His Third Wife Read online

  “The feds?”

  “Good, let them carry his ass off to prison, good riddance,” Val said. She’d met Ras a few times at the office and had decided she didn’t like the way he looked at her.

  “Leave it alone, Val. You don’t know him,” Jamison said. “This isn’t like him. None of this is.”

  “Won’t matter much longer,” Leaf interjected. “It won’t matter at all.”

  “They’re lynching him,” Jamison said.

  “What? Lynching him why? For what?” Val asked. “Please. Everyone’s talking about what he does in the community. Weed and white girls? He ain’t no Martin Luther King. Why would anyone want anything to do with him?”

  Leaf looked at Jamison.

  “Something has to be done,” Jamison said.

  “I know you have a lot riding on him, but I don’t think you should get involved right now—not if you don’t have anything to do with it,” Leaf advised. “It’s a watch-and-wait game right about now. You get in the rink and whoever’s after him will come after you.”

  There was a sobering quiet as Jamison thought through everything Leaf had said.

  And then Jamison’s phone rang and clanked on the counter pulling all eyes to it suspiciously as if the “who” that Leaf had been talking about was about to teleport right through the little technological device. It rang in the silence two more times before Jamison looked at the screen to see the word MAMA and the little pudgy woman’s face smiling in a picture she’d uploaded to the phone herself.

  Jamison answered with the voice of someone who was relieved.

  “I done called you five times. Called the house too. Bet that Val was there just looking at the phone ring.” All this without saying hello.

  “Mama, I was going to call you back when I got out of the shower.”

  Val quickly rolled her eyes and turned away from the conversation, busying herself with something on the kitchen counter.

  “I don’t hear no shower going right now,” Mrs. Taylor said.

  “That’s because I’m not in the shower.”

  “I don’t care if you’re in the shower, boy!” This declaration was so loud Leaf could hear it.

  “Mama, what do you want?” Jamison pushed.

  “I’m in the hospital.”

  “What? Why are you at the hospital?” Jamison had already reached for his car keys. Val turned to him and asked what was going on.

  “Don’t go all crazy. I was just breathing heavy when I woke up this morning. Was about to go on out to the church, but my breathing wouldn’t get right, so I came on to see my doctor.”

  “What did he say?”

  “They’re running tests. My pressure’s high again.”

  “I’m on my way over there,” Jamison said. “You stay right where you’re at.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Val asked when Jamison hung up the phone. “Is everything okay?”

  “Leaf, cancel everything for the rest of the day,” Jamison said, walking toward the door. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Jamison, what happened?” Val pushed. “Is everything okay?”

  I damn near had to run Jamison down in the driveway to get in the car to go to the hospital to check on a woman who hated me and who I hated back—maybe more. But what I hated more than that was knowing that if I didn’t get in that car, it would give that woman more ammunition to convince Jamison to hate me. Call it duty or defense, I wasn’t letting my husband leave that house without me. I left Leaf standing right there in the kitchen.

  I tried to calm Jamison on the way to the hospital, but there was something that just got into him wherever his mother was concerned. If she told him the sky was purple he’d believe it without concern. Like he owed her something. For a long time I kept telling myself it was just that I’d never seen the insides of a mother-son relationship—I only had sisters and for most of our lives we hadn’t wanted anything to do with our mother. But the more Dorothy Taylor dug her nails into my back, the more I kept thinking there was more to it. She had it in for me and I knew she wasn’t the type to stop things at “good enough.” She was going to cat fight me into a corner and force me to claw my way out. And when I didn’t, she’d look at her “baby boy” and say, “See, I told you so.”

  Jamison stopped the car in the front of the hospital and I had to park before walking over to find him and his mother.

  When I walked inside and approached the nurses’ station in the emergency room, I felt all eyes on me and my stomach and wished I’d taken my sweater out the backseat of the car. I asked a male nurse in a fuchsia smock for Mrs. Taylor and the other nurses all went to whispering about me.

  “She’s right down there, hunny,” he said, smiling at me and pointing to the right of the desk as a nurse behind him pretended to be sending a text to a friend, but she was really taking a picture of me. A month before I would’ve snatched her skinny nurse ass up in that emergency room, but Leaf and Jamison’s publicist Muriel kept talking to me about watching how I acted in public. That “everyone” was watching me and that I didn’t need to give people more news than they already had. I funneled my hate through a smile before I walked to the room the other nurse had pointed toward.

  Jamison looked like he was about to climb into the bed with his mother. They were whispering and huddled up so closely, I stood in the doorway for a second thinking they were praying.

  When Jamison finally stepped back, there was Mrs. Taylor in a red jogging suit with her blond wig perfectly styled. Nothing about her looked sick. She looked like she could slide on a pair of sneakers and jog around the hospital a few times.

  “Hey,” I said, waving from the door.

  “Oh, you came, too?” she said like I was some crackhead Jamison had to peel off of the floor of a crack house just before he pulled up.

  “Yeah, we wanted to make sure you were okay,” I said, making sure she heard “WE.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to get you two all riled up. I just wanted to let my baby boy know I’m okay,” Mrs. Taylor said.

  “Any of the tests come back? What’s your doctor saying? Where is he?” Jamison rattled off, sitting at his mother’s side with his back to me. He was cradling her hand in his so desperately I wanted to walk out the room and vomit in a corner. There I was, pregnant with his child and running behind him to the hospital, and he hadn’t even asked me one time how I was feeling or if I needed anything.

  “They said I need to relax. Too much stress in my life. Got to stop getting my pressure all up like this,” Mrs. Taylor said, and I was happy Jamison couldn’t see me because I was mocking every ridiculous statement she made. What stress? She didn’t work. Her only job was chasing Jamison around. That and fucking with me.

  “See, Mama, I told you to take it easy. You get yourself too worked up.”

  “I know, baby boy, but it’s just all this stuff with you and . . .” She looked over at me. “. . . and Val. I get so worried. Can’t let nothing happen to my family.”

  “And we can’t let anything happen to you,” Jamison said, turning to me. “Right, Val?”

  “That’s right,” I said, backing him.

  “Oh, that makes me feel so good, ya’ll. My family is all I have,” Mrs. Taylor said so softly I could nearly smell the salt she was trying to toss into my ocean. And then Jamison opened up the flood gates.

  “You know what, Mama, I can’t have you alone like this anymore. Let’s just do it,” he said, looking back at his grinning mother. “Let’s just move forward with our plan.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “What plan?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Jamison answered his mother. “It’s settled. Let’s do it.”

  “What? What’s settled?” I asked.

  Jamison turned back to me and said, “Mama’s coming to live with us at the house.”

  “What? Who? Live?”

  I swear I was either hearing Jamison wrong or I was in the middle of a nightmare that was about to end with Mrs. Taylor
twenty feet tall and chasing me down a hallway.

  “I’m moving in with you two, ” Mrs. Taylor said so happily it was a dare for me to oppose.

  “But I—don’t we need to—”

  “Jamison and I already discussed it last week. He said that I should move in to help you two get ready for the baby, but I said, no, because I know you young people need your space,” she said, cutting me off. “But now that I’m sick, I do agree with him that it’s the best thing.”

  I looked at Jamison, but he’d turned back around.

  “For how long?” I asked his back.

  “Mama, the most important thing is that you get better. You can stay with me for as long as you need,” Jamison said, answering my question to his mother.

  By the time I really, really, really, really realized what was happening, Jamison was telling me to head home alone and get the guest room ready so he could drive his mother to her place in her car to get some of her things.

  I wanted to scream. That or at least ask Jamison how he thought someone suffering from shortness of breath or whatever the hell was wrong with her could get into a car and drive herself to the hospital.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Jamison in the lobby. I insisted that he walk me outside of the room.

  “My mother’s just coming to stay with us,” he said.

  “You didn’t even ask me. We never talked about this.”

  “That’s because it just happened. What do you want me to do, Val? Let her die?”

  “That’s a bit much,” I said. “Considering that we don’t even know how sick she is. Did you speak to her doctor? I didn’t see a triage bracelet around her wrist.”

  “Are you calling my mother a liar?” Jamison asked. “Be very careful.”

  “I’m not saying she’s a liar. I’m saying you didn’t discuss anything with me. She said you asked her to move in last week. I can’t believe this.”

  “I was joking with her,” Jamison said.

  “Apparently, you weren’t.”

  “Look, she’s my mother and that’s my house.” Jamison threw up his hands. “And that’s it.”

  “That’s it? You say it and that’s how it goes? What if I did something like that? Moved my mother in?”

  “Go ahead. Do it.” Jamison turned and walked back toward the room, and I saw the nurse pretending to check more text messages.

  I gave her one solid middle finger to post to wherever she pleased. Fuck it. Fuck everyone.

  “We’re Still a Family”

  Friday. Midnight. Friday night at midnight. Midnight on Friday night. It seemed like it was always that day and time. No matter how many times Jamison looked at his watch to keep track of time, somehow he’d forget to check and somehow when he finally did, it would be midnight and Friday.

  That might have been okay for a young man who was trying to make it to the weekend to party until sunup and sleep until sundown. But Jamison was no young man anymore. He had the gray hairs sprouting on his temples and softening biceps to prove it. He wasn’t trying to waste time; he was trying to slow it down. Savor it. Find more of it. Hold on and maybe just once look down at his watch to see that he had a little time. More time. Or extra time. And each Friday night when he looked down and saw that it was midnight, he knew his time was running out. Another week was done. Gone. And the clock was a terrible reminder. A loop of meetings, and meetings about meetings and meetings to set up meetings and trying to find time to work out to build his biceps again, and not working out, and eating in his car, and being late and getting four hours of sleep and arguing with Val or Kerry or missing Tyrian or whatever it was and there he was again—looking at his watch on Friday night at midnight.

  Somehow Jamison had thought that being mayor might slow this tick to something more meaningful. Something that mattered. That he could take stock of. Make the blur of moments in his week seem so eloquent, so necessary like they did in all the black and white pictures he’d seen of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. eating dinner with his family, or speaking at a church with brown babies in the front or meeting with Abernathy and Jackson, Hosea and Lewis in a dark back room clouded overhead with cigarette smoke and dim lighting.

  But now he was thinking that maybe time had been the same way to Martin and maybe Malcolm, too. That their time was just them moving between here and there and those old black and whites that meant so much to any person who wanted to be as great as those men were just impressions of fast time caught standing still. If Martin was like him, when he was at dinner, he was already late for the speech at the church and when he was at the church, he was thinking about what the people in the back room would say afterwards.

  Where was the time? Friday at midnight? What about all the things he wanted to do? Get that pothole fixed on Lee Street. Sit down and have the simple conversation he needed to have with Val. Visit his father’s grave. Cut his own grass. Sleep. Make a change. Change himself. Time was up. Friday. Midnight.

  Jamison went to sleep on Friday night at midnight and rose on Saturday morning having forgotten everything he promised himself he’d do as soon as he got up—all the things he hadn’t done that week. Instead, he was rushing. There were reminders and text messages and missed calls on his phone. Everyone already had a plan for him.

  Val was hiding in the bathroom. She’d started spending most of her time in there. Jamison pretended not to notice these extended visits to the boudoir, where he could hear her talking on the phone, clicking away on her laptop, or watching television. He told himself she’d be all right in there. The bathroom was nearly the same size as the bedroom. There was a couch and ottoman in the closet and even a refrigerator/microwave combo. Plus, he knew what Val was hiding from.

  It had been just six days since his mother had moved into the guest room and as Jamison already knew, her presence was a cup of oil poured into a thimble of vinegar. In six days, his mother and Val hadn’t had a single verbal altercation or physical fight—both of which seemed highly likely and overly imminent—but Jamison knew that wars between women were seldom fought that way. It was about what they weren’t saying and weren’t doing. When they didn’t complain. When they did turn the other cheek. For women it could be World War II and most men would never know—not until the bomb was dropped and radioactive waste was seeping into the earth.

  What Jamison could see was that the women were staying out of each other’s way. His mother was in her room. His wife was in her condo/bathroom. Maybe it was peace-talks time and things could actually get better. He wanted to believe this, but each time he saw Lorna—the official secretary of state of the house who had to carry messages between the bedroom and bathroom as she cleaned the house—frowning at him, he knew the time of peace would soon blow over. And he had to do something. Lorna was sending him not so subtle signs of her limitations, letting him know she had signed up to clean up after one man and she wasn’t a “carrier pigeon” or cook or best friend. But what was he supposed to do? Any talk about Val with his mother would lead to more questions about the baby and reminders about how that “Memphis trash” had trapped her baby boy. Talks about his mother with Val would lead to her hollering again about why he’d let his mother move in anyway when he knew his mother hated her and knew she hated his mother. And that was the one thing he could really care less about doing anything about.

  Concerning his mother, Val was sounding more and more like Kerry. Resentful and suspicious. And maybe they had a point. His mother had put the first nail in the coffin of his first marriage by basically setting him up with Coreen, and every time he saw her eyes on Val, he knew she was trying to find the right nail for that situation, too.

  He knew that everyone thought he was a mama’s boy. And that his mother was a big, pecking hen. And, yes, he knew she was no sweet angel. But she was his mama. And just on that alone, she came before anyone. None of them had seen how life had pecked her. Neither Kerry nor Val had seen his mother wake up before the sun and get ready to take three buses just so she coul
d go across the city to clean old white people’s houses. Her feet so swollen she bought shoes two sizes too big. Her hands bleached so white from scrubbing floors he could barely see the cuts to pour the iodine on when she had passed out on the living room couch. None of them had heard her wails, so loud and sharp and mournful the morning his father died in their bedroom. She’d sounded like she’d found out everything in the world was a lie. And then she looked over at him and said, “You’re my baby boy—all I got now.” Almost everything he ever wanted to be, to do in his life, was to make up for what she had been forced to do, made to lose. What had pecked the hen.

  So, so be it. And so be the silence.

  Jamison knocked on the bathroom door and Val let him in to take a shower.

  She sat on the side of the tub and watched him in the water.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I asked where you’re going,” Val repeated, raising her voice so he could hear her over the water.

  “To Yates,” Jamison said. “Tyrian has a tee-off.”

  “Ohh.” Val looked down to think before she would ask to go, knowing it would just lead to an argument about Kerry and then Jamison storming out of the house. He’d just started talking softly to her again and she didn’t want to turn that fate. But she was bored and didn’t want to be stuck in the house avoiding Mrs. Taylor for another day.

  “That’ll just be for a few hours though and then I’m meeting with the president of the Urban League,” Jamison said, and then he remembered something he’d promised himself he’d do before he’d gone to bed at midnight. “Hey, you free for dinner?”

  “Dinner?” Val repeated the noun like it was in another language. She and Jamison hadn’t been out to dinner since—well, since she’d realized she was pregnant.

  “Yes. I was thinking we could talk. Like you asked.”

  “Where? When?”

  “I was thinking Paschal’s. At like 8 or so. I’ll have Leaf make the reservation.”