was,” one sister said.
“Evil!” another said and they all laughed.
“Yes, evil, but decisive in her evility,” another said, and everyone hollered.
“Evilina,” another said.
“Queen Evilina!”
“Yeah, but only when you crossed her. Only when you hurt someone she loved.”
One sister had quietly gotten up from her seat and taken a picture over to Jamison at the refrigerator. It was of him and his mother standing in front of the Grand Canyon. She rubbed her nephew’s back but didn’t say a word as he stood there looking at the picture like it was a vision right in front of him.
“She loved,” someone said.
“Loved her family. Loved her son.”
“Loved her son more than life itself.”
There was a collective, elongated sigh that had been perfected by women gathered around kitchen tables for such purposes.
The funeral events—and that’s what one would call them—were a mix of tradition and new money. Claiming always, “Baby sister would want it this way,” the three sisters took Jamison’s credit card and bought the biggest pink and gold casket they could find. They didn’t wait for people to send flowers. They ordered twenty dozen pink roses to be delivered wherever their sister’s body went (new ones at each stop). When they called the newspaper to place an obituary, they decided that the quarter-column statement the editor was offering was too small for the mayor’s mother. They paid for a two-page spread—in color. A chartered bus went down to Mobi
le, Alabama, and picked up twenty-eight people, turned around, and made three more stops on the way back to Atlanta to gather whoever wanted to get to the funeral to mourn the dead. There were three choirs, two pastors, and a full reception with a band.
By the time they made it to the burial, the mourners were more psychologically fatigued than a group of freshman heading home from their first spring break in Jamaica.
Jamison’s shoulders were so low. At some point, he’d stopped crying. Maybe his eyes were too swollen. At the burial, he sat in the front row with Tyrian beside him looking around awkwardly at everyone crying and tugging at his tie.
Once it was announced that in the order of all natural things, ashes had been returned to ashes and dust to dust, Jamison got up not knowing where he was or how he’d get home. Through the stops of the day, he’d been depending on a series of tugs and pulls at his sleeve explaining that his car was over there, it was time to get to the church, his seat was up front, he had to read the eulogy. But after the burial, it seemed everyone was dispersing back into their own worlds. The sisters with their promises of care now had their husbands and their children. The shipped-in mourners were getting back on the bus. Kerry came up and retrieved Tyrian, kissed her ex-husband on the cheek, and said she was sorry, she was really sorry. Jamison was about to say something to her—perhaps it was about the gun in the nightstand—but he decided not to.
His Third Wife Page 21